Your place at the fete may be hereditary

Under a scheme now circulating among parish councils, admission to the village fete would be allocated from a waiting list rather than at the gate. The list, on current uptake, would run to eleven years. Positions could be left in a will.

Community events that were once free and unticketed are increasingly moving to online booking with capped capacity. The shift is driven by insurance requirements, event-safety planning, licensing conditions and the ease of ticketing platforms, which encourage organisers to set a limit and release places in advance. Capped places for popular local events often go within hours, and waiting lists have become the default way of managing the surplus, as they long have been for allotments, nursery places and GP registrations. At the same time, many village fetes and shows are shrinking or being cancelled because of volunteer shortages and rising costs.

Adults £4, children £2, under-fives free. Admission subject to allocation. Register position non-transferable except by inheritance or documented bereavement. The words would appear in eight-point type beneath the price on the poster for a Saturday fete in a village of nine hundred, stapled to a telegraph pole, under a scheme drafted by a body calling itself the Rural Events Assurance Board. The scheme would replace the gate with a register. A village could admit only the number of visitors its insurer's crowd model allowed for a field of that size, and everybody else would wait. On current uptake the wait would be eleven years, which the board's guidance describes as within tolerance.

Joining the list would be free and would happen online, through a portal the board would supply to any parish that asked. Applicants would be banded. Residents of the parish would receive priority points, as would anyone who had run a stall in a previous year, anyone over eighty, and anyone who could show that a relative had attended the fete before the register existed. The list itself would be kept by a volunteer allocation officer. In the pilot village this would be a retired postmistress named Maureen Tapley, who would keep it in a ring binder and, at the insurer's insistence, also in a spreadsheet she would not trust.

Villagers would adapt, as villagers do. A woman in the pilot parish, Denise Orrell, would report having joined the list in its first week and moved up four hundred places by marrying a man who ran the plant stall. "I did not marry him for the position," she would say. "But I did check." A father of two, Craig Amblin, would describe registering his younger daughter the same afternoon he registered her for nursery, on the grounds that both lists were long and only one of them had a coconut shy. She would be admitted, on current projections, at fourteen. "Old enough," he would say, "to find it boring."

Inside the field the register would not stop at the gate. The cake stall would operate on twenty-minute slots, released in advance and gone within the hour. Tombola tickets would be allocated by ballot, with a supplementary ballot for the bottle stall, and the dog show would be closed to new entries until the class of 2033 had been judged. The vicar's blessing of the produce would take place by appointment. A boy of nine would be found queueing for the guess-the-weight-of-the-cake competition with a printed confirmation, having been told by his mother that the cake, by the time his turn came, would be a different cake.

The clause on inheritance would be the scheme's least discussed and most used. Because a position could pass by will, solicitors in market towns would begin adding a standard paragraph beneath the one about the house. Siblings would contest it. In one probate matter the board's guidance would cite as instructive, a widow would leave her cottage to her son and her fete position, at number 212, to her daughter, and the daughter would be understood to have done better. Family trees on the parish noticeboard would be annotated, in pencil, with list numbers. A position in the first hundred would be described at funerals as a good innings.

A secondary market would be prohibited, which is to say it would exist. The board would permit what it calls compassionate swaps, under which a position could be exchanged for one in a neighbouring parish on production of a reason. Reasons would be assessed by Mrs Tapley. Villages with short lists would become destinations; estate agents would add the fete wait to listings, between the broadband speed and the school. A three-year village would be described as up and coming. An eleven-year village would be described as established. A hamlet with no fete at all would be described, with some care, as unspoilt.

The board's chair, Philip Drane, would say the scheme does not limit attendance but sequences it, and that everyone who wants to attend a fete will attend a fete. On the Saturday itself the two hundred and twelve permitted visitors would walk the field at one person per eleven square metres, the insurer's recommended density, and the rest would stand along the churchyard wall, where the register would not apply. The brass band would turn, by tradition, to face the wall. The raffle's first prize would be a place at the top of the list. It would be won by Mrs Tapley, who would decline it and be listed again.