I always enjoy Liskeard Show. It's quite the best small country town agricultural show around and I hope nobody ever tries to change it and go up-market or down-market or the like. It's perfect as a child-friendly local occasion with something to interest everyone.

My first taste of agricultural shows was at school, and the annual outing was always to the Royal Sussex Country Agricultural Show, which even then was enormous.

It was always the same; We arrived by coach at around 9am clutching lunch bags and what money we could squeeze out of our parents. The teachers told us firmly what time the coach was due to depart and where and then left us to our own devices.

We spent the whole day racing in and out of trade stands annoying insurance company managers and tractor manufacturers and collecting leaflets with illustrations of implements to stick up cows' backsides and instructions on how to cure warble fly. At going home time the teachers were always tetchy and tired apart from Mr Buller who had been in the beer tent all day and was just tired; and invariably several pupils came sauntering back half an hour late and we were all in trouble. Educationally it was a dead loss.

Years later I was sent to cover this show for a local paper. The press tent was, in those heady days, a cornucopia of free food and alcohol. It was rumoured that one veteran staffer on a local evening paper stayed in the tent for the whole three days, sleeping under one of the benches and certainly few members of the press ventured further than the nearest loo and boasted that they never set eyes on anything furry with four legs for the duration of the event.

At one show I was waiting with a photographer to talk to a prizewinner when he suddenly said 'Hold this, I'll just go and get a clean white coat on'. 'This' was a very large Charolais bull, which I suddenly found was in my sole charge on the end of an extremely flimsy piece of rope through his nose ring. The photographer displayed an unaccustomed alertness and assumed the look of a man on the starting blocks for the 100 metres. Any sudden move and he was going to be off.

But that's what I like about shows, especially the Liskeard one. You can wander around the cattle pens admiring dewy eyed cows and getting close to handsome bulls in a way not normally possible unless you are fleeing for your life across a field. And aren't the sheep wonderful? Sheep in fields always look faintly distressed wool wise. As if they have had a new perm and then gone out in the rain. But at the show not a woolly hair out of place.

I can always imagine sheep owners saying to friends the night before the show 'sorry I can't come out tonight, I'm blow drying the flock's backsides'. It's the same with the horses, all curried and combed and shining. And don't those ladies in the sidesaddle competition look splendid? Of course I've never really understood why anyone would want to sit sideways on a horse. I have enough difficulty with bar stools. But they do look magnificent in their long habits.

If you do get bored you can always play my favourite competition games. There's the person wearing the silliest hat game, more fun at large county shows where people crash out the feathers and the birds' nests. You can't, by the way, count bowler hats because these are essential wear for officials and others at agricultural shows as well as being the official headwear for some sections of the civil service. Don't ask me why.

Then, on sunny days, there's the 'spot the person who should never be allowed out of the house wearing shorts' competition. A goody this (and I would be liable for entrance should I be foolish enough to wear those Hawaiian impulse buys).

My favourite, however, has always been spot the person with the silliest footwear. While most of us wear old shoes, boots or trainers, you can always find the fashion victim who wants a matching outfit and dons totally ridiculous shoes and then regrets it the second she (and it's always a she) steps into her first pile of what is hopefully mud. I saw one woman at the Devon County one year wearing pale oatmeal suede peep-toe strappy sandals with high heels tripping delicately along the boardwalk until it ran out and then she stepped gingerly onto a small hummock of grass which was obviously floating on something unmentionable because she sank to her ankles into black goo and promptly fell to her knees. It would not be truthful to say nobody laughed, because I did for a start.

The most sensible things to wear are Wellingtons, but I haven't owned a pair for years. I keep thinking I must buy some but then I'm never near a Wellington shop when this thought occurs. But then you never are, are you? Because there aren't any Wellington shops as such; but at the show there are plenty of Wellies in all shapes, colours and sizes. The trouble is I was put off Wellington boots by my mother who always said they were common because they made your feet perspire. My mother was not a person who would ever have had a rubber fetish.

This leads neatly to a little saga I've been longing to share, which should be an object lesson to those who constantly nick their mother's rubber gardening gloves. Said gloves had only to be put down for a moment to disappear. However, that was prior to one very hot day when I had had a long morning in my vegetable plot and stopped for cup of tea. Returning to the garden I found my daughter wearing my gloves. 'These gloves are full of water', she said. 'Have you been using the hose?

'No', I said, 'just sweating'.

I didn't even have to turn round to watch the quickest removal of a pair of pink Marigolds in history, nor watch someone beat a hasty retreat into the cloakroom in search of hot water, Imperial Leather and probably the Dettol. It's these little triumphs which make life worth living.