Pigeon flinger

In town, the pigeons are feral. Bred and evolved for a city environment they are like a winged version of a motorcycle dispatch rider, mad-eyed, filthy and reckless. They also crap all over the place. They’re starved - their diet is whatever they can scavenge so it’s down to fag ends and pigeon shit basically. In the country, pigeons are plump. Christ knows what they’ve been eating - the local cat population by the look of it. One sits in the garden and is startled by a creaking - it’s a twelve stone pigeon sitting on your fence which is swaying like the Berlin Wall on unification day.

In the city, pigeons swoop and flutter, usually at your head. They are blasé about human contact but if sufficiently startled, usually by a small child, they will flock off.

In the countryside, pigeons keep a wary distance, conditioned to be just out of range of somebody who would, for instance, worry about discharging a shotgun in their back garden and missing the fat feathered fellow, instead vaporising a neighbour’s gazebo. Hence, when they take to the air, they need assistance.

This can be the only reason for the size of the aerials in the neighbourhood. Our feathered friend clambers up on the roof and makes his way to the end of the steel structure, which begins to bend like a willow under his weight. He gets to the very end, jumps once, twice and then: sproing! He’s off into the wild blue yonder leaving nothing but a cloud of feathers and his launcher vibrating with a noise like a ruler being twanged on the edge of a desk.

The alternative is that my neighbours are deep cover agents, planted in the 50’s, and that they use the communications gear to contact the mother country. As this can now be done more cheaply and securely using a phone card bought at a bargain price at a car booter, the communications gear is now used to get a decent telly picture, even on channel 5. No mean feat.

You can call me Al (Fresco)

The only sane response to temperatures gone mad is to avoid manual labour and drink heavily during the day, refusing all food. I find that gin is the drink of choice, as it’s kept in the freezer and so the very act of fetching it out every twenty minutes provides blessed relief.

Starting at nine in the morning means that one is fashionably unconscious through the worst heat of the day, usually stretched out prone on the stone floor of the kitchen. Coming to in time for cocktails and the cool of the evening, it’s recommended that one dine outside. By nine, the heat is tolerable and appetite returns, given that edge that only starvation and dipsomania can produce. Favourite meals include salads, fruits and, of course, a really, really huge bowl of crisps.

Brown and pleasant land

The setting on the countryside appears to have been turned from ‘lush’, through ‘ripe’ and all the way up to ‘crispy’. The whole nation looks positively Tuscan. This does not mean that people have started drizzling their pork scratchings with olive oil but rather that the usual palette of rich greens, dark browns and the occasional brooding concrete blot has been replaced by golds and yellows. It really does make one want to sing some sort or rustic harvesting song, possibly involving a milkmaid, possibly not. If you’re a hay fever sufferer it makes you want to sit inside with the curtains drawn scowling at the weather forecast while sniffing and dabbing your streaming eyes.

Also gold and brown are the lawns of the nation. We now appear to be lurching our way towards the sort of scenery you normally see combusting picturesquely behind some loony reporter as he talks about dropped cigarettes, forest fires and ‘houses in great danger if the wind changes’ (all the time thinking ‘which would look a lot cooler on camera than shrubbery smouldering’).

And indeed, saw my first grass fire of the season the other day.

It was on a trip up to Runcorn, where I am receiving treatment for an ingrowing ego. Runcorn is within teeing-off distance of the golf club in Liverpool where they were playing the open and, for once telly and real life were in perfect harmony. On the television the only blobs of colour were the humorously attired golfers strutting about the place (hey, if some sweatshop owning trainer company wants to pay me ten mill a year, I’d dress like a pantomime cow with a swoosh on my ass if they said so) and in nearby Runcorn the green had gone brown. And this is the north!

Driving from the hospital one passes a KFC (strategically placed near the wing dealing with eating disorders so the bulimics can order a bucket of Krispy Freaking Chickenybits then have something handy to throw up into afterwards) and across from that, a grass bank…on fire.

Luckily, two small boys were in attendance. A spreading bush fire was being stamped into submission by two twelve year olds. All you could smell was burning grass and singed reebok. Knowing I would be near Liverpool, I had drilled dialing 999 and did so. At the same time some bloke with a fire extinguisher leapt from his car and spoiled all the fun by managing to put out the fire just as it reached the bushes.

