Seeing the Ronnie Scott’s band perform at the Chelsea Flower Show was the best bit by far for me. I have to admit to not being a great fan of the Chelsea Flower Show on account of the fact that it is so bloody busy. You just walk and walk at the pace of a snail catching snippets of conversation from the great and the good of Chelsea and beyond. A sea of corduroy trousers and Barbour jackets blocking every single view of the gardens to the point where I just stopped trying to squeeze in.
This was the one view that I really loved and queued to wait for a front row space. What a labour of love this was. Teeny weeny crocheted or hand knitted poppies from all around the world creating a sea of red:-
Close up you can see the detail of each poppy:-
So basically I missed the finer detail of each and every garden. The following example basically summed up my experience compared to others in the difference between my opinion of a garden Vs my friend’s:-
Me: How strange, there’s a garden with some front doors in it….
My friend: OMG did you see the garden that was inspired by the fight against modern slavery and the abolition movement? The doors represented captivity and hidden crimes behind closed doors?
I lost the people I was meant to be meeting so wandered around on my own feeling a little billy-no-mates. So the Ronnie Scott’s jazz band was just what I needed and great fun. The conductor/standup comedian/clarinetist was fantastic, although I didn’t catch his name – very funny and talented and they all played a jolly little piece he wrote called “There Is No Tomorrow And Very Little Left of Today”….he kept introducing band members with their name and then “they’re from a place called “No Fixed Abode.” Many of them did solo’s and all were hugely talented – especially Tony Fisher the trumpet man who has played with Tom Jones and featured in several of the James Bond theme songs.
Iain Mackenzie came on for a few of the songs and was a great jazz singer:-
and Georgina Jackson was also brilliant, not only with a fabulous singing voice, but incredible on the trumpet:-
Sadly for me, I had still managed to lose the person I was meant to be sitting with, having texted “I’ve got two seats on the front row, right next to the Chelsea Pensioners”….for some reason she didn’t get it, or chose to ignore it which meant I was sitting on my own right at the front in full view of the band without even a notebook to pretend that I was there as press. Consequently I had to do a lot of clapping and finger clicking to make up for the fact.
Even the Chelsea Pensioners had mobiles:-
It’s made me want to go back to do a night at Ronnie Scott’s – arguably the best jazz music from around the world – something I haven’t done for a long time now.
