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Third weekend in June - it must be the Middlesex Show. It’s a long way around the M25 - further than Heathrow, but it’s an LBC sponsored event, and good fun.

The postman woke me up, slamming my letterbox some time after seven, then banging on the door ten minutes later. There was no way I was getting up for him at that time on a Saturday, so pulled the duvet over my head and ignored him. Another bang of the letterbox and he was gone. I seems he’d been after my signature, as there was a recorded delivery slip on the doormat, informing me that he’d taken my parcel away again, and I could pick it up at the sorting office.

When I went to collect it, I was pleasantly surprised to find it was the Estonia Eurovision CD I’d ordered the day after the concert and quite forgotten about. Listening to it back again, there are some distinctly dodgy tracks that I don’t remember being so bad on the night itself. A lot of them are great, though. I really don’t know why Finland (tall woman, short gelled peroxide hair) and Slovenia (the transvestive air stewardesses) didn’t do better. The winner (Latvia) was good, but there were other entries more deserving.

Anyhow, the traffic was friendly, getting us to the showground in time for the nice lunch they put on for invited guests in the Directors’ marquee. With linen tablecloths, gold-rimmed crockery and posh nosh it’s very easy to forget you’re actually in a tent in the middle of a field a hundred yards from a pen full of llamas.

We ate a slow lunch and listened to Simon (Bates) narrating the show jumping course as he walked its length with the commentator, then set out to explore the tents and exhibits, full of fluffy animals and exotic plants. For the second year running an enormous kitchen-sized display of lethal fly-trap plants had taken gold in one of the larger tents. It was very impressive, but I preferred the bonsai trees. I had one once and it was a nightmare to look after, so anyone who can keep one going for longer than I have been alive deserves a certain amount of respect.

By mid-afternoon, it was starting to spit, so we sat in the LBC tent and listened to Wendy Lloyd present her show over the noise of a siren and a marching band with bagpipes on the other side of the canvas, then returned to the marquee for tea and cakes as the sheepdogs herded geese before heading off home.

I called mum from the A12. Sal and Dan were round for Andrew’s birthday and she had been planning a barbeque, but the rain had put the skids on that. She’d stuck everything in the grill, so I went round for a salad pitta while they munched chicken, then flopped in front of the telly with Ant and Dec and a cup of tea, too tired to move too far.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 22nd, 2002 at 9:26 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.