It really was the oddest thing. A ring of fire, a la Johnny Cash, slowly creeping outwards. All I could think of was the opening credits of ‘Bonanza’.

WTF

Conventional science would have us believe that there are three states of matter. Liquid (for instance, gin or tonic), solid (for instance, a slice of lemon) and gas (for instance, the fizzy bits in tonic).

I postulate a forth state of matter, termed ‘what the fuck?’ or WTF.

The WTF state of matter is one that can mimic one or more of the other two states simultaneously. For instance, one is busy farting around at a buffet or other gathering where catering has been provided. Possibly one is entertaining a fellow with a few chosen bon mots or seeing that all the good booze is hidden from the masses. One then picks up ones dinner plate, which has been baking under a heat lamp like a teenager on holiday in Lanzerote. The state of the ceramic plate as you pick it up could be stated as solid.

Three things will then happen. You will notice an odd smell, such as burning pork, you will then realise that you are experiencing the sort of pain one would normally associate with an accident around a theshing machine. Finally, the plate obtains a WTF state, as you drop it, leap in the air, scream ‘what the fuck!’ and plunge your hand into the nearest jug of water, wine or beer depending on what sort of party you are at.

WTF matter can also exist in a dormant state. Two usual examples are in the bedroom. In your own bedroom WTF exists as an object such as the end of the bed which you know about and which has always been there. This does not stop you stubbing your toe against it. Likewise, foreign hotel beds are sometimes surrounded by a WTF field. This is normally set at shin height and may resemble a wooden or metal frame.

WTF is unique in that it is not always a solid form. Occasionally it is liquid and discovered unexpectedly on your suit after riding on public transport, or gaseous and encountered when entering a public convenience.

A unique property of WTF is that it can cross as a state into the human population.

For instance, I was sitting outside a popular franchised chicken cooking establishment recently, minding my own business, when two of the most enormous human beings I’ve ever seen waddled past.


Fat indicators - they had the lot. Greasy appearance because squeezing into the shower to clean is a special occasion, waddling walk that indicated that, like a supertanker, they would not be able to stop for miles once they got going and, most important of all, trousers with an elasticised waist that signal ‘I have given up’.

In they went, then out they came with a family bucket.

A bucket. Of food. Has nobody sat down with these people and explained that food is something to be enjoyed, savoured.

When was the last time you enjoyed anything in a bucket? Truthfully - buckets are normally bad news are they not. Bucket chains, head in a bucket, kicking the bucket. All negative images. What genius thought that a bucket full of food would appeal? Buckets and food only go together in two circumstances, when you’re vomiting into one because of that warm prawn you had for lunch, or when you and your cellmate call it the ‘en suite’.

Food IN a bucket? They might as well go the whole hog and fit it with ear straps so that the porkers could just strap it on like a feed bag.

Still, it seemed to make them happy enough, as they waddled away at a slightly increased pace. I suspect that they were taking it to their car to eat as if they had lived some distance away and wanted to get there quickly, they would have simply turned on their sides and rolled home.

So we see how WTF can exist as a moment in time, an idea or an event. Certainly when I saw this pair exiting the fast fat food place, one holding the bucket and practically caressing the damn thing, while the other eyed it loveingly, I experienced a genuine WTF moment. Possibly very much like the one experienced by the two gourmets when they later popped the lid on their dinner and found some prankster had filled it to the brim with salad.

From the Constabulary

As a village bobby, I'm often asked 'how much to look the other way?'. This was indeed the question posed by the person I understand to be the (un)usual writer of this weblogged journal. Said person is now residing in cell number 3, on a charge of dawdling without due care an attention.

On confiscation of his home computer (a rather fabulous bespoke Babbage & Turing 'thinking machine' with mahogany case, ivory keyboard mother of pearl decorative inlay) I of course did the normal background checks to see if there was anything on there that should not be. Unfortunately the file bearing the title 'Stroke Mag' turned out to contain nothing more than an article for a rowing magazine. Normal procedure is to check then the history of browsing on the interwebworldwide. There were the usual links to the more socially acceptable areas of the hard-right movement such as the Church of Scotland and the Royal Family, but nothing that indicated the server for any particular web-site may be in a cave in Afghanistan or Leeds.

