Time to get haughty-cultural

If you own an allotment, eventually you will succumb to the terrible emotional blight that is Vegetable Envy.

Hello. My name is Peter, and it’s been a week since I looked at another man’s courgette and felt ashamed, yet strangely exhilarated.

I tried to check myself into the ATC (Alan Titchmarsh Clinic), but autumn is a very busy time for them, and they were fully booked.

If you happen to be a sufferer of this debilitating problem (usually brought on by your neighbour’s beautiful plump brassicas, or perfectly shapely peas), then going to your local horticultural show is definitely a bad decision.

So, there we were, in the quaint village hall (portrait of the Queen on the wall, vintage upright piano covered up in the corner) marvelling at how anyone managed to make a onion grow quite so large without the use of steroids, or by staying up all night softly calling it “big boy” whilst gently stroking it’s silvery surface.

There’s only so much a proud man can take. When I found myself saying out loud; “My God, that is a beautiful leek” in a fit of perplexed envy, I realised I had reached a watershed moment in my life.

A couple of decades or so earlier, I’d have probably been hanging around in my local record shop, agonising over which band’s back-catalogue I needed to own first. Or maybe just asleep. How did I reach a point where agonising over whether 1st prize had been awarded to the correct potato was my normal Saturday fun?

To compound my sense of dismay (not helped by the realisation that the only category I would have stood a reasonable chance in was the one titled “Vegetable disaster”), I even misjudged my attempt at claiming the star prize of the show. A posh garden spade and fork were on offer, in a sealed-bid-highest-wins contest. To make it even more tantalising, they were stainless steel (Because, let’s face it, no true gardener wants to see a stain on their spade, do they?).

Using my best allotmenteer’s logic, I concluded that other people might go with a round figure – say £20. So if I prepared to go with £20.50... no... Someone else might think of that. Go with £21.50!

Mrs G filled out the high-tech form (a post-it note) and put it in the entry box (an ice cream tub). After the show, we got a call to say we’d won by a tiny margin, and could we come and pay our £22.50?

It turns out she used a higher level of green-fingered logic than I could muster, and assumed that if a man irrationally obsessed with dandelions was suggesting a figure, it was wise to go slightly higher than that, too.

Even if I can’t manage to use the shiny, new, implements to help me grow some decent crops, at least if I angle them correctly, I’ll be able to reflect sunlight into the eyes of my rivals to disguise my ineptitude.

This post first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday, column, in the North West Evening Mail, on the 12th of September 2014. I'd offer you a link to view it on their website, but it doesn't seem to have made it on there. Shame, that - I was pretty happy with this one.

When my copy of the paper arrived yesterday, I thumbed through it and couldn't spot my column in the usual section. I went back through, and started thinking I'd been royally dumped - nothing online, nothing in the paper... had my vegetable-based innuendo been one juicy plum too far?

A final flip through from the very start revealed I was on the left of Page 4 - giddy heights for me, and I was actually in a news section too. Mind you, if anyone ever actually thinks my stuff is an unbiased news report, they're in serious trouble.

(Tunes tonight from the Art Of Noise, and a 4 CD set called "And What Have You Done With My Body, God?" Some great stuff, and some pointless stuff. That's the risk you take with compilations of demos, remixed and unreleased stuff!)

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It was always tricky to fit everything you wanted into the intentionally short character count of Twitter, especially when, like me, you tend to write ridiculously long sentences that keep going on and on, with no discernible end in sight, until you start wondering what the point was in the first place. The maximum length of a text message originally limited a tweet to 140 characters, due to it being a common way to post your ramblings in Twitter’s early days. Ten years later, we’ve largely consigned texting to the tech dustbin, and after a lot of angst, the social media platform’s bigwigs have finally opted to double your ranting capacity to 280. Responses ranged from “You’ve ruined it! Closing my account!” to the far more common “Meh” of modern disinterest. As someone rightly pointed out, just because you have twice as much capacity doesn’t mean you actually have to use it. It is, of course, and excellent opportunity to use the English language correctly and include punctuat...

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