Goose Fair | quercuscommunity

Tonight we had a customer who dawdled so I set off home ten minutes late. With the addition or rain, roadworks and a broken down car, this turned my journey home into a 50 minute marathon. With clear roads in the morning I expect the reverse journey with take ten to fifteen minutes. When I got home Julia was already there, looking wet and bedraggled. She had been caught in the rain and her bus journey home had been even more unpleasant than my car trip.

The trouble is Goose Fair. The bus had actually had to make a couple of diversions to avoid the worst blockages.

The truth is that the city streets are not suited to the rush of visitors that accompanies the fair. It should be moved out to the edge of the city. Unfortunately nobody wants it on their doorstep. The noise and smell of fried onions are a nuisance, but they aren’t great inconveniences. Even the parking problems and congestion aren’t the worst things. That is, as one of my friends once told me, the feeling that anything in your garden that isn’t nailed down is likely to be stolen.

They used to cancel their milk for the duration of the fair as it was always stolen. OK, that’s a long time ago (I’m not sure anyone delivers milk now) but the principle remains the same. It’s here for ten days this year, supposedly to allow the stallholders to recover after Covid. It’s going to be an unpleasant interlude.

It shouldn’t affect my journey much but it is not going to be much fun for Julia. We may have to look at an alternative route home for her. In the mornings we will continue to take the long way round and avoid the place.

Yes, I’m a grumpy sod, and yes, it isn’t the view that usually makes it into the local papers But it’s all good source material for my future biographer.

Vegetable soup from October 2014. Was it really so long ago? Top picture is home made piccalilli.

Goose Fair arrived in the first week of October, and started a train of thought that led to gingerbread. From Goose Fair, through Halloween, Bonfire Night and until Christmas we will have gingerbread in a variety of forms. It started off with a look at traditional Grantham Gingerbreads. I’ve never done too well with biscuits that spread out, so I decided to look for another recipe and go back to that one.

It’s still in note form at the moment, but I will get round to writing it down properly soon.

These are more like a ginger biscuit when they are done, being crisp all the way through. My research (which meant eating several a day for three days) shows that they keep well. The residents of the Care Home we visited yesterday, and the Men in Sheds today all confirmed that they were good biscuits and had kept well. As these are people with years of experience in biscuit eating I think we will class this recipe as a success.

We also did apple juice and hoopla at the care Home, and talked of other fairs apart from Goose Fair (it turns out that most of the ladies don’t come from round here so we ended up talking of Shaftesbury, Hull, King’s Lynn and Barnet). All in all it was an animated session even before Julia unpacked her mobile hoopla kit. Once the lure of prizes set its hook even the card school in the corner stopped to throw a hoop or two.

The only problem was that there were a lot of biscuits – forty medium size, forty small, six round and one odd shape. I tested them until I couldn’t test another one and when I went to bed I could still see them, row after row of gingerbread men…