I've just come back from the village flower show. The storm of wind and rain in the week of the show had played havoc with any flowers growing out of doors so it wasn't just its usual standard but as in the fictional village of Cairndhu, it did its best. When I arrived, my friend explained he had looked round his garden and didn't think there was anything worth exhibiting but he'd look again in the morning before the show. As usual one of his entries got a first prize in its category. There were one or two miscarriages of justice but on the whole the judging was fair, nobody bribing the judges with fillet steaks and legs of lamb like Gillespie in Cairndhu. Over the years the number of cups and trophies has ballooned and it takes a good half hour to hand out all the silver-wear despite it being only a village affair. An innovation since I was a lad is the scarecrows; the favourite last year was Donald Trump but, being SNP country, this year Boris Johnson was the scary man. There were one or two amusing ones and I've added one to the images at the bottom. If the flowers were not quite up to standard, the vegetables were with some enormous leeks and huge cabbages and they are also displayed underneath. I can't shut down without mentioning the lunch which always drives me mad because I have to chose from so many delicious dishes.
In Best in Show, I tried to capture the atmosphere of a village and some of the characters I knew as a boy but a village is a living thing and all I could do was show what it was like in the fifties. I grew up among the mines, so I made Cairdhu a mining village but I'm sure there were and still are non-mining villages with similar characters.
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