A Poor Showing

I apologise for my recent absence, gorgeous and resourceful reader. My health took a turn for the worse and I have been sequestered in the emergency wing of the Harry Kewell Gout Facility where I have enjoyed the benefit of the most advanced treatments available for this pernicious condition.

Last time I was in there they strapped me into a chair and drilled my teeth. It hurt, but not as much as the gout. I suppose they thought it was a counter irritant.

This time I have mainly been strapped into a chair (a craze of theirs it seems) with big sort of tweezer things holding my eyelids open, enabling me to watch disturbing video clips while Ludwig Van blasts out from speakers on all sides.

I am pleased to say that a few weeks of this has left me refreshed although I do yearn for a white singlet and a bowler hat. I will let you know how I go with that. Some eye makeup might be nice, too.

Anyway, the great toe of my left foot has now largely recovered and can take the weight of the bedclothes resting on it, which is pleasing because the Amity Society is due to start its new pipe of port, and one can never really enjoy port when one’s toe is twingeing away.

In other matters, residents of Adelaide are currently revelling in the pleasures that come once a year in the form of the Royal Agricultural and Horticultural Society of South Australia’s annual show.

The Show, as it is known, started out as an opportunity for country types to wander in to town leading their fattest pig or most veiny-uddered milking cow on a string. The country type would shove the beast into some sort of contest and then take the opportunity to totter off to one of the busier thoroughfares where he would bump into groups of other country types that he had not seen since last year and they would all stand around in big groups talking about rainfall and generally hindering traffic.

We, the polished boulevardiers of the town, would tolerate these rustic meanderings on the basis that it only happened once a year. The pigs and cattle would be sorted, awards presented and everything would go back to normal.

So in theory, that was the point of the show. In fact for children the point was quite different. There were the sideshows with shooting galleries, ghost trains, laughing clowns and medical curiosities such as the Headless Boy or the Half Man Half Woman. Then there were the rides like the Big Dipper and the Gravitron which were calculated to cause you to lose the quantities of fairy floss, ice cream, chips, donuts and battered saveloys that you had inadvisedly ingested immediately before getting on board.

In short, the show became mainly a dirty, cheap, noisy travesty populated by petty criminals and carney folk. The attraction for a child was almost unbearable.

Dotted around the sideshow alleys there were also stalls for various local business which demonstrated their wares and sold bags of product, usually various types of confectionery and sweet drinks.

You can no doubt see why this combination of disreputable entertainments, junk food and dangerous rides is irresistible to children. This has been the case ever since my own youth.

Unfortunately my parents took the view that it was not a desirable environment for me and so usually when my friends trooped off chattering excitedly, I was doing homework or something. In the evening when the fireworks were visible for miles, mine was the pale face pressed against the glass looking out to the festivities.

Even you, robust and worldly reader, would have been moved to tears at the pitiful spectacle.

When my friends returned, they would each have four or five paper bags all full of chocolates, smarties, bertie beetles, those chocolate racing cars with sultanas in them and whiz fizz in a waxed paper envelope with a plastic spoon that had a ring on the end of it that you could detach and wear around if you were sufficiently dainty of finger. Which I wasn’t.

Anyway, I remember vividly that I was once taken to the show with a friend by that friend’s parents. Despite being Amish or something they seemed to be much more liberal than my parents as regards what a child should be allowed to do.

The show was every bit as good as I had imagined it could be with a few startling and unexpected additions such as day old chickens that had been dyed bright colours for some reason. And a chair lift (or possibly chair-o-plane) in which one might, should one so desire, get a birds eye view of a couple of hundred yards of grimy sideshows. It was fantastic.

I think we were allowed 2 rides and one showbag. I don’t remember what rides I went on, though I think the chair-o-plane may have been one. The other one was probably a ghost train but I am not sure.

What I do remember is the showbag.

The other children undertook extensive investigations to ensure that they got bags with maximum sugar and minimum educational value. If you wanted a game where you rolled a couple of ball bearings around until they lodged in the indented eyeholes of a cartoon character, or one with a sort of grid of moveable letters which one was expected to manipulate to spell a word, you could always trawl through last year’s Christmas stocking but the chance to smother yourself with lollies may not come your way again. The knowledgeable child made sure that there were no games, colouring-in books or other junk like coloured chalk to dilute the sugar rush that was coming to them.

This was where my lack of experience showed. It showed in two ways.

The first is that I had trouble making a decision at all. I wavered between the Hoadley’s bag and the MacRobertsons, the Menz and the Cadbury’s. Ditters looked good but Allens’ clearly had more product, plus a fairly disreputable looking comic book which might have been worth a look.

With all of this vacillating I started to run out of time. We had to go and I had not selected a showbag. We were being dragged away and I was still empty handed and so there was the second manifestation of my lack of experience. I just panicked. Instead of allowing myself to be guided by one of the others, I lunged at the next bag I saw and flung a few sweaty coins to the vendor.

My heart was thumping. I could barely contain myself. There was something sticking out of the top of the bag. Nervously I checked it. A kite. Hmmm. Well, not too bad but not really what I was after. I checked the company on the bag, but didn’t recognise their name.

It wasn’t until I got into the car that I had the chance to examine my purchase properly.

It was from a hardware firm.

The worst showbag ever.

There were some bits of dowelling, some contact cement, a small box of white chalks, some assorted nails and one of those flat carpenters’ pencils. Possibly there was a small tape measure and a couple of other bits and pieces like string for the kite, but I was too dispirited to go through it once I was sure there were no lollies. I made a half hearted effort to trade the chalks for a poly-waffle, but not only did the trade not come off but the other kids saw what I had in my bag and heaped scorn on me.

The car was a sea of wrappers and packets. I think I was grudgingly given a snake and a couple of jelly beans, but the bitter envy I felt was not greatly eased.

I didn’t really go to the show again after that. For some reason the glamour had worn off.