Birthdays and unbirthdays

Before I start, I should warn readers that this post includes some relatively bad language. I could, of course, clear it up, but it’s the duty of the historian to record events as they truly happened. How can he do that if he applies his own moralising filter to the record he is keeping?

The immediate cause of these events was my wife Danielle’s birthday. Now Danielle is difficult to buy presents for. Ask her what she’d like, and her immediate response is always ‘nothing’. So either you surprise her or you push her and prompt her to come up with a suitable present.

‘How about something for your allotment?’ I asked.

Danielle keeps a colossal market garden with a friend, thanks to which we are kept in excellent fresh fruit and vegetables for pretty much half the year. It involves a level of effort I find it exhausting merely to contemplate, but it seems the two of them enjoy it. While I wouldn’t enjoy the work, I certainly enjoy the produce, so we’re all happy about it.

Clearing the allotment:
work has remained backbreaking ever since

‘Ah, yes,’ she said, reflectively. ‘We could do with some horseshit.’

Well, I’m a former marketing man so my specialty is bullshit, but I suppose I could, at a stretch, have fulfilled that wish. But then she astonished me.

‘Actually, what I really need is a ho.’

A ho? That wasn’t the kind of language I expected my wife to use. Nor the kind of need I expected her to have.

Then she confused me still further.

‘You know – like the one they stole from the allotment.’

Surely this would have been something I’d have read about in the papers?

‘An African ho,’ she added in what was obviously intended to be an explanation but only left things as murky as ever for me.

‘it’s the only kind,’ she continued, ‘that seems to break up the earth well. You know, the soil’s so heavy in clay. That broad blade and the long handle, they just break the clods up like a bomb had hit them.’

A hoe! I’d been missing an ‘e’. Amazing the difference a single letter can make.

An African hoe. Not to be confused with an African ho

So she got her hoe. She’s apparently delighted with it. Though to me it just looks like another source of backbreaking work. Still, one should judge other people’s tastes by one’s own.

In any case, as Lewis Carroll points out in Alice in Wonderland, unbirthday presents make much more sense that birthday ones. We have, after all, a great many more unbirthdays every year than we have birthdays. So I’m grateful to Danielle for getting me an unbirthday present at the same time as I got her the hoe. A far more expensive gift, as it happens: a pair of walking boots.

Very comfortable they are too. Or eventually became. When I put the first one on, I was surprise to feel how tight it was over the top of my foot – pressing down and even quite painful in the way it rubbed.

‘Oh, well,’ I thought, ‘perhaps if I just walk them in a bit they’ll be quite snug.’

Then I tried to put the other one on. My toes were immediately met by an obstacle preventing my foot sliding in. I took a look. There was a piece of cardboard, the shape of the front part of the upper of the shoe, jammed in the front.

I’m glad to say that it didn’t take me long to work out that if there was a card in one shoe, there might have been one in the other. That somehow I’d managed to get my foot into that shoe despite the card. And that it was its presence that was making the shoe feel tight and painful.

So it turned out. I took the first shoe off. I extracted the card. Thereafter both shoes fitted beautifully.

Result? We’re both pleased with our birthday and unbirthday presents. No bullshit. And no hos.

Allotted task

Into every life, a little dung must fall.

At least, if you’re the husband of a committed allotteer. That may not be a word, but it’s the title I use for the keeper of an allotment. In turn, that’s a plot of land, generally rented out by a town council, usually to make a vegetable plot.

A vegetable plot, by the way, isn’t a bunch of cabbages in a conspiracy.

I have a high respect for manual work on the land. I admire it intensely, but preferably from afar. I have gone to great lengths to ensure that I would never find myself dependent on working with my hands, least of all in backbreaking agriculture.

The trouble is I benefit from the excellent broccoli, carrots, onions, broad beans, artichokes even, to say nothing of the soft fruit – the strawberries and raspberries – Danielle’s allotment produces. Even I have to admit that it’s hardly unfair to expect me to make some minor contribution to the endeavour. Especially if it’s just once a year, as is the case of the task of shoving a few hundred kilos of horse dung in wheelbarrow loads from one end of the allotment to the plots Danielle manages.

