The season lost in time

As traditional summer events are cancelled, Debora Robertson reflects on a quintessential part of British life

Each year for Christmas my husband gives me a very expensive diary and I have a frisson of pleasure as I begin to fill it in, covering its pale blue pages with glimpses into the future: family lunches, friends for dinner, trips to the theatre, cool drinks, hot restaurants, parties, trips to museums and the theatre, concerts, festivals, book launches, holidays, birthdays, weddings, gallery openings, garden visits.

What is that old Yiddish saying, “Mann Tracht, un Gott Lacht”? Man plans, and God laughs.

In the early days of lockdown, back when I was still wearing shoes, I resolved to keep filling in my diary – in part to assuage my need for structure, but also so as not to waste the expensive pages. Meetings and lunches were replaced by “Dust pictures”, “Plant radishes”, “Make corned beef pie” and “Descale iron”. I gave up on that fairly quickly. There are now empty pages where my life used to be.

The severity of our current situation really hit home for me on March 17, when the Chelsea Flower Show was cancelled for the first time since the war. It is one of my favourite events of the year, not just because being surrounded by flowers while sipping champagne is the closest thing to heaven I can imagine, but because it is the day when I feel the year opens up. Gone is the winter of reading by the fire, introspection, and thoughts of self improvement; let the games begin. The air of gentle excitement walking down the Avenue, snapping pictures of favourite flower combinations in the Great Pavilion, ordering new plants as presents to my future self, pausing to watch a military brass band, magnificent in their scarlet uniforms, play show tunes at the bandstand: is there a better way to spend a spring day?

And then there was my local Literary Festival, where I organise food events, which was also cancelled – just part of the avalanche of small and large disappointments which for all of us will be the distinguishing feature of this extraordinary year. You will inevitably have your own: a wedding; a trip; a party; a happy punctuation point in your year, now abandoned, small in the grand scheme of things but cumulatively, a great blow to cheerfulness.

But it is not just the artful arrangement of alliums, nor the author talks or demonstrations, I will miss, it is the people. For all of us, those meetings that happen only once a year, whether at the races or the tennis, whether it is a shared love of roses or rowing, poetry or music, that brings us together, there is a joy in common endeavour, shared delight. It is not just seeing my own friends that I look forward to, though obviously right now I am desperately longing to hug my furthest and dearest half to death. There is deep pleasure in enjoying something together with strangers. The shared laughter and applause makes us feel less alone.

Of course, there is an economic as well as an emotional impact to all of this. Events such as Glyndebourne, the Chelsea Flower Show, and Henley Regatta make enormous financial contributions – Glyndebourne alone adds almost £11million into the local economy. These events are honey pots to the billionaire bees whose social status relies on them having a seat at centre court at Wimbledon or being seen in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot.

Personally, I am doing my best to stave off the country’s economic collapse by spending roughly what I would spend at these events in a frenzy of mail-order madness. I have – selflessly and heroically – ordered enough plants to create my own show garden, enough books to stock a library, filling those blank diary pages with pleasure in the best way I know how. Until we can all be together again, social amusements of the season are replaced by solitary ones.

I suppose these will have to do, but in a time when we make much of simple pleasures, I would be lying if I didn’t say that I long to get back to extravagant, elaborate and complicated ones, ideally which involve a cast of thousands and an enthusiastic brass band.