Thursday 6th August 2026

I’ve always craved Badminton and everything to do with it. Her Late Majesty Queen Mary was there during the War. It’s not open to the public. So naturally I’ve been screaming to get in.

Royston King had special entré to the Flower Show and a reception in the North Entrance Hall. Not even attendance in Intensive Care, had I been in Intensive Care, would have kept me away.

Arriving by motor vehicle, even 10 miles from the house you enter a distinct domain. There’s nothing you could put your finger on but an elusive uniformity, a certain sweep to the fields and the placing of trees can only mean one thing: single private ownership; a great estate.

The Flower Show was placed on a vast plain before a lake. In the remote distance was the house. However were we to trek to it for the reception? Although classical, the mansion lours like a fortress, unassailable ducal greatness never to be dislodged. Although right, a mere Landed Gentry, such as me, Adrian Edge, cannot but feel a certain menace.

My dread was that we would never gain the mansion. The reception in the North Entrance Hall would come and go without us. For Royston insisted on ten minutes at each stall of the Flower Show, to welcome and congratulate, then he had private needs, then we ran into one of Britain’s greatest philanthropists on her own private motorised buggy and a suite in attendance. She was buying geraniums for a balcony. She said that Royston had been right after all re: their dispute many years before. Or maybe she said that she’d been right. Her jewellery was lavish and only might have been costume.

After all that there were only ten minutes before the reception and easily it would be 40 minutes across the blazing parched plain to the North Entrance Hall. I could see that North Entrance Hall slipping further and further away into eternity, never to be seen by me. Royston had no patience with my middle-class outlook. He must have Kings in his ancestry.

Then a miracle: a buggy appeared, driven by an important RHS executive. I was whirled to the door in seconds. Royston was left behind, looking for his handbag, lost during the encounter with the world-class philanthropist.

At last I was in the North Entrance Hall. It has been much photographed. The rest of the house has not. But you never know… once in… other doors might open. I’m sorry to say the North Entrance Hall was rather a plunge. I would have re-done it. Royston King when he finally arrived, also by buggy, thought my outlook common. He was, a few days later, to be a private guest in the house and saw it all.

The North Entrance Hall – well, it is rather bashed about, shall we say? Doors off were open. But all you could see where piles of junk heaped up in the rooms beyond. The Duke and Duchess made an entrance from another door. There was a stir for their arrival, without doubt. I was not the only one who had come to be in the presence. Later the Ducal pair were en fumeur which was highly unusual and the imported staff, not of the house, were trying to extinguish them.

One ploy was to seek the facilities – which meant you could get into a passageway which was like a corridor in a school with stark white paint and pipes showing. At once the Butler materialised though – jacket and tie with trainers, all the better for covering vast distances indoors as he supervises.

A surprise in the corridor was a well-known youthful editor of a magazine for those advanced in years. He said the Duchess is his cousin. He had been involved with the mansion’s swimming pool.

Important people, speeches – then we went back to the Show. In reality it was 20 minutes to walk. More drinks on the Show Garden, more millionaires, trustees, major execs: projects, funding, projections, budgets, movement of personnel, webs being woven, comments dropped with possible effect. This is how things are done.

It was very late when we rejoined the car for the return to the capital but pleasant to wend through lanes to the charging station. It would have been a classic English summer evening as we once enjoyed in our youth but now of course wracked with worry about drought and everything dying. At the charging station the woman running the Co-op outlet donated two cottage pies which we planned to put in our freezers.