The Craft Fayre

‘Never, never take me to a craft fair again, even if I beg and scream and implore you, do you promise?’

‘I promise,’ said my husband, gripping the steering wheel with barely concealed rage as we joined a queue of cars leaving the craft fair car park. At my insistence we had broken a cardinal rule: never leave the house on a bank holiday.

Some long-repressed herding instinct had swept over me the night before and I had pored over the Leicester Mercury, looking for local attractions to visit. ‘Aha,’ I cried eventually, and began to sell the idea of visiting a country house, complete with woodland walks, market garden and craft fair, to my husband. I had been in a peculiar mood all week, beset with doubts and insecurities, dithering at the wardrobe door in the morning, etc. So, no doubt as a way of appeasing the madwoman, my husband agreed to leave the house on a bank holiday. It was a glorious afternoon, we shouted goodbye to the teenage daughter who was skulking in her room, hiding from the sun, and joined the bank holiday traffic. We tootled along happily, listening to The Archers on Radio 4.

As we listened to the afternoon play (a modern drama about family life, involving incest, murder and madness), the first signs started to appear on fluorescent cardboard tied to lampposts: ‘Craft Fayre’. Of course we should have turned back there and then, done a Starsky and Hutch three-point turn and headed for home at full speed. To spell fair as fayre is ten out of ten naff. It is as bad as calling a café Ye Olde Tea Shoppe or a cart selling sweets Ye Olde Sweet Kabin.

I saw the latter in a city centre shopping mall last week. To confuse the issue, the boy weighing the pick'n'mix wore an old-fashioned butcher's uniform, complete with striped apron and straw boater. Ludicrous when you think that the sweets are probably made by machinery in a business unit on a windswept industrial estate.

But, patient reader, we did not turn back. Like lemmings, knowing our fate but unable to control it, we rushed towards the edge of the cliff. I shuffled my credit cards impatiently as we approached the grounds of the country house. I counted my cash as we joined a long queue of traffic. I could hardly stop myself from leaping out of the car as we toured the various car parks looking for a space. Eventually, my husband bumped up the car's suspension and drove down a rutted cart track, parked in a ditch, and at last we were able to join the madding bank holiday crowds.

‘Tea Rooms’, it had said in the newspaper, and I conjured up images of plump apple-cheeked waitresses serving home-made scones warm from the oven. The tea rooms had a long queue, which my husband gallantly joined, leaving me to sit outside in the sunshine. I was perfectly happy for the first half hour. Then I began to be concerned. Had he fallen into a black hole or had he gone berserk and smashed the tea rooms to smithereens in a frenzy of impatience and hunger? Eventually he emerged carrying a tray, on which lurked two sad scones. At a glance I could tell that these apologies had only recently made the journey from freezer to microwave to cash till. There were no apple-cheeked waitresses, either – just one gawky teenage girl who looked to be in need of orthodontic treatment. With globs of scone sticking to our palates, we entered the craft workshops.

I wasn't aware that sticking nuts and bolts together and making little men sitting astride nut and bolt motorcycles had ever called for a seven-year craft apprenticeship. I was not tempted by the clumsy jewellery made from polished beach pebbles, or by the machine-made quilts in insipid colours. As for the New Age Merlin wall plaques, they looked like solidified cat poo. I almost broke a hundred crystals in my rush to get out of that particular shop. The pottery was heavy and dull and slime green. You wouldn't want it on your table, though it could have been handy for slitting your wrists over as you crawled home, bumper to bumper, in the bank holiday traffic.