My mum now she has retired, has started a list of all the things that she wanted to do when she was working but didn’t have the time/money. Her Birthday is the 12 of May and I decided that instead of buying her the usual assortment of quite useful but lovely stuff (with which she would only clutter up the new ‘retirement pad’ I should take her to do one of the things on the list. Every year she bemoans the fact that she hasn’t been to Chelsea flower show, so I got in there early and bought us both tickets to the final day. I’ve been having a really rough time in my personal life of late so mum like the awesome person she is came down early on the Thursday night and we went out to our local (and lovely) Lebanese. Friday she amused herself in Abingdon while some of us went to work (!) then on Sat it was up at the crack of dawn to make the first train to London (Waitrose breakfast on the train, glad she didn’t spend that day off in vain). We got there pretty early but already the crowds were pretty dense, I had some vague idea of buying one of the show Orchids (Orchids being one of my favourite flowers, we also seem to have the perfect light for them on a window sill in my house, which helps maintain my enthusiasm a lot!). As soon as we 
were inside the marquee it was pretty much love at first sight with this lovely thing to the right (there were so many beautiful ones but most of them I knew there was no way I would be able to keep alive, they almost were not of this earth).
So we put a reserve on one of these (it’s what my Auntie Sylvia advised if we saw something we liked) and headed off to see the rest of the Marquee. My mum had been to Hampton Court when she was at university and was looking for piles of sweet peas and tall blooms to replicate what she had seen there, I think we managed that in the marquee alone without looking at all the small gardens outside and the bigger show gardens (more on these two in the next post for now I leave you with me and mum making the most of a patch of sunshine (we asked a random passer by to take a photo explaining that it was mum’s Birthday treat and I think the responsibility of being a ‘photographer’
got to him slightly. He arranged us in from of one of the show gardens and was saying things like “to the camera girls” and in this one he made me kiss my mum, to which she replied steady on. It was all great fun, now onto the next post some of the stranger things that we found at the flower show plus a VIP guest.