Or is it twice? I can’t remember. You know how oblivion draws a merciful veil over traumatic shock? I’m afraid dung-doling is that kind of experience for me – I agree that it’s reasonable to expect me to move the bags, I may even do the work willingly, but I can’t pretend I find it anything other tha a soul-shaking, morale-shivering and character-undermining challenge to me.

In my defence, the work started badly. While driving to the allotment, I found my way blocked by a colossal lorry coming the other way. I was forced to reverse several hundred metres just to let him by. At which point I saw that the flat bed at the back was loaded with huge bags marked “CompostDirect.com”.

Colossal bags.

The lorry that delivered my torment

My heart sank. That had to be the lorry that had delivered to our site. So I knew what I was in for.

Our colossal bag had been dumped at the bottom of the allotment area. From there, the individual 50kg bags had to be manhandled into the wheelbarrow and then man-shoved, two at a time, up to the plots. 

Sheer delight. And repeated eight times.

It’s an activity like banging your head against a brick wall, which only feels good when you stop. Shoving a wheelbarrow uphill provides no sense of satisfaction, I find, just a relief that it’s over, qualified by the consciousness that it has to be done all over again with the next two bags.

Danielle is quite clear, too. It’s not enough merely to do the job. I have to like the work too. Or at least look as though I’m happy doing it. Or if even that it’s too much to ask, it must be possible for me to smile while wheeling the barrow.

Genuine rictus of joy
at the sheer pleasure of dung-carrying

So I did. At least at the rictus level, much to Danielle’s amusement. Smile and the whole world smiles with you, the song assures us. Well, maybe the rest of the world. Not the bit inside me, though.

Until, at least, the work was done. The 750 kilos moved. At which point, I could plant my feet on the ghastly bags, with a small sense of achievement at having resisted their effort to break my spirit and wreck my knees. I’d come out on top.

At last! True joy. The dung job's done!

For once, the smile was real.

It was then I noticed that the bags were marked “Bord na Móna”, which is Irish for “Peat Board”. Suddenly it all fell into place. It was the Irish that had been giving me grief, and nothing could be more appropriate.

At the end of the last rugby season, the Irish team inflicted the first defeat on England that it had experienced in 21 matches. By doing so, they denied England back-to-back grand slams. For those not aware of the workings of the noble Six Nations Championship, a grand slam is when one team beats all the other five. England was denied, on the line, by Ireland. And not for the first time.

So it’s merely in keeping with the laws of the universe that an Englishman finds himself having to take a load of horseshit from the Irish…

Fresh fruit and vegetables, from someone else's allotted work

Nothing beats organic vegetables, and there’s no better way of guaranteeing that they’re truly organic than to grow them yourself.

Or, if you’re like me and can’t bear the idea of gardening, then nothing can be better than having someone in your household who thinks the most marvellous way to relax at weekends is to go and weed, dig and plant on an allotment.

Well, to do it with a friend of hers.

Well, two allotments really.

Well, two plus a third smaller one.

All this, apparently enjoyable, effort means that there are today at least two Luton husbands who have a fine source of high-quality fruit and vegetables for most of the year. I’m delighted to be one of them.

All it costs in return is that we occasionally have to shovel large quantities of horse manure into bags and haul them to the vegetable beds on our wives’ allotment(s). And occasionally to dig a hole or two, to plant... well, plants. Or sometimes trees. The making of such holes I regard as holy work, and from such holiness will, in time, come apricots. Pears. Apples. Plums. Virtue finds its reward in fruit.

My holy work, allotted and done.
Just a few years left until we reap – literally – the rewards

What amazes me is how educational the experience of working an allotment turns out to be. I came home on Sunday, from my own rather more limited form of entertainment – badminton – to find both our gardeners tinkering with a powerful and daunting looking piece of machinery which they’d got in bits on our carpet.

