The story begins with the donation of two free tickets. These were given to us by a friend of ours who wasn’t interested in attending, himself, but had come by the tickets in a rather interesting way.

He had been parked in his car (A Mondeo - for those car buffs out there - poor lad), in a super market car park and was listening to a cassette of some Country & Western music, with the windows down, when he noticed a guy, in the next car, nodding and tapping the steering wheel in time to the music. Paul, noting the other guys obvious enjoyment, asked the chap if he liked it? The other fellow said "Yes" and Paul said, "Here you are then, it’s yours" and handed over the tape (kind lad is our Paul, but it was only a copy of a CD he had). The response was a gift of two "Complimentary" tickets for the Nostel Priory Steam Fair.

The event was held at Nostell Priory, situated about 5 miles East South East of Wakefield, on the A638 - Doncaster Road, over two days, Sunday 25th & Monday 26th of May. We had the option of when we would prefer to go and selected the Monday, as the weather report was better for then than the Sunday.

As it is on the doorstep (about 2 - 3 miles) we set off at around midday and had no problems with queues or traffic, so were parked about 10 minutes later. The ground was wet from the previous day’s rain (good choice to go on the Monday then) and we did lose a bit of traction on the inclined grassy field, but we managed to park ok and went off for a "toby" round.

I’m afraid the rest of the tail is rather boring. It was a "Steam" fair, but with muddy, slippery ground which just caked your shoes and meant you had to watch your footing. We’ve been to them at Harewood and Bramham Park (hosted by the girl from last years event), and they don’t change the format much, so read last years show report for Bramham, retitle it Nostell and you have what we had. Noisy fairground organs, the smell of burning coal, a fairground (waltzers, gold fish, helter-skelter, cheap tacky tat prizes and £3.50 burgers), a few "classic" cars and motor bikes (no clubs that I noted) and that’s about your lot.

We had a walk round, noting the pristine engine bays (I’ll just say "Hello" to Jem at this point - we can’t have a show report without any mention of Jem) of a few Triumph TR cars (4, 5 & 6), watched some of them do the arena thing (A picture for Babs of a "Moggy Thou"), same guy on the microphone, same inane comments - he should know all the cars and drivers by name by now, had an ice cream and walked up to the House (priory?).

At the house we found that the tickets, we’d left in the car were required. As we’d just walked up a half mile hill  we weren’t about to go back down for the ticket stubs and then trawl up again, so decided to call it a day and leg it home.

At about 1.30 we arrived home, changed into shorts and flip flops, opened a couple of beers and sat out in the sunshine.

I don’t think I’ll be doing it again and certainly not if it’s not free (£6 per head for adults) but it passed an hour. The only Fords we saw were "Cortinas" one of each of the Mk1, 2 & 3 and a Mk1 Granada Coupé