Bounty Anxiety

No, nothing to do with the popular coconut-based chocolate bar*, but a demonstration of how one can have too much of a good thing.

Early cropping has started in the Hollow Garden, with young broad beans and kohlrabi on the go and peas just around the corner. The early strawberries are yielding a frankly embarrassing 750g (just over 1½lb) per day, and the early raspberries are almost ripe despite a mystery affliction striking two out of five plants (investigations are ongoing). Rhubarb is still ticking along, and the first early spuds are ready to lift. So what could possibly be wrong?

Easy. We're going away for a bit, leaving the Hollow in the care of a house-sitter.

Let's call her Tashy. Tashy's a bright and personable sort. She's happy to feed our fish and boot the cats out of the bedroom (or should that be the other way round). What she's not prepared to do is open the tunnel first thing, spot water and watch for pests, pick strawberries, raspberries, peas and beans daily, let the chickens out and feed them, and generally watch everything for the first signs of trouble – a must in an organic garden.

For all this (and a dozen other things) we have to fall back on the benevolence of our neighbours who, for all their loveliness and good intentions, are collectively a bit random when it comes to the self-sufficiency lark. I've sent advance gifts of strawberries which went down well despite me failing to realise it was 10pm at night (such is the life of one who gardens until it is too dark to see and thinks nothing of the gathering murk), so it's fingers crossed time. Last time we returned to find a sizeable colony of wasps ferrying raspberry pulp from the fruit cage to their nest, meaning that fruit picking had to be done after 7pm when only the drunk ones were left – a bit like trying to clean up after a student party, except with all the pissed students armed with tazers.

When the garden's in full productive swing it can get a bit overwhelming - but at least our gardensitters won't have to process anything; that's a step too far. We might go without peas this year, but it's hardly the end of the world. Raspberries, on the other hand...



*Although I could easily have developed a neurosis based on Bounty Bars rooted in childhood, after my mother sneezed while eating one. This is not something anyone should ever have to see, and suffice it to say that we had to redecorate the kitchen. How I survived my childhood is a mystery to me.

Vegetable Plot Battleground

So here I am on the train to Southampton, journeying to pick up the Agéd Parents (fresh from the Isle of Man) and bear them home for a week's holiday. It's a year since I've seen them, and it'll be interesting to see how long it takes us all to start bickering.

Wow, but there are some blank-eyed shambling morons in Poole. Whoops, getting distracted.

I'm hoping that this parental visit will be a chance for everyone to recharge their batteries; morning cups of coffee with a home-made bun, gentle walks, perhaps a little light shopping. But it wasn't always like this. I remember the few holidays my Dad took with the rest of us as whirlwind endurance marathons. How many attractions can we fit in? How far can we walk in search of a better restaurant, and will any of the ones we passed still be open by the time we return, stumbling, through the gathering darkness? As I think back on it I realize that my Dad was always doing; he found it hard to relax and just be.

And what's worse, I think I've inherited it from him. Perhaps it's some sort of meme.

Yet for all that, there are never enough hours in the day for me. I rise without too much trouble (although getting started in the morning is a tadge harder) but I resent bedtime. It marks drawing a line under the huge list of things I had intended to do that day but didn't manage because of my one great sin; getting sidetracked.

Sometimes this is unavoidable, but some of the time it's the closet perfectionist in me making himself known (I've been known to spend an entire day cleaning and reorganising the kitchen cupboards. I'm not proud of it). But most of the time it's just hopping from one thing to another like a butterfly with a bad case of the squitters.

The internet is the worst place for me. Given my job it's inevitable that I spend a fair bit of time on there, seeking opinions and information, but every second I'm being jostled by such interesting trivia that I can't help but get sucked in by some of it. I mean, did you know that They Might Be Giants' Birdhouse In Your Soul is a song about a night light in the bathroom? There you are, see, you just learned something that might save your life one day. An axe-wielding madman could barge into your house just as you sit down to your cornflakes and shriek 'No-one gets out of here until I know; who is the Blue Canary in the outlet by the light switch, and why is he watching me?'

