Report of this year’s Lambourn Carnival events by Louise Wilkin

Since Covid19 successfully scuppered our plans for Carnival this year, we came up with a Plan B. On Carnival Day, Sunday 30 August, we invited Lambourn residents to have a picnic or BBQ in their front gardens and to decorate their gardens and dress up in fancy dress. We called it Picnic on the Porch and we ran a competition for the best turned out gardens and fancy dress. The result was a very happy day; there were lots of entries in the competition and other families and groups had entered into the spirit as well with several more parties taking place around the village. The entries to the competition were amazing, all very different and all very inventive, although this made it very difficult to judge! They were all wonderful in their own way.

Special thanks to our judge, the former National Hunt jockey Colin Brown, who manfully sorted out the scoring; John Brunskill who drove us round in his classic Land Rover, complete with bunting; Richard Hart with his super County Discos music; and Jim Bracy who provided and drove the lorry. We are also grateful to Noll Country Garden Services for their sponsorship.

In addition to Picnic on the Porch we were also able to run a couple of our regular events. The Car Treasure Hunt, which had a record number of entries; the Scarecrow competition with the theme this year being Key Workers; and a Garden Competition, a scaled down version of our Village Show which concentrated on gardens, tubs and hanging baskets, missing out the usual array of veg, cakes and crafts.

We were delighted at the number of entries in these different events, and the complimentary comments on facebook afterwards. So Thank You to everyone who took part and who supported our efforts.

The results of the various events are as follows:

Picnic on the Porch:

Decorated House or Garden: 1^st Kiri Fowler’s Lambourn on Safari 2^nd Jane McCarthy’s Special Birthday 3^rd Tessa Brown’s Ponderosa Circus

Fancy Dress in a Group: 1^st Tessa Brown’s Ponderosa Circus 2^nd (tied) Mags Jackson’s Hedgeland Pirates and the Mooney’s Drive by Movies

Fancy Dress Adult: Chris “leopard skin man”, Ponderosa Circus 2^nd Nora Batty, Back to the 80’s

Fancy Dress Child: 1^st Popcorn girl at Ponderosa Circus 2^nd Beauty & the Beast, Darcy at Highlands

Highly Commended: the young rowing boat pirate at Hedgeland and Noah’s Ark, the Classics