Allotment quickie!

Today I went to the allotment to have a tidy up and, more importantly, to dig. The following pictures show Finlay doing just that.

Good hot bath at the end of the day, of course!

The aim is to finally get rid of the horrid path of couch grass behind Finlay and that area will be covered in potatoes, five varieties this year - two reds, two whites & a salad variety. Where the black plastic is will be cabbages and beans and such like. And the area where Fin is "digging" is the fruit area - bramley & braeburn apples; rhubarb; blackcurrant; and black, goose and rasp berries! 

The words great and genius are so over used. Always have been, but they seem to be wheeled out far too frequently in these over hyped, "celebrity" obsessed days. Gareth Bale for instance, he of Tottenham and Wales. Basically he is a good footballer, like so many, he IS a good player of the game. BUT he is NOT Lionel Messi, nor is he Cristiano Ronaldo; he has a long way to go before he can be mentioned in the same breath as Ryan Giggs. Mr Bale is not even in the top 20 footballers in Europe, but he is continually mentioned as the best. When he consistently performs to the standard that we all can see he has occasionally achieved, and not just every now and then, that is when we can think of him as great or a genius.


And taking those two words, great and genius, we can move on to to Spike Milligan. He is without any shadow of doubt the greatest genius comedian this country (Empire? don't forget he was born in India) has ever produced. Without him, Not Only But Also & Beyond the Fringe would not have existed. Neither would Monty Python, Alexei Sayle, Eddie Izzard, Lee Evans, The Mighty Boosh, Reeves & Mortimer, Harry Hill et al and even that exceptional kid's show, Horrible Histories, would not be. He invented a genre and countless others have since followed it. 


Anyway comrades, once a leftie always a leftie, except if your name is Paul Johnson of course (turncoat - wasn't he horrible on Desert Island Discs the other week?), so here is a picture of my very favourite, and new, t-shirt. I got it for my birthday last week. I also got a Spike Milligan Sweat shirt, basically in honour of the 10 year anniversary of the great man's death.

So there we are, a bit more politics amongst the compost and why not? Politics is life; life is politics. Unfortunately we can not escape it, they effect (infect) so much of our lives do politicians. The person who says, "I don't care about politics, it doesn't effect me," needs serious help...


Happy allotmenteering!

Allotment life Pt the first...

...this may be a random, every now and then thing, who knows.


Tonight, at dusk, I took my first batch of dwarf french bean plants over to the allotment. There are some quite nice people over there, but as I am basically a sociopath I very rarely talk to them. Especially Tim, who has the plot to the right of ours. I joked (a bit) about being a sociopath myself, but Tim is most definitely one of those people with the social grace of Michael Winner on speed - "calm down darling" indeed!


Last year Tim asked me how I was getting on with my job search, I said I had just started gardening and he said, looking disparagingly at my plot of barely tended ground, "What makes you think you can be a gardener?" Unfortunately at the time my 4 year old son was running towards the main road that we have to cross to get back home, so I couldn't reply as I had wanted - i e, a nice slice to his neck with my trusty hand hoe. I muttered something like, "Sorry, my son is about to be splatted by the 500 bus to Aylesbury, so can't stay..." and ran to catch aforementioned child before that very thing could happen to him.


Suffice to say, I attempt to avoid the loon at all costs. I bumped into his wife the other day and found that she is almost as lacking as Tim in the social skills - she has an Ann Widdicombe type approach, very direct and twice as ugly. She laughed when saying, "Remember how you lost all your potatoes in that late frost last year?" (The hand hoe, where's the fucking hand hoe?) I smiled through gritted teeth and carried on regardless.

...handy hoe killer...

She also said, "Fleece is the answer, fleece and mulch." "Yes," I replied, "and perhaps the BBC weatherman getting his weather report right." "Don't see you over here much these days," she carried on. "Wonder who does all the work then, d'ya think it might be the potato fairies?" I replied, acerbically. (NB: these are the actual words, I kid you not.) She did not even acknowledge the fact that I used the words fairies and potato together in one sentence. I know it's not exactly Grouch Marx, but per-lease, it was mildly amusing. "Yes," she carried on, "fleece and mulch." "Sounds like an old english hey-nonny band, you know, Morris Men and all that?" She blanked me, success! 

Hey-NONNY!

Anyway, tonight Tim was just leaving as I arrived with me dwarf french beans plants. I haven't seen him for months, well not up close as if I see him when I round the corner from our place and he's on the plot I turn round and go home - trust me, it's worth the hassle as I will kill him if I mix too much with him. He ALWAYS has to say something, ALWAYS! and this was the brief conversation:


Tim Bit late to be planting, what you got there then?


(he never says hello, just blunders straight into what ever his strange instinct brings up)


Me Never heard of the old phrase?


Tim What?


Me When 'tis half moon seen, Plant your dwarf french bean. Don't let me hold you up I can see you're off home, BYE!

'tis a true delight by the light of the silvery moon

Happy mulching...