There are places people want to visit at holiday times... and places people are glad to get away from. There’s no doubt about where we stand in the scheme of things: the prospect of a lazy afternoon in Milltown, celebrating the less-than-rivetting fact that the banks are shut, can summon the scum of five counties. Yes, like swallows - but bigger, and with wallets - the visitors are back.

St Cadbury’s Day represents the first chance this year for people to get out and make a nuisance of themselves. There’s always an appreciative audience for anyone attempting a handbrake turn, at speed, in St Bernard’s Square. And Milltown is the ideal place to crank up the bass on that new in-car stereo and see what it’ll do. As anyone living within five miles of Milltown is painfully aware, it sounds like a man armed with a leg of lamb trying to batter his way out of an IKEA wardrobe.

There are two kinds of motorists who feel drawn, this Easter, to explore the narrow, twisty lanes around Milltown. There are those who want to pootle around at a stately 20mph ("Oh look, dear, a cow. And there, if I’m not mistaken, is another one". "More milky tea, dear?" "I don’t mind if I do"), and those who see the South Pennine hills as a race-track, their very own Indianapolis 500. The prospect of these fruitcakes sharing the same stretch of road is a convincing argument for Milltown folk to stay home, draw the curtains and watch a re-run of Ben Hur on the telly. Compared with the motoring mayhem around Milltown, the chariot racers seem a model of courtesy.

Sometimes we wonder why the visitors come, but who cares as long as we’re robbing them blind. And, anyway, it’s not really robbery, is it, as long as they’re happy to spend money on some small souvenir of their day-trip to Milltown, like a didgeridoo or food poisoning. So the least we can do is organise a few events.

You’d have to go a long way (well, another postal district, anyway) to find better entertainment than the Duck Race.* And, as if that wasn’t excitement enough, we hold the annual World Dock Pudding Championships. Despite its origins as an elaborate joke during the reign of Queen Victoria, cooking with weeds is taken very seriously round here. The competition is to see who can rustle up the best portion of this delicious local delicacy - so delicious, indeed, that we eat it just once a year.

The classic recipe was found by chance, hand-written on a scrap of paper tucked inside a slightly foxed first edition of Edwin Drudge’s classic volume, A Springtime Ramble In the Vale of the Calder. ‘Take 2 lbs young dock leaves, 1/2 lb nettle tops and 2 chopped onions. Boil everything in salted water. Add one cup of oatmeal, and cook for 20 minutes. Strain off liquid, stir in a knob of butter. Shape into puddings and fry in bacon fat. Throw puddings away. Eat out’. And, despite the intense rivalry on the day of the competition, this is the recipe that locals prefer.

The Pace Egg Play takes place on Good Friday. This ancient mummers’ play recreates the classic combat between the forces of good (St George) and evil (foreigners, mostly), with a few other themes - jingoism, quack medicine, rank xenophobia, bringing the dead back to life, etc - thrown in for good measure. The host of splendid characters includes Bold Slasher, the Doctor (with his restorative bottle of Nip Nap), the King of Egypt, Osama Bin Laden and, best of all, a ragged, toothless idiot savant called Toss Pot.

The Pace Egg Play is what Shakespeare would have written, if he’d gone unerringly for two-dimensional characters and undemanding jokes, and sensibly condensed two hours of overwrought action into a crowd-pleasing twenty minutes. It’s brilliant: from the first hesitant performance of the day to the last, by which time the players are frisky, pissed and happy to improvise.

Confusingly, two versions of the Pace Egg Play are enacted on the same day. The so-called ‘boring’ version is recommended for those of a nervous disposition. During the more violent, ‘combat’ version, however, the players have been known to let their natural exuberance run away with them. We hope there will be no repeat of the tragic events of 1987, when two spectators were accidentally stabbed to death during an altercation between St George and the Dragon over who was getting the beers in.

The Milltown and District Agricultural Show (‘featuring the best of local produce since 1894’) was another hardly annual, traditionally held on the first wet Sunday in June. It was a mid-summer extravaganza that promised something for everybody. That’s what the poster said, anyway. To the show committee it was a Family Fun Day, though you had to think twice about any event that included the words ‘Family’ and ‘Fun’ in the same sentence. Offcumdens, probably used to more sophisticated fare, dubbed it the ‘fete worse than death’.

A field just outside Milltown was transformed, for one day each year, into a rural playground filled with marquees, stalls and show-rings. It was our local squire, Lord Saveloy, who cut the ribbon and declared the show open. With the aristocracy losing most of their traditional perks (even deflowering virgins wasn’t something they could take for granted any more), opening the show was Lord Saveloy’s last public duty.

We enjoyed daring displays of derring-do by the Purple Helmets, Milltown’s very own motor-cycle stunt team. They risked life and limb by jumping over a line of cars. But with jaded audiences being weaned on big-budget blockbuster films, the stakes had to be raised with each performance. One year they attempted the stunt while towing a caravan, giving the crowd what they came for: a lethal fireball.

The Milltown Show was an opportunity for the local farmers to get together and monopolise the bar in the beer tent. Once they’d been let off the leash for the day, they could put a fair few pints away. When they emerged, blinking into the afternoon sunshine, they’d cast covetous eyes over the brand-new tractors on display. They tried to convince themselves their work-rate would increase if they had heated seats, double-glazed windows and a state-of-the-art in-cab CD system... to replace the clapped-out tractors rusting away on the farm.

