The Scottish Game Fair at Scone Palace is three days long. It is also exhausting in a way that only makes sense if you've spent three days having genuine full-attention conversations with strangers about the animals they love.

I came home with mud on my boots, a phone full of names I need to follow up, and the particular tiredness that means something real happened.

That's the measure I use now. Not how many cards I gave out. Whether something real happened.

What the weekend was actually for.

I want to be honest about this, because I think it matters.

This wasn't about sales. Other vendors at the fair told me their sales were down. I wasn't there expecting twenty-five bookings by Sunday afternoon. I was there for visibility. For connection. For being out in the world, dressed in my tweeds, among people who love their animals and spend their weekends in fields and on hills doing things with dogs and horses that most of the world doesn't understand.

The Scottish Game Fair is my people, or close to them. People who are rural, or who love rural things, or who understand what it means to have a working dog or a hunting horse or an animal who is genuinely a partner in the life you live rather than an accessory to it.

Being there, being real, being present: that was the whole point.

The bell tent.

The bell tent looked gorgeous. I'm genuinely proud of how it came together. Framed prints on easels, somewhere to sit, a space that felt considered rather than just a table with some leaflets on it.

What I learned is that a bell tent at a fair like this needs to be unmissable to draw people in on its own. In a smaller footprint, tucked among other stands, it didn't have the draw card I'd anticipated. I experimented all weekend with the layout, bringing things forward, moving them back at the end of each day, trying to understand what made people stop and what made them walk past.

It's a learning curve and I'm glad I went through it. Next time I'll know more.

The photograph that stopped people.

Here's what I know now: the draw card was a photograph of Kai.

A German wire-haired pointer, photographed out on the hill during a hunting shoot. Not a posed studio image. A working dog in his element, doing exactly what he was bred for, and the photograph caught his true spirit in a way that you could feel.

For a rural, game-fair crowd, that image was a language they already spoke. People who work with dogs on the hill, who understand the relationship between a handler and a pointer in the field, stopped for that photograph in a way they didn't stop for some of the others. It was real. It was authentic. It showed the world they actually live in.

That's what I need more of on the walls. The working life. The dogs and horses who are partners, not just companions.

The Buddy photograph worked too, the black and white of Karen and her horse touching foreheads, the weight of feeling it carries. That was a different kind of conversation starter, quieter and more intimate. People came back to look at it more than once.

The conversations.

I gave out a lot of business cards and quite a few brochures. The names I came home with are people who stopped and stayed, who had the longer conversation, who were genuinely interested rather than just politely passing through.

One was a lovely lady who came with her puppy. We talked for a while about the Legacy Circle, what it would mean to document a dog's whole first year, to have that record of the relationship growing. She liked the idea of the model call. I need to follow up with her directly because my email isn't getting through, but the conversation was real and I'm holding onto it.

There was a man talking about his German short-haired pointer and being out on the hill. He understood immediately what the photograph of Kai was about, because it was his world too. We talked about what it means to capture a working dog in the work, not performing for a camera but just being exactly what they are.

A family with hunting dogs and a Bernese mountain dog stopped because I had a photograph with a working shepherd in it, mixed in with hunting dogs on the hill. The shepherd was the connection point. He had one. Suddenly we were talking about working dogs and rural life and what those photographs mean to the people whose lives they document.

That's the thing about authenticity. It finds its people.

The puppy in the rain.

On the Sunday, near the end of the day, it was raining. I sat down on the floor at the entrance to the tent to get out of the way of the weather.

A puppy came and sat down and snuggled in. Just like that. No fuss, no invitation. Just a small dog who decided this was a good place to be.

There are moments that don't need a caption. That was one of them.

A puppy in the rain, deciding your tent floor is a good place to be. You don't plan for those moments. You just try to be present for them.

What I'm bringing into the next one.

I'm not sure I'll do the Scottish Game Fair again at this scale. It's expensive and the return is slow, which I knew going in. But the seeds it planted are real, and seeds take time.

What I know for next time, at any fair, is this: the photograph that stops people is the authentic one. The working dog on the hill. The grey horse in his paddock. The image that shows a world the person in front of you already knows and loves, rather than the world you think they want to see.

And the conversations that matter are the ones where someone recognises something. In the photograph. In the work. In the particular way you talk about animals and what they mean.

Those are the conversations I carried home.

With muddy boots and a full heart,

Jules x