A visit full of reminiscences that went out with a floral bang

Can flowers do anything with a bang? I mean, they seem fundamentally gentle to me. Still, I suppose if you make a battle of them, a bang would be the least you might expect.

What’s certain is that a Battle of the Flowers meant that the visit to us of our friends Sarah with Jake ended with a bang.

It had been, I like to think, a pretty good visit. Not particularly thanks to me, I admit, since I wasn’t much of a host, but fortunately my wife Danielle made up for my shortcomings. She was ably assisted by her first son, my stepson, coincidentally (and confusingly) a David like me, whose visit overlapped with Jake and Sarah’s. Danielle and David ensured there was plenty on the visitors’ agenda, specifically enough to keep Jake, who is eight, amused. I just tagged along from time to time.

We all had fun 
including Sarah and Jake 

In fact, I think my biggest contribution was having Jake join me on walks with our two dogs in the woods. Jake has a cat but no dog. Getting better acquainted with our pair of poodles gave him a lot of pleasure and walking either of them on a lead became something he was most unhappy to miss out on. I’m glad to say, he missed out on it very seldom.

That was an important change. Jake had met our two dogs years ago, when he had a tendency, like most toddlers, to squeal out his delight in things. He’d squealed while playing with Toffee, who’s scared of few people, and scares still fewer. Luci, however, has a far more nervous disposition and reacted to the squeals as though they were screams. There was a baring of teeth and some ferocious growling (for a dog that small, she does ferocious quite well). Luci had to be shut up in a bedroom, to her disgust – in her own house! Imagine – while Jake came to terms with the realisation that, through no fault of his, an animal had turned threatening towards him.

Well, neither had forgotten the other. You could see it when they met again. And yet there was a tentative rapprochement right from the outset. A mood of “time to let bygones be bygones, wouldn’t you say?”. It wasn’t long before Luci was lying on the couch next to Jake and he was stroking her. After all, not everyone strokes her as much as she’d like, and Jake’s willingness had turned her view of him right around.

Otherwise, by far the largest part of Jake’s holiday seemed to involve water. That’s where David really came into his own. We have access to a community pool and I think that, left to his own devices, Jake would have stayed in it until he was as wrinkled as a prune. What’s more, Valencia’s on the Mediterranean. So he had a choice of swimming in the pool or in the sea. As often as not, he chose both, one after the other. His enjoyment was all the greater for David's company, while David was with us.

It’s good to see a young lad enjoying himself. In Jake’s case, it was all the more satisfying because over three decades ago, Sarah had been an invaluable help to me when, for several Saturdays, I’d given Danielle a little time off by taking our two boys out for a few hours and leaving her in peace at home. Sarah, then a teenager, often accompanied us, making the trips all the more fun for everyone.

This was the tail end of the time when there were tax benefits for British companies offering employees a car and free fuel, even for personal purposes. That meant that, financially at least, I didn’t much care how far we drove. Sarah reminded me during this visit that I once took them to York, a three-hour run for us, each way. 

The excursion I remember best, however, was to somewhere much closer to home, Hampstead in North London. We had lunch in one of the historic Hampstead pubs, the Spaniard’s Inn, which was as much fun as it was picturesque. 

An American couple joined us at our table. During a pleasant conversation, they asked a few questions which rather suggested they thought Sarah was the mother of my kids. That left me speechless. To be the mother of the elder, Michael, she would have had to have him at twelve. Since I was present at Michael’s birth, as I was at Nicky’s, I can assure you this was not the case.

Sarah and I chatted about that moment while she was here with us.

“We set them right, didn’t we?” I asked her.

“No, I don’t think we did,” she answered. “We just left them trying to puzzle things out for themselves. They may have gone home thinking of Britain as a barbaric place where child brides are popping kids into the world at an age where many girls haven’t even reached puberty.”

But the day contained another event with a far less satisfactory outcome. After lunch, we visited Kenwood, which is nearby. It’s a glorious parkland estate on the edge of Hampstead Heath, itself a wonderful piece of country around which London has grown.

There’s a stately house in the middle of the Kenwood estate that is now an art museum, and there are sculptures scattered around the lawns. Michael decided to climb on one of them. A Henry Moore. When he got down, Nicky clamoured to climb up in turn. But in the meantime, I’d woken up to what was happening and decided that, no, kids shouldn’t be climbing on priceless sculptures. I stopped him. Not unreasonably, he complained loudly and fervently about the unfairness. If his brother could climb up, why couldn’t he?

The Henry Moor Sculpture at Kenwood

I’m not sure he’s forgiven me yet. I know I haven’t forgiven myself. I’d allowed a belated sense of aesthetic concern to trump my desire to behave fairly towards the two boys. Today, in hindsight, I think I made the wrong choice. Equity should have had priority over art.

Anyway, sharing the reminiscences with Sarah only added to the pleasure of chatting with her when they were with us.

On the final day, we wrapped their visit with what I can only describe as a fine display of floral battling.

Danielle and I have decided that we’re too old to see all the fiestas in the Valencian region in the time we still have on Earth. I’m probably exaggerating, but it sometimes feels to me that there’s another one every single day.

A float from the Battle of the Flowers procession
The tennis rackets, it turned out, were defensive weapons.
Excellent against incoming marigolds

For the Battle of the Flowers, people don traditional dress and sit on floats or open carriages drawn around a procession space by horses. I’m sure that the participants are chosen without distinction of age or gender, so it’s surely simple coincidence that most of them are young, female and pretty. 

Once the procession’s over, the participants and audience pelt each other with marigolds, baskets of which have been thoughtfully prepared for the purpose. Apparently, some 1.5 million of them.

There are Valencian fiestas where people fling tomatoes at each other, which strikes me as a waste of food and a disaster for clothes. There are others in which they throw firecrackers at each other, which is just plain annoying, bordering on dangerous. Flowers seem a fine alternative.

A float under fire - from orange marigolds -
and returning fire - in kind

Besides, I like the idea of a floral battle. Given the ones involving heavy artillery and armour in Ukraine, it strikes me as a hugely preferable alternative.

We all had fun, especially as after the main event, anybody could descend on the procession area and join in the flinging of the marigolds. That was something Jake did with great enthusiasm. I’m only glad that I gave him as good as I got. I may even have hit him at least as often as he hit me. 

Of course, he might claim that he actually had the edge over me and scored more marigold hits than he suffered.

Either way, we had fun. And it was a good way to close their stay with us.

Out with a bang, as I said.