Week 59 in London

Week 59: 16 – 22 May 2016

A week out from Chelsea Flower Show and the pleasant weather continued. The city was coming alive with colour, with multiple celebrations and floral displays right across London in the lead up to Chelsea.

Kings Road, one of London’s best-known streets, runs through the heart of Chelsea and there were a number of green displays along the strip. The front façade of the swanky eatery, The Ivy Chelsea Garden, was transformed into a vertical bouquet of colour and was easily the most impressive, attracting plenty of people keen to take a snap.

On Tuesday Roslyn also had a garden themed event, the Hidden Garden Festival at Hampton Court. As a venue showcase, there was face painting and delicious food, the highlight being the Life’s a Beach dessert station, with everything edible including shortbread sand.

Unfortunately our recent streak of good weekend weather was broken on Saturday. Overcast and drizzly weather deterred us from spending too much time outside, so we instead went across to Southside Shopping Centre at Wandsworth for retail therapy.

As we already mentioned, Chelsea Flower Show was slated to take place next week. Having missed out last year, Brendan was determined that this year he would visit the world’s best known and most prestigious flower show. The only problem was that most of the tickets were sold out, and those that were available were insanely expensive. The other problem we faced was that the show ran from Tuesday to Saturday, but we were going to be in Turkey from Friday night onwards thereby limiting our options even further.

The efforts that Brendan went to in order to secure tickets were quite extreme and a little bit stalkery. In Facebook he went to the search bar and typed in the term “Chelsea Flower Show tickets”, and then trawled through the countless people (whom he did not know and had never met) who had posted about having spare tickets. One by one he messaged them throughout Saturday and Sunday, and oddly enough had a response from a man in a small town called Arlesey.

Unfortunately he had no contacts or plans to come into London. Desperate for the tickets and having not heard back from any of the other random people Brendan had messaged, we decided this was our best chance and so on Sunday boarded the train and headed an hour out of London to collect them.

We were definitely not in the city anymore. The small village station was completely unstaffed (it made us wonder whether it was worth actually buying tickets) and there was very little happening in the surrounding area. The tickets we purchased had apparently only become available because the man’s wife had just given birth to their babies (plural though not sure on quantity) eight weeks early. We now had our tickets, under the guise of Mrs Becky Allen, and so to kill some time strolled up to the pub nearby for a quick drink before the return train to London.

In all we spent less than an hour in the village, with no plans to ever return...

Highlights for the week:
- London coming alive in colour ahead of Chelsea Flower Show
- Roslyn’s event, Hidden Garden Festival at Hampton Court
- Shopping at Wandsworth
- Brendan’s desperate efforts to secure Chelsea Flower Show tickets
- Train ride out to “the sticks”, Arlesey