School May fair today – Grrrrrrr

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Today Big One’s school is holding the annual May fair. This is their biggest fund-raising event of the year and so all us parents have been bombarded with requests for items for the tombola stall, the white elephant stall, the plant stall, the cake stall, school uniform stall etc etc as well as to buy raffle tickets, man the stalls and of course come along and buy stuff. Now I’m all in favour of supporting school events and helping raise money for useful equipment and all that, it’s just the way they go about it that gets my back up. The first few times they asked for cakes for a cake sale (which they hold about once a term after school as well as at the fair) I went to a lot of trouble to make and decorate appealing cakes. That was until I found they were selling cakes at about 20p for a small cake or slice of a larger one – less than the cost of the ingredients, not to mention the electricity to cook them and the time spent doing so. And then of course we have the choice of either buying our own cake back again, or taking pot luck on someone else’s which half the time turn out to be quite horrible! (probably because they have used the cheapest possible ingredients, having realised it isn’t worth spending any more) I suppose from the school’s point of view it doesn’t matter if someone spends 20p on a cake and then throws it away in disgust, but from my point of view I’d be better off eating my own cake and just giving them some money and saving the time and effort! This year I have given them a couple of trays of plants to sell. Again I expect they will sell them for less than the cost of the potting compost, but they were cluttering up my windowsills and I do want to show willing. On the plus side I suppose there is a chance that if I find something I want to buy there, it will be an absolute bargain! All rights reserved. © Text and image copyright Fleur 2016.