Your turn at the coconut shy may take a decade

Entry would still be two pounds, painted on a board by the gate. The small print beneath it, in a typeface chosen by the parish clerk, would explain that two pounds buys a position on the register rather than a place in the field, and that the register is currently taking applications for the 2037 event.

Waiting lists have become a routine way of rationing scarce goods in Britain and elsewhere: allotments, nursery places, GP appointments and social housing are all commonly allocated by queue, often with priority rules tied to how long an applicant has lived locally. At the same time, village fetes and rural shows face rising insurance and safety-compliance costs, fixed capacity limits on their grounds, and a shrinking pool of volunteers willing to run them. Since the pandemic, many rural areas have seen an influx of new residents, second-home owners and day visitors, which has strained relations with long-standing locals. Popular countryside events increasingly cap numbers, sell tickets in advance or run ballots rather than simply opening the gate.

Under a scheme being circulated among parish councils in one of the larger rural counties, any fete whose attendance exceeded the licensed capacity of its recreation ground would move to a waiting list, with applicants ranked by length of residence, recorded volunteer hours and, where those tied, distance from the nearest bypass. The scheme's authors would describe the list as a fair mechanism for a finite field. The field in question measures four acres and has a duck pond in one corner, which would count against capacity, and a duck, which would not.

The fetes would have become oversubscribed because the villages had. Where an afternoon of jam, dogs and a brass band once drew the parish and a few cousins, it would now draw coachloads from the nearest city, weekend residents from the converted barns, and a category the scheme calls content visitors, who come to film the vicar. Insurers would have set the capacity. The parish council would have set the list. The vicar, by his own account, would have set nothing, and would be waiting like everyone else, in band C, behind a family who moved in during the pandemic and have since left.

At one fete, in a village the scheme redacts as a courtesy, the list would already run to eleven years. Parents would register children at birth, as they do for nurseries, and the register would record the occupation of applicants under two as pending. Positions could be inherited, subject to probate. Marion Tulley, 64, would have taken over her mother's position and found herself, on the day, running the bric-a-brac stall her mother had been waiting to visit. “She wanted the guess-the-weight-of-the-cake,” Mrs Tulley would say. “So I guessed, and I put her name on the slip. She was three ounces out, which for her was close.”

The stalls would be brought inside the mechanism. Running the tombola would require a separate list, with a shorter wait of four years, because it involves lifting. The coconut shy would keep its own register, with a ten-year wait and a fixed allocation of three throws per applicant, non-transferable. Derek Ashby, 71, would reach the top of the coconut register the same summer his hip ruled out throwing. “I asked whether I could nominate a proxy,” he would say. “They said the coconuts have to be knocked down by the registered person. I said the coconuts don't know who I am. They said that wasn't the point.”

A secondary market would follow, as one follows every list. Band A positions would be advertised in the parish newsletter, between the piano lessons and the man who does gutters, at prices the scheme would describe as inconsistent with the community character of the event. The council would respond by appointing a list compliance officer, a part-time post with a high-visibility waistcoat, whose duties would include checking utility bills at the gate and asking children to confirm their date of birth without looking at their parents. The officer would report that the children were mostly honest and the parents mostly not.

The fete that resulted would be quieter than the one the list was built to protect. Those who reached the field would have waited so long that the attractions they applied for would have been replaced. The dog show would have become a dog-and-owner wellness circuit. The brass band would be a playlist. The raffle, still run by a man called Ken, who had been running it since before the list and was therefore exempt, would offer as its first prize a position in band B, and as its second a ham. The ham would sell more tickets.

Asked whether a waiting list could be reconciled with the idea of a fete, a clerk to one of the participating councils would say that the list does not stop anyone attending, it merely sequences them. Attendance would be published annually, alongside the median wait, in the same table as the weather. Sequencing would extend, in time, to the cake competition, the welly-wanging and the tug of war, which would be contested by two teams who had registered in the same year, had waited the same decade, and had, by the time they reached the rope, nothing left to prove to one another.