Sarah Todd: Still sore after young rowdies left us sleepless at the showground

The tale never got told about one of the worst night’s sleep of our lives.

First things first. Both The Husband and I were young farmers so we were braced for a bit of good-natured banter and boozing when we got landed near a load of tents that seemed to be referred to as the “young farmers’ village”.

We were staying with my parents who are also ex-young farmers and so hardly naive about the prospect of getting any shut-eye before midnight.

The fact that they’d paid rather a lot of money – on top of their annual membership – to stay while car load after car load seemed to arrive having parted with nothing more than the price of a bottle of cider, was taken in good spirit.

Any goodwill had completely disappeared by about 4am, when they were still rampaging. The girls were probably behaving the worst (certainly having the foulest mouths). In the morning, the grass was strewn with bottles.

It’s difficult not to say anything but the ageing “when I was a girl” line. But it’s so true. When I was a girl, if things had got out of hand older members would have stepped in and said “enough’s enough – shut up and go to sleep”.

They certainly would have whipped us all into line in the morning and had us going around with bin bags picking up bottles and other litter. Here there was toilet roll and goodness knows what other horrors.

Once there would have been an element of pride – we wouldn’t have wanted anybody thinking badly of us. Maybe, as a girl suggested on the young farmers’ pavilion in the showground, many of them making all the racket this year weren’t actually club members – just hangers-on out for a party.

Whoever they were, we probably won’t stay over at the show again, and there must be a good many others who came away feeling the same.

There are a lot of older people who stay to save on the hard work of driving in every day. Then there are those like us, with young children.

It was a super show. There’s a poster of the French horseman Lorenzo in pride of place in the tack room. “Did the children buy it?” interrogated The Husband. “No, mummy did…” they laughed back.

We sat and watched everything from side-saddle to scurry driving. There were some real hairs on the back of the neck moments, such as Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall making the presentations in the cattle parade, and the handing over of the president’s staff in the closing ceremony.

All wonderful, but gosh did we sleep well when we finally returned home.

The sad thing is, the culprits probably did too.

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