A Season of Fetes JULY 2009

If Autumn be the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness then summer is surely the time of fetes, fairs and festivals.

Opening St Joseph's Primary School Summer Fete

No honest MP considers a June or July weekend complete without at least a dozen such occasions and he or she will stagger back home on Sunday evening replete of tombolas, raffles, “beat the goalie” competitions and bearing enough home made jam to feed a fair sized nation.

Opening the Pitshanger Party in the Park

An MP may have – typically – between thirty and forty primary schools, half a dozen high schools, a score of Scout and Guide Groups and a fair clutch of places of worship in their constituency.
In June and July every single one will have some sort of a fair or fete and to these must be added the carnivals, melas and typical civic duties revolving around anniversaries, unveilings or awards.

Opening the St.Raphael's Primary School Summer Fete

Each and every occasion will see the MP once but the MP will see every one of them over the weekends and it can become a little confusing.
Heaven help the Honourable Member who announces to the massed membership of the St.Raphael’s Parent Teacher Association that he is delighted to be here at St.Gregory’s. Other small errors creep in and I was severely upbraided – whilst unveiling as plaque in honour of the hundredth anniversary of the birth of three times Wimbledon winner Fred Perry for mentioning local sporting heroes such as Andrew Strauss and Peter Crouch without realising that M.J.Brearley or Middlesex and England was also an Ealing boy. How I could have forgotten the author of that thunderous triple century against Northern Zone in Peshawar during the 1966/67 U25s tour is inexplicable and inexcusable but pales against the awful error that I committed last week.
Dashing off a few hundred words for the “Guardian” newspaper (a poor provincial substitute for Asian Voice”) I made passing reference to Peter Sallis – the actor who played Clegg (the character in “Last of the Summer Wine” not the faintly risible leader of the Liberal Democrats) – and meant to refer to him as “the great Peter Sallis” of “Wallace and Grommit” fame.
Some damnable gremlin crept into the system and my words emerged as “the late Peter Sallis”.
Little did I know that Peter Sallis (very much alive and thankfully so) is massively popular among the “Guardian” readership and I was almost swept under by the tidal wave of fury from his friends and fans for suggesting that their hero was no more.
I telephoned to his agent in an attempt to discover the address to which a grovelling apology could be sent but was told that Mr.Sallis was rather distressed as some beastly MP had said that he was dead. I wisely hung up the telephone.
Now, with fevered brow and sunburnt pate soothed by unguents I can sit back and contemplate the error of my ways.
I can also recall the wonderful weeks of summer madness and reflect on the eternal verity that every MP will complain of the festival season but that none of us would change it for all the tea in Whitehall.