BECKY called in for coffee on Sunday. ‘Can’t stay,’ she said. ‘It’s the village fete. They always have a fabulous bric a brac stall – I’ve picked up some real bargains.’

The verges on our country roads are once again blooming as hand-painted signs spring up amongst the foliage advertising the date of the local fete.

“While the village fete endures, the fate of the village is secure” ran a national newspaper headline a few years back. The village fete, quintessentially English with cameo feature roles in the Archers, Midsomer Murders (death lurking by every stall), Just William and PG Wodehouse is as enduring as it is ubiquitous with its mix of homespun stalls, homemade cakes, jams and cream teas, amateur entertainment an inevitable Morris troop.

Village fetes can trace their origins to the 19th Century, a distant cousin of the county fair. The whole village was a unit of agricultural production with little opportunity for time off. But a lull in early summer, when the winter fields were prepared the harvest was not yet ready gave a chance of some carefree sunshine.

Villages have changed in character; farm hands have been replaced by commuters and second homers; the blacksmith has long since disappeared; the shop and school, once considered stalwarts of the local community, are either gone or living on borrowed time. Sunday Church Services, held only on the nth Sunday of every month, are attended by a handful of elderly residents, presided over by retired, visiting or part-time clergy (the rectory having long since become a nursing home) whose main qualification is no longer theological but that they can play the harmonium.

Amidst these upheavals, the fete endures, unchanged over the years; the ‘splat a rat’ as mesmerising to the internet gaming generation as it was to ours; the tombola, where the numbers on the objects never quite match up to the tickets in the tin; the bottle stall a selection of sauces and soft drinks, a lone bottle of half-decent whisky surrounded by strange foreign liqueurs (that seemed a good idea at the time) making recurrent reappearances. The book stall, overflowing with cook books and cheap airport fiction; children’s toys, a refreshment tent selling warm soft drinks; someone clutching an inadequate microphone and tries to bring order to chaos , while teenagers are onlookers to the proceedings, chatting to each other until the last stalls are packed in darkness as previous generations did before them.

At one time the church provided a bastion against village decay. Now it too has succumbed, with its women vicars, modern language, guitars and facile music. The village fete alone carries the weight of our yearning for simplicity, unchanging values and the hope that in the face of change, decay and uncertain values, we can rely on some things never to change…