Hello all. Just a reminder that this coming Saturday and Sunday Beckworth will be hosting the annual Christmas Smokers Fair in the Market Square with the added lure this year of a traditional Germanic ”Weihnachten” Christmas Fair lining the high street. It’s sure to be a wonderful weekend for smokers and sausage lovers of all ages so get your towels onto the supplied sun-loungers very early.
All the events will be held outdoors, with the exception of the marijuana smokers pottery classes, pipe-rack engineering and sauerkraut construction drop-in sessions which will be held discretely in a porta-cabin in the school playground.
The fairs are your once in a year opportunity to buy flavoured tabacco, nicotene patches, lighters and those poncey electric fags alongside seasonal Christmas decorations made from fragments of the Berlin Wall, Angela Merkel fairies to top your tree, Volkswagen car parts, used lederhosen and whatever else it is our German friends sell at Christmas.
Great news for all the family; the pubs will be open from 8am Saturday and stay open until 11.30 on Sunday night to cater for the expected influx of heavy drinking teutonic smokers.
Event’s during daylight hours include St Nick’s PC Grotto, (a smoking non-gender defined German speaking Santa will take presents from children to redistribute to the poor and needy of Frankfurt, or sell on the ferry back to Europe). There’s a smokers trivia pub quiz in the pub car park from 7pm, tug o’war, Puffin’ Willy’s Steam Fair, and a brand-new “Northern European smoke-themed” kite display by local celebrity Noel Edmunds. After dark things will get very festive with a mimed concert by Stereokicks on Saturday night and late on Sunday evening the duel crowning of Beckworth’s Smoker Of The Year 2014 and Beckworth’s German Of The Year 2014.
Given the failure in previous years to beat the world record for the most snuff-sniffers in one field we will instead aim to beat the record for the most Berliners in a stationary car (the current record is five which may prove hard to top).
Due to health and safety laws we are not allowed a lit bonfire during the fair but will have a large TV screen set up in the window of the undertakers showing a DVD of The Wickerman. For the public’s safety smoking and Bavarian bear-baiting will only be permitted in the designated areas furnished with ashtrays, spittoons and posters of England’s 1966 World Cup winning football team.
For the youngsters Flintlock Farm’s Mobile Petting Zoo will be setting up in a corner of the sports field and promise to show off some animals native to Deutschland (I’d guess that will include snakes, giraffes and tigers). The icing on the Christmas cake will be our very own Beckworth & Crewbury Historical Re-enactors in the scout hut re-playing the 1914 Christmas Truce Football Match (as seen on TV), complete with trenches, goals and a barbed-wire strewn muddy pitch.
So see you all this weekend, Mayor Gary Grimsby