It did throw up the link to his ego-stoking webloggarpage though and, after careful and painful seconds of deliberation, I decided that as the usual werelogger is currently snoring in cell 3 before, on past form, waking up and demanding gin, the world could benefit from a well chosen words from a rural crime-fighter.

Policing the countryside is not all about stopping blokes shagging animals. Mostly, but not all. For instance, the current hot weather has brought with it its own particular problems. Only the other day I had to caution a woman for being overweight in charge of a bikini. Thankfully a social worker was on hand and with the aid of powerful tranquillisers we were able to crow-bar the lady in question into a more acceptable form of attire - in this case her front room with the curtains closed.

Our own vicar, of course, sets a marvellous example. He wears a perfectly acceptable long black robe, beneath which he can and frequently does wear what he likes. With his beard and robe he is quite an exotic figure as he calls the faithful to prayer every night by marching into the saloon bar of the Bull and screaming and whipping at them until they line the pews.

Rural coppering is all about trust, you can't trust these buggers an inch and so have to watch them like hawks. Everyone has a gun or two, a dog bred to attack and a 4x4. It's like Lewisham with hedgerows. Thanks to a firm hand, policing by consent and a vigilante style execution now and again, I manage to keep a lid on things, the obvious exception being the riot at the judging of the jams at the local fair last week, but that's en exception.

The only thing to really trouble the village recently has been an outbreak of gnoming. Three times runners up in the regional heats of 'Britain Gnomes', the villagers take their gnomes seriously so the kidnapping of several of the little fellows over a number of nights was quite a shock. Who would so such a thing? Obviously, reprisal raids were launched against neighbouring villages but it didn't seem to halt the problem.

Modern policing did the trick. I was wandering back from the pub at three in the morning when I happened across an unnamed but prominent villager wearing an overcoat with a suspicious protrusion under it leaving a front garden of a lady of the village. Remembering that whole nasty business of 'The Case of the Convent Pervert' last year, I made sure the man was not a ranking member of the General Synod and promptly arrested him, as soon as he woke up from my coshing of him.

Beneath the coat - a stolen gnome. And an enormous erection. No accounting for some folk.

I shall gloss over the details but suffice to say the gnomes were found safe and well in this fellow's sub-basement, where they had been repainted - let's say 'pink' - all over and placed in suggestive positions in an artificial garden in front of a sophisticated web-cam set up. Apparently web-cam perverts will pay to watch gnomes in the wild before they are civilised and take up clothes, gardening and fishing in front gardens.

The gnomes were restored to their original bright colours and their original gardens. This was a relief both for their owners and for the boy scouts who had been standing in for them, sitting all day in 90 degree temperatures wearing jaunty red hats and false beards. It did mean however that the boys got their badges in fainting and heat exhaustion.

As for the village gnome-fiend - as usual the village tribunal sat in secret session and, on finding him guilty, conferred upon him the sentence of social death by ostracisation.

So next time you think coppering is easy, think on.

PC Peasee

Guest Blogger

The regular 'writer' of this blog is currently laid up in bed, receiving Pimms infusions as a result of severe bruising to the ego following a game of speed-croquet. At short notice, his great friend the Very Reverend Ghallahad Thistlebow has kindly agreed to post today's blog entry.

As a curate, I'm often asked: 'what is worse, beastly ghastlyness or ghastly beastliness?' Well, without a doubt, it is beastly ghastlyness.

On occasion, one is beastly. I recall on various occasions when I have had to be beastly. Often it is to close family members and one is beastly to them in such a way that would result in a very serious physical assault if one treated a stranger like that.

Occasionally one has to be ghastly. It's no good, but there it is. There have been times, and I'm not proud of them, when I have been ghastly. Most recently, I had to help several tourists who had arrived in the village and asked for directions to a nearby town. I confidently directed them back to the nearest motorway where, I was sure, they would have to reach Glasgow before the opportunity to turn around presented itself. Naturally I would have scrounged myself for such a beastly act if I had not considered it to be God's will. This being the case, I had the verger scrounge himself instead.

