Hipster-fying the village fare would be a fete worse than death
On Saturday mornings in our house there is an unseemly scuffle over The Daily Telegraph. It’s not the news pages we are competing for (too depressing), or the sport (ditto), but the back page of the Saturday section, where Graham Norton, looking like an Old Testament prophet who has just been told a racy joke by an irreverent disciple, dispenses sage advice to troubled readers. If one’s conscience had recently had a full service, it might sound a bit like the Voice of Graham: brisk common sense tempered with compassion, a generous dollop of worldliness and a bracing dash of fire and brimstone.
Among the dilemmas to which he brought his judicious counsel last week was the tricky question of village fetes, raised by Anon of Wilts. Anon’s village holds an annual summer fair. These things, as anyone who has ever been involved in one knows only too well, require prodigious feats of organisation and offer ample opportunity for misunderstanding, contumely and huff.
Most villages harbour an indomitable personage whose boundless energy and superb disregard for anyone else’s feelings find annual expression in the village fete. Poor Anon of Wilts is confronted by a brace of such personages: incomers keen to turbocharge the village fair. Upgrades to the music and decorations loom, along with a “craft beer tent and a pop-up restaurant”. Here we have, encapsulated in fete form, the perennial dilemma of village life. On the one hand, new blood is needed if the community is not to die. On the other, incomers invariably import their own notions of rural life, formed by such Petit Trianon fantasies as Daylesford and Babington House, with a sprinkling of National Trust and a smidgeon of Escape to the Country.
I live in south-east London, where craft beer and pop-up restaurants are as indispensable a part of summer living as ploughing matches and puppy shows are in the country. But between the ages of five and 11, I went to a village primary school in Kent, whose glorious summer fete has always struck me as the perfect model of what a fete should be.
The ur-fete is opened by a pillar of the local community who makes a speech of which the only intelligible words are, “Declare this fete open” – at which everyone makes an unseemly dash for the cake stall. There is a toy stall, where sobbing tinies buy back the treasured toys their heartless mothers have forced them to donate, and a bric-a-brac stall at which to pick up hideous old Chinese vases that Sotheby’s will later auction for zillions (in one’s dreams).
These days I suppose there are regulations that forbid bowling for a pig (the pig rootling happily in an enclosure of straw bales). But there are toffee apples, a coconut shy, a tea tent smelling of crushed grass and mildewed canvas, and the chance to hurl wet sponges at the rector. At the end, everyone says, as they do each year, “Weren’t we lucky with the weather?”
To a sophisticated urban eye, such simple summer celebrations might seem rather dull (no sushi, no artisanal gin). Yet they embody something even more precious than innovation: continuity. At my ideal fete, small children lay down memories that will last into old age, while their ghostly ancestors peer over the churchyard wall and murmur approvingly, “It’s just like it was in my day.”