As a newish gardening enthusiast, I found myself properly aware of Chelsea flower show for the first time this year. It looked wonderful – beautiful green things – but I don’t really understand. People build gardens? Then transport them to a park, somehow? Then other people, including celebrities (mostly in the “might appear in one of those cosy Best Marigold-style TV travel shows” category), dress up to come and look at the gardens? It seems like something you’d struggle to explain to a foreign visitor (though other cultures have those: the French national agriculture show appoints a cow “muse”; this year’s, a five-year-old heifer called Ovalie, was described as “rustic, robust, docile and highly adaptable”).
Chelsea is mysterious because it’s part of a bigger British mystery: the “season”, a series of events I’ve had to consult Tatler to try to understand. The historical rationale – nearby entertainment for aristocrats who came to London at the precise time of year their country estates were at their most beautiful (why not do it in winter when most of Britain is mud?) to find a spouse who wasn’t too close a cousin – no longer exists. Yet the remnants (boat races, opera, horse stuff, tennis matches) are viewed with reverence as a quintessential distillation of the British spring and summer and another excuse to spam us with pictures of the royal family.
I find this stuff alienating and vaguely enraging; it’s codified, performative fun in florals. I’m not envious: I hate leaving the house anyway and what’s on offer seems so unappealing. Watch millionaires grunt at each other in pitiless direct sun while eating a microscopic punnet of strawberries (£14): no. Boats: never, in any context. Squint at far-distant horses owned by the ruling elite of a repressive Gulf state? Emphatically not. My pumpkin-size head can’t do hats anyway. Then there are the rules and rituals: hem-length checks and spaghetti-strap bans, excessive use of the words “smart” and “ladies” and non-ironic blazer-wearing. Why would anyone subject themselves to this when they could be quietly eating crisps in forgiving leisurewear?
I accept the British spring and summer are shaped by a sequence of recurring events and experiences. I just think the ones most of us would recognise are quite different. Here are mine.
The Pimm’s Disillusionment Festival
You know you don’t like it, but it’s a warm day and all that fruit and ice looks appealing, so you try some, and no, it’s still alcoholic cough syrup.
The Great Sunglasses Hunt
They were there; now they’re not. There’s no closure, unless you’ve gone for the more dramatic option of sitting on them. The dress code for this is easy: no sunglasses.
Weather App Weirdness Month
The climate crisis means our time-honoured seasonal tradition of checking the forecast to summon the quixotic promise of a few days of sunshine has been replaced by comparing increasingly desperate notes on the prospect of rain. “I had a 30% chance on Tuesday but now it’s disappeared – you?” “No, just a single cloud on Sunday week.”
The London Bikram Yoga Masters
AKA the Central line from June to August.
The Street Harassment Carnival
“Everyone gets horny in summer,” a friend says gloomily. If you can’t be 48 and wearing gents’ chinos (works a treat), adopt New Yorkers’ camouflaging “subway T-shirt” strategy or prepare for leering.
River Rescue Regatta
Watch in horror as a gang of lads have the genius idea of jumping into the local sewage-y watercourse to “cool down”, then need the emergency services to rescue them. A weary appeal not to do this is subsequently issued on the regional news.
The Stealth Boasting Championship
Glastonbury, home-grown heritage tomatoes, Umbrian villa lunches, poolside six-packs in designer swimwear … The correct way to spectate on this outpouring of Instagrammed creativity is stuck to your sofa, curtains drawn, scrolling fingers sticky from an iced delicacy whose first listed ingredient is an E number.
Glorious Park Carnage
A lawless labradoodle steals your halloumi, the PDAs on the next blanket are stomach-churning and, dazed from frisbee concussion, sunstroke or both, you drink the wasp swimming in your negroni tin. Ah, the season.
• Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