Very occasionally, one has to indulge in an act of ghastly beastliness. I well recall one parent's day at school when a Mrs X asked about her son. I recalled the boy well, and remembered in particular his screams as we had crucified him one evening for whistling on the Large Quad, which was strictly forbidden. I looked at Mrs X, standing there in her green coat, red hat and brown shoes and thought of her poor dead tortured son, now lying in a shallow grave on the six yard line of the ruggar field and it was then I committed my act of ghastly beastliness by stoving her head in with a cricket bat for wearing green on Parents' Day. Later, I learned she had a medical condition and had a note from matron. It was this unpardonable act that drove me into the arms of a number of prostitutes, drink, drugs and finally the church.

But beastly ghastliness - no, as an act it is unforgivable, and damp.

Many thanks for the booze soaked best chum for allowing me to dictate this note to his 'blog-bitch' of, as I believe they are sometimes called, secretary.

Toodle Pip.

V. Rev G. Thistlebow

On greeting

In Town, one does not. Avoid eye contact at all times. If one is forced to acknowledge the presence of another, for instance if the underground is so crowded that you accidentally enter another passenger, a mild grunt of apology is sufficient.

In the more vital and cosmopolitan areas of town, stabbing, either informally or by arrangement, appears to be the usual greeting. Screaming a greeting from a passing car is also popular.

Naturally there are some oasis left where a civilised greeting may be made. The back bar at Marco's is one such place, where the traditional greeting of 'it's your round' is followed by such formalities as establishing identity and relationship to the greeter.

Standard rule of thumb, a doffing of the hat is acceptable. A doffing of a hairpiece is acceptable if one does not have a hat or is at the theatre. If in doubt, leave the building, put on your hat, doff it and return. A kiss one one cheek is the correct form of greeting for aunts and mothers. A kiss on both cheeks is the correct for for your mistress. A firm handshake for the wife. Foreigners should be greeted wearing latex gloves although holding up a sign with their name badly misspelled on it at an airport arrivals gate is also popular.

In the Country, things are different.

Strolling along, one may encounter an agricultural worker. An indulgent smile as they doff their caps or knuckle their foreheads is sufficient. Hopping smartly out of the way if they are driving a bloody great combine at you at night up a lane when pissed on cider is also very much the done thing.

On meeting a neighbour one first comments on the beauty of the day. This applies to any conditions up to and including blizzard conditions, at which point one may remark that it is chilly.

One then enquires about ones neighbour's crops and muttered appreciation is made.

One then turns the subject to livestock. It is at this point that any semblance of humility may be discarded as one brings round the conversation to the entry of ones prize bullock or pig into the local agricultural show. One cannot lavish enough praise on such a creature. Praising your neighbour's livestock is also acceptable, especially if their entry into the show is in a different class to your own and competition thus avoided.

After an hour or so, one may continue one's ramble, secure in the knowledge that one has discharged ones social responsibilities to the full, and that the combination of bribes and blackmail has secured you that best-in-show rosette for the third year running, so one may brag with confidence.

Written at 'the New Inn'

Okay, so the pubs are within walking distance.

It's hot. The Met office have issued a weather warning saying that things are melting and that now is a really good time to go and use an outdoor pool, or something like that.

But tonight I saw physical evidence of heat that went beyond tarmac melting. I was wandering from one pub to another, going down a street that is not, shall we say, the poshest in Worcester (this will become relevant later) and saw what I first thought was a pool of oil on the pavement. This tuned out to be a cat. An actually black cat on the pavement, lying there in the heat like all of its bones had been removed, like it was a puddle of cat. It didn't even have the energy to raise its head and give me that look that all cats give those who mix with dogs, that sort of resentful stare that you would allow your lower legs to become polluted with the scent of the canine.

Walking along and pondering on cats, heat and, shame on me, roofs, I see another one. What's been going on, has somebody been dropping cats from the sky to land in a cat splash in the road? I thought that cats were supposed to be individuals. here were two cats, lying on the pavement like notes on a sheet of paper: 'bloody hell it's hot' first movement.

Just how hot it was was driven home when I passed the (open) door of one of the houses and was regaled with the sight of a fat bird reclined on the sofa. OK! So it's hot and okay - you're fat and you probably have some sort of doctor's certtificate to wear that top in this sort of weather (and yes, we are talking breasts like unfettered wild horses running over a stomach like a tsunami) but really, do you have to have your front door open? Can you not just open a window, or a fridge, or, you know, a diet book?

