Life on an allotment waiting list is all about patience, steely determination and whining. We are still only ten months into a ten-year waiting list and time is passing slowly. We have to content ourselves with growing potatoes in mud sacks and tomatoes on our window sill but on Saturday we had a glimpse of the good life that awaits us in 2019.
One of the local allotments was holding an open day, a chance for wannabe allotmenteers to get a look around and for current allotmenticians to show off a bit and flog some jam. They were growing the kind of thing you’d expect – yer carrots, yer peas, yer lettuce – but there was one guy with a massive plot of coriander and another who was growing chick peas. Chick peas!
It was fantastic. It was inspiring and exciting and a major fricking tease. I want an allotment. I want one bad. It’s a desperate longing, the kind of longing you might feel for a Calippo after crawling for days through a desert and gargling dust, the kind of longing your crotch might feel on a life stretch in the joint with a sixth form boarding school outside your window.
It’s spurred us into action. We’re joining waiting lists for the other allotments all over Zero City, even if they’re miles away, even if they’re on the other side of the tracks. On the good side. We’re going to clean up the shared yard and see what more we can grow there, we’ve bought some strawberry plants for our other window sill and I’m going to bump off the other people on the waiting list. The big decision there is an appropriate name for a serial killer. I’m thinking The Butcher of Eden. Maybe The Germinator.
Photo credit: The Zero
