Bead fairs are your friend

3am, and it's dark. No matter what time of year, it's dark. Darker than dark, really, and dragging ourselves out to the car to travel to Yet Another Bead Fair. 3am means a four-hour drive to the fair, and another four hours home afterwards, depending on the traffic, the pit stops, finding some place for breakfast (McD's a fave of the son, as he loves the pancakes) and feeling sure that the sat-nav is not lying about where the venue is.

The car is full of stock, displays, bags of snacks, a pillow and blanket for the yawning child and two Nintendo DS games for the longer stretches of boring motorway in the dark, where we will do battle with the forces of LEGO evil. Indiana Jones today? Batman? It's difficult to say until we get on the road.

Weeks of preparation are behind, now it's two hours of setting up, and six to seven hours of meeting people at the fair (any fair, they all run fairly much the same). Selling beads is only a very small part of it, sometimes it's the easiest, most straightforward part, too. People mostly know what they want and ninety out of a hundred people come with reasonable expectations, intelligent conversation and a sense of humour. It's great to talk to people about Mike's work and hear their appreciative comments about the beads. It's always a highlight of the day. And there are always encounters that will end up as something to tell our friends who are convinced that all we do is sit around, drink tea and rake in money. Sometimes we simply survive the day on our senses of humour, if the fair is slow and sales slower.

We spend part of the day thinking about what is happening during the fair: are the beads right for the venue, is the display working, do we need more lights or less things out on the table, should we change the layout... it never ends. So much time goes into things that customers never see. New materials for displays, new equipment in the studio, new glass colours, new bead techniques and a pile of discarded practice beads for every style that finally makes it to the sale table. We think about sales, will we just meet our costs or will we be so rushed off our feet we don't have time to think till we're ready to break the stand down for heading home. Sometimes it seems to be in the laps of the gods, all the hard work nothing as compared to the vagaries of location, inclination and economy.

Seven hours can fly past, or they can drag like a Very Slow Dragging Thing. We can smile or we can use the 'clenched teeth grimace' that looks like a smile but isn't. It all depends on so much. How many people are there, do they know what they're looking at, do they want beads or do they just want entertainment. On occasion, it's impossible to tell.

Then it's time to pack. We have a system now, it's almost a ballet, one person does the packing of boxes, one does the break-down of the displays, and it's now down to an art. Half an hour if we're lucky and we're in the car, ready to find someplace to re-fuel ourselves and brace for the long drive home, which can be anything from a couple of hours to a mind-numbing 8-hour crawl along the motor way.

Fingers crossed that the Nintendo batteries hold out!