I had a second experience of all that is right and holy and good and true. Asking the sweating landlord (same chap who, some weeks ago, offered me a sampler of beer and is therefore a good chap) how the beer was keeping, he replied that the cellar was the only decent place to be. I nearly relocated to there with a bag of pork scratchings and a straw, but manners dictated I should not.

Written at 'The Mug House'

I'd forgotten how beautiful home is.

England is sitting under a heatwave at the moment, an honest-to-God, Met-office-are-issuing-warnings and people-are-sweating-like-foreigners heatwave. This means two things, that there are hosepipe bans spreading through the country like SARS at a chicken-fucker's convention and that the countryside around Worcester looks glorious. I'm serious, this is like some postcard from Ruscany or some other area where media types practically come all over the television, the camera, themselves and the audience in an effort to communicate just how lovely a particular village where the only recreation is fucking goats is.

The pallet of the countryside at the moment is brown, gold and green. You can tell everything that needs to be watered because it's all turned brown, anything that is ready to be harvested is gold and anything with decent roots is green.

This means you have a green hedgerow, no doubt inhabited by cuddly middle-class characters, and, you know, feral foxes, surrounding crops.

On the M25, gold, green and indeed any other colour gave way to black and, briefly, red, as the fire brigade turned up to extinguish the roadside. I knew about this because I was sitting in the fucking tailback while they did it.

I've come home for a week.

And it is beautiful. Not just because it looks so great, and it does, with the green and the gold and the brown and the blue blue blue of the sky with a multi-coloured hot-air balloon hanging, motionless, suspended above the earth.

And wouldn't that be a fucker, in this present heat I could imagine that a balloon may well stay up forever, defying all attempts to bring it back down to earth. Can you imagine that, being stuck up in an enormous picnic basket and running out of food? You'd basically be looking to see what steeple or chimney you could reasonably snag yourself on, and also which of the other people in the basket were the most succulent looking.

It smells like home too. You can smell the fruits and vegetables in the fields. It's so hot they don't need polytunnels at the moment and you can smell the strawberries and the raspberries and you can smell the onions and you can smell, Jesus Christ you can smell, the sheep and the cattle and the silage that the farmer has been spraying. It smells great. Intense. Don't think you could have it wafting round in an office though.

You can certainly smell the hot earth. This is beyond baked dust, this is baked fields, this is a vegetable bake on an acre-by-acre scale. This is the smell of hot metal, of sprayers and of diesel cooking under the hot sun and of course of foreign pickers getting hotter than they ever did in their accession country markets.
All that is right and holy and true: a pint and a packet of pork scratchings. God, they were fantastic.

Is there anything that goes so well together as a packet of pork scratchings and a pint? I felt so good that afterwards I thought we could solve the whole middle east problem if they just sat down with a big bowl of pork scratchings and a few pints. Mind you, when i were a lad, the pork scratching had bristles on them - now they were real pork scratchings.

Fleeing

London has become a pest-pit. A boiling soup of what can only be described as tourists, foreigners and >:shudder< the working class. Like Henry, like Charles and like all who consider themselves Gentlemen, I have decided to leave London (yes, I am tired of it, fucking tired of it) and take up residence at the family's ancestral home for a while. This will recharge the batteries, soothe the spirit and have the effect of plunging one into a broth of home, family and decently trained dogs.

I have chartered what can only be called a French car. I spent seven seconds mastering the controls and half an hour re-tuning the radio stations on the pre-sets from various po[/rock/chart shit to radio three. This means the next person to rent the car will not have to worry about quality radio or accessing the Proms.

Dante's Inferno would have been a lot shorter had Virgil been a mini cab and had the inferno been the M25. Dante would have told him to go fuck himself, with a stick, smeared with jam and not gone into hell. Unfortunately, for those of us who want to break out of London, we have the M25, or as it's known this weekend, the Ring of Fire, to cross first. Then again, I was doing it in a hired car.

