Once a year I work somewhere that looks for all intents and purposes ( at least from a bit of a distance) like a Medieval court on a stop during a procession through the country.

Coming out of the woods and along the road you can see large marquees, banners fluttering and though the house is 19th century, you could imagine a 15th century version in which the local lord and his wife were both overwhelmed by delight at the honour, and horrified by the expense and trouble, of having this ‘visit.’

For all I know, the current landed gentry owner is feeling much the same because infact this is The Garden Show at Stansted House in Deepest Sussex.

I don’t want to extend this metaphor too far because we don’t have knights a jousting or cooks’ boys roasting hogs but still I needed you to get the image in your mind.

So, back to the 21st century and what it is like being involved in such an event.

Like all events, the activity behind the scenes is invisible to the visitor’s naked eye unless something goes wrong and it is our job to make sure they never notice any of it.

( We have a staff area which is well cordoned off from members of the public so that we can get on with things, have a break, leave stuff lying around, take radio messages of missing children and so on.

I found one elderly woman coming through our area and approached her and told her that this was not on the ‘public route’ through the show area and could I show her back onto the main show ground.

‘What the hell do you need a staff area for?’ she asked.

Well, 6,000 visitors a day, several hundred exhibitors, a timetable of events which makes sure the flying eagles display does not coincide with the doves being let out, a chance to have a cup of tea without being asked where the toilets are and what time is the chocolate cookery demonstration…….)

As with all such things 90% of the visitors are lovely and 90% of the exhibitors are great too.

But if you are staff those bloody 10% take your time and energy.

So, here is the story of the 10% this year.

There was a woman stallholder who was not happy.

The amazing person whose role it is to smooth ruffled feathers went to see her.

( In brackets, how many companies could do with an Anna, for that is her name. Worth her weight in gold, and she is definitely appreciated as such – smoother extraordinaire.)

It is hard in normal day-to-day life to imagine yourself negotiating and calming a woman dressed in a large pink tutu who is complaining large and loud.

But we were.

And it wasn’t just her, it was the man selling garden furniture next to her and the woman selling, dear reader brace yourself, dog poo composting systems.

I won’t bore you with the details but you can picture, if you like, the smoother extraordinare, the head of security and the woman in a large pink tutu, and me at each corner of a gazebo and walking across the site with it.

And the man with the popcorn-providing fire engine (yes indeed), picking up the tutu woman’s goods and chattels and following us to her new site.

Meanwhile, dog poo.

So, the dog poo composting stallholder bent my ear about the fact that she was a few months into being self employed and risking her livelihood on selling this product at shows like ours and this show was proving to be an abject failure for her and she was on the brink of failure.

I, learning from the smoother extraordinaire, was talking to her about the early days of a new business and how difficult they were, the vagaries of shows and how you could have bad sales one year and great the next, how you had to try shows to find out which worked for you because the demographics were different, how we could only bring in the visitors and the sales were up to the stallholders and so on.

She was not appeased.

When I went back to the staff area, I said that I had had this conversation and I thought they might get more in the way of complaints from this stallholder.

‘But it’s shit,’ said a colleague – accurate in various ways, but not providing me with a line I could take with the dog poo woman next time I saw her.

Now, I am well aware that first impressions can be wrong and I am often reminded of that fact when I make a hasty judgement on someone or something only to be proved comprehensively wrong.

But if, as I did today, I open a box to find a souvenir programme from Charles and Diana’s wedding, six books all relating to cats and The Good News Bible and ten Readers’ Digest abridged novels, I know that things were not looking promising.

This box was one of about 17 donated by the same person so my heart was not, dear reader, a-leaping with excitement.

But, bless their hearts, they had gift aided the contribution.

Gift aid means we can get 25% more for each sale, so we like it a lot.

Now the 17 boxes were clearly labelled as gift aided and at the same time there were other donations which weren’t gift aided, all in the same area.

It is, of course, completely unacceptable and against the rules to gift aid a book which is not in the appropriately gift aided box.

But you know, accidents do happen.

I know that the government just wants to help and they have set up the gift aid system to support good charities and I know that people who donate a lot of books are expecting a lot of books to be gift aided.

So, the accidental happenstance of one or two books which are of excellent quality being wrongly gift aided is, in this light, is a happy happenstance, surely.

And you can never tell what is at the bottom of the box.

So, among the royal books ( never a good seller in our bit of Deepest Sussex) and the old Blue Peter annuals ( no doubt one day a valuable book but not in this century) there were a few delights.

