llywela | Hampton Court Palace Flower Show and Other Stuff

Okay, so the Hampton Court Palace Flower Show is very beautiful, but very big and crowded, stifling on a hot day. And yesterday was very hot - amazingly enough, considering how cold and wet it has been for weeks now! I had to buy a hat to keep the sun out of my eyes, as I was getting a headache. I'd almost forgotten what the sun looks like...

The traffic was unbelievable, though. Coming off the motorway on the final few miles to the show, having encountered next to no traffic up till that point, it took us two hours to finish the last stage of the journey - longer than it had taken to get to that point from Cardiff. We were literally inching along - had lots of time to admire all the pretty houses we were passing. The same stretch going home took only 15 minutes, that's how bad the jam had been in the morning! Awful, really awful, and so hot and airless on the coach.

"See that big tree by there," said our driver, on the journey home. "It's got 60,321 leaves on it. I counted 'em on the way in!"

But the show itself was lovely. Lots of gorgeous show gardens on display, and lots of pretty plants for my mum to buy. It was kind of hard to navigate, though, covering such a large area and with the stalls and show gardens all interspersed the way they were. Hard to know if you've actually found everything there is to see or not. But we think we got around it all. We were certainly all gardened out by the time we got back on the coach. It was really nice to spend the day hanging out, just the two of us.

Today I am very tired! Just watched the men's final at Wimbledon - excellent match. Federer has won, again, but it was a close thing. I kinda wanted Nadal to win, just for the variation, but I like Federer as well, so it's all good.

In Sunday School this morning we were rehearsing our play for prizegiving the week after next. It's kind of annoying actually. Our Sunday School is very small at the moment - we've got quite a few teenagers, who are too old and cool to take part in a play, and lots of under 10s, plus we've got an unusually large number of children who have some degree of learning difficulty. This means that putting on a play isn't all that easy. So, the teachers thought it would be a good idea to have a simple poem of some kind, maybe with the children having a line each to read from a card that they could hold up to display a picture related to what they were reading. Something nice and simple, that they could all take part in.

Instead, the SS leader decided to adapt a sketch he'd written for the youth group some time ago. It's ridiculous - a sketch that's suitable for teenagers to perform is in no way suitable for under 10s. It's dialogue-heavy, way too complicated - I was itching to be allowed to edit it and cut the extraneous dialogue by at least half! - and completely over the heads of our little ones. They won't understand what it's about, and thus will be bored with it, and won't be able to memorise their lines or cues, and so will have to stutter along reading from bits of paper, which looks untidy. The kids want to perform well for their parents, so should be allowed to do so, which means providing them with suitable material and giving them enough time to practice.

But there's no arguing with Dave. He'll listen to what you suggest - like the idea about doing something nice and simple - and then go away and do something completely different, without giving anyone the opportunity to object. We're stuck with this stupid sketch now, it's too late to change it. So we just have to keep our fingers crossed that the kids can manage it.