Oh yes. The hired car. There is something very special about a hired car, it's clean! There could have been a murder in that car, there could have been a dirty protest in that car, there could have been a fox hunt and a seal clubbing in that car and it would still have been clean for my collection. That car was cleaner than my house, cleaner than my fridge and, I have a suspicion, cleaner than my mouth. It was clean.

And the hired car is not bound by the same laws of physics as your own car is. Two words, Engine degradation. For instance, am I going to do the ton for thirty minutes at a time in my own car? I don't think so. But a hired car. Oooohhhh, let's see what it'll do!

Say what you like about the French. They are bunch of cunts and they can't build cars. Sod papa and sod Nicole, the fucking Clio is a mobile pissoire. You put you foot down and thirty minutes later it goes a bit faster. Such is the life of the diesel. However, once you get up top speed, nothing stops you. Especially not that porche driver - god, how humourless is that, just because I was on his bumper asking him to move over.

Actually, he was okay, the real problem is the speeding rust piles you just know are held together by will power, rust and DVDs of the Fast and the Wristuourous.

It's official though, Heathrow is the hottest place on the surface of the planet. At least it was when I was sitting on the M25 underneath the flight path of the return charters from Benidorn. Maybe it's the sunburn from the passengers that makes everything hot, but it certainly seems, as the tenth Boeing screamed across my sunroof leaving tyre marks, that there may be some truth in the link between global warming and untaxed unrestricted air travel that fucks the environment like a sex addict with a prozzie voucher.

Let's roll!

Now I know whenever I'm faced with the quandary of whether to shit or go bowling, just what to do...go bowling.

Bowling is surely the perfect sport. It requires very little physical fitness, it is almost impossible to cheat at and yet it affords endless opportunities to bicker with those you are playing against, playing near or, best of all, playing with. Oh, and you can drink beer.

The greatest ambassador for bowling was no doubt The Dude, otherwise known as The Big Lebowski. Surely, if we were all a bit more like The Dude, there'd be a lot less hostility in the world, and a lot more bowling.

I like the idea you can do it in teams, I like the idea that, like golf, sooner or later you end up playing with yourself (or should that be against yourself? In the difference hangs an ASBO banning one from Gleneagles). The run up is like cricket, the underarm motion is like crown green bowling, the slow roll of the ball on the practically frictionless surface of the lane is like curling and the eventual STE-rike! is like a brutal punch up in a bar of monopods.

All this and shoes that make you look really cool. I don't know why more shops don't sell two-tone shoes? If I could get away with it, I'd wear a pair to work. then, when you were having your soul sucked out of you and flamed in front of your very eyes, you could look down and smile at your shoes. or in boring meetings you could play the game of wondering what interesting fungal maladies the previous thousands of occupants had.

Thank Christ I've go big feet. If you have one of those popular sizes there must be millions of people stepping in and out of them.

The 'pro shop' had really cool bowling balls, some funny colours but the very cool ones with stuff sunk into them, perspex spheres containing flowers or stuff. What a missed opportunity, they need weird totemic shit like shrunken heads, skulls (a la 'mystery men') or hands. Or what about a flame? How cool would that be?

So bowling is the perfect recreation, you bowl, you drink and then you have a burger and fries. Then when you're ready for a challenge, you can get them to take the gutter rails down.

If it was good enough for Henry VIII

Hampton Court provides a pretty spectacular setting for whatever you might have in mind. If you wanted to eat a kebab in style, Hampton Court would be the place to go. I bet one could even look stylish in a cagool at Hampton Court, forking Pot Noodle into your mouth through a beard thick enough to lose a troupe of Boy Scouts in.

No wonder then that the RHS have a show there. It was rather different to Malvern, but not in any way that overshadowed that show, this was just - bigger, and different - not necessarily better.

Added to Malvern's mix of people who looked like their lived for (or in some cases in) their garden, or who owned half of the county, was the Londoner. The sort of person who may only have a window box but, dank on it, when they were forking their window box they were going to do it while sporting designer wellies and drinking from a mug reading head-gardener, all bought at the show. Their attendance probably had nothing to do with the opportunity to drink industrial sized quantities of Pimms without the need for an excuse.

Next year, I shall sprint past the plants and make straight for the country living tent. Here, I am reliably informed, they hand out free samples of their gin and vodka based products, as well as samples of sausage. Free booze and pork? How the bloody hell did I miss that this year?

