Raising funds

One way they raise funds here for the Church or the new village hall etc is to hold a Chinese Auction. Why it is called a Chinese auction I don’t know and you don’t have to travel very far outside the area before you encounter locals who haven’t a clue what a Chinese auction is and so maybe it did evolve here first.
With a conventional jumble sale the organisers are left with a huge pile of rubbish that nobody wants and it is a real problem to get rid of it.
I remember once having to store a huge pile of the late Mrs D…’s old corsets in our garage – why she thought they might have some resale value I don’t know.
I wished Id hung on to them though because I think I might have been able to shift them on ebay especially if I lied about their provenance.
Incidently Mrs D….. in the days of Thatcher regularly delivered to our house the local Tory newsletter much to my concealed annoyance. In one issue they were running a competition, which was , complete the following ,’ Oh dear Kinnock and Hattersley……..’
I sent in ‘will soon stuff the tories and then where will Maggie be’.
I didn’t win but she never delivered another Conservative newsletter.
Now the thing is that under the Chinese auction regime Mrs D…..’s corsets would pose no problem at all. With such an event all the donated bits of junk are set out in piles and in front of each potential prize is placed a plastic cup. The punters come in and buy a book of cloakroom tickets. They then wander among this cornucopia of crap dropping a cloakroom ticket into each mug which is adjacent to prize in which they are interested. But you are saying at the end of this session Mrs D….’s corset collection will have attracted no tickets – surely not?. You would be right but the beauty of this system will now be demonstrated. Suppose that you, a punter, wished to win that first edition copy of ‘Gone with the Wind’ nobody had noticed and placed all your tickets in the plastic cup adjacent to it and suppose when they came to draw the winning ticket it was yours! The skilled assistant auctioneer would gather up your book, and here is the beauty of it, Mrs D…..’s corsets too and present the lot to you as your winnings. You would say ‘I didn’t put in for these’ to which the standard reply is ‘ Its all part of the same lot’ . Brilliant , all gone no crap left.
I thought I would help out once with an advert. I scoured the internet and found a magnificent picture of the Duke of Edinburgh in fully military kit and he was pointing towards the camera. I inserted a speech bubble which had him saying ‘Go all slitty eyed at the Llyswen Chinese Auction’. Unfortunately it was deemed not suitable by the committee.