There are few things that are as quintessentially English as the village fete. Just hearing the words conjures up images of fairy cakes, screaming kids, "More tea Vicar!", junk stalls, lucky dip etc. Every one has that concept in their minds eye of what such a day should behold. And it would be sunny too!
Well, last weekend I visited just such an event. It was indeed sunny. I would say that the usual "perfect" fete takes place on the village green. Not so the Wallington village fete. It happens on a water meadow. Just in case their are people out there are not aware of what a water meadow is I shall give a brief description. the meadow in question was a piece of low lying pasture that was never cultivated but allowed to flood when the river Wallington took it's fancy. As a kid I remember seeing cows in the field, but only just.
There was a time back in the early seventies that it looked like it would get built on as an industrial estate. My family marched on County hall in Winchester to protest. I think it worked because the owners allow us to use the land as a recreational resource. So it is quite important to have the fete in the meadow.

I like the events that the Wallington Village Community put on. I really do. I think that any activity carried out to bring people together socially is extremely important. But as an ex resident of the village I sometimes thought the association was grasping for an ideal that was somehow bogus. The idea of Wallington as a village is, in my opinion, a little conceited. It was, historically no more than a hamlet. There was a manor house and a dirty great Victorian fort aimed at protecting the naval yards at Portsmouth. Wallington as a village was really created predominantly post war. I would guess 95% of the housing is twentieth century. The village is actually part of the town of Fareham and is literally a stones throw from the town centre. It was never a village but a suburb at best. And at times I have believed that there was a search for a non existent rural idyll. Certainly not one that ever existed in Wallington. Take for instance a patch of grass in front of one the two pubs in the "village". When I heard it called the "village green" I nearly died laughing. Technically because it was green and existed within the area known as the village it was therefore a village green but it is barely 5 square yards of turf, so I felt it was being a little optimistic calling it the village green.

The village has two pubs and a village hall (a pretty good one at that), and does in many ways qualify itself as a village. The WVC does organise many community events aimed at providing social outlets for all members of the community as well as a powerful lobby for the protection of all aspects of the environment. For all these things it is to the credit of villagers. But sometimes, just sometimes it can appear like a bunch of townies trying very hard to become a bit of the Cotswolds. For all the wrong reasons!

Still the fete is nearly always good value. My Mum one year entered a Dundee cake in the bakery section and was very pleased to find she had won second prize!That is until she found out that she was the only entrant for that class. The judge felt that even though she was the only entrant it was not of good enough quality to win!

The 2010 fete was blessed with fine hot sunny weather,The type small children remember well into their dotage. For many reasons, none of which spring to mind at the time of writing, I was unable to attend the whole event. When I arrived with my rather unimpressed kids there was an exhibition of Falconry. Now I have seen falconry before - and this group, but if it was your first time as a viewer and you had walked in just at the moment I had you would think that the field was, in fact ringed with carnivorous trees, not only that but these trees were obviously of the performing variety. The reason you would have come to this strange conclusion would probably because at that moment two men with thick leather gloves were standing next to just such a tree, they were whistling in a sort of "come and get it" manner and flinging morsels of meat in the air whilst the narrator in the ring was saying that it would probably come down when it felt hungry.

What in fact had happened was that a Harris Hawk had been released to the custody of the tree and nothing was getting it to budge. Harris Hawks must be a bit truculent as the last time I saw this troupe the Harris Hawk, once allowed off the leash immediately buggered off to play with the seagulls in the far distance closely followed by meat flinging Falconers and we never saw it again.

They spent some time trying to get the hawk to comply whilst the narrator desperately tried to fill with all sorts of trivia not limited to but including olde englishe expressions that have origins in falconry. They even tried to entice the hawk with offering it a small child running up and down the display area to act as a bunny. All to no avail, I should add that actually the small boy in question was towing a rabbit lure on a long string but I think you'll agree that my earlier description is the more comical.

Having exhausted his witty asides the troupe gave up on the Hawk and brought out the Peregrine Falcon. Which also buggered off to start with. However this was because it had a technique not dissimilar to the Luftwaffe of 1940. It like to swoop in on it's prey from high above and it flew away so as to generate the altitude it needed out of sight. One of the troupe then departed from the previous display and now had morsels tied to a bit of string and then waved it around his head. I did just wonder what kind of animal did this in the wild, but it seemed to attract the falcon after some time, and not before it chased off a local Buzzard that had become interested.

It was after some swooping of the Peregrine that the Harris Hawk had obviously felt it lacked attention as it too joined the fray, first with the Buzzard, then the swinging morsel and finally the Peregrine whose morsel it was intended to be.

The narrator finished off by saying that with the Harris Hawk it was win win, people seemed to enjoy it misbehaving as much as watching it hunt. I like to see the way these birds interact with the local bird population. I once saw a Steppe Eagle mixing it with the local Crows and the Crows really not knowing quite what to make of this interloper. As the eagle settled onto the factory roof next to the Crows the squawking and body language suggested they weren't happy about it but couldn't quite work out whose job it was to tell the Eagle to clear off!

The inevitable period of silence during the handing over of the arena to the next display team (Cadets marching up and down) i refrained to the marquee where my mother was helping with the bric-a-brac stall. There she was with her co defendant, like a couple of ancient Greek sirens only with bus passes and attracting Young children. It was all "isn't this shiny!" "Look how it glistens". The kids didn't stand a chance. having these dear old ladies attract their attention toward all that shines they were in a trance and could not stop themselves from buying all the glittery tat their coppers could get them.honestly my mum should be ashamed of herself. And family were not immune. My daughter got the full treatment too and unfortunately bought a lot of the stuff I had given ( which were probably things bought from last year).

We had spent quite a lot of time in the heat and needed refreshment. Unfortunately so did everyone else. There was a large queue for everything except hamburgers (which were pretty good actually), so as mum lived opposite the field we went home and raided her freezer for branded luxury ice cream.

By the time my Ma arrived back form her exhortations I felt she needed a rest from people and took my kids off to watch a film about a girl whose only major lifestyle choice was to spend the rest of her life with a "vegetarian" vampire or a werewolf. Oh, if only life were that simple.