It’s not easy to write about gardens or gardening this week.
I have hardly ventured outside at all and my mind has been on managing the chaos of having new flooring laid during a storm, with the electricity down, due to said storm. I think it came belting over the Atlantic as a Thanksgiving present from the USA. Thank you!
I don’t think we have had any trees down in the storm – Charles did a walk round and said all was ok. But that was when the wind was still wild, so today might tell a different story. But we’re still clearing up inside and waiting for the tile layer to finish his work.
Just last month though, there was much talk and much suitably very modest social messaging about Awards being won at the Garden Media Guild’s annual booze up.
I don’t think I’m going to be involved in any of that anymore, so I thought you might like to hear a little about my experiences with the awards.
Charles even stuck this one up in his office. Quite right.
I think we have been finalists once or twice (see above) but no longer even think of entering any of our work. My publisher did put in Outwitting Squirrels, which did not even reach the finals. However, as I never tire of reminding you, it has currently sold over 50 thousand copies, so I am not terribly distressed about the lack of an award.
I was once, however, many years ago, invited to be a judge of the Inspirational Book of the Year.
The process was a bit of a shock. I believe I am right in saying that we received the enormous pile of enormous gardening books about a month before the Awards ceremony. Just reading them properly – twenty or thirty? – was a ridiculous challenge under such pressure.
Then there were two of us judging this category, living miles apart from each other in pre Zoom days. So our debates took place by email, which was a bit tortuous. Fortunately we had no major difficulties, but we did have one or two headaches, beside the time pressure. We found the category ‘inspirational’ truly problematic. I see the Cambridge University press thinks that means ‘making you feel hopeful or encouraged’. You may be amazed to discover that at no point did either of us feel either of those things. I think we agreed that we were simply going to have to decide which book we thought was the best – from a very diverse pile.
A different award ceremony, which I actually attended. Big cheque, it seems. Are they about to quarrel about it?
The next problem was that we both believed that we couldn’t actually give the award to the one we thought the best.
It was by someone that no-one had ever heard of, and a very unusual garden book. It was up against a major writer with a big posh usual garden type book full of yummy photos. We debated, we were troubled, we asked if we could give two awards (no) and struggled mightily with this problem. To relegate the posh book would have looked very strange and might have had many eyebrows well raised and our credibility damned forever. My reputation for being difficult would have escalated. I was marginally tipped towards all this, as usual. My colleague less so. After much toing and froing we failed to give the award to the unusual book and all passed without remark. A bit of a shame.
I haven’t been asked to judge since.
Given the size of the task, the effort, lack of remuneration, challenge to one’s integrity, and the possible pointlessness of it all, I couldn’t accept again if I was asked. A good thing you may well think.
Judging an Award. originally appeared on GardenRant on December 12, 2024.
The post Judging an Award. appeared first on GardenRant.
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