Fate of the fete is safe

Jun 15 2008 by Colin Patterson, Sunday Sun

WHEREVER you are in the North, there’ll be a fete near you.

Nothing is more certain than, throughout the summer, hundreds of folk will beaver away for their hospital, village hall or hospice. It is a real community celebration, bringing old and young together.

Last weekend, I spent a pleasant afternoon at one of our local fetes, helping to raise funds for Magic’s charity. Everything was hi-tech, as you’d expect in 2008 but, in some ways, I felt nothing had changed.

There’s a wonderful old Jacques Tati film called Jour de Fete which shows all the pitfalls of a fair in a French village after the Second World War . . . and most of the shenanigans seem to revolve around the bar.

Despite the difficulties these days with cut-price booze and the like, there’s no doubt that the centre of the community is still the local boozer, and bottles of various stuff are ever-popular on the tombola.

I suppose it is a measure of how affluent we’ve become that, nowadays, Champagne and scotch are more usual than pale ale or stout. I won a bottle of pale ale on the tombola at a fete when I was 10.

I remember it well because Violet Carson from Coronation Street was opening it, and one of her hairnets was another one of the prizes! Opening the fete, that is, not the bottle of pale ale.

Nowadays, the organisers would have been locked up and I’d have been given counselling.

Back then, my father merely picked up the bottle, saying that he’d swap it for some lemonade. I thought I’d got a good deal.

Why is it that tombola rules mean you only ever pick out tickets ending in a three, seven or nine when the winning tickets all end in zero or five? And why, after having forked out £5 in a desperate attempt to win something, do you always get a prize meant for the opposite sex?

There are also time-honoured traditions of face-painting, guess the weight of the cake, and bonny baby competition.

Anyone who has judged one of these will know you end up with one happy mum and the opportunity for a very swift exit, depending on how many entrants there are.

And there’s another tradition . . . the local rock band. The band at the fete I attended was excellent, and was called The Reverberations.

The earliest song they did was from 1957 . . . the year when John Lennon met Paul McCartney. At a church fete, natch!