As news of my blog spreads, I receive emails from traders up and down the land asking if I can help them with their problems. I received this only the other day from a Mrs H of Hartlepool:
Dear Michael,
My husband and I run a small small business selling signed photographs of game fair notables. Last week, I sold a signed photograph of Archie Jordan for £10.00 despite a prominent sick stain to the bottom left-hand corner and some slight foxing. I have high hopes for a collection of Chris Green memorabilia which I found in dustbin just outside Bodmin. But I digress. I always wanted to put our Cairn terrier, Lucretia, in kennels when we go to the shows but my husband always insisted that our motor home (once urinated over by Carl Cox) was large enough to take the dog along. However, over the weeks I began notice that the bitch resented my being there and my husband spent more time with her than he did with me. On a couple of occasions, I entered the caravan to find him fumbling with trousers. What should I do?
Answer: Knock.
While Mrs D of Budleigh Salterton writes:
Dear Dorothy,
I met and fell in love with my husband, XXXXX, on the game fairs where he had a stall selling selling his hand made beard presses and tunnel traps for moles… to catch them, that is; not for moles to use. Although the life was very different from the glamour model work I had been used to, we were blissfully happy. But then, without warning he started to drink heavily. He grew a beard, stopped bathing and started to wear camouflage clothing. The GP diagnosed wild-fowling but I knew it was more serious. I thought it must be something to do with me so immediately invested my life savings in a crash course of cosmetic surgery resulting in, some months later, my new chest which is clearly visible from space. It did no good. The final straw was two weeks ago when he announced that he had bought a Series One Landrover. What am I to do?
Answer: Is that the 88 inch chassis or the longer pickup version?
Many traders are finding it hard to make a living out there so I am pleased to help in any way that I can even though sometimes it might look like knicking their idea and getting it made more cheaply in China. I’m even willing to help show organisers. Take Bisley Live, for example. On reading some descriptions of this event in the press, I felt that I must have been at a different event. Some were so strangely positive, it was as if Alistair Campbell had taken the weekend off from his PR labours on behalf of his new employer (rumoured to be Beelzebub) to put a positive spin on this harrowing three day affair. They say (whoever they are) some shows are created great (Shooting Show) whilst others have greatness thrust upon them (CLA). Bisley Live falls into a third category where the unfortunate organiser manages to create the show but then realises that he is going the have to work like and indentured labourer for three years if the franchise is ever going to get anywhere.
Pithy epigrams like ‘Never eat the yellow snow’ or ‘Never launch a military offensive against Russia without sufficient resources to see you through the first winter’ (not quite pithy, I’ll admit) can help us live longer and more profitable lives. Up there with the classics like ‘never carry out electrical maintenance work while taking a bath’ is ‘never hold a game fair in a bog’. Most shooting ranges and county show grounds are established on land of little agricultural value. The Royal Artillery bombard Lark Hill not because they hate it, they bombard it because it’s good for nothing else and, if the gun is accurate enough, you can scare the living **** out of traders setting up their tents for a January point to point. Bisley range is essentially one huge marsh. Despite temperatures in the 80′s for all three days, the ground at one end of the show was still inches deep in brackish water and marsh grass was everywhere. Had it been raining, the event could have been renamed The Trench Experience. The show would benefit from moving to area around the club houses and the Pavilion Hotel.
I know it’s an easy mistake to make but Bisley Live, even with its Italian glamour models and Shaun’s Harley Davison is in Surrey, not Nevada. In Surrey, they spend to live. Entire monthly incomes go on the mortgage or the kids’ mortgage. In Nevada, they live to spend. No one’s got a mortgage their because Granny lost it all playing Black Jack at Caesar’s. Events have to be priced accordingly. If the organisers want to kill Bisley Live stone dead, stick with the same ticket and range pass prices. This is the main complaint I have heard from those attending. It’s not that they don’t appreciate the opportunity of trying a whole load of shotguns and rifles at a show, they just didn’t want to pay the purchase price of a Barretta in order to do so.
From the traders’ point of view, the stands were too expensive for a first time show so this will need addressing. Most of the full-time traders bargained hard but some paid full whack and went home carrying a whopping great loss. Customers were notable only by their absence. The few that did attend fell far short of the projected attendance levels. When traders are bored, they get up to mischief. Not just drinking, drawing rude signs on people’s faces with indelible marker when they are asleep and seeing how may metres they can drive a mobility scooter on just two wheels type mischief but the type where they get annoyed at not taking money and start talking the event down.
So those are the bad bits out of the way. Are there any good bits? Yes, surprisingly there are. There is definitely a gap in the calendar at this end of the year for such an event. The organisers seem to be sensible. They didn’t spend the three days (two is enough, please) hiding in a drain. They were seen and were available for discussion. This created the right impression with many traders (although the free bar also contributed to this) who could be tempted back next year.
But there was a quieter, more ethereal side to Bisley Live which few saw and fewer appreciated. As I crawled from my van at 2 in the morning to have a pee, I saw something truly fabulous. The night was dark but clear. The marshy ground was shrouded in a gossamer mist. I could clearly make out lights dancing in the dew-laden air. You hear people talk about will o’ the wisps and marsh lanterns but you expect to see one. As the lights drew closer, I felt the hairs on the back of neck stand up. I prepared myself for my first encounter with the supernatural. What should I do? What should I say? To my surprise, the will o’ the wisps took the initiative and spoke first:
‘Do stop whining.’ said the first voice.
‘If Wes hadn’t dropped the fucking phone in the first place, we’d all be in bed asleep now. Just keep looking.’ said the second.
‘If I keep this phone light on any longer I’ll run out of battery…’
I retreated to the safety of van leaving the Blaze Publishing staff to their quest; finding their employer’s mobile phone in two thousand acres of open marshland.
Barely three weeks later, I find myself driving through the gates of Bisley again. This time it’s the Trafalgar Meeting. It’s so easy in this game to get lulled into a false sense of security. I had convinced myself that even with the finals of the Great Shooting Bake Off which was scheduled for the first evening, the weekend would at least be better commercially than Bisley Live. Well, I got that wrong. It might be that the BBC won’t shut up about the recession. It might be that all my regular customers had already bought from me at Bisley Live. It might be that there were very few shooters taking part in the competition. Whatever the reason, I secured very few sales over the weekend. As things turned out, the Great Shooting Bake Off was one of the high points. Judged by Dave (behind the Bar) and Hugh (do any of the cakes have cauliflower in them?) Massey Birch, the competition was cut-throat. Sean’s Gaddaffi Pie (so named because if had begun to go off slightly by the second evening) was favourite until it pipped at the post by Emma’s late entry lemon drizzle cake. Voices were raised and words were exchanged when Paul Newell (for some reason wearing a Luftwaffe dress uniform hat circa 1943 )was accused of trying to sabotage Emma’s winning lemon drizzle cake with the addition of pepper but justice prevailed and the victorious Emma goes through the next round where she has to cook a cake in Gary Barlow’s house without him noticing and bringing it along to the grand finals at next year’s Shooting Show.
So as the Patterdale terrier of poverty buries the proceeds of another year of selling leather goods in the vegetable patch of time, I turn my mind to winter work and wave the 2011 show season a fond farewell.
