Do you want to know the really great thing about the Goose Fair of old? I'll tell you - because nothing ever changed. You could have skipped it for ten years, came back, and virtually everything would be in the same place. This made it the fairground equivalent of the carpet in Rock City.
Not only that, but you'd get an incredibly deep feeling of communion with your ancestry. The cakewalk you took your girlfriend on would be the same one your Nana and Grandpa went on when they were courting. The merry-go-round would be the same one you went on when you were three, getting a kroggy off your Mam. The plastic spoon you ate your peas with would be the same one that had been in your Dad's gob in 1963 (and a million other people since then).
But never let it be said that Goosey couldn't kept up with the times. Every now and then, it would come up with something that captured the zeitgeist and reminded you of your own place in history. Come, let us go back to the year 1991, when the world was in turmoil over unrest in the Middle East, unlike today of course. Ahem.
By the time Goosey rolled round in '91, the Gulf War had been over for months, but Saddam Hussein was still in power and not very well liked. And some genius fairground bloke hit the jackpot. That year, the Forest played host to a one-off version of hitting metal ducks with pellets fired out of an air rifle with bent sights, and no-one who saw it will ever forget the massive signs that screamed out into the night.
The main one, over the shooting gallery, was the name of the game; Saddam Assassin. The two other slogans were equally arresting; Make Your Mark and Free Iraq, and, more prosaically, Kill The Bastard. Well, what man could resist that? People were queuing round the block to hand over a quid to have a go.
In 2003, anyone who managed to put a bullet into Saddam's head would have been given $20 million by the US government. Sadly, anyone from Notts who did the same thing in '91 would have only won a tenner. And let me tell you, not even the best sniper in the SAS would have been able to do it.
The target was actually a banda-printed sheet of A4, with a selection of celebrities of the day, such as Lady Di, Bart Simpson, John Major, Maggie, Gazza and Neil Kinnock. Read that again; the bastard was actually using Lady Di as a human shield. Oh, it just made you want to hand over more and more money to take the bleeder out.
That wasn't the worst, though; there was not one, but five Saddams hiding behind the celebs. The rotten get had brought along four of his doppelgangers! And you only had five shots!
I'm prepared to believe that out of the thousands of people who had a go on Saddam Assassin, not one of them actually won the tenner. If you were a Forest fan, you just wanted to pepper the podgy, gormless face of Gazza for that tackle on Gary Crosby in the FA Cup final five months earlier. If you were everyone else, you aimed for Maggie. If you missed Saddam on your first go, you just went on a celeb-killing spree.
Saddam Assassin was a one-year wonder, and I'm surprised that no-one else has thought about repeating its runaway success. Why hasn't anyone come up with `Hook-A-Paedophile', or `Throw model aeroplanes into the Twin Towers for a coconut'?
Next: The Snake Woman of Bombay!
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