Royal Bath & West Show

Phew, what a scorcher, it was hot at the show and we returned after three days extremely tired. The atmosphere was excellent with some first class salacious gossip circulating and everyone very relaxed. Helen McMahon did an hilarious imitation of an alpaca coming into the ring to demonstrate to the exhibitors where they should walk and stand. It got better day by day with spitting etc included.

We did all right with CME Paris taking the Intermediate Male Champion and behaving himself in the ring. CME Adonis won the Intermediate Fawn Male Class and the Jaquinto progeny group was first out of ten groups with our Tulaco Centurion third. All our animals, except one, (he was robbed!) came away with a rosette so that was good.

I was stood up drifting off into a reverie when one of Tim Hey’s animals (you owe me a large drink, Tim) did a big green spit. I was covered and was still scraping it off my marvellous pink glasses hours later. I also got a humdinger of a kick from one of Joanna Sainsbury’s animals – the bruise is a joy to behold. We went out to dinner on Friday night with the show organisers – they were wacked. Helen appeared to be asleep sitting up and Di Davies’s eyes had vanished into black holes. All the exhibitors felt they had done a great job so there was a whip round and we gave Di the loot so that she could spend it on something suitably sybaritic. One of the stewards Gary Naish appeared in shorts on Friday evening and Saturday and as there were a lot of female exhibitors and two female judges we could not resist the opportunity to ake the piss out of his shapely calves. This year we were in a big wide span marquee down by the dog show as the cattle boys had evicted us from the permanent building. It sounded worrying as alpacas are not keen on dogs but it turned out well as the parking was a few metres away and there was lots of room to put up outside pens for the animals on the grass to dry them out after the heavy dews.

It is nice to he home and sitting down whilst Chas and Andrew are toiling away in the fibre barn shearing! Some of us are just too delicate for such tasks, ha ha.