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Comes the time of the flower festivals

flars

This weekend: flower festivals! A flower festival can happen any time in the Summer, but they tend to cluster at the end. Probably it’s a good time to harvest flowers. What do I know from flowers?

To recap, a flower festival is a church thing, a way to show off parish churches and raise money toward their upkeep (most churches that have flower festivals are beautiful ancient treasures and enormously expensive to take proper care of).

The church picks a theme, parishioners arrange flowers to suit the theme and set them up in displays all over the church (including sacred spaces like the baptismal font and the high altar). It’s wonderfully weird and I love it.

There’s a program that explains the displays, and tea and cakes. Maybe some bric-a-brac and book stalls outside. A nearby pub may host a barbecue.

At this particular one, little girls in starched pinafores circulated through the crowd with baskets of posies and sachets of lavender, a pound apiece. They and their mothers had sewn the lavender into little calico bags and tied up the posies with ribbons.

I shit you not. I bought one of each. The lavender is incredibly pungent.

Also this weekend, thousands of young lefties and brown people of foreign extraction turned out on the streets of London for the Notting Hill Carnival, a festival of the fine Afro-Caribbean traditions of vandalism and violence. Over 400 were arrested and five were stabbed.

I have chosen my side. I am on Team Flower Festival.


Her Maj turned 90 this year, and the theme of this flower festival was things that are also 90 this year. Can you guess what this flower arrangement represents? There’s a big ol’ hint on the side. Correct answer in the comments.

Comments


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: August 30, 2016, 9:17 pm

If you said “Air Wick”, slap yourself. You are a shame unto the House of Weasel.

No, it’s the 90th anniversary of the aerosol can (see the clever fronds of vegetation — with little rhinestones stuck to — coming out the top). All around the arrangement were little colored labels with examples of things that come in aerosol cans. Like foot powder!

I love this place.


Comment from Uncle Al
Time: August 31, 2016, 12:19 am

…foot powder, and bacon scented air freshener!

It is intriguing the connections the come to my mind at times. Aerosols in a practical form were indeed invented in about 1926, but the real breakthrough came in 1949 when Bob Abplanalp, a machinist, invented and patented the now-universally used low-pressure valve that made disposable aerosols commercially possible.

Does that name Abplanalp ring a bell? Good ol’ Bob was a pal of one Dick Nixon who used to visit him at his Biscayne Bay retreat.


Comment from Steve Skubinna
Time: August 31, 2016, 2:06 am

It sounds as if all it needed was Clarence, Lord Emsworth in top hat distributing prizes.


Comment from SCOTTtheBADGER
Time: August 31, 2016, 4:57 am

I thought it was Stikwick, and it was the 90th Anniversary of the writing of Stikwick Stapers, by Charles Dikkens, ( That’s Dikkens with 2 Ks, the well known Dutch author ).


Comment from Deborah HH
Time: August 31, 2016, 11:55 am

Good theme. No, I didn’t see get it was an aerosol can, but I was intrigued by the fragile “spray” on top. Very good work there, to glue rhinestones to grass.

Mmmm. I love lavender, but I have always thought it was more of a masculine scent—like sandalwood—rather than a feminine scent. (But then I loved Yardley Black Label so much when I was a giddy teenage girl—I wore it as my signature scent for a few years).


Comment from weaselwannabee
Time: August 31, 2016, 4:48 pm

Desk Weasel
http://imgur.com/gallery/vedEWMK


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: August 31, 2016, 8:31 pm

Weaselwannabe, that’s Ozzie! His YouTube channel is adorable. Though his owner goes to some lengths to tell us weasels make lousy pets. Bitey and bad tempered.

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