The Hooverville Hexagon: Eclipse Edition!

 

But first, a word about that viral sensation…

 

Llanigon Fair

by Robbie Stamp

 

Llanigon Fair

I've come to really, really love the Llanigon Fair.

 

It takes place in a field, not the one right opposite me, but the field just to the right. It is  a field on a big dairy farm with two or three hundred head of cattle. The grass was very brown this year as we are weeks into a summer of no rain at all.

 

I only started going to the fair three or four years ago, when somebody who'd helped look after our house down here had said for years that I really ought to go. So I finally did. This tends to be an August week I spend on my own now at my little white stone cottage, as my wife heads to the Edinburgh Festival with friends.  There is also something in the quiet solitude in the fin de siècle feel that August has that I have come to love as I get older, that is gently punctuated by the fun of the fair.

 

In the morning, from my garden, you can see the gymkhana taking place. Mostly still young girls who come with their horse boxes and their ponies and clip down the lane and do their jumps, and you can hear the kindly and enthusiastic female announcer's voice across the Public Address System, welcoming 'Iona on Midnight' and 'Tabby on Super Ted'.

 

Then in the afternoon they've got all the things you'd expect. Cake competitions and painting competitions and sausage roll competitions and scotch egg competitions. It's very lovely. I head down mid-afternoon; it is only a five-minute walk to the gate and there's a well-trained trained dog competition, assault courses for people of all ages, with apple bobbing thrown in; all great fun.

 

But the bit I've come to really look forward to is the hay bale tossing competition.  There's a women's competition and a men's competition. A bar is suspended between two farm vehicles and gets lifted six inches or a foot each time round as each competitor has two attempts and people are eliminated until one throw wins.  It's as it sounds: people with what they call a pikel have to stick the pikel in the straw and get the hay bale over the bar, somehow. There are a lot of techniques. Though clearly only one that really works for the biggest heights.

And it is mesmeric. I sit there for a couple of hours nattering to folks, drinking cider. The compere for this part of the Fair, who has done this gig for twenty-five years and has an endless supply of gentle insults for the competitors and a surprisingly high-pitched giggle, makes the same joke over and over again about looking for the 'biggest tosser in Llanigon' as he has done each year for a quarter of a century.

 

A few years ago Scarlett, somebody I've known since she was a little girl, the daughter of the owner of the Blue Boar, our local pub, was the female winner. She hasn't managed to defend her title since, and she didn't manage it this year, either. But she came close, standing on tiptoe and trying just to get the inch-perfect tipping balance needed to push the bale over the bar. Close, but no cigar.

 

The men's competition does raise the bar a fair bit higher. Literally, not metaphorically. It just does have a higher bar. It actually gets really very high in the end.  I think I'm right in saying it got up to something like seventeen feet (maybe 20? – blame the cider – this year.) The Men's is won almost every single year by an absolute bull of a man called Julian, who tend to stand slightly aloof from the other, mostly younger contenders, leaning on one of the farm vehicles; it is both paternal and a body language that says, 'this is my hay bale tossing competition.'

In the second year I watched, however, after he had won yet again on my first visit, he was beaten by his younger half-brother, who was in town. It came down to the two of them, the bar getting to record-breaking heights – and he lost. There was something almost Greek and tragic about it. Order has been restored since, and Julian has won the last couple of years, breaking the record last year and this settling for just winning.

 

It's an absolutely wonderful experience, a farm show (there are vintage tractors, too) for farmers, for families, in aid of the Llanigon Young Farmers Club under the lee of the foothills of the Black Mountains, in front of my beloved cottage. And I go to sleep to the sound of the local band and  the delighted shouts and whoops of the young farmers and friends dancing in the tent in the field just to the right.

 

 

Comment Section

FWR suggests the sleeping-cat mountain could be Vanil Noir or Vanil de l'Ecri. Ring a bell, anyone?

The Editor tried to look this up in German and discovered that the German-language searchbot is not only clueless but rude. That thing did not have my permission to address me by a familiar pronoun.

Tavaron's comment to this: Oh, dear.

 

 

Quote for the Day

(Because we don't know who won yet)

 

I am the Galactic Centre.  The rest just revolve around me like little planets.

Count Binface

 

And Now…the Eclipse!

by FWR, Galaxy Babe, and SashaQ

 

When it came to the eclipse, FWR saw it all from his vantage point on the Wirral. Being a superb photographer, he gave us this splendid progression of images.

 

 

Also on the Wirral, SashaQ, astronomically-minded, compared the view of the eclipse through a pinhole camera to looking through eclipse glasses.

 

FWR made his own pinhole camera. This work of art involved a Chinese takeaway carton. The spirit of invention is not dead: it just moved to Hooverville, its true spiritual home.

 

 

Cleethorpes' amateur astronomer extraordinaire, Galaxy Babe, tried another experiment: during an eclipse, look at the shadows cast through the trees. What do you see among the leaves?

 

 Superfrenchie shows us the difference in the light and colours of the world between pre-clipse and mid-eclipse:

That was the only eclipse for this year. We'll leave you with the traditional eclipse blessing, which I captured in the Hooverville town square park during the eclipse of 2017.

 

Live Long and Prosper, Dmitri Gheorgheni, Editor