I want it on record that I did not want to enter the horticultural show.
I want that stated plainly, in writing, before anything else happens in this piece, because there is a very real chance that by the end of it I will have talked myself into sounding like a man who always secretly wanted to display a watercolour of a lighthouse to the residents of a village hall, and that man is not me.
That man does not exist.
I was talked into this the way you get talked into most things after sixty-five, which is to say slowly, by someone being reasonable at you until resistance simply becomes more effort than surrender.
It started, as these things do now, with a throwaway Note.
Back in the spring I mentioned — almost apologetically, the way you'd admit to a minor incontinence — that I'd taken up watercolour painting in retirement and was, without exaggeration, catastrophically bad at it.
Trees that looked like green explosions.
A boat that several people identified, unprompted, as "possibly a shoe." I posted it mostly to make myself laugh and went to put the kettle on.
When I came back the thing had done numbers I have not managed with pieces I spent actual effort on, which tells you something about the market for honest failure that I haven't fully made peace with.
Somewhere in the comments, a reader — I won't name her, she knows who she is, she can live with the consequences privately — said I should enter the art category at my local village show.
I laughed.
I typed something dismissive.
And then, because I am constitutionally incapable of leaving a challenge unanswered even when the challenge is "publicly embarrass yourself in front of people who grow prize marrows for fun," I thought: why not.
I had been painting for perhaps six weeks. I had never shown anyone a finished piece in person, only online, where the crucial mercy is that nobody can watch your face while they look at it.
The show itself runs on a machinery I recognise from forty years of ships: somebody in charge who is entirely unsentimental, entirely competent, and entirely unimpressed by nonsense.
That somebody was Pauline.
Pauline has run this show for eleven years and processes exhibitors the way a harbourmaster processes vessels — briskly, correctly, without a flicker of interest in your feelings about the process.
I handed her my entry, a watercolour of the harbour that had taken me four attempts and involved one incident with a jar of dirty water I'd rather not revisit, and she looked at it for perhaps one and a half seconds before writing a number on a card and moving on to the next person's chutney.
What happened next — whether the watercolour made it past Pauline’s judgment, and what unfolded inside the show — is where things get interesting. Get the full story: the results, the chutney drama, and the moment that made the whole harbour laugh. Join below — Pauline wouldn’t waste your time, and neither will I.⬇️
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