An old guide to Egypt, a couple of large old books on the rivers of England, a limited edition of a ghost story which seems to be worth something though I am not sure why, and a Hairy Bikers Pie recipe book which someone will like.

And then there was the man who came in yesterday and carefully handed over to me a pile of postcards dating from about 1970 and who said that he thought someone would undoubtedly buy and treasure them and at the same time put money in Oxfam’s coffers, I didn’t like to disabuse him.

If you are spending a week in Budapest for dentistry – which we were – there are some basics you need.

And the means to create tasty adult baby food is one of them.

That means trips to the Spar supermarket in the nearby shopping mall called Mammut.

In it, you can get a Thai massage, shop in H&M or indeed in Marks and Spencers, buy and apartment or a pet bird, and buy a potato peeler and masher – necessary for the obvious reasons, and not supplied in the apartment despite the fact it is rented almost exclusively to those coming on dentistry missions.

I am sure there are quiet times in Spar when you can waltz through the checkout but I don’t manage to hit on any.

So, I queued up with everyone else, hoping that my grasp of the currency would mean that I didn’t brandish the equivalent of a £20 note for some milk and potatoes – and that I would get change that was in notes rather than the completely incomprehensible coins which I can only distinguish one from another with my glasses on and in a good light.

( A very nice young woman at the bakery stall in the market had kindly taken all my coins and given me the note equivalents the day before – it made me absurdly grateful.)

One day, there was a young Goth on the Spar till. She had white eyelashes and very white makeup and some rather painful looking tattoos on the back of her hands.

She dealt with the man who seemed to be discussing at length some issue around his store card points – though he could have been talking about the national debt for all I knew.

Then there was a woman who seemed to have bought the complete frozen fish stock of the place and wanted each item put in a plastic bag before she would move on.

And then it was my turn. I smiled and  packed my rucksack as quickly as I could – despite, or maybe because of, the long queues the till women are ruthless at getting everything processed quickly.

Then she said something to me and I was lost. ‘Sorry, mm, sorry,” I said.

‘Oh,’ the nice Goth girl said, ‘ I was just asking if you wanted a voucher but don’t worry, it probably won’t be of any use to you. Are you here on holiday or for dentistry? Have a very nice stay in Budapest and have a good day, thank you for shopping Spar.’

Opposite our modest apartment in Budapest is a rather remarkable building.

Originally built in the 1800s as a military hospital and then turned into a concert hall, it was ‘transformed’ in the late 1990s into a stone, wood and shingles building stretching down the street and round the corner.

This is a city with some very big buildings – modesty in architecture seems not to be a Hungarian trait.

The parliament building is huge – makes our Palace of Westminster look positively unassuming. I am not sure what ratio of laws to square metres each produces but if there is a direct link, then the Hungarians must have more laws than they know what do with.

So, here we are for a week and this is our view which is not bad, but the Swan Building also had a nice little secret.

I spotted a board on the street not a minute’s walk down the road.

You go through a chain link gate and follow the path – halfway along, there is another notice telling you  to ‘be brave and keep going.’

And then there is a bar semi-sourrounded by the building and under trees with outside tables and chairs  – and the promise of a rabbit.

Needless the say, this is where we can be found every early evening.

Last night we sat next to a table at which were a group of students and a (almost inevitably) pony-tailed ‘professor’ talking about creative writing.

One of the students volunteered to read out what he had been writing.

Suffice it to say, his explanation afterwards of his hero was, ‘Jimmy was a randomnist and before that, he was a contrarian.’

( No, I haven’t translated this from the Hungarian – they were English-speaking. My grasp of Hungarian stretches to hello and thank you….)

As Nick said, sotto voce, ‘ The crucial thing is how to break the silence at the end of that reading.’

When I went in to pay the bill inside, the nice young man at the bar told me that the building was controversial when it was built because ‘ many people still had communist ideas of architecture and this was a fairy house.’

He also told me the building was problematic, ‘ an architect’s idea, but not really practical.’

The roof leaks, the offices – for it is mostly businesses in there – are too small and the windows shadowed by the stonework make them dark and pokey.

(Not like the big windows and un-leaking roofs of proper communist style buildings….)

But, he told me, you get an interesting cross-section of people in the garden bar, like the writers, he said.

‘Is the one talking all the time any good? It sounds not so good to me but then I don’t speak English that well.’

‘Oh, you do,’ I said.

I asked if the promised rabbit was in a stew.

‘No, no not at all, he is on holiday until the sun is warmer and it stops raining.’

‘Are you here on holiday or for dentistry? ‘  The question everyone in Budapest asks a British visitor.