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The Fair
The Fair
During our working holiday on a farm in France, we spent one weekend selling the goods from the farm at a fair. Vincent, our boss, was supposed to pack the van the night before so that we could set off early on Friday, but, instead, he had stayed up late drinking and smoking pot, so we had to pack the van in the morning and we ended up leaving very late.
The van itself was roadworthy, but the windows were held up with cardboard, the seats were held together with string and the lights were operated by a switch made from the extension lead for a lawnmower. Vincent hadn’t brought a map, so we ended up getting lost, and late for the fair. Vincent got stressed and his driving got worse, he went through red lights without noticing, went down one-way streets the wrong way, and cut up other drivers. We got to the fair very late, and couldn’t get in straight away because Vincent had forgotten his pass, so it took a while to convince security to let us in. We set up the stall, but it started to rain and everyone left, so we left too, without selling anything at all.
On the Saturday, Vincent ran the stall by himself. At lunchtime though, things got very busy and he needed our help, but he wouldn’t let us help without first showing us what to do, and he was too busy to show us what to do, so we couldn’t help, and the queue got longer and longer. Eventually, though, he had to go to the toilet, and he told us to look after the stall until he returned. We had managed to serve everyone in the queue by the time that Vincent had got back. Serving customers was very easy, the only reason that there had been a long queue, we realised, was because Vincent was really inefficient.
Vincent was very easily distracted from his work, even when things were really busy. He kept trying to swap our products for beer from the people on the stall next to us, without noticing that this annoyed them, and that they didn’t like us anyway, because we had much more custom than them, despite our incompetence. Vincent drank this beer whilst working, and in front of the customers. I told him the customers were upset about this, expecting him to stop, but instead he put the bottle under the table and kept kneeling down to drink from it, but because the table was small, the customers could still see. Luckily they found it so funny that they were laughing too much to be upset anymore. He couldn’t take his drink though, and so kept tripping over the wires and boxes around the stall. When people he knew came by, he’d stop working to have a cigar with them, which he continued smoking whilst serving people food.
We had sold so much on Saturday that we had run out of cold drinks and because he was making so much money from them, Vincent said he was going to wake up early on Sunday, drive home and re-stock the van. However, instead of driving home, he slept in. He was quite worried about how much money he had lost, but much more worried about how angry his wife would be if she found out, and he swore us both to secrecy.
On one side of the stall we sold cakes and hot drinks from an unstable old table. The kettle was also old and sometimes would stop working. The cakes were delicious, but difficult to eat without getting chocolate everywhere, so we served them on napkins, which we kept on a plate next to the kettle. On the Sunday Vincent ran out of napkins, so he was trying to think of where he could get new ones from. At that point Vincent sent my girlfriend and me to get lunch and we found a supermarket, where we found lunch, and also some napkins for the stall. We got back to the stall to find Vincent gone, so we put the napkins on their plate and were soon very busy manning the stall.
10 minutes later Vincent returned, looking very pleased with himself, and triumphantly smoking another cigar.
“I managed to find someone with kitchen towel…” he said taking a roll of it out of a bag. He was trying to tear off individual sheets from the roll of kitchen towel but found he couldn’t do so at the same time as holding his cigar, so he put his cigar down.
“…I’ve been round all the other stall holders and none of them had napkins,” he said, shaking his head, “I can’t believe how unprofessional everyone else here is.”
A large flame suddenly leapt up from the tabletop. Vincent had put his cigar down next to the napkins we’d bought and they’d all caught fire and the flame was huge.
I passed Vincent a metal bowl to put over the flame to put it out but he used it as a fan to try and blow it out, which made the flame bigger and created a cloud of smoke. Panicking, Vincent brought his hand down hard on the burning napkins, making the old table shake dangerously. This did seem to be putting the fire out, so he did it again and again, but as his hand came down one last time to put out the last embers, the table collapsed. The cakes fell into the mud, the ash from the burnt napkins blew into the customers’ faces and the kettle tipped over, covering me with what I thought would be boiling water.
Luckily the kettle had stopped working some time before, and the water was cold. The fire was out, and we didn’t have to worry about the napkins anymore either, because all the cakes had been destroyed. A couple of customers who got splashed were very angry, but at that moment a procession of burlesque women dressed as ostriches came past throwing feathers in the air, and the customers calmed down very quickly. It’s apparently hard to have an argument with someone when you’re covered in feathers and a half naked woman on stilts is tickling you on the nose with a feather duster.
The customers seemed to take pity on us, and we managed to make quite a lot of money that afternoon. Vincent was quite shaken, and so stopped drinking and by the evening was even sober enough to drive us home.
