In November 2018 I began to organise the NABD’s 28th annual national fundraising event, the You’ve Been Nabbed 28 Rally, which was to be held in a huge paddock at the eastern end of the Royal Cheshire Showground just off junction 19 of the M6 motorway. Over the following five months, I and Julie Williams, the NABD’s office manager, sorted‐out the site plan, the marquees, the stages, the fire‐fighting and safety equipment, the toilets, the radios, the security systems, the waste disposal infrastructure, the beer orders, the traders, the caterers, the bands, the comedians, the local authority licensing, advertising, ticket sales, and all sorts of policies and plans for everything from Child Protection to Terrorist Attack. Meanwhile Tina Slesser, the NABD Secretary & Rally Secretary was amassing a list of 140+ stalwart volunteer marshals and organising a timetable of 4‐hour rotating shifts that would have taken a highly‐paid civil servant and several ‘consultants’ a year and at least three ‘fact‐finding missions’ to somewhere 14
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exotic at the tax‐payers expense. I have no idea of the total amount of hours we spent putting all of this together, but by April we had just about everything organised and all we had to do was wait for Wednesday the 8th of May when the marquees would start going up. Then, just two days before we were going on site to set‐up the event, I had a call from one of the showground directors saying, “Somebody has ‘accidently’ ploughed the part of the showground where your event is to be held!”
mile away from the one we used for the past two years and, of course, a whole new site‐plan; which I had to draw‐up from scratch! At one point during our emergency meeting, one of the showground directors actually said they were thinking of fitting Sat‐Nav systems to their tractors to avoid something like this happening again. My knee‐jerk response was to blithely suggest that it might be cheaper to simple stop employing idiots to drive the tractors in the first place!
I’m still somewhat baffled as to how anybody manages to ‘accidently’ plough any field but, at the time, we did not have the luxury of time to contemplate the possible causes of this somewhat surreal state of affairs.
Fortunately, over the past 28 years, some of us longer‐standing NABD committee members have had quite a bit of practice at reacting to critical last‐minute changes of plan, as attested to by a song written in our honour by NABD Patron, Stevie Simpson; aptly entitled “The Kings of Winging‐It”.
I had an emergency meeting with several of the Showground directors just one day before our set‐up was to begin and it was agreed that we would move to the opposite end of the showground, which meant us using a new entrance over a
As dawn broke over my deeply furrowed brow on the morning of Thursday May 9th, I headed for the new site with much trepidation and prepared for a hellish weekend of frantically reacting to anything and everything going wrong.
