It’s mid July and outdoors London is in full swing even if the weather is not keeping up but I’m hopeful it will improve very soon. I was at 2 major outdoors event last week – a live screening in Trafalgar Square from the Royal Opera House and Hampton Court Flower Show – both good fun and luckily we escaped without getting rained on at all!
A really big screen was put up overnight in Trafalgar Square for a live screening of Massenet’s Cendrillon (or Cinderella as we know her) from the Royal Opera House. This was in panto style with great costumes, sung in French with subtitles. Although it would be wonderful to be in the Opera House, the outdoor version does have 2 great advantages: it’s free as the Opera House can be very pricey; and, as it’s televised you get some great close ups. They followed the story pretty closely and in the tradition of panto the principal male role was played by a woman which was rather strange as it resulted in soprano wooing soprano, where the spoken voice is less obvious, this was unexpected especially as the Prince looked like a young KD Lang!
The Square was completely packed with a lively crowd all sitting on the hard floor but eased by free blow up cushions courtesy of the sponsor BP. We enjoyed the show and look forward to next year already.
Photos take us through the first half of the event as we saw them on the screen (with Nelson’s Column in the background): the intro from Deborah Bull with crowd in the Square behind her; the ugly sisters before and after they are dressed up for the royal ball; our first view of miserable Cinders who has to stay home; Cinders and the Fairy Godmother after she has waved her wand; the wonderful carriage with horses (Carosse in French); Cinders arrives at the ball in her dazzling white dress while everyone else is in red; and, finally, the first kiss.
Hampton Court Flower Show is a major annual event in the gardening calendar and also for those who like a good day out! We were kindly invited by friends who had a stall in the massive Country Life tent where you could buy a huge range of lovely things – none more so than on their stall of course – Floreat was best! This show is absolutely enormous and you could spend all day walking round without going back on yourself and some of the tents were the size of the centre court at Wimbledon! We saw show gardens, amazing flower displays, everything you could ever need in your garden, and everything you will never need in your garden! As we were there on the last day, there were great bargains to be had as they began to close up and they pulled the show gardens and sold the plants off for a few pounds. As a result people were struggling out with huge plants and it’s a long way to the car or train station so goodness knows what state the plants and their owners would be in by the time they got home!
Photos show: Hampton Court’s Long Walk with tents all around; flower displays; a garlic garden(!) ; fabulous colours x2; blue and white agapanthus; and, a cactus garden, looking a bit like a cake stall!
Bye for now, Sue
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