JULY is when we go a bit mad. Up and down the land you will find grown adults throwing  balls at coconuts.

This is the month when beefy blokes hurl old gumboots as high and far into the air as they can manage.

Families amuse themselves by paying £1 to chuck custard pies at the local vicar, or by showing off Dad’s bulbous onions, or gambling on races involving yellow plastic ducks.

All this before one even mentions the three-legged race or the octogenarians’ egg-and-spoon competition, which often ends in allegations of cheating.

Yes, it’s fête time!

Foreigners do not really do fêtes. I did once come across a good one on  the Channel Island of Sark but that’s about as far afield as the genre works.

JOYOUS SNAPSHOT OF MODERN BRITAIN

Spaniards, for a communal knees-up, will hold an evening fiesta with castanet-clacking, flamenco dancers and lots of shouts of: “Ole!”

Scandinavians, in their few moments of fervour, will dance around apple trees, drink aquavit and jump into the nearest lake wearing their birthday suits.

Germans obey the summons of an oompah band and will sit in orderly rows at long tables to eat cake and take the pils. The French play boules in dusty town squares. Icelandics bubble in boiling mud baths. Swiss yodel. Italians sing. And Russians sunbathe standing up, like armies of penguins.

Yet we British attend local fêtes or school fairs, to delight ourselves with cheesy games. Do you like whack-a-mole or are you more of an apple bobber, plunging your head into a barrel of cold water to try to bite an elusive Granny Smith?

Bouncy castles, face-painting, white-elephant stalls, the suggestive-carrots display, guess-the-length-of-the-sausage-dog or the dreaded bric-a-brac stall: These are the daft indulgences of the British summer. Sophisticated? No. But that’s the whole point. Fêtes are exuberantly shambolic and unsnobby.

Politicians and quangocrats and the BBC are convinced that the country is in decline and that everyone has some problem or is oppressed by an -ism.

You’ll find them in country and urban districts alike, from the Isle of Wight to Inverness. They never wheedle for public money. You won’t ever hear them bragging about their Bame quotas. They just get on with life and are cheerfully self-sufficient and unaffectedly diverse.

The other weekend a  friend worked the BBQ  at his children’s school in London and reported a joyous snapshot of modern Britain.

Lots of women in hijabs played hook-a-duck, spending their cash on halal burgers and cans of pop. It’s not a bad definition of Britishness: Have you ever been to a fête?

FOLLOW THE RULES

Certain rules apply.

RULE ONE: At least one lady on the organising committee shall be called Peggy or Alison.

RULE TWO: The trestle tables at the tea stall shall wobble alarmingly, but never quite collapse.

RULE THREE: The home-made chocolate eclairs shall start to melt in the cakes tent.

RULE FOUR: The PA system operated by the master of ceremonies (red corduroys and a moth-eaten panama hat, and probably called Clive) shall be prey to random bursts of deafening feedback.

RULE FIVE: Even if it rains, everyone will totter home happy.

Foreigners often find us hard to understand. At present they are baffled that our Government may soon be led by crumpled, grunting Boris Johnson, and that his opponent will be rambling revolutionary Jeremy Corbyn, an OAP who likes shell-suits and municipal manhole covers.

Global diplomats and analysts pore over the socio-economic data, the pollsters’ pie charts, the tax statistics and more, and they puzzle.

'WHY DO YOU WISH TO LEAVE OUR EUROPEAN UNION?'

Likewise, they behold the weekly argy-bargy of Prime Minister’s Questions, or the sight of Nigel Farage and his merry MEPs turning their backs on the EU anthem at the opening of the European Parliament, and they are flummoxed. Brexit bamboozles them — “But why do you wish to leave our European Union?” They really don’t get it.

My advice to our foreign friends is this: Follow the bunting and get yourself to a neighbourhood summer beano.

Visit a fête and you will soon understand the British character. Bloody-minded,  quirky, unassuming, unfazed about politically-correct crazes.

Fêtes are a telling combination of romantic tradition and anarchy. No one wants them to be slickly modern.

We want our fêtes to be small-c conservative: The canvas marquee to smell as it did 50 years ago, the skittles lane to be surrounded by no more health and safety paraphernalia than a few straw bales, and at least one of the domestic-produce judges to become squiffy after sampling the home-made sloe gins.

At our village in Herefordshire it is always my job to supervise the dog show. In the parade ring things invariably unravel. We have had fights and attempted matings (among the dogs, not their owners, I should say).

One year a lad aged  about six entered the ring with a Great Dane twice his size. The dog, naturally, was called Tiny.

Another year, in the musical mats competition, a great-gran in her 90s was so determined to win that she used her walking stick to trip up a teenage rival. We Brits may have an amateurish bent but we are competitive, too. The EU should not overlook that truth.

Politicians and quangocrats and the BBC are convinced that the country is in decline and that everyone has some problem or is oppressed by an -ism.

A trip to a fête would put them right. Fêtes are optimistic, classless, unpretentious, fun. No race quotas. No safety announcements. No risk assessments. No race or gender angst.

They may often look like something from a Richard Curtis film but fêtes are a better reflection of 21st-century Britain than any state-subsidised art show or any right-on TV soap.

See you at the tombola stand.

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