Thanks to Covid, village shows are withering away

I measure out my summer in invitations to judge classes of flowers, fruit and vegetables at local village shows. The flower-show calendar is as changeless and as adamantine in its continuity as the high days and holy days of the Christian liturgical year. Or rather it was.

In the past, as I have prepared to set out to one of these shows, armed with my RHS Horticultural Show Handbook, schedule of entry classes, tape measure (to assess the longest runner bean) and gardener’s knife (to cut into a beetroot’s bloody heart), I have sometimes thought how pleasant it would be to stay at home in my own garden, for judging is very precise and tiring work. But always I go, and always I am glad I have, since a village hall well-stocked with produce and handiwork is an enlivening sight, and one that encompasses, in its understated way, an extraordinary amount of effort, talent and expertise. Two hours later, I drive home, the richer for a bottle of wine or bunch of flowers, and some diverting gossip with kindly, public-spirited souls, some of whom I have met once a year for 35 years without a break, and whom I count as friends.

Many small local shows were founded in the 19th or early 20th centuries by paternalist landowners or clergymen, keen that ‘cottagers’ should make the most of the allotments or gardens, at a time when good husbandry might be all that kept Want from the door. Others were spurred into being by wartime necessity. Nassington show, to which I am invited every August bank holiday Monday, dates back to 1880, a time when there were few ways for villagers to show off their hard-won domestic skills, few occasions when they could live for an intoxicating moment in the ring of sanctioned, respectable competition, and few ways of earning a little extra money.