Great Yorkshire Show was cancelled this month

I’m an off comed’un here in Yorkshire, meaning that I wasn’t born here. But it’s my home now and it deserves its name of God’s Own Country. Living with a Yorkshirewoman born and bred I’ve picked up a few phrases o’ t’accent, and now’s a time to say blimmin’ ‘eck! before reverting to my own accent. Blimmin’ ‘eck! They cancelled the Great Yorkshire!

The Great Yorkshire http://www.greatyorkshireshow.co.uk/html/home/ is a highlight of our calendar. For farmers and for people in the supporting industries, it’s a trade fair where business is done. The show includes classes for livestock of all the important species: sheep, cattle, pigs, horses and many others. Prizes won at the Great Yorkshire make real differences to breeders’ businesses. The show includes trade stalls showing and selling everything from tractors to hog-roast sandwiches, to photographs, to knitwear, and that’s before mentioning the gundog performance displays or the funfair. For me one of the best bits is the Academic Pavilion where people like me display our science and chat with everybody who wants to pop in. This is it, you see. I’m writing from my own viewpoint but somebody else would write in quite a different way. The Great Yorkshire Show is a grand day out with something for everybody.

So it’s taken me a couple of weeks to be ready to write about how this year’s Show was cancelled. I wasn’t putting on a display in the Academic Pavilion this year, but I’ve done it before and I know people who were doing it this year. The first day of the Show the rain peed down and the site became a mudbath. People’s cars and vans had to be dragged out by tractors. Look, this is Yorkshire! We’re used to a spot o’ rain. But this year the rain’s no joke.

When I started describing our damp squib of a British summer here on this blog, I said that I wanted to write about how the Jet Stream is affecting our farmers and growers. Well here it is. How much money was lost at the Great Yorkshire this year, we don’t yet know but Auntie Beeb said it will cost thousands http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-york-north-yorkshire-18792794 It’s good to see that trade stand holders got a refund from the Show’s organisers, the Yorkshire Agricultural Society http://www.yas.co.uk/ but that organisation isn’t exactly rolling in cash. More rolling in mud, just now, and rolling in the same economic hard times that are affecting all of us. As for the ordinary folk who bought tickets to the Show, they’re not getting refunds and how could they? Nor are the people in the hospitality industries who’d prepared for the annual influx of trade that the Show generates for our region. Blimmin ‘eck.

Advertisement