We have been to Appleby Fair.
We made an uncomfortably early start on the day. We left the dogs asleep on the sofa and took thick slabs of walnut bread and butter with us to eat in the car.
We decided not to take the dogs, because Roger Poopy has never been on a lead, and probably a noisy gypsy fair full of cart racing and lurchers would not be the best place to make a start.
When we got there we were jolly glad that we hadn’t.
It has rained a lot this weekend, and Appleby had turned into one of the muddiest places I have ever seen.
It had rained so much that the ramp down to the river had been abandoned, and nobody was swimming with their horses. The water levels were too high and the current too fast. One or two horses were standing damply in the river, having their tails shampooed, but nobody seemed to feel much like being completely submerged, a sentiment with which I had every sympathy.
The place was packed to bursting.
When we thought about it afterwards we realised that hardly any casual spectators, like us, had been there, probably because of the awful weather. Apart from a relatively small handful of locals and bystanders, almost everybody we had seen had been gypsies. Fortunately our dress sense is of a standard for us to fit right in, and if anybody thought that we did not belong, then they were polite enough not to mention it.
There were horses and children bounding about everywhere, grinning young men flying up and down the roads behind lightweight sulkies, and boys riding bareback, racing with them. The road at the bottom of the hill was covered in skid marks from hundreds of iron-shod hooves, and every few minutes people scattered as the carts hurtled downwards towards the crowds by the river.
We had deliberately not taken very much cash with us, because of self knowledge about our reckless extravagance, and this turned out to be a good idea. My taste in clothes and kitchenware is somewhere between that of a gypsy and a six year old, and the field was crammed with gypsy sellers. I could have bought skillets and lace-edged towels, rainbow-coloured shoes and scarves, and all manner of pretty things: but I didn’t.
We almost came to grief over a set of pans with roses and lavender patterns on the outside of them, they were probably made of paper-thin tin, and would have lasted about two weeks, but they were utterly beautiful, and I loved them.
We slipped and staggered through the mud, which was well over ankle-deep, and I was glad for well-dubbined boots. Gypsy children were charging about everywhere, the boys muddied to their armpits, plastic bags sticking out of the tops of their wellies.
We watched one family with five children, struggling with a pushchair in mud which was well above the depth of the wheels. At one point the father smacked the eldest boy, who might have been nine, around the ear, and told him that he was not to share his cigarette with the six year old. The boy cried, but shared it anyway, surreptitiously, behind the father’s back.
I was impressed by the amount of upmarket merchandise, I could have bought any amount of Dior or Chanel, or Harrods’ own brand. One of the stalls was selling genuinely upmarket music CDs, and I was so impressed that I have pictured it below, it is the one with the flag.
In the end we did not buy anything. We considered buying a couple of horses, so that we could ride together. There were some beautiful horses, sleek and sturdy and kind-faced, and I thought wistfully that we might keep them hidden behind the workshop at the farm for quite some time before Mark’s sister noticed and demanded that we removed them. Of course this is not true. Mark pointed out that not only is his sister not stupid, but we don’t really want to have horses, at the very least not until we have got no more school fees and also live next to a field instead of the Co-op.
We might have some then. We can build our own gypsy caravan and live in the field with the horses.
We had an ace time, and we are sitting on the taxi rank feeling completely exhausted.
Looking at gypsy caravans is a tiring business.
