Ian McMillan: Baby boomers in full bloom at garden show

Everybody is wearing leisurewear in muted colours. In this hotel, everybody sits down slowly for their breakfast and places a napkin carefully on their knee. They eat fruit and then, with a glint in their eyes, have the Full English because, just this once, it can’t kill you.

Just be careful not to spill beans down your slacks. At dinner, an elderly woman says to her daughter: “It’s the exact same menu as last night.” The daughter says: “Well, you always have the exact same anyway, mam.”

They laugh gently and spread their napkins on their knees and wait for their Soup of the Day. I’m just back from a visit to the Malvern Spring Garden Show, which is like Woodstock for welly-wearers and barrow-pushers.

My wife is a keen gardener and she’s wanted to go for ages and so this year we took the plunge. My grandson Thomas wasn’t impressed when I told him: he twirled his finger at his temple in the age-old sign for emotional instability and said: “A flower show? You’re mentalists!” I disagree. We’re the salt of the earth. The salt of the well-tilled, well-watered, well-manured earth.

We arrive at the hotel in the early evening. A coach trip from North Yorkshire are disembarking at the same time. It must have been a long drive: a man takes off his flat cap with a sigh of relief and the red ring round his head looks vivid and at least semi-permanent.

It feels like everybody in this hotel is going to the Flower Show. Thomas would have twirled his finger at his temple again at the sight of us all asking for directions to the showground, and some of us writing the directions down in spiral-bound notebooks. A man says to his wife: “I hope we’ll have room for all the plants this year.” She smiles indulgently and pats his arm affectionately. It’s as though we’re all on a second honeymoon, a second honeymoon powered by water features and flowers in small pots. As my wife says: “All the women have got the same hairstyle.” It’s true. Here come the baby-boomers, and we’ve got money to spend and car boots gaping!

The next morning we’re at the show nice and early but not as nice and early as some. A sea of grey hair is moving slowly across the field as we park; all these people are dragging collapsible trolleys behind them and they’ve got looks of determination on their faces. In a sense the looks are just versions of those looks you see on the faces of young kids on their way to a Saturday night on the town, looks that say: this is my time, I’m going to enjoy it, so don’t you dare get in my way.

We go with the flow and buy a collapsible trolley which my wife drags along and on the edge of which I keep barking my shins. I’m amazed. This is coalition Britain in 2011. Inflation is up, the cuts are biting and everyone is tightening their belts. Except here, as the clouds scud over the Malvern Hills.

The variety of things you can buy for your garden makes you gasp. You want a giant metal giraffe? Here they are. You want a hot tub for your back lawn? Which size, sir? You want a gizmo to sharpen your knives? This will razor-up your bluntest blade! You want a fancy waistcoat for when you’re sitting in your summerhouse? Try this one on and look in the mirror! And, in these huge marquees the size of Huddersfield, you want plants? We’ve got ‘em! Come and buy! We fill our trolley with endless items that we may or may not need.

In the late afternoon, we stand in front of a huge display of what can only be described as designer chicken-huts. They’re like little Swiss cottages or the kind of shed a radical architect might have in the garden of his pied-à-terre.

“My dad would go mad if saw this,” my wife says, and I imagine him taking off his flat cap and scratching his scalp in puzzlement as the red ring round his forehead glows angrily. People like her dad and my dad had allotments to grow food to keep a family. Rows and rows of beans, and tomatoes piling up in vivid red mountains. They kept chickens in huts knocked together from bits of wood from the pit. They had, let’s face it, no use at all for a hot tub.

Ah, it’s a changing world, and I just have accept that I’m middle-aged and sensible. I wonder if I should buy a metal giraffe? Just a small one, of course. One that will fit in my collapsible trolley.