Banbury and District Show
Today was the Banbury and District Show, set in the two front fields of Spiceball Park. I have to hold up my hands and say I'm not always the greatest fan of such events. Perhaps you need at least one over-excitable child to make the event more relevant, but I often find myself wandering aimlessly, peeking at random stalls, shurgging, and then moving on. So... was this any different?
Firstly I began the day assisting the Visit Banbury team by helping assemble their stall. My efforts mainly extended to tacking cloth to the table neatly, hanging bunting, and sticking prices on appropriate items. Task sorted I popped out of the park to reset, have a coffee with the wife, before heading back in the guise of Banbury Pulse.
In previous years the layout has seemed a little underwhelming and haphazard. This time, several neat rows of well presented stalls lined the left of the first field, just after the skate park. This created a hub of activity in the main thoroughfare from the canal entrance, with the main arena to the right of all the stalls. These sturdy, ready-to-use stalls were filled with numerous local businesses and charities, the latter offering a slew of ubiquitous tombolas. If someone can come up with a better, more creative way to raise income at charity stalls I would much appreciate it; I just feel the tombola belongs in the past, with bell bottoms and multi-coloured floral shirts. Don't get me wrong, these shows are great for raising the profile of many charities and I understand something quick and easy needs to be on the stall, but when each one is offering pretty much the same, eventually they become counter-productive and do not attract the essential punters.
As well as stalls with their cornucopia of merchandise, there was a great variety of food to chose from; Thai, Bratwurst, Burgers (but of course!), fresh stonebaked pizza (they looked amazing!!), Roti, and gourmet coffee, to name the main ones. I ended up practically covering lunch solely by eating various samples. My own Kick Start Fat Loss were present in the Health & Vitality tent and I snuck in a good few of their tasty treats. Elsewhere Shirley Gelleburn had a stall of homemade jams, pickles and cakes, which provided another source of pickings! A jar of her amazing pineapple jam is going to be winging its way to my mum, and I have a slice of coffee and walnut cake ready as a cheeky treat after dinner tonight!
Aside from the shopping potential, there were also a larger amount of fair ground attractions, bouncy slides, go-karts, climbing walls, and what I shall describe as a bouncy jumpy spinny device and leave you to work out what it could be. All of which I did not partake of, being the aforementioned attractions for children. Despite having been at the show for several hours I had yet to procure a young being, and so continued, yes, it had happened, aimless wandering!
The stalls that had drawn my attention had been seen, purchases had been made (dog chew made of antler!), and I had also photographed Sindy Matthews doing her KSFL HIIT with some of her crew, and sent the resulting images into the social media stratosphere. Happily during my photographic interlude I had been mistaken for an official photographer, which led to a future Banbury Pulse blog with Yvonne from the Foscote private hospital, whom I learned today are now fully independent and unique to Banbury! Look out for that one in the near future folks, could be interesting!
Also present was Tanya Collins, the very next blog to come along I promise! In my defence it's her fault... she had so much to tell me about her past, present, and future that it will take me a little than normal to filter through it all. Frankly it's all too fascinating and could fill numerous blogs! But I digress.
In the same tent Cherwell District Council also had a presence, asking, if you can believe it, for us to grumble! Post-its were provided and you could scrawl whatever gripe about the area you may have. For my part I had a whine about the state of the area around the train station, which is my opinion needs renovating asap, being the first impression of our town, and not doing the best job at the moment. But I'm not here to grumble...
As mentioned earlier there was a main arena in the first field, where various events took place throughout the day. You could pick from a fire show, galloping acrobatics (horses if you hadn't guessed), army vehicles, and dance with the DJ (with my least favourite element; the dreaded audience particpation!!)
The second field also had a large arena, for yet more events; Julie Bruce dance academy, Freestyle Martial Arts, and Banbury Boot Scooters. The show I was most eager to see out of all of these, not being a big dance fan, was the fire show in arena one. The pictures below give a brief gist of the madness, though it would be better if you had a screen with heat-o-vision installed, for maximum effect!
Into the box he goes!
The box goes up in flames!
A glamorous showgirl magically emerges... sort of!!
Now he's just showing off!
"You turn me upside down!"
Yup, that's a man dressed only in frilly underwear cycling through a wall of fire. Obviously.
A dramatic finale of flame!
Other than a mad naked man jumping through flames, and horses horsing about, animals were also a prominent feature of the show. Dogs are always welcome in the park, and there is a fun, anyone can enter, best dog competition in the second field. On the opposite side of field two there were also well trained pooches from Banbury Cross flyball club leaping along obstacle courses with boundless doggy enthusiasm. Well, except one chap who seemed very nonplussed about such foolishness. Perhaps he was just tired by the time I got there.
But it's not all about dogs in Banbury. Oh no! There was also pig and ferret racing! Yep, you read that right. The wife and I even had a little flutter on the ferrets, which almost yielded a win for Geri; her ferret definitely poked its nose out of the tube first, but suddenly became shy of the crowd and got beaten by the lady I had initially chosen, but then changed to a handsome chap called Warrior who was useless! He started of in the lead and should have won, but decided to head back to the start after half way, and ended the race out of his tube, basically as a non-starter. Honestly, if you can't trust a ferret these days, then I don't know what the world is coming to.
Ferret racing tubes!
The eventual winner, Marge, who moments after this shot exited the tube and ruined the wife's almost win!
In conclusion, how did I find the show? Sure enough I did aimlessly wander, and only some of the events appealed, but that's the nature of the beast. And the truth is I spent the entire day, from 10:30am until 4:30pm happily catching a little of this, and a little of that, making a few small purchases, watching one main event, and chatting with various stall holders, all of whom felt the footfall had been enough to have made their visit to the show worth the effort. Also, by the reactions of the various children within my proximity when watching the fire show, and the animal antics, they were definitely having a great time, and all in all, events like this are for the family. Local businesses and entrepeneurs sold some wares, charities were promoted, and fun was had.
And it didn't rain.
What else could you ask for from a summer show?
