Allotment Diary 17 and 24 March

Sunday 17 March

St Patrick’s Day. I should be getting the potatoes in by now, but it’s still near to freezing out there, so they’re going to have to spend another week huddled together in plastic trays on the utility-room windowsill, impatiently growing out of the top of themselves great gnarly green sprouts which in some of the more impressive cases have by now reached the dimensions of portable black-and-white TV aerials. So I venture forth empty-handed into the mid-afternoon bleakness, forty single potato-eyes tracing my departure with insolent glares.

As I reach Plot Seventy-One I’m greeted by a gale-assisted hailstorm, whose horizontal sniper-fire sends me scuttling head-down for the safety of the shed. When the ravages subside, I emerge to find a man taking off a crash helmet, which I take to be a somewhat over-cautious response to the momentary precipitation of tiny ice-bullets, until I notice his motorbike parked three feet away. As he sets off down the path that leads to the plots down by the freight train track, a shout from the polytunnels intercepts his progress:

‘You got the felt on that shed yet?’
‘No, that’s his bloody job!’

This brief not-quite-encounter with humanity concluded, I toil until well past teatime in glorious isolation, carting heaped wheelbarrow-loads of only-slightly-damp woodchip from the Stockport-Council-donated mountain by the side-gate, and using it to renew the path that runs in front of the compost bins. As I reach home, Charlotte and Frankie emerge out of the blackening skies from the train station on mud-encrusted bicycles, to regale me with tales of a strenuous day’s outing in the wildlands of the Buxton line, rewarded at its culmination by the serendipitous discovery of a trackside hostelry featuring cheese-and-onion crisps and Guinness on tap.

What with the Irish in us (an eighth each in me and Charlotte’s case; so a sixteenth in Frankie’s) it seems rude not to continue the gala-day merriment- so I effect a minor diversion to Bargain Booze and return with the carrier-bag jangling. An impromptu familial kitchen Ceilidh ensues, powered by a ‘popular Celtic songs’ playlist sourced via the wonders of Spotify. Some hours later, as I sashay into the utility room on the latest of several return journeys to the fridge, I could swear that the potato sprout/aerials are swaying along in time to the Cranberries ‘Let It Linger’, and that each of their single Irish eyes is smiling appreciatively in my general direction. I raise a newly-liberated bottle of ale towards the windowsill and wish every one of them well: ‘You’re a fine set of lads, so you are. Best of luck to your luck’. I’m back on speaking terms with my Desirees and my Duke of Yorks, and all is well with the world. Monday morning can wait.

Sunday 24 March

Last Sunday’s impromptu kitchen Ceilidh has evidently convinced the Spotify algorithm that I’m a permanently-signed-up devotee of all things Celtic, so I’ve spent the week carrying out my daily business to an internet-enforced lilting backdrop alternating mournful ballads, rousing freedom-fighter anthems from the Times of the Troubles, and whisky-fuelled helter-skelter jig-along tap-room floor-fillers. It’s not altogether unpleasant, and the stop-start, fast-slow rhythm produces some significant productivity-related side-effects which should in the rightful national interest be drawn to the attention of scholars in several respectable fields of the social sciences. When Saturday comes, the climactic fiddle-burst through the headphones of the Dubliners ‘Rocky Road to Dublin’ effects a quickening of the pace over the last three hundred yards of my weekly Parkrun, proving enough to register an internet-confirmed personal time for the weekly ‘fun’ communal five kilometres event of twenty-six minutes and forty-seven seconds (personal fourth-best).

I’ve still not slowed down by Sunday, when me and the two plastic trays of impressively-sprouted potatoes make our way down to Plot Seventy-One for their overdue consignment to the patch of pre-prepared earth adjacent to the compost bin. In contrast to the many hours of sweat-browed exertion which have since January attended the clearance of this Iberian-peninsular-shaped area in readiness for occupation by tubers, the insertion hand-deep into the early-spring-warmed depths of twenty each of Desirees and Duke of Yorks seems an almost obscenely quick affair, and it’s not long past noon when the year’s sowing is concluded. As I take a step back to review my handiwork, the stooped figure of next-door neighbour Trevor, veteran plot-holder and unofficial site handyman, emerges into my peripheral vision.

‘Morning! You winning there, then?’
‘Well, I’ve just got these potatoes in, and…’
‘Good for you. Well- I’ve been here since bloody seven o’clock- not even been on my own plot yet!’
‘Ah, you’re a glutton for punishment, so you are, Trevor!’

This exchange being enough to satisfy both parties’ requirements for social interaction during the foreseeable future, Trevor continues on his lone furrow towards the polytunnels, and I set to busying myself with some very basic hammer-and-nail-based DIY in the putative onion-region at the corner of the plot nearest the freight-train line . Before long it’s time for a pre-arranged teatime rendezvous with Charlotte so I set off towards the main gate entrance. Before I can get there though, I encounter the windowless frame of a displaced greenhouse, lying at a rakish and inappropriate angle across great swathes of Plot Seven with all the startling incongruity of a stricken dinosaur.
The-bloke-whose-name-I-can-never-remember, you know, the one with the moustache and the Alsatian, is on his way past in his Four-by-Four. He cuts the ignition and steps out, wide-eyed:

‘Blimey. That’s the thing Trevor was putting up this morning. The wind must have got it!’

There’s nothing for it but we are going to have to get the great unwieldy fabrication on its feet one way or the other, and after several minutes of humming and hahing and head-scratching and ‘now then-what the hell have we got here- ing’, we manage to parlay it inelegantly into a half-sheltered corner of neglected patio where we reckon it can’t do too much damage, especially once we’ve weighed its semi-fractured undersides down with four hefty pallets.

‘That’ll bloody do it. Ah look, there’s your missus!’

And it is- she is. Charlotte, arrived street-side of the locked main-gate dead-on-time for our rendezvous, with a small Tupperware box containing one Mr Kipling’s-style apple pie (actually they’re Co-op’s own brand, but you wouldn’t know the difference) for each of us. I’ve wolfed mine down by the time we’ve made it back to the shed. Reckon I’ve earnt it, one way or another.