For three nights (two if you're an old get), Goose Fair is a place of happiness, merriment, and being ripped off. But round this time of year comes a sense of dread and foreboding. More often than not from your Nana. She'd grip your arm with a strength beyond her years, point a bony finger of warning and say "Don't go to Goose Fair on a Saturday Night".
Then she'd purse her lips, as Nanas are prone to doing. There were two reasons why grandparents used to mither about Saturday night at Goosey. The only joy they ever got out of it was finding out how much everything cost, so they could have a good mither about it. "Twenty bob for a toffee apple? What a load o' balsam!"
That was just for starters. What they really loved about Goose Fair was banging on about Saturday night, when prices were jacked up to astronomical heights. The way they went on about it made you believe that the only people who could actually afford to go to Goosey on Saturdays were coach parties of Arab sheikhs, who came up from the casinos of Mayfair in order to spend £200 on a pot o' peas and gamble away their petrodollar fortunes on the Hook-A-Duck.
The other reason? Two words; Football Hooligans. (and even more lip-pursing). According to Nanas, Goose Fair transformed itself on a Saturday night into a cross between Mad Max and, er, Mad Max 2 (but not 3, because that was rubbish). They would conjure up images of basin-cutted Bovver Boys in star jumpers and silk scarves round their wrists brawling on the Spinning Teacups, swinging bike chains on the Dodgems, throwing blunted darts at each other and inhaling the fumes round the back of the candy floss stall.
Obviously, this really made you want to go on a Saturday night.
How times change. Now everyone knows that, what with the high police presence, being in Goose Fair on a Saturday night is a million times safer than being in town. And the rumours that electrify the playground these days have nowt to do with hooligans.
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