The Summer Fair

Yesterday was summer fair day. Now, I know that at some schools this involves teams of stay-at-home strategists, legions of women (usually women) furiously baking and arranging, drafting in celebrity friends to cut the ribbon and slaving night and day to come up with fantastic money-making stalls and attractions. Fire-eating men on stilts or an ostrich burger barbeque. That kind of thing.
Our school is somewhat different. Our planning goes more like this. Five (if we're lucky) of us meet a few weeks beforehand. We draw up a huge list of stalls, then put sign up sheets all round the school. These are routinely ignored. No one signs up for anything. Rumours reach the two of us who have been left to really organise everything that so-and-so will run hook-the-duck or will braid hair. All those people who usually make the lunch food throw a huge, muttered grumble over something, although the cause isn't quite clear. I spend an afternoon hunting for the said ducks and eventually find them, looking sad and some now blind. Nevermind. We put up more posters round the school, send home notes. Still no one volunteers for anything, except a new Chinese parent who offers to write people's names in Chinese characters. We are unreasonably excited by this, probably frighten her with our gratitude, partly because it's a new thing for the fair, but mostly because someone has stepped forward. When cornered, the woman who had said she could braid hair now says that she can't because, well, because she hasn't the time. We try not to slap her.
The day before, we two are called in to see the Head who is pretending that it's not her panicking but everyone else. Where are the lists of who's doing what, she says. Where are the piles of things that are usually in the staff room. We shrug and say it will be fine because it always it, but she has worried us, so we spend the rest of the day dashing to local pounds shops to find toys, prizes, lollypops, huge bags of crisps, anything really that may possibly of use at a fair. We can't find it all at pound shops so end up spending many pounds each, which, of course, we could have just donate directly to the school and saved ourselves all this trouble.
That evening, we bake furiously all night. I make jellies and even use an out of date cake mix, just to boost numbers. Still worried, I send out my husband to buy extra cakes.
I wake up on the morning and think, "I'm never, ever, ever doing this again." More than that, I want to move to Surrey, find a little village and never deal with the trials of inner-city education again. I am in despair about our school, our parents, our children, my terrible cakes.
Of course, it all turns out to be fine. People bring food; there are many toys to sell; ducks are successfully hooked, the hoops la-ed. Raffles tickets are bought, rain doesn't fall. Faces are painted, nasty cheap burgers are consumed and no one is poisoned by cakes made from out of date mixes. Children spend many twenty pences on all kinds of things. They buy armfuls of toys and win even more. They guess where in the world the teddy bear comes from and make lovely paper birds. They dress up and have wild and hilarious photographs taken with their friends They are all lovely and I feel ridiculously fond of them all. The teachers are fun and not teachery at all. And, as an added bonus, we actually raise some money.
So for a while anyway, I'll forget about that Surrey plan.