David Hurst

On Saturday, I went with my family to the Taunton Flower Show, which may seem like a strange way to pass the time given that I don’t much like Taunton (I used to live there and moved away when some girl fighting with her boyfriend on our doorstep pulled a 12″ inch kitchen knife out of her handbag when I opened the door to complain. The place is a chav nest.), and I’m not much keen on looking at flowers either. That is to say, I’m not that keen at looking at arrangements of flowers - wild flowers in a natural habitat? Lovely. Pretentious arrangements of fertiliser fed flora? Not my bag.

The reason for the visit had more to do with my wife entering three of her photos in the art competition. She has recently become very keen on photography, and thanks to the wonders of eBay, our house has filled up with lights, umbrellas, enormous backdrops and other photographic curios. I think she has made good progress given the absence of formal training, and has a good eye for a shot, ably assisted by her rather fantastic Olympus D-SLR. She put huge amounts of work into the presentation, and spent quite a bit of cash and petrol getting the images printed and mounted. Given that she’s only just started, and given the quality of some of the competition, I wasn’t expecting any success but I know my dear wife was secretly harbouring ambitions of stardom.

To our delight, she did in fact get first prize in one of the categories, and I was pleased that I’d taken the decision to go - just to see the look on her face. Unfortunately, that was the only highlight of the day.

My wife had a free entry ticket, but I had to pay £8, despite turning up 2 hours before the end of the show - you’d have thought they might have reduced the entry fee. Still, I figured there would be suitable amounts of entertainment for my 8 shiny nuggets. I figured wrong. Apart from the competition tent and the flowers tent, the rest was trade stands. It was like paying to go shopping. And I didn’t even get chance to look around the flowers tent before they started flogging all the plants off.

There was the showground, and my (almost) 3 year old expressed a desire to watch the dogs, as presented by the “internationally famous” Essex Dog Display Team. I naively assumed that we would be entertained - it being a showground at a show, and them being called a “Dog Display Team”. What we actually got was a load of rescue dogs (pretty unamusing apart from a little Staff) running around with their trainers over a few obstables, whilst some guy droned into a microphone. He wouldn’t stop talking, and like your neighbourhood cat lady, appeared to have crossed the line between humanity and the animal kingdom. I’m not really a dog fan to start with (I hate the smell, the crap, the hair, the ball licking, the sphincter sniffing, and pretty much everything else they do.), so it probably wasn’t the best choice of entertainment, but I soldiered on for the benefit of my young son, to whom dogs running in a field is a singularly brilliant spectacle. Enjoy it son, says I, for you won’t ever be having one of those flea and germ ridden animals - not whilst you live under my roof anyway. We stayed until they started jumping dogs through hoops of fire, which is not the kind of thing I ever want my kids attempting to emulate with Fido next door.

After this, it was time for my wife to collect her prize. £4. Clearly Scrooge himself was in control of the prize fund. Looking at the vast sums of cash they would have collected at the gate over two days, and the income from all the trade stands, I think £4 was a bit mean. It probably cost us £40 to get the prints, mounts, my ticket and the petrol for the travelling.

Whilst she was collecting the cash and picking up her prints, a pipe and drums band entered the showground. This provided an interesting diversion for a few minutes, primarily because one of the drummers was clearly drunk. Obviously, I had to cover my ears. The bag pipes are an instrument not of music, but of torture.

We made it to the miniature steam railway by Vivary Park just as they were shutting, which pretty much capped off a forgettable afternoon at the Taunton Garden Trade, sorry, Flower Show.