The vicar’s wife used to run the childrens’ pet show. When picking a winner, it would have taken the wisdom of Solomon to choose between the rival claims of, say, a guinea pig and a shaggy shetland pony. So, since they were all God’s creatures, every pet got a rosette.

The Milltown Show was a pleasantly old-fashioned affair. In the main tent we could admire the displays of fruit, vegetables and home-made produce. The competition categories were reassuringly traditional; so it was ‘three English apples, ‘six broad beans’ and ‘pot of home-made lemon curd’... rather than ‘three mobile phones’ or ‘six website portals’. The children exhibited woven samplers, and examples of their neatest handwriting. Their models were made, in best Blue Peter style, out of toilet rolls, washing-up bottles and sticky-back plastic. The 'guess the weight of the cake' competition was nearly cancelled one year, when a goat ate the cake. It took a sudden and triumphant leap of imagination to change the name of the competition to 'guess the weight of the goat'.

Yes, when we saw the marquees going up in Potter’s Field, we felt a sense of community that stretched back as far as anyone could remember. So it’s a real shame that the Milltown and District Agricultural Show was a casualty of the foot & mouth epidemic. The show was cancelled last year (the first time since the Second World War) and God only knows when it will be held again.

We’ve tried all sorts of events, over the years, to bring tourists into town. Book-burning, for example: a fine old tradition that's rather fallen out of fashion since the collapse of the Third Reich. Our aim was to resurrect the idea in a modern context, feeling that the collected works of Lord Archer (novels, short stories and his forthcoming prison diary, ‘Knuckles and Me: a Union Forged in Adversity’) would make a good blaze.

The Victorian Weekend enjoyed a brief vogue; from dawn to dusk you could hardly move for crippled children, unfrocked vicars and women of easy virtue. We’ve had beer festivals - even though, for most folk, the prospect of ‘200 real ales, ciders and perries’ on sale in a draughty marquee is about 195 too many. The Festival of Sarcasm ("Yeah, right, what a great idea that was") came and went, largely unlamented. One year we had a Festival of Shoplifting but, to be honest, it’s something we’d rather forget about.

Given the town’s relaxed attitude to paternity, Father’s Day is proving to be a real money-spinner. If kids send one Father’s Day card, they’re as likely to send a dozen. And Sperm Doner’s Day was a noble attempt to ‘Remember the anonymous man who gave you the gift of life’. In hindsight, though, we shouldn’t have printed so many cards. What’s next on the agenda? Surrogate Mother’s Day, perhaps; if nothing else it would give the manufacturers of turkey basters something to cheer about.

All these events pale into insignificance, though, compared to the Milltown Mardi Gras. It started off in the most modest way - really just to add a little colour to the gaunt gritstone scene - but we think we may be onto a winner. Despite media reports about Milltown being the Lesbian Capital of the North, we recognise that not everyone in town is gay, and that lesbianism is merely one of many possible sexual orientations. We wanted to raise the profile of a beleagured minority, and bring people together who might not otherwise feel they had a great deal to shout about. The Straight Pride March and Breeder’s Cup gives heterosexual folk the chance to reclaim the streets, stand shoulder to shoulder and give vent to their feelings: "Say it out loud... We're straight and we're proud". If there’s another town that celebrates the multi-facetted nature of heterosexuality, by dressing up in gaudy costumes, then we don’t know about it.

It’s not all about marching though. People are encouraged to find new ways to express themselves. A man may stand at the end of his street, hand on hips, and announce to the world: "I, Stanley Peregrine Gawkroger, have pleasured my woman". Or we may demonstrate our solidarity with the cause of gay liberation by having casual sex in public toilets. A lot of men wear badges - ‘How dare you assume I’m homosexual’ - in an attempt to challenge over-hasty assumptions. There’s a lot a pressure to be gay in Milltown, to be sure. But a man may not be gay at all; he may just be light on his feet. It takes all sorts, doesn’t it?

* Stop Press

After the shameful events of Easter Monday, an ashen-faced spokesman for this years’s Duck Race (who has asked to remain anonymous) read the following statement...

"We are stunned. The entire duck-racing community is stunned. The event, held for many years, always went swimmingly. We raised thousands of pounds for Lame Ducks, a charity offering financial support to inept retailers in the Milltown area. But after yesterday we’ve become a laughing stock.

"We have witnessed many sporting disasters in recent times. The abortive Grand National of 1993. Mike Tyson chewing Evander Holyfield’s ear off. And - most recently and most sadly - Halifax Town being relegated from Division 3 into the barren wastes of the Conference League. But these events are as nothing compared to Monday’s debacle.

"In the middle of summer the river overflowed into our lovely homes. But yesterday, in the cruellest of April Fool jokes, the river level was unseasonably low. It made the going firmer than we (or the ducks) would have liked. Some people suggested the ducks weren’t trying. But random drug tests proved negative until we started on the assembled crowds, whose boos and catcalls so disorientated the ducks that they swam around in circles.

"No-one comes out of this shambles with much dignity. There will be a steward’s enquiry. Heads will roll. Thank you"

The winning duck, for those who care about such things at a time like this, was number 69. He - or she - was unavailable for further comment.