Azziria's journal

Go to the Chelsea Flower Show again.

Chelsea is the biggest and most prestigious flower show in the UK. It's run by the Royal Horticultural Society, and is the most spectacular thing to see, even if you're not that interested in gardening, plants or floristry. The show gardens are my favourite - it's fascinating to see what different garden designers come up with for the same small space.

I've been once before, the year my father died. My mother was exhibiting there, and my dad was too ill to go with her, so I went instead. Mum won a gold medal that year (and a Chelsea Gold Medal is pretty much the pinnacle of achievement) and at least my dad knew she had before he died (he died the weekend after the show).

(Overachieving obviously runs in the family - she was running a business and nursing a dying husband and she still managed to win a Chelsea gold...)

D has never been to Chelsea, and we've said for *years* that we wanted to go but we've never got round to it. But this year our bank had some tickets to give away, D spotted it and sent an email, and we won two free tickets in the draw. So we're off to London next week to spend a day looking at beautiful flowers :)

I'm going to start with a big one: sail across the Atlantic, from the Old World to the New. (That is sail as crew, not on a cruise ship.)

This falls under the heading of 'big but not completely impossible' because of the time factor: I could find a crew spot easily enough, but it takes about 3 weeks, and it's not fair on my family for me to use up all my annual leave doing something that they can't (and don't want to) do with me.

But maybe, maybe in a couple of years if DS goes to the state sixth form college he's contemplating and we only have one set of school fees to pay for a while, maybe then I could take some unpaid leave from work and do it :)