Gadding

Off to the RHS Spring Show - it was like Glastonbury for plants. Predominant smell - old people, boiled sweets and honeysuckle.

The place was amazing. One could wax lyrical about the show gardens and how a field had been transformed into garden after garden of delights, some that were modern and some that were traditional and one - the ‘sanctuary garden’

that looked for all the world as if it had been there forever. Then there were the flower displays. The last time I saw colours like that I was medicated up to my eyeballs as a result of a bout of flu. Amazing. Then again there are the flower arranging displays.

This in itself is surely worth a mention. Flower arranging, I am sure, attracts the same sort of highly-strung people that enter show-dogs into Crufts or children into beauty pageants. What you do is make an incredible effort with something that is, at the end of the day, outside your control. Then you lave it to be savaged by the judges. The judges leave cards with comments, mostly along the lines of ‘good effort but you ran off with my husband you bitch so no medal for you.’

What made the show though, better than the gardens, better than the flowers, better even than the stalls where you could get loads of plants far cheaper than the shops, were the people.

There were three types. Those oo tarked on a praper cantry accent and those who were so posh they talked only on vowels, i.e. ah, eeh eye you?

But they all dressed the same way, as if they had just escaped from the potting shed after a hard winter. These were people who cared a lot more about whether their borders and lawn co-ordinated than whether their jacket and trousers did and these were also people who (presumably) looked in the mirror and thought their hair was acceptable like that.

There was no telling if somebody was there to buy something for their window box or if they were shopping for a new moat.

Then there were the charioteers. I’ve never seen so many of those mobility scooter things. It was like formula one on valium. People weaving around, beeping their wee horns and behaving as if they were in the chariot racing scene from Ben Hur. As the afternoon wore on two things happened, the scooters became more and more laden with plants until it was a regular sight to see what appeared to be a mobile hedge bearing down on you and the drivers became more and more loaded on Pimms . It was life and limb time, I can tell you.

As well as plants there was the food tent. I managed to find a kind gentleman selling beer and wandered around - outstanding product had to be the butcher selling a noisette of lamb with a slice of black pudding at its centre. Outstanding!

Finally, a mention about the young lady done up like a statue to sell patios. I wandered along and saw her, thought to myself ‘a little too real I think’ and then realised she was a real person (the wind ruffled her ‘stone’ toga). She was perfect though, standing there as people examined her - then she opened her eyes. Jesus! It was the creepiest thing I’ve ever seen. On some level it connected with every story about graveyard horror and possessed statues I’ve ever read and my spinal cord nearly jumped through the top of my skull with fear. Luckily she then turned round and shared a joke with some colleagues and the sight of a laughing statue somewhat thawed my marrow, but only just. Wanted to get a good photograph but it felt somehow intrusive. Anyway, disturbing image is burned onto my memory, especially around about lights-out time!