Blogging for Victory

This just about sums it up!

If You’re Happy and You Know It

Our 3 year old son, is almost as excited as we are about the allotment. That will wane sometimes – I’m under no illusion.

He has some lady-bird gardening gloves and a new spade which he took over the road for some serious ground reclaiming today.

The plot is completely over-grown. Lord knows why we have waited so long for it as it can’t have been tended for years but off he goes with his dad for some ‘boys work’.

Ted's little world

He has been given his own little area and thanks to the copious rain of late the earth is soft and easy for him to turn over. He starts in earnest and then, my husband tells me, subconsciously and completely in his own little world (Child, not husband) starts to sing ‘If You’re Happy and You Know It!’ Out of the mouths of babes, eh?

The key to happiness [July 2011]

Until last Saturday I had been gazing longingly from my bedroom window at the locked gate over the road. Not just any old gate (that would be odd) but the gate which leads to a secret world. A world only to be tasted, literally, by those who hold a key.

I’ve watched the cheery faces come and go with their baskets piled high with produce they have nurtured to maturity, although some of it looks so perfect I feel certain SOMEONE in that world is cheating and sneaking off to Waitrose for the best that money can buy, rolling it in earth and passing it off as their own, or is that a bit of the green eyed monster coming to the surface there? Maybe.

I have seen how these people guard their key, how they furtively look around to make sure that once they open the secret world that some ne’r-do-well on-line shopper isn’t about to pounce out from behind the recycling bin and gatecrash into the living greengrocery beyond.

I felt like the mother in Rapunzel gazing over into a garden belonging to a wicked enchantress at the fruit and veg she desperately needed for her health, so much so that she promised the witch-like allotmenteer that when she had a baby she would immediately hand her over in return for delicious fresh produce. Bit steep for a bit of broccoli in my view. Although sometimes I would happily swap mine for a turnip.

Anyhow….Jealousy move over…smugness sit down next to me. Hurrah! On Saturday morning what should plop on to the front door mat? ….my allotment key. Ok OUR allotment key. My husband and  myself have been waiting for almost three years for this day and, maybe a little tragically, I am genuinely ecstatic. 

The Shed Debacle (Give a man an inch!) 

I have never seen anything like it. We have been sent the ‘rules of the allotments’ simple reasonable requests such as

• Keeping your plot neat. (agreed)
• Being respectful to others plots. (obviously)
• No live animals ie: chickens. (why would you?)
• Shed regulation size. (Wait just a minute – a size issue?!!!)

My husband cannot get past the fact that there is a rule to say not only whether you are allowed a shed on your plot but how big it can be, what colour and what the roof should be constructed of.

Now, before moving down to the coast I lived in suburbia for most of my life and am therefore well accustomed to rules, by-laws and interfering neighbours reporting any non-reg TV ariel to the local watch-scheme for the chronically bored. My husband, on the other hand, seems to have lived on an entirely different planet where rules are made for people who need to be told how to behave. He assumes that, because he is keeping his beautiful shiny head under the proverbial parapet and is generally a well-behaved citizen that a little bending of any rule is acceptable even expected. Here we go!

He has visited our newly inherited plot with a tape measure on 3 occasions. Apparently our plot is a 4 ‘ROD’ (me neither) and to qualify for a 6x4ft shed one needs to be tending to nothing less than a 5 ‘ROD’ (seriously). He has tried every trick in the book to make his ‘ROD’ allowance acceptable (although it seems fine to me – he is not happy). It remains, unhappily, too small.

My euphoria at having this allotment will NOT be tainted. I keep telling him that a little wooden tool shed will do and that size isn’t everything and that it’s how we use it that counts but he appears to be totally emascualted by the whole ROD issue.

He will be writing to the Council on Monday. Watch this space!

 

 

Mr Angry of Hastings Writes...

Add caption