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!
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!
1 Comments:
at first I was starting to get worried that you've been frequenting too many garden shows until I saw the house in the tent...It kind of remind me of Biosphere. And, the abandoned picnic and missing fisherman? Very creepy..many they should consult you before doing any more exhibits.
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