With the end of the shooting season in sight, February brings a mixed bag of point-to-points. There’s nothing else so I thought I might as well try some new venues. As I’m old and lazy, and despite the low stand fees, I only attend point-to-points within a 100-mile radius. Some traders are more adventurous (or desperate) and would travel all day and night to attend the opening of a packet of crisps. Not me. I got tired of making less than the cost of the diesel to get there and at least I can get home for a good night’s rest afterwards.
There are also some minor technical irritations to take into account. My phone line has been dead for a week and we live in area where the appearance of a wheel still stops the locals in their tracks, so mobile coverage is a non-starter. If their advertising is anything to go by, I don’t fall into BT’s ideal customer range. I am not a fashionably clad middling executive who appears to be pussy-whipped into doing all the manual chores for the divorcee, Jane, while keeping in touch with my feminine, caring side by keeping his ear permanently glued to a mobile or landline handset. I just run a business from home and need to talk to my customers.
Remember BT’s catchphrase, ‘It’s good to talk’? I do. You probably do. BT doesn’t. It takes forever to get through to BT engineering. This now mostly carried out by a company called BT Open, which is closed to customer enquiries. BT Open is only open to other telephone companies with engineering enquiries. Somewhere on a BT middle manager’s laptop, there is a Powerpoint presentation entitled ‘BT Open: Taking the Customer out of the Loop.’ I wonder if other enraged BT customers have taken up my habit of shouting: “Piss off, Jane!” at the BT adverts on TV.
Every time that I have checked my phone line remotely, all I get is a message telling me that my mailbox is full. My customers will probably believe that I have finally succumbed to pneumonia contracted from sleeping in the back of the van in freezing February or that I have finally drunk myself to death at home and that the terrier and the Labrador are busy eating their way through the gruesome evidence.
There is therefore an acute need to get earning at any show. The weather, as always, is the determining factor. Having paid the stand fee for The Royal Artillery point-to-point at lovely Larkhill, the event was cancelled the day before. I stayed over at a friend’s house in Somerset en route, so I returned home penniless and appallingly hungover.
But there was hope! Heythrop point-to-point was on the following day. I book myself in with a mobile phone call from the lay-by about four miles from home. This has acted as an ad hoc office for the last week. Lots of stands were already there when I arrived, which illustrated the widespread need for cash across the trader community. The omens were good.
I noticed that Steve from Natterjack Cider was wearing one of my leather jerkins – a bit of free advertising as he sold his excellent spiced hot cider punch. The sunshine at 8am was deceptive. The temperature dropped steadily throughout the day – typical of this end of the Cotswolds. Trading started inconsistently as usual. The punters hadn’t had a drink or a bet yet and didn’t want to squander their meagre resources on an early impulse-buy. By 10am there was a good crowd.
An enormous bloke stood just off my stand as if he owned it. He really was huge. I remember thinking that he was probably visible from space. He wore a curly-wired earpiece, such as those beloved of security services worldwide. I was so interested in why someone like this should be at a point-to-point that I entirely missed the Prime Minister’s first question. To be fair, he was disguised as a child-minder with a baby strapped to his front and other kids around him clamouring for attention. It was only when the delightfully blue-eyed Mrs Cameron asked me how much my belts cost that I suddenly clicked back into reality. I resisted the temptation to reply: “I refer the honourable member to the answer I gave a moment ago.”
I thought about offering Mrs Cameron a trade discount as she is ‘in the leather business’ but thought better of it. No real bargaining or compromise was necessary to secure the sale as no Liberal Democrats were present.
The Prime Minister bought a modest buffalo leather trouser belt before he moved on, looking like any other 40-something in a high-pressure job stealing a few hours with his family. Unlike the pussy-whipped git in the BT adverts, I actually felt slightly sorry for him.
That’s as close to a tax rebate I’ll get this year.
Almost instantly, a pushy individual who I took to be news reporter arrived on the stand, demanding to know which type of belt the PM had bought. When it became clear he wanted to buy one, I pointed to the most expensive belt on the stand. He bought two and seemed grateful that he didn’t even have to hack my mobile phone to get the information. Of course, if he’d hacked my BT landline he would have died of old age before hearing so much as a dial tone.
Ian at Hats Off, two stalls down the row, had a busier time. We always think of shoplifting as a crime of youth. That’s presumably because most of them who get caught combine their youth and stupidity with the manual dexterity and showmanship of Tommy Cooper. You’d be surprised by the number of middle-aged and elderly shoplifters that populate these events. Ian noticed a thief in his 60s lift a hat off his stand and push it into his pocket. Rather than causing a scene on his stand, he decided to follow the thief down to the row of bookies where it seemed he was working, and then to the man’s car. The thief put the hat into the back of the car and tried to close the boot but couldn’t because Ian’s hand was now holding up the boot lid. An altercation ensued in which the sad excuse for humanity first of all denied the crime, before pleading poverty and then offering to pay Ian for the item – removing a huge wad of notes from his pocket. Thieving, lying, cheating and not particularly poor, either. Yep; it’s shameful the way I misled that news reporter.
I asked Ian why he didn’t call the police. He shrugged. What’s the point? They do nothing. Their time is taken up entirely with the concern for the rights of the thief, as is required of them. The rights of the law-abiding, tax-paying trader come a very poor second. I wrote to my MP about this recently. He’s obviously fed up with my letters. I was told in pretty short order that even though he hates the European Human Rights diktat which allows this perverse up-ending of social values every bit as much as I do, the current UK government can do nothing about it without upsetting the coalition partners, without upsetting our European Union overlords and, of course, without losing the votes of that most important section of the electorate, convicted criminals serving prison sentences.