Aha! And there it is; the moment that turns this train journey into something special. Our train has been idling along at slightly less than walking pace (British trains often do this, I'm not sure why) for a while now, and I've been watching a seemingly endless row of gardens pass by; regular slot after slot of ornamental pap in various states of order. Plastic ponds and plastic sandpits, stands of pampas grass and flowering shrubs, and always the bulk of that precious space is given over to useless, monotonous grass. And then suddenly, standing out like a jewel in the suburban monotone, a working garden; rich earth, broad beans in flower, a compost bin with a squash plant poking out of the top, strawberries almost ready to announce the summer. You can stuff your forsythia up your bottoms, suburbia. Give me the battleground of the vegetable plot any day.

Blue Bottoms (Regs part 3)

So; The sloppy drafting of regulations can lead to playing a game called 'unintended consequences'. But for truly idiotic results you need another ingredient.

For better or for worse the UK is part of the European Union, which means we have to have a whole second raft of MPs for the European Parliament (known as MEPs), on salaries which make the boys in the domestic parliament in Westminster look like paupers. It also allows our Prime Minster to attend no end of summits and eat staggeringly expensive lunches. I had a look at some figures released through official channels recently, and the cost of one lunch for one person would feed my family of four, on our normal diet, for a little over ten days.

But I'm getting off the point, quelle surprise. Whatever benefits politicians believe the EU brings to Britain, the people of our country hate it because it seems to exist solely to strangle us in red tape. Every year brings a ragbag of new rules, each more proscriptive, more involved, and in some cases more downright daft than the ones they replace. For instance, did you know we had (until recently) a maximum allowable curvature on bananas offered for sale? True. We have to be protected from bananas which are too bendy at all costs.*

But what really chaps my ass is that the UK is more seriously affected by these regulations than almost any other EU member, and here's why. If the EU passes a regulation, everyone nods wisely and goes home. In sensible countries like France and Italy, they already have a filing cabinet filled to bursting (actually a whole roomful of them) with unactioned regulations – so this one gets shoved to the back of the bottom drawer, to be dealt with after lunch; which is to say, not now. France (for example) regularly gets fined by the EU for noncompliance with various exciting bits of paper. So what? Say the French. It's still cheaper than trying to implement it all. Bof!

In the UK, on the other hand, the MEPs hand the new regs over to Mr Pewty with his pencil moustache. Mr Pewty turns the new regulation into no less than twenty-seven minor amendments to existing regulations, plus three new ones. He lives for moments like these, and before long the amended rules and regulations are couriered out to a small army of sub-Pewtys, and by dawn the next day they're out on the roads visiting farms, armed with their clipboards, ready to make everyone's lives that little bit greyer. Anyone who refuses to comply will be dealt with by the courts, because there's a whole tribe of Pewtys who are employed, on the taxpayers' dollar, to prosecute miscreants for such heinous crimes as displaying prices in pounds and ounces, selling unpasteurised stilton, or feeding vegetable peelings to their chickens.

This is the missing ingredient in the game of unintended consequences. You have to have a slavish devotion to rules and regulations, coupled with a dogmatic and inflexible attitude. Never having had a popular revolution, the British excel in this regard; the Pewtys are, in their own way, like the medieval reeves setting out to impose the will of their feudal masters. Somewhere in the heart of the Brits, there still lies the conviction that whatever we are, we are because our betters allow us to be so. We know our place - and incidentally so do our MPs, who have used their own regulations to keep their heads firmly in the feeding trough all the time they've been beating us with the big rulebook.

So where am I going with all of this? I guess I'm calling for a long overdue British revolution. Not the storming-the-Bastille type of affair (that just wouldn't be cricket), but I think it's time to let our representatives know we want out of all the red tape. Perhaps that's a matter for the ballot box; perhaps it's a matter for gentle civil disobedience.

Or perhaps it's time to paint our bottoms blue and bloody well emigrate.



*This was touted as making packaging less likely to damage the bananas, but was widely accepted as a way of legislating against Caribbean bananas which tend to be smaller and more bendy. In these more enlightened times, however, that policy has been abandoned in favour of punitive tariffs which are a much more efficient way of putting the Caribbean banana farmers out of business.