There are the usual things to see. The show gardens were good, but not as good as the ones at Malvern I thought, although the Scandanavian Garden was lovely.

The floral marquee was great fun. Walking in is an assault on the senses. There's that smell of a huge amount of canvas covering all, with just that suspicion of dampness that indicates that it was either put away wet, or that somebody's been careless with the watering. The smell of canvas means different things to different people and your reaction to it is based mostly on whether you were brought up in the circus, or if you were fiddled with by your scout pack leader while camping.

The warm, wet canvas brings out the smell of the flowers and fruit. The lilies perfumed everything, although the strawberries also smelled fantastic, almost beyond real, like it was a chemical flavouring of strawberry being aerosoled through the tent.

While the lavender stall was lovely, like a little lavender garden, the cream of the crop was the vegetable stall. It was beyond food porn, it was beyond giant marrows and indimidatingly large leeks, this was hyper-real food. The reds of the tomatoes were so vivid, the greens so lush. It was as if one were staring at the sea and the sun were being reflected back at you on the crest of a thousand waves and you had to screw your eyes up...but with veg.

My immediate reaction was to order 7 gallons of dressing and a huge bowl, or toss the lot in a pot and make the most exclusive soup in the world.

Temptation had obviously proved too much for some and an occasional cherry tomato was missing from its vine at child height at the front of the display. I suspect that the veg, though all natural, may be liberally coated with pledge or Mr Sheen and rather hope that whoever helped themselves to a handful of gold medal winning toms now has a tongue with a lovely beeswax finish.

The business of the floral marquee of course is to allow the exhibitors to sell their wears, which are potted up and ready for sale on the table next top the display with the promise that you too, with our plants and a few decades patience can have a garden like this.

On sale was just about everything you could want. From gardens through to sculpture that ranged from the eerie, such as bronzed children to what appeared to be a lion taking a poo. Obviously this is the stuff you buy when you're a drug dealer and you've run out of tat to buy for the house and so want to start polluting the garden too.

The exhibit that impressed me the least but which I have been thinking about the most was the Daily Mail pavillion. This was basically a cottage with a garden and stream in a big tent. A house in a tent! the concept was so absurd I couldn't help but be tickled by it.

It revealed the dark mind of the Daily Mail. Obviously this is how the editorial board of that scandal rag thinks we should be living. All that was missing a copy of their dreadful paper on the doorstep, waiting to blight the life of the owner of the cottage when he or she read it.

One can almost imagine that the vision of the Daily Mail for Britain is to have hundreds of thousands of these cottage plots clicked into place like squares in Sim City, with everyone living a life of white, pastoral pleasure. I was secretly hoping that at the flick of a switch, an electric fence would spring up around the marquee to keep out lefties, wierdoes, dole scroungers, foreigners, members of the working class, members of the upper class, more lefties, gays, blacks, jews and anyone in any way shape or form connected to the EU, while the top of the bee-hives would open up revealing asylum-seeker-seeking rockets or, even better, trained bees, that would rid Daily Mail cottage land of any kind of foreign or malign influence leaving it clean and free to enjoy for the right kind of people.

The icing on the cake, the single telling detail was that, in the artificial stream running through the Marquee there was a sign at each end saying 'private fishing'. Jesus Christ! Now I assume nobody is actually stupid enough to think you could actually fish there, or that there were fish there - so why do you need the sign?

It was about then that things started to get a little spooky, when one started noticing disturbing details.

For instance - what had happened to the fisherman who's waders were left abandoned at the side of the stream? Had he gone back to his cottage for a cream tea? Or had he been abducted by asylum seeking dole scroungers? The whole thing preyed on your fears. if you read a lot of Agatha Christie the thing looked fishy but was probably a red herring, if you like the X Files then there was probably a mutant trout involved. They should have planted a couple of more clues nearby, like a half-brick with matted hair and dried blood on it.

Then there was the abandoned pic-nic. The scene could have been titled Mr Kipling meets the Marie Celeste. They should have employed people to fish, or pic-nic, or pretend to enjoy themselves. Christ, I'd have done it for free. Starting at nine you could slowly make your way through a pic-nic basket liberally stocked with scotch eggs and booze. Okay, so come five o'clock you'd probably be pissed and have to be stopped from urinating in the stream, but if they want a feel of the real country they should involve some al fresco micturition.

