I am now qualified to judge the class I won
A written paper, a practical on a bench of onions, and then the long runner bean class at Woodbridge, in which Colin was entered.
Village show judging looks like an opinion and is not. It is a points system, published in a handbook, and every judge in the country is working from the same numbers.
A dish of runner beans is worth eighteen points. Long carrots are worth twenty. The points are split across condition, uniformity, size and freshness, and the maximum for any class is only awarded to a perfect exhibit, and the handbook is clear that a perfect exhibit does not exist. Judges know this. Exhibitors know this. Nobody has ever taken it well.
The qualification is a written paper and a practical. In the practical they put a bench of exhibits in front of you, you point every dish on a card, and your card is compared against the examiners’. You are not being marked on picking the winner. You are being marked on the gaps between your numbers.
Colin
My first show in the chair, I drew the long runner bean class at Woodbridge, which is the class I won in 2017 and have not entered since, and which Colin has won in every other year of my adult life.
His bean was nine centimetres longer than anything else on the table. It was also straighter, evener, fresher, and better presented, and there was no combination of numbers I could have written on that card that would have put it second.
I gave him the first. He had it comfortably. It was not close and it was not a decision.
He shook my hand at the end, exactly as he had in 2017. Then he said, “You’ll want to declare an interest next year,” and went to get his card, and I have been turning that sentence over ever since.