There’s no business like Miniatura, you can tell it’s a show by the panic that invariably surrounds it. If any major difficulty is going to occur, in the year, it will do so in the fortnight before the Min, absolutely guaranteed. I used to think that things went wrong because I was in a rush, then I thought they went wrong simply because so many things were happening that mathematically something was bound to go belly up. Then I thought it was because people, seeing you rushing around, thought, ‘Ooh, there’s a busy person, I’ll annoy her with some daft requests!’
I did have a phase of thinking it only happened to me but I asked around and it’s pretty much everyone. It’s show fever.
What’s gone wrong this time is the kiln. First it wouldn’t fire, then I found out the manufacturers have stopped making it, then, when I got an electrician out, who mended it, nominally, one of the rods which should have been doing nothing was glowing orange, right next to the electrics. So I’m lying wide awake at half past three, wondering if my porcelain insulators have cracked, never a good thing at my age.
Also I think I’ve broken my toe. Well, not actually the toe, as much as the arthritic lump behind the toe. It’s clicking in a way that doesn’t make you want to snap your fingers and dance.
Will the new business cards arrive in time to publicise the website at the show or are they more likely to be sent to outer Mongolia? You guess.
What will do no good whatsoever, will be to arrive at the show, exclaiming, whilst setting up, ‘You’ll never guess what happened to me!’ as it will only be drowned out by the chorus of very much worse, possibly life-threatening panics from anyone in earshot. It makes me think that 250 exhibitors turning up on the same weekend is not so much as show as a miracle. I would like to get hold of whoever wrote that song about there being no people like show people. This jolly ditty, you may well recall, bangs on endlessly about the happy show folk, chirping bravely how they smile when they are low and against all odds will go on regardless of an interesting range of personal disasters. In my small and lemon-juiced view this is asking for it, big style and should be outlawed and replaced by a song about how we’ll all get a lift there and a win on the lottery the week before.
The really amazement about the show is the organisers. There’s Andy Hopwood at the top of the blog, giving number 2 son, William, the best seat in the house. The Hopwoods seem to take 250 lemming-like exhibitors and 6,000 visitors in their stride, as if it was all in a day’s work. Why would you want to do such a thing, for a dolls’ house show, for goodness sake? Sometimes I think the whole kit and caboodle: the world-wide visitors, the ditto crazed exhibitors, the organisers, the office staff, the car parkers, the lot are all balanced on the knife edge between complete and utter genius and stark staring mad, raving bonkers.
Which is, of course, what makes it such a very good show.