THE PLOT THICKENS

Now things have got very busy around here over the last few months and so I have to apologise to you for the extended lapse in blogs. Over the last 3 months we have been fully booked in the cottage and pretty close to fully booked in our Bed and Breakfast room.

This, of course, is bloody marvellous and has totally exceeded our expectations. After being given notice of redundancy from HSBC Alison elected to take up an option to take one months gardening leave followed by a further option to leave 1 month early and so she became 'available' in July. This was very useful in managing the busy time in the B and B.  However it was not her intention to get sucked into the daily running of the business but she can expand more on this in a later episode...

Alison was particularly helpful in stepping into Claire's shoes in cooking evening meals for the guests and making jams and has created quite a reasonable additional income in doing so but I will also leave this for Alison to expand upon at a later date.
Within this toil we have had the added workload of one allotment to concern ourselves with. You may recall that we have taken the rare opportunity to acquire an allotment just so we don't get too bored. Now this allottment plot is not a full sized one, no it is just half a plot and only measures 15 metres by 39 metres, that's 585sqmtrs or about 6,000sqft every inch of which was full of 3' high weeds. I have worked in several supermarket stores that were smaller than this and all I had to do there was sweep, mop and buff the floor and that took long enough.

Both the sheds are within the plot.

6,000sqft of weeds and debris and several anxious neighbouring allotmenteers all watching to see if  I, no WE are up to the challenge. So in July and August I made several trips down to the plot to try pulling out as many of the largest weeds as possible in the hope that I could stop them dropping their seeds but this was futile as for every plant that I plucked out my arse or elbow or mere presence caused a further 20 to shed 10 million other seeds. Also weeding a reasonable garden plot is one thing but this is more like a field!

The allotment has world heritage status as it contains 95% of the known worlds grass species and 12 as yet undiscovered ones.

It is rumoured that 'Big Foot' has been spotted here too.

A decision had to be made. Either we were going to try to manage the plot using as green and eco-friendly methods as possible over many back breaking weeks or.....
Several gallons of farm strength weed killer on the lot and start the whole thing from scratch.


So off we went to buy some weed killer.


I don't feel too guilty about this as it is exactly what Farmers do after every harvested crop, no it is a needs must sort of choice. So my neighbour across the road told me about a guy who lives at the end of the village and can supply me with the said weed killer and anything else that I may need to set up the allotment. Well Alison and I nipped down there to see what he could do for us. We had no idea that he sells stuff from his out buildings as he has no signs up or displays or any indication at all that he is in business. All he has is a wind sock in the field behind his house where his private runway sits for his aeroplane. We just assumed that he was a rich city gent or perhaps a pop star, we know that Martin Shaw lives in Norfolk and owns a Tiger Moth so we thought he would be of that ilk.
Far from it. The guy is well into his sixties and retired and being a fairly hefty old Norfolk farmer type he uses a mobility scooter to get around his yard but yet he owns a plane and regularly flies off to Essex in it. As we drove onto his property a sensor picks us up and the next thing you see is this cheerful Bernard Matthews kind of geyser whizzing around the corner on his mobility scooter. He explained he and his wife don't need to use them but it just means they can get around the property a lot quicker!

After some 10 minutes of conversation pretty NFN (Normal for Norfolk) he says "follow me" and we had to jump into the car and pursue his mobility scooter which was rapidly disappearing around another corner...

Eventually stopping by what appeared to be a couple of aircraft hangers where he took us into one of them and opened one of several boxes of weed killers followed be a full run down on its capabilities and useage. We then received a précis of his life story  'The later years....'  this is fairly typical up here and if you go into any pub and buy a fellow a pint you will find no problem in obtaining his, his wife's, his parents and indeed even his wife's parents life story. I believe that it is the very reason that they created kicking out time in the pubs just to give the poor sod at the receiving end a chance to say "Oh, is that the time?" "I guess I'll just have to hear how your great Aunt Meredith got on when she moved all those miles away to.....?  Oh, the next village you say, well I'll look forward to hearing that story another day... such a shame they called time."

We bought the weed killer, a pump and a pair of gloves and we were there for nearly an hour. Afterwards I explained to the neighbour that had sent me there that I could of driven the 10 miles to Fakenham bought some from B&Q and driven back the 10 miles in that time. He said "Why would you want to waste all that time when you've got a guy right here in the village?".


 They live in a far simpler and happier time zone here in Norfolk and I still haven't quite got it yet.....   but I will, I will.

WMD........ Weapons of Mouse Destruction.

We have a few mice and shrews taken up residence in the garden. They are by no means a serious problem and we probably would be none the wiser if it were not for the fact that Scribble (our cat) has taken it upon her self to carry out a Bush like Shock and Awe attack on the critters.

This cat is at least 12 years old and should really be thinking seriously about her retirement and not running around like a teenager. Don't get me wrong a mouser is invaluable in keeping the rodent population at bay and indeed I even tried to get the Accountant to class the cat as tax deductible for playing this role. But I wasn't expecting that she would actually catch any!!

The trouble is, you see, she can't just catch and eat the mice, no she has to play with them for half an hour first. We have sat in our living room and watched the B&B's cat from across the road trot merrily along with a dead king size rat in its jaws swinging to and fro as the cat jauntily jogs along. That's the thing you see... it's dead as a dodo, dispatched to it's rat run in rodent heaven, whereas our cat will having caught the thing take it back to her lair and play with it for an inordinate amount of time.

She will invariably save the moment for the very time that we have chosen to eat our breakfast out on the patio resulting in me having to interrupt said breakfast to go and rescue the poor bullied rodents.

Scribble has clearly sensed that I am writing about her and has climbed across the furniture and plumpted herself down on my lap twisting her head right back to stare at me with her two large black iris's and looking as cute as a cuddly teddy bear. "What me?" she could be saying.

So I am in the middle of my toast and marmalade when there is much commotion and hoo-haa coming from under the rusty red cob nut tree better known as my evil cats lair. A shrew is being mauled as I break for a sip of my PGTips, I look away feeling guilty and spread a little butter on the toast...  Looking up I watch the cat suddenly jump up like a spring lamb as she is surprised that when she lifted her paw to see if she still had the thing it took the opportunity to make a dash for it. With her wits quickly recovered she zooms off after it in hot pursuit and once again wraps her clawed paw around the poor sod. I spread a little marmalade on to the toast only to have my eye drawn back to the cat throwing the shrew up into the air stabbing it with her spiteful claws on the way down.

As I raise the toast to my mouth and as the taste buds prepare for that warm marmaladey taste my conscience over-rules the whole procedure and I feel obliged to save the shrew from the humiliation and suffering and throw my toast down grummbling "Bloody Cat!".

We have found that a very large clear plastic salad bowl with a flattened  Cornflake box works brilliantly well in catching the distraught rodent, you simply use it as you would a glass and a piece of card when catching a spider.

I then find myself leaving the house (and my toast) and with one hand under the cardboard and the 2nd one ontop of the upturned salad bowl whilst the rodent runs around (or limps) in circles I march down the lane past some houses hoping not to meet anyone on route and finally release the creature into the hedgerow. I am even more concerned at meeting someone on the way back as the reason for me carrying a large (tinted lime green) salad bowl and a flattened Kelloggs cornflake box is far less discernible to any onlooker.

Back in the garden I see the cat looking totally bewildered as she re-visits and sniffs the place where I captured the shrew. "That is so odd", I can imagine her thinking, "I had it in my paws, I swear I did! Where on earth did the blithering thing disappear to?".

And whilst I leave the cat to ponder this enigma, I return to a piece of cold toast washed down with some cold tea. Lovely.

WMD

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