Some of the good stuff about the National

6th September

OK, I'm back. Today we moved the boat from a very peaceful mooring at Branston up to Alrewas, getting here after ten o'clock. There was plenty of room on the moorings, a sign that the summer frenzy is beginning to subside.

BW has finally sorted out the mooring signage here, so that there is one length of fourteen day mooring from Kent's Bridge to the Gallows Footbridge, and all the rest is forty-eight hour with the exception of the water point, the lock landings and the winding hole.

Now back to the National: the start of the main wrg camp meant that the focus of our activity shifted to the wrg compound, so that we were only getting back to the boat after nine o'clock at night having left it before seven that morning. Some days, one or other of us would manage to return to the boat during the afternoon or early evening to take a shower, but that was still not conducive to blogging.

In addition, there was some stuff going on in connection with Sheila's role in the Admin Village which made me reluctant to say anything at all on this blog before we had had time to take a calmer view. I'll deal with that in a later post; in the meantime it's appropriate to look at the positives first.

The show site was much easier to work on than some previous ones, being of a regular shape and with a usable roadway, some metalled, some dirt track, around three sides of it. Clearing the camping field of the hay crop was the most physically onerous job that we had to do; in addition the show site itself was very uneven, but I think it's fair to say that the ground in general was the best we've worked on since Beale Park in 2006.

A certain amount of woodchip was deployed, but only to cover the soil which we had used to fill in holes and ruts. The weather remained largely kind and although we had some episodes of heavy rain it soon dried off in the gusty wind which was also a feature of the site.

The wrg camp also ran very smoothly, largely thanks to the excellent leadership of Neil Collings. It's invidious to make comparisons between volunteer leaders, but I must say that Neil showed great skill and judgement in the demands he made on his available workforce. It was a real pleasure to be a team leader for him.

Neil's partner Al Moore did her usual splendid job as cook, producing a variety of meals from the wrg Portakabin kitchen. I should perhaps explain that this facility is not as basic as it sounds; it's a modified "hospitality" cabin which contains two six burner professional gas ranges, two electric griddles and several fridges and freezers. Washing up is done in the Brew Hut next door which is a more basic cabin, fitted with two sinks and a good length of stainless steel worktop. It contains two electric Burcos to provide hot water within the cabin, whilst two gas fired Burcos are constantly on the go immediately outside, thus enabling a continuous supply of tea and coffee.

The show itself went very smoothly with no major alarums. For the second year running we didn't need the missing child procedure, which is probably more a testament to the ubiquity of the mobile phone than to improving standards of parental care. The total footfall has been quoted at twenty thousand, which is at the lower end for this event, but several of us who talked to traders in the course of the show found that they were generally satisfied with the levels of interest they were experiencing.

Things will be much busier next year, when we return to Beale Park. It hadn't in fact been the intention to go back quite so soon, but the arrangements for the planned site in the North West broke down at the last minute, and Beale Park was the only venue which could commit at such short notice in time to enable the announcements to be made at this year's festival.

Finding usable venues continues to be a major challenge. The show is now so big that in addition to the obvious requirements for substantial mooring space (two hundred and seventy boats this year and up to five hundred at Thames locations) we need a total of about seventy five acres for the show itself, the camp site and the car parks.

There's a continuing debate about the purpose of the festival, which I'll come back to next time. In the meantime, we have more or less caught up with our sleep and recharged our personal batteries. I was surprised at how tired I had got, since I had thought I was pacing myself much better this year; I'd obviously been feeling the effects of the stress of supporting Sheila much more than I realised.

More of this anon.