Unpredictable April!

April’s mixed weather bag has definitely been turned upside down and given a good shake. Within the space of one week we have had rain, sleet, hail and small splatterings of very welcome sunshine; my greenhouse is slowly losing its grey, lifeless demeanour and is gradually, but purposefully, most definitely, going green. Time to get in there and hunker down amongst the grow bags and slug pellets. Think it’s a man thing; sheds and greenhouses are pretty much related and the vast majority of us males love them both; sheds, with their pot-bellied stoves in winter, and greenhouses with their pot-bellied men in summer – often encouraged by a beer or two hidden amongst the tomato plants.

However, labouring over nature’s fecundity does have its downside. Pests, alien spores and death-by-damp watch from the shadows; thrips, mites and things that make your leaves curl, flock like vultures to a lion kill. Within a day, all can be lost and, considering my ease of access to rows of thripless supermarket shelves, I often wonder why I do it. But never, not ever, will I abandon the quest for red-ripe, greenhouse-grown tomatoes and cucumber jungles.

After all, where else can a man pretend to work, drink his beer and dream...?

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An English Boy’s Wanderings in Africa: another little bit of...

... By my mother and mother’s growing circle of other mothers, Friday nights were eagerly looked forward to; that one night a week when the mundanity of holding together family life was forgotten. Husbands were corralled in the club bar and could be spied on via the waiters’ serving hatch, or waved at for another round of drinks. Children of semi-responsible age had two bob thrust in their hands and were then sent outside to ‘go and play’.

Two bob got me two cokes and two packets of chips (crisps). Kids were seen as little people who wandered into the cocktail bar for one more sixpence and hourly check over’s, but I wasn’t the smallest kind of a kid anymore. That following year I would be twelve years old and like a grown pig for the spit, I was ready for Alcatraz – boarding school. Fort Victoria High School, stuffed with trembling, homesick wannagohomers, cold showers, lonely hostel matrons and sadistic hairy men, torturously intent on flaying every boy within range of the birch. But that’s another story; six months time was a still a long, long way off and I duly made the most of my freedom.

Sat on the club steps with my second coke and first packet of chips, I was suddenly alone. The other kids had legged it and watched with full grins from the safety of the flower beds.

‘You’re the boy in the Morris Minor?’

I looked up and nodded, more out of fear than politeness.

‘Your mother came for the draw then?’

Another nod. My fingers closed and crushed my chips; the rest of me refused to move. I had been loomed over by the giantess from hell; the lady with the lookalike blood splatters all around her dress.

‘You mustn’t sit too long on the steps, you know.’

‘Why not?’ I croaked.

‘The spiders will get you.’

‘Spiders?’

‘Big ones with red hair.’

‘Red hair?’

The giantess nodded her head. ‘Like the one climbing onto your shoe.’

I left her on the steps, along with my coke, my chips and a spider big enough to push-start our Morris Minor...

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