Tuesday 7 October 2008

Someone can't count!

They're at it again!

Remember how the Council claimed there were "over 300 stalls" in the Market Spectacular earlier this year, when in fact there were less than 60?

Then they said there were "around 100 stalls" at last weekend's first Darlington Food Festival. Well, if 25 is around 100, they were right: but it isn't.

Now they say "25000 people visited the Food Festival". If so, there would have been one person entering the marquee every 2 seconds constantly from 10am to 5pm on both days. Thank Heavens I only spent half an hour there on the Saturday, it must have been sheer bedlam the rest of the time, with a quarter of the town's population squashed and trampled underfoot. I'm surprised we haven't heard about this from the hospital.

Ok, give 'em some leeway: it was a very good Food Festival. Read what other bloggers said here and here.

I bought quite a few things, though not as much as one Labour portfolio holder who was persuaded to part with over 100 nicker for a saucepan. Good to see they're doing their bit to help stave off the recession.

The ostrich, goats' cheese and red onion marmalade pie was the culinary highlight for me. And some gorgeous seeded wholemeal bread from Richmond was wolfed down within a few hours. I also found two new suppliers who I'm hoping to persuade to supply my shop.

Let's hope they do it again next year; I might even invest in a stall myself: though they'll have to get a marquee four times as large, just to get all this year's stalls and shoppers in!

3 comments:

Darlington Councillor said...

In the end, I didn't buy the saucepan....

Allyaec said...

I wondered what the noise was coming from the town centre, it was that loud with 1/4 of the population in the centre I thought it was a ghost town everywhere else!

In the real world... I didn't even realise there was a food festival.

Mike Barker said...

Dear anonymous,
I've deleted your comment. It was quite funny, but it was also a gratuitous swipe about someone else's physical appearance, so I've removed it. Sorry!