Apparently they do a cottage every year. How pants is that? I'm not saying they should do a tower block but how about a caravan park? It would be right up the Daily Mail's alley (or narrow country lane), they are bloody obsessed by gypsies as it is.

And it was good to see gypsies represented in the form of a couple of characterful wendy-houses. Cheap? Probably not. Delightful? Maybe. I don't have much against the traditional gaily painted Romany caravan. For me it occupies an era along with working barges on the canals. Something tells me that a modernised version, basically a tupperware box being pulled by a thieving scumbag in an untaxed Shogun, would not evoke the same reaction.

Thing that really jarred was that whenever you get two gipsy caravans together, you inevitably also get a shitload of black plastic bin bags full of rubbish that have burst open and at least three burned out cars being guarded by pit-bulls. Not very RHS though.

Still, if they were too lazy to hack into the local power cables or run a huge pair of jump-leads to a nearby pylon, they could always use a wind turbine. I have got to get me one of these. Not only could you generate your own electricity but they just look so cool. Stick two of them on your house and you could start flying night missions over Bremmen!

Don't drink and click

Two purchases from the iTunes music store this week, both made under the influence. Neither of them regretted, but a warning to the careless user that stepping into the parade of shops that lines the edge of the information superhighway can result in a debit on the credit card. Luckily, I've not yet reached the point related by a guest on a R4 panel show the other day that a couple of days after getting fairly drunk, it's quite usual for packages from Amazon to start showing up.

One of the tracks purchased was Under Milk Wood. Truly astonishing. Richard Burton's voice is the voice of God. It's so good that I've listened to it three times - correction, it's so good that I've started to listen to it three times, the problem being that the first two times were in bed at the end of the day and very soon the dreamers of Llareggub were joined by me.

I think you have to be Welsh to write with such love about a place like this and make make the love you feel saturate every line, come out the pours of every character. Welsh and a genius. Welsh and a genius and tortured. Welsh and a genius and tortured and an alcoholic who dies from, most probably, a fall from a drinking stool. the same way Ollie Reed was taken and so probably the same way I shall go that I believe the day is drawing close when I shall start taking a small crash mat with me when I go for a beer, or week long binge.

Could something like this be written now. Not by an Englishman, or to clarify, not my some metropolitan tosser. The closest anyone got was Ralph McTell and Streets of London.

Today, the story of a small English town would have to be quite different. 'To begin at the Tesco carpark. It is spring, moonless night but the hallogen lamps turn the bible black vault of the sky into an orange fanta coloured haze. The potholed streets are busy still with revellers, shoppers, drunks and litter, litter, litter from kebab wrappers, greasy and sleazy, to the rattling bottles left in doorways not by the milkman, but by the chav leaving his bicardi breezer bottle, empty now, in a convenient spot.'

And so on.

I like to think that Llareggub is a damn sight more real than the towns of today.

So, for the moment, I'm glad I don't have a big red button in the centre of my keyboard that reads 'I'm drunk, don't let me buy anything'. maybe drunken purchases are the ones we really need because they are the most selfish, bought not just because we've been told to purchase them by advertisements but because, even in a pissed up state, we can still make the effort to focus on the screen, tap in credit card numbers and navigate security, making the purchase all the more worthwhile.

Euch!

Right, Wimbledon is, what, nine miles from here? So where's the rain? I remember going to the lesbian-fest that is the England Lawn tennis club or whatever they call themselves last year and it bloody pissed down. So where's our precocious precipitation. Word is that we're going to get it all tonight in about 17 seconds.

It's hot. It's gone beyond holiday hot, beyond the sort of heat normally experienced by BBC film crews while they loaf around Africa waiting for the rains to revive the parched earth. Frankly, we're into Tennessee Williams territory.

This personally suits me to a tee, as I am anyway a borderline alcoholic with so many personality disorders a diagnosis would look like the index in a medical directory. Days like this were designed for swanning about in a vest, drinking very very very alcoholic drinks with lots of ice in them and being angry and melancholic by turns. But Christ, don't people kick up a fuss if you do that in a meeting.