pumpkinstrokemarrow

Yesterday to Hampton Court to see all the flowers of the show outside the gates to the Palace gardens. Very handsome some of them were too. And the show tradition of rewarding exotics with gold stars continues; it seems to be much easier to get gold stars with cacti or bonsai which don't grow naturally here than with stocks or aubretia which do. That said, the exotics were fascinating and this year I was much more taken with the cacti than the bonsai. But much more taken altogether with the specimens illustrated. Someone at flower show knew his cabbages.

The show was very up to date too, with some show gardens especially designed to encourage us to reflect on breast cancer or the plight of grey spotted newts. What twaddle; worthy of the brit art crew.

As ever, a good proportion of the space was given over to merchandise with a vaguely garden flavour. So there was a selection of more or less ridiculous huts to erect in your garden, mostly coming in at between £5,000 and £10,000. I don't think Champions (http://www.championtimber.com/) bothered to turn up; their stuff obviously not being up to snuff. The prize for imagination goes to the chap who was selling lovingly crafted replicas of shepherd's huts - the sort than run along on iron wheels - at the top end of the range. It seems that lots of people just love have one of them in their garden for use as a study, a spare bedroom (they are vary carefully insulated) or whatever. An important advantage is that you only need the wonga, there being no need for planning permission to install an agricultural implement in your garden.

In fact, an awful lot of the merchandise was entirely unsuitable for us suburban folk, whom I imagine made up 99% of the visitors to the show. But I suppose that we only visit on the basis that for the day we can pretend to have the sort of garden for which this sort of stuff might be vaguely suitable. Which would bring one around to the idea that the show organisers have to pay merchandisers to provide a show, rather than the other way around. And that it would be quite fun to have a peek at the accounts. Who pays what to whom. Do the RHS subcontract the whole business to Merlin Entertainments (the people that run Chessington World of Adventures)?

However, this is all froth. My only real complaints were the sarnies and the beer. The former were in rather short supply and those that there were were something short of hale & hearty and the latter, despite being described as traditional ale, was cold Adnams out of a gas tap. And I had thought that Adnams was a reputable brewer.

But what irritates me about this is the way that the legal profession is steadily getting its claws deeper and deeper into the day to day running of the country, claiming the right to second guess all kinds of relatively unimportant administrative activity. Is this their response to our attempts to give the legal aid bill a haircut? If one avenue for profit closes, open up another?

I allow the need for something of the sort as a remedy of last resort. But I do not allow its being invoked by anyone with a beef. It is not a very efficient way of doing business.

Rather less serious was the deep concern felt by HRH The Prince of Wales over the discovery that in a carefully selected sample of 600 adults resident in this country, a significant proportion were able to estimate neither the number of miles of dry stone wall in the country nor the number of miles of hedgerow in the country. There was even a hint that some of the 600 did not know what a dry stone wall was. What on earth is the chap on? Why would anyone other than a member of the chosen few with a deep interest in the matter have a clue? Or did the DT make it all up?