The recent Green City Days festival in Sheffield, which we presented under the Universal Funfairs banner along with Yorkshire showman James Holmes saw us undertake the first working trials or our bio diesel initiative. We have been running a test generator on various blends for a while, but this was the first time we used it to actually operate at an event.

Most of the generators there were on various blends from B5 upto about B30 (30% bio), but one of our Kubota sets was taken all the way upto B100 (pure bio). We had to change the filter mid way through the event as a precaution, but other than that it worked excellently. We are now taking our other small generators upto B100 fuel with the intention that by the end of June all of our smaller events will be powered 100% from fuel made from waste vegetable oil.

From a business point of view, most of the family attractions at the event did quite well. The games units and catering were a bit poor which is surprising, but children's rides and bigger rides such as the waltzer rode well.

The organisers were so pleased that they have already offered us a number of other events, and representatives from other councils who were visiting the festival have asked about presenting something similar in there own Boroughs.


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"The diligent farmer plants trees, of which he himself will never see the fruit."

— Cicero

Our environmental sustainability project is progressing nicely. We have the biodegradable consumables and recycling schemes working well, we are using Fairtrade products as standard and our on site waste composter is steaming away merrily. At an event we are running over the weekend, not only are we complying with the schemes we have set up, but the other catering units on site have also fallen into line so hopefully things are spreading outwards from our initial project.

THe second phase of our policy will see us make the switch to bio diesel, engineered from waste vegetable oil. The test bed system we are running is already using a B50 blend (50% bio fuel). Over the next couple of weeks we intend to raise this to B100 (pure bio diesel). Once that has happened and the system runs reliably, we will be making the changeover with our other units. We then intend to have the generating sets repainted in a bright green, and vinyl lettering applied to the sides of each set giving details of the fact that they are environmentally friendly. The main thrust of this bio fuel scheme was to lower emissions and obviously mineral oil consumption, but a handy side effect is the fact that bio diesel is classed as a non hazardous substance when spilt, and evidently degrades at the same speed sugar does. This should help our marketing efforts when applying for sites in public parks and near rivers etc.

We have also received our first Gary Cooper speech of the season, for the uninitiated, this is where one of the older funfair operators (think Jurassic period) decides that an event we are involved with should belong to him because of some divine providence. This usually results in warnings of extreme calamity to be visited upon us. Oh well, we haven't had one for a while so I suppose life would become a bit boring without them.


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As mentioned in a previous post, we have formed a joint vebture with another operator to acquire and run a number of events in the Yorkshire region. The first of these is in Sheffields Hillsborough Park and the microformat is below for anyone that can make use of the standard;




Green City Festival:
May 25th-
26th,
at the Hillsborough Park Sheffield




We have taken and organised the first event in a little over 2 weeks, which didn't leave us a lot of time to put everything into place, the new company logo is shown below, although this is a first draft and it will evolve with time.



We received one piece of really bad news this week, a star of one of our previous posts, Paul suffered a massive stroke in his bed a couple of days ago. Only 38 he is currently in a critical condition in a local hospital.


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Over the last few years, we have moved most of our business away from traditional fairgrounds and into the corporate arena. However we do take on new funfairs from time to time depending on our corporate workload. Recently we were offered the chance to form a joint venture with another operator to take on a number of new events in the Sheffield area. Although we haven't decided on a trading title yet, we have just secured the first of these events in Hillsborough park over the whitsun bank holiday.

The flyer is pictured below;



It looks a promising event and I will include a full write up here after it has taken place. One of the deciding factors in winning this was our environmental policy, and we will be placing recycling stations and waste collection services around the site.


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Arthur and I were at 3 different events last weekend. At the first of these, we supplied a number of attractions for a private party just North of Newcastle upon Tyne. The estate was absolutely stunning, and must be one of the most impressive private homes we have ever operated at. After setting everything up, the transit van and trailer we were using sank in the soft ground. After 2 hours of trying to dig it out and extricate it using skidmats we were well and truly stuck. Just then the estate owner walked up, dropped a set of keys in my hand and said "I'll leave this with you lads."

As he walked off I spotted the vehicle he had left us, an American Hummer, the smaller version of the American military Humvee off roader. When I say smaller, its all relative, the Hummer was smaller than say Mount Everest, but still larger than anything we possess other than our Heavy transport vehicles. Anyway I jumped in, we chained it to the Transit/trailer combination and I set off backwards, it pulled them with real ease, all the more impressive when you consider that I hadn't given Arthur time to jump in the tranny, and the handbrake was still on.

After our successful extraction, I jumped out to let Arthur have a turn. He moved about 3 feet backwards, stopped, jumped out and said "I don't like it, its too big. " I suppose with him being little it made it seem relatively bigger than it did to us normal people.

On the day the event went well, right upto the de rig and removal of everything. We had contracted someone in with a children's ride as ours were all booked up. Micheal has attended various events with us and helps us out on occasion. As he was exiting the site, he had trouble passing a large bush and didn't want to scratch his new pick up. So he decided to trim the bush back. He stepped on a very large branch to give himself room to cut it, his foot slipped and the aforementioned branch sprung back up, depositing Micheal on his backside and breaking his nose, not to mention knocking his glasses off and cutting his eyelids open!

I rang a few days later to check on him and he was sore but recovering.


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