I say tinkering but I have to admit that it would be far more accurate to say they were expertly assembling it.

‘It’ in this instance turned out to be a petrol-driven strimmer. A strimmer, in case you don’t know, is a machine that can be drawn along the sides of a flower bed or a lawn – or a vegetable plot – and, using a pair of viciously rotating plastic threads, free it of any unwanted growth. There is, fortunately, no such thing as a Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Plants, or such a device would certainly have been banned.

Fiendish device

My engineering skills are limited to understanding that you climb into a mechanical device, insert a key into the ignition and turn it, after which by some extraordinary miracle, you can move off and travel, with speed and efficiency, to your destination. Or at least to the first traffic jam on the way to that destination.

So I was impressed to bits to find these two friends competently putting together threads and shields and handles and a motor, until they were ready to fill a miniature petrol tank and put the strimmer to work. Which, apparently, it did to their immense satisfaction. Leaving me full of admiration for their mastery of mechanics.

Not so much of economics, of course. Add up the price of tools and plants and seeds and other products, and the cost per vegetable starts to mount up. Add in the opportunity cost of their time on the allotment, and I suspect that you’d find the produce was significantly more expensive than what you get in a supermarket.

But, oh so much better tasting. And better for you. So, if they’re enjoying the work, I certainly won’t complain.

Just as long as my involvement is kept to the present minimum, and my role is limited to eating the produce and expressing my (sincere, heartfelt) satisfaction.

Shit happens, but sometimes that's not such a bad thing

Thirty years in business have left me with a highly-developed appreciation of bullshit.

Here are a few pearls for your delectation.

“I’ve glanced through it but need to read your document again at more leisure.”

Translation: “I haven’t read your paper at all, but by all means outline to me what it says, unless you’d like to just cut to the chase and let me tell you what you ought to be thinking.”

“I think this needs a discussion in a wider group.”

Translation: “I really don’t want to take a decision today, so let’s call a meeting for two weeks away and give me a bit of a reprieve.”

“We don’t really think of you as a supplier, more as a partner.”

Translation: “We know that all your clients tell you that they’ll open doors for you to take lots of other sales, in return for a discount, but we really, really will so we’d like a really, really big discount.”

What I hadn’t previously grasped was that as well as bullshit, horseshit is a highly desirable commodity. My wife Danielle cultivates two plots of land with three of her friends. This being the spring, it’s the time to get hold of dung and spread it liberally on the plants. And not just any old dung, apparently, but the well-seasoned stuff. Plants, it transpires, relate to dung like a connoisseur to fine wines: the young stuff may be enjoyable, but real appreciation only comes after it’s aged a bit.

So Danielle and our friend Moira presented me with an enticing prospect this morning. Go and shovel four year-old horse manure into plastic bags and cart them to our allotment. One of the great advantages would be that it would spare me having to play badminton, which is what I’d have been doing otherwise.

You can no doubt imagine how much the prospect attracted me. What better ways are there of spending a Sunday morning?

At the horse farm:
manufacturing plant converting raw material into finished product

As it happened, I was to be cheated of my opportunity to display real virtue. The woman who runs the horse farm had taken pity on her customers, and was offering the alluring stuff pre-bagged.

Shovel the stuff ourselves?
Or buy it at a pound a bag?
So hard to choose

So instead of the joy of shovelling, I simply loaded bags into the back of the car.

My simplified task: dump the bags in the car...

...and deliver them to target

The benefit became particularly obvious when I took a look at the heap I’d have been shovelling otherwise. 

What the task might have been.
Spade, wheelbarrow, back and arms. And what a setting.

It wasn’t until I dropped the stuff off that I at last learned my real lesson. That was when I realised that this ancient horse dung really was as wonderful as Danielle and Moira claimed. I only had to look at how the plants were visibly enjoying it. 

Incipient rhubarb.
Pushed upwards, with obvious pleasure, by the fine material around it

Why, I might even be forced to the conclusion that it’s richer and more beneficial than bullshit in the business environment.