Last updated 14:36, Friday, 29 August 2008

It was an eerily quiet bank holiday Sunday. No decorated floats, loud music, fun fair rides or crowds – just a handful of beery smokers, standing ankle deep in cigarette butts piled outside the pubs.

Anne Pickles

Pretty dejected they looked too – at a loose end among their own loose fag ends, so to speak. Not the norm at all... for an August bank holiday Sunday.

High hopes for last-minute rescue had been dashed. There was to be no pretty carnival queen waving from her throne.

No hot dog stands or pipe bands. No fried onions competing for attention with the sonic booming of that earsplitting DJ – the one who last August directed us to fill buckets with money to secure this year’s carnival.

We did fill them, as I remember.

But in the event even buckets of fivers couldn’t fight off an encroaching malaise.

Apathy is resistant to fivers as flu is immune to antibiotics. And Brampton had succumbed to the English disease of apathy.

A dampener had descended on the old market town. Some blamed credit crunching and financial squeezing.

Some pointed accusing fingers at bothersome drinkers coming in from elsewhere last time – as though we didn’t have enough of our own.

Some said they couldn’t be bothered.

And plenty blamed Carlisle City Council, which is a compulsory sport in Brampton.

But in the age-old tradition of all good things coming to an end – and for no greater reason than an end is what we tend to hasten for all our good things – party-time was cancelled... due to lack of interest.

It was a great shame – not least because I’d invited the folks up from Yorkshire to enjoy it.

Trumpeting the joys of carnival like a Cumbria Tourism chief on damson gin, there’d been more than a touch of gloating in the preamble.

“A real slice of Cumbrian life,” I’d trilled. “Proper participation stuff.

Fun, food, games, music, fancy dressed floats you haven’t seen since Whitsun in the 1950s. Neighbours cementing friendships – a real old fashioned community summer event.”

“Sounds wonderful. What time do we start?”

“Er... actually, it’s off. Nobody could be bothered.”

Bet this never happened to the New Orleans Mardi Gras. Can’t quite see them doing apathy down Bourbon Street.

Still, there are worse things than egg on face and more to share with visiting parents than men dressed as ducks and marching pipers in swinging kilts.

Best not to bore with full, four-day itinerary but a routine running repair to a drippy downstairs loo, turning rapidly into a heavy investment episode of Changing Rooms with Titanic overtones – but mercifully without Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen in a wet suit – was a definite lowlight.

Yomping together around Birdoswald Fort was a high, as was the sunny (rare for August) scenic drive to Samye Ling Tibetan Centre at Eskdalemuir to soak up delicious doses of serenity in the Buddhist Temple and fragrant herb gardens.

Lunch at Cumbria Cottage, a Chinese dinner at home with sticky fingers and prawn crackers, silly giggly laughter, hugs and cuddles, reminiscences, surprising parental concern about my keeping a tidy house, make-do-and-mend meals, snatched naps, girl talk with Mum, late nights of one too many nightcaps with Dad. Family.

Funny thing, family. Very much like our lost carnival.

If we’re lucky enough to have something close, full of love and fun, we can tend to take it for granted until one day, when we’re least expecting the loss, it’s no longer there.

Where are we then but at a loose end? Disconsolate, dejected, surveying an empty space where the party used to be, wondering why it was we hadn’t foreseen the pitfalls of apathy. Wishing we could grab back those times we couldn’t be bothered... and be bothered.

We can’t always help good things coming to an end but we can do our best to squeeze every drop of joy out of them before they do. And we can resolve to do nothing that might hasten the end of anything strengthening family, friendship and community.

Credit crunching, financial squeezing, bothersome drinkers – even councils – can all add up to hard times. But it’s the can’t-be-bothereds who are the real killers of what we truly hold dear – and that’s what we need most when times are hard.

There’s a rumbling in the old market town and a campaign running on a new-fangled website.

Can-be-bothereds are working towards a carnival revival next year – bigger, better, more closely bonded in neighbourhood fun and friendship than before.

I hope they do it.

It’s quite an achievement to know what you had once it’s gone – then to bring it back again.

And I must declare a vested interest. I want to bring my loved ones back again to Brampton to see what they missed.

Is that a date?