The Chelsea Flower Show is Decadent and Depraved

you should keep in mind, you stupid people outside the realm of the brain, that you only see things because your eyes keep moving. if your eyes stopped making tiny movements inside your skull you would cease to see, and cease to make visual memories. the visual system, like the rest of you, is dynamic and thrives on change. like einstein says, the only way to ride a bike is to...but what happens when the moving stops? how do you record an event in your life if the tiny saccades of your eyeballs are forced to standstill because of unnatural factors and nefarious intents. You don't forget, you bastard, you just don't remember.
so this is what is was like to amble through the chelsea flower show. stasis, as best represented by an outdoor/indoor $10million salute to plants. all you could expect, i guess. these factors, i should point out, weren't nefarious so much as inertial: 200,000 people on pensions shuffling through a crowded tent, with only roughly half of them observing the one-way signs directing them from the black orchilds to the strawberry towers, and about half of them sticking to the small picket fences guarding the exhibits. it didn't help that my fellow flower-gazer, the old bastard that got me into the show, was in the beginning stages of Parkinson's, developing his shuffle in an appropriate venue for such a motion.
i never really knew what the lower-upper class looks like till i went to the show, but now i know. Tweed coats and a bamboo cane, or a double brested suit with some meaningless crest sewed onto it, and a wife that looks like Camilla. And horrible teeth, which seemed to me more a mark of priveledge than unruly dentition. the phrase "can't be bothered", emitted at a regular frequency of about 5 times an hour (admittedly, this is a catch phrase common to most of the British, and a goo number of the americans who come get sorted here).
And, of course, rampant rudeness. but i realized about halfway through it, after shuffling past one too many english garden exibits, perhaps after i whiffed too much Miracle-Gro, that the only experience the Show was willing to engender was one of abject boffishness or class submission. I, the American, have no experience with either, and so of course decided to make a complete fool of myself.
It starts, i suppose, when you ask the john deere rep if you can take a lap around the Show in his 30-hp Gator. When he does not capitulate, you make a fuss with British words like finkle and preposterous, but in an annoying American accent ('oh my god, look at the liine'). With that display you've probably earned enough guff to walk into the Champagne and Oysters Tent, run by Perrier-Jouett. Ch. n' O. are apparently the only foods the residents of Knightsbridge are willing to eat in public, outside the confines of four-star restaurants and gastropubs.
You perform the duties of the waiter, i.e. clearing the table of unconsumed Ch. n' O.'s. Men in tweed jackets and golden walking sticks and women with birds on their heads both notice you and scoff. As if you noticed. As if you noticed security, even.
It ends, apparently, with two men in red coats, pensioners who laid down the old limbs for god, queen and country, old enough to be my medieval ancestors, escorting you to the Gate. For "being a nuisance". Nothing for free in this district, mate.