pumpkinstrokemarrow

Now had a couple of days of drying weather and the ground is now in reasonable condition - for planting beans anyway - after all the wet weather which we have had over the last few weeks. So got a row and a half in this afternoon - maybe another four and a half to go. Then onto onions and leaf beet.

Tenacity of weeds continues to impress. Weeds which have been upsidedown in the ground, several inches down, for months, continue to struggle to the surface. Whacking great shoots nearly making it. If only plants that one can eat were so tenacious.

Rain has unearthed various interesting debris. For example some very bleached chunks of crab shell which have survived being composted for perhaps a year or more. Then various silk flowers which come with the leaves which the council sweep up in the Autumn from their cemetaries and crematoria.

Interestingly, quite a lot of allotment types are not into composting. You would think that they are deeply orgo but they are not. Maybe half simply pile their waste - quite often including bottles, tin foil containers and plastic bags - up in heaps around the edge of the allotment field. They are quite firm that it is for someone else to deal with. Probably relatives of the sadly numerous people who don't think it is any part of their duties to remove, for example, empty beer bottles from their part of the pavement.

Someone has been talking in the media about UK needing to punch above its weight - a phrase invented, I think, by some Tory Foreign Secretary - Douglas Hurd maybe - some years ago - and which people continue to trot out. Now it is a good sounding phrase but wrong. I see no merit in trying to be bigger than one is. Eventually you get found out and all the expense has been for nothing. But at least there is some good sense left in our Labour party. Some of our MPs are prepared to say out loud that they think that the hugely expensive replacement Trident is not good value for money. But sadly no where near enough to stop the thing.

Someone has also been talking about a person with two heads - a subject in which I have a passing interest given that the shrink book from Ashburton was all about multiple personality. A person with two heads is a very extreme case - not something that I had not thought possible. Correcting myself as I go, I should have said two persons with one body. I am told that both persons sound suprisingly normal - although it has taken them some time to learn to coordinate control of the one body. Apparently, to some extent at least, one person has control of half a body. Maybe in time there will be advantages. One person could worry about running around leaving the other free to concentrate on something else at the same time. Using the mobile phone while her other half drove the car doesn't work with only one set of hands but there must be activities for which that is not a limitation. And then I imagine that they could make themselves a fortune renting themselves out to university pyschology departments - assuming that does not count as some kind of abuse. (In the (golden) olden days people with severe challenges were often happy to make a living in circus freak shows. One point they made was that at least in that context people took them for what they were and didn't try to pretend they were something else. No longer quite the thing though). Must ask Google for more information.