Cheshire Show
Well, its’ been hectic but then, what’s new there! Over all it’s been a very good 2 days. Aprilia has been crab fishing, sand castle building and visiting people with my mum and dad. She’s had a riot by all accounts! I’ve chatted, had a good dose of socialising (not socialisation though, they gave up trying to fit me in the mold years ago!) and felt like I’d done something useful. The show was huge and I barely saw any of it but as most of the exhibitors had to trudge past us to get to where they needed to be I saw a fair bit! The weather has been kind with only 1 short monsoon to soften up the ground and make it entertaining watching people drive off the field.
Typically, after spending 2 full days in RedX uniform and doing not 1 bit of first aid (okay, I was there to do radio comms but that’s never stopped me needing to muck in before!) I ended up having to look after a little girl at Rainbows less than an hour after clocking off duty! Strangely it seemed to stamp me as being okay and part of the team as far as the girls were concerned to see me doing the "lets jolly you along and stick the plaster on to make it better" routine. I did vaguely wonder if it was becuase I actually validated her feelings rather than doing a oh I’m sure it doesn’t hurt really routine (which used to really offend me as a child - if I said it hurt then it did OK??)
The one thing though that has spoilt it all is that there was a child lost. We had 2 school staff come to us all casual and not particularly worried at about 3pm to say that they had lost one of their children, a 12 year old boy. Quipped that out of 40ish kids it wasn’t bad really that they had only lost one. Then dropped the bombshell, they were from a special needs school. So somewhere on a site covering several square miles there was a 12 year old child with special needs such that he had no idea of danger, time, direction etc but who looked "normal" so would not stand out physically from all the other 12 year old boys roaming round. No ID tag on him. No supervision. No idea where he was until everyone else was on the bus for home and he wasn’t. Having left that with us they wandered off to look for him again without leaving us with contact details of any kind. At 7pm the police called off the search as the site was fairly empty and between them and security they had challenged every person leaving the site with a boy anything like the description. The teachers were no where to be seen and never got back to us either to say he was found or to see if we had him with us. I can only hope they were just thoughtless enough not to let anyone know that they had found him.
