Common Day

Having been rained off last year, the Epsom Common Association managed its day on the green this year, a fortnight ago today.

This snap, looking north towards the entrance, does not give much of an idea, but there were plenty of stalls and plenty of people. Event ring just about visible left, behind the green tent. An otherwise better snap was spoiled by an occluding thumb, or some such thing.

Despite the presence of promotional stalls, I managed not to have an eco-rant about promoting the growing of cows (I have a long standing aversion to the Association's practise of running cows with horns on the Common), the welfare of badgers or the manufacture of charcoal, this last generating lots of bad, green house stuff. But should I boast of this not managing? If we all politely ignore bad things, they will never change - and the message at reference 1 is that a great deal of change is needed in very short order.

The Epsom & Ewell Silver Band did very well, although I wondered why the conductor excused himself from wearing the uniform.

We caught an owl & hawk display at which we learned that while a peregrine falcon might dive very fast, on the level it was slower than a pigeon. And the fastest on the level was the eider duck, by coincidence, the subject of an article about the vanishing eider duck trade of Iceland, probably a long read from the Guardian. From which we learned that you did not need to kill the duck to get the eider down, you rather gathered the down from their nests, after first use. The peregrines were handsome birds, but smaller than I was expecting. Far smaller than the owls on display.

I noticed that they needed frequent snacks & titbits to keep them up to the mark, very much in the same way as people who do dog dressage.

The only puzzle was how it was all paid for. There was no entry charge and there was a lot going on. Perhaps it comes out of our subscriptions.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/07/advertisement.html.

Reference 2: http://www.eesb.org.uk/. The band.

Reference 3: https://www.epsomcommon.org.uk/. The association.

Reference 4: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=cows+epsom+common. Unheeded rants from the past about cows and related matters. I rather like the one of 3rd April, 2010, the one that comes out first on this laptop.