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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.

August 30, 2016 — 9:15 pm
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