Hampton Court

The Hampton Court Flower Show is billed as the biggest flower show in Britain. Which probably means the biggest anywhere, because nobody is as keen on gardening as the English, with the possible exception of subsistence farmers out in the arse-end of some hard-to-pronounce country whose continued survival depends on a good rice crop. It's also visited by the biggest collection of gardeners in England, from those that tend an estate to those that tend a pot plant with a name in the one sunny corner of their flat.

A perfect bowl of fruit, luscious, ripe and gorgeous, at the Waitrose display. This is possibly the most middle-class image ever recorded. Warning - they get really funny if you pick any of these and, like repressive regimes who hunt down those who favour democracy, they can find you in a crowd because of your stained fingers.

The English love to garden. This is for a number of reasons.

First and foremost it is because a large garden means that your nearest neighbour is a respectable distance away, hopefully separated from your home with a high hedge or two, and a moat. Your moat. The one with the genetically modified crocosharks lolling in it.

The secret of success is to have unconventional, strange looking plants in very regular lines, like modern art, nobody feels equipped to criticise something that looks that odd. Do not turn to the lady next to you and ask if she likes things ten inches long with a purple tip. If you do, don't wink while doing it.

Even a small garden can provide privacy, if your hedge is high enough or your feature wall is topped with razor wire.

And the English love to grow things. Beautiful flowers and bountiful fruit. If the beautiful flowers can be entered into a local competition to win you glory, that's good. If your bountiful fruit can be grown a couple of inches longer than the others in a 'largest marrow' competition, bringing defeat to your bitter rival, better still. If anything you grow can be converted into alcohol, better yet. And if you grow something that looks phallic enough to cause the Vicar to flee should you place it before him should he call fund raising, or give the organist a funny turn when you plonk it on the altar at harvest festival, that's perfection.

Intimating to the grower that his plants look artificial will see you chased the length of the floral marquee with an enraged yokel three short steps behind you.

The English grow gardens of flowers because they like flowers. They grow gardens of vegetables because they taste great but even more importantly, they remind us of the war when we were digging for victory. Look carefully at any decent vegetable plot and you will see a little Anderson shelter in the corner.

It's all about trade at the end of the day. Yet grabbing a handful of the nearby display and asking 'how much' is very much not approved of.

While the English love to garden in seclusion (the garden is a place for solitude, be it quiet reflection, furtive smoking or, that perennial favourite, the midnight interment of a hastily murdered unwanted house guest) yet oddly relish the crowds at a flower show.

It's as if some critical mass or tipping point is reached of people who spend much of their lives with potting compost under their nails and they start enjoying each other's company. Of course, the principal reason for this is that there is a sufficient divergence of interests that every need is catered for. If the show were, say, a festival of parsnips, then the natural aggression of the parsnip grower would mean that things would turn as ugly as a phallic root vegetable pretty soon, resulting in the usual mayhem and a display for only for soup.

An olive tree, what could be lovelier? Well, an olive tree with lavender beneath. If Greece adopted this planting method, they could export sachets of scent to keep underwear draws fresh as well as providing the worlds favourite cooking lubricant, hence doubling their economic prosperity. And they'd still be f**ked!

But at Hampton Court the lovers of the succulents and those who favour box can pretend a polite interest in the passion of the other, secure in the knowledge that their way is the true path to happiness, and that path is lined with the bedding plants of their choice.

In a simpler age, when farms were farms owned by families rather than agro-industried owned by the banks, this is what tractors looked like. Built to a human scale rather than the grotesque balloon-tyred tractors on steroids with enclosed air-conditioned cabs, GPS and hot tubs that farmers have today, it's true that the driver would occasionally die of exposure, but at least you could bloody pass him on a B road, rather than trailing behind for miles with only the occasional splod of manure flung from the tractor tyre to your windscreen to relieve the monotony.

The show is a meritocracy. The show gardens, large and small as well as the displays of flowers and vegetables in the floral marquee are there to be judged and ranked. The judging panel choose carefully which garden deserves gold, silver gilt, silver or bronze medals, balancing a desire to fairly reward beauty and hard work with, it would appear, a genuine desire to pitch visitors into a state of incredulity as they wonder why the hell a rustic cottage in a pastoral garden got a silver while what appears to be a lawn with a rotary clothes line festooned with fairy lights got a gold.

Garden sculpture. Presumably for people who find this sort of thing amusing. If, in front of the leapfrogging frog (Oh, I just got it!) there was a small boy holding a blender to catch it, that would be funny.

Either this is a fantastic bit of planting, or they just let a plot go to seed last year.

This year, the garden as social space was very much the theme. The English love eating outdoors, it's almost perverse that a race dwelling on an island with a climate so ill suited to it could develop such an affection for dining al fresco, yet the English have turned picnicking from an art into a science.

This shade of blue is only achievable by dedicated growing. By master gardeners. Who did LOADS of acid.

The advances in windbreak technology alone are staggering and the same principles developed by the English to keep tea warm long enough to finish when sipping the stuff on a rain-scoured seafront will probably be incorporated into the space suits for any future Mars mission.

The ultimate fate of anything found in any English garden, up to and including badgers, is to be adapted for alcohol. the perss is useful because after you have pressed the apples you can use it to print the labels. And kill Terminators.

So it was natural to see many gardens planned around tables and chairs and social dining in the garden. It was also good to see some honesty, with one of the small garden featuring a huge flat screen telly on the wall and a seating area facing it. The idea was that this was the domestic version of open air cinema.

These ugly bulbs will one day turn out to be beautiful lilies. There's probably a metaphor here about not judging things in an immature state. But I'm just wondering what would happen if you fermented these bad boys and turned them into an alcoholic beverage. Given tat lillies stink like a combination of dead flesh and urine (No? Just me then) I would dub any such concoction 'Loopy Juice'.

Next year, I hope to see this taken to the next logical step; the telly showing premiership soccer and a solar powered fridge full of beer placed nearby. If the garden is well screened with high hedges, then after dark it can become the Babestation garden - not so much for the al fresco perving but because if the models that channel features are rough enough to stop my principle nocturnal activity dead in its tracks, then it can do the same for the crap-happy fox and cat population.

Honest. Unpretentious. The greatest threat to the French since Wellington, Nelson or the clap. A vine that grows on English soil and produces great grapes. The English already brew the greatest beers in the world and distill the greatest spirits (scotch and gin). It was only a matter of time before they tried wine and when they do, they'll conquer the world. Again.