As the league season ends this Saturday, us oldies have one more injection of ibuprofen left to enable us to contest the Grey Fox Final at Scarborough’s famous old Marine Road Ground on Sunday afternoon.
This beautiful old ground will host three teams from Bradford as our neighbours and friends from Hepworth Idle Tracksuits CC – still bitter about their catastrophic earlier defeat to the Villas – contest the Plate competition before Villas take on the mighty Bradford Bhuddas.
But first it’s our end of season party night – triple Jager Bombs all round – and with the Tracksuits known to like a tipple or two with their Weetabix, one senses pre-match preparations for the Bhuddas may be a touch more spiritual than spirit laden.
The last time we tripped to Scarborough in search of cricket we did not see a ball bowled and I have to say the hangover took weeks to vanish.
Lured there under false pretences, I spent most of the second day wandering the shoreline in a dazed state. Molly has booked us into a local flea pit close to the ground so, come rain or shine, we hope to see a few of you in the stands cheering us on for our last stand.
Last Days of Summer
Acclimatised as we are to moaning about the weather in England, it seems this summer we’ve had good reason to. They can promise all they want of a late Indian summer but we all know that will fade quicker than a street light, if it ever materialises at all.
The garden allotment is looking bare now, meagre crops picked and eaten before the bugs devoured any more or the local cat shat on them…again. Hard lessons learnt in another summer of discovery…must get a shot gun for Christmas.
The promised cucumber harvest turned out to be a trickle of gherkin-sized prickly green things with the skins of an alligator. My onions got “bottom rot” which is a condition I have only experienced in the dressing room at the Villas.
And only Bear Grylls could ever get excited about eating the amount of bugs penetrating my spuds. There is a perverse joy as, when peeling spuds, a bewildered bug pops it’s head up like a trapped soldier from a trench, only to get it sliced off.
If only my lodger knew what he had been eating this summer.
Even the normally hardy broad beans attracted an army of brown furry caterpillars turning plants black as if they were miniature flame throwers burning the land in search of their prey. I swear the plants looked like the scorched forests of Vietnam.
At least the old man’s insistence that I learn to grow tomatoes before he vanishes to the big greenhouse in the sky did bear fruit, although months of pinching out side shoots for a crop that would have cost a couple of quid at Aldi makes you ponder.
Grasshopper you now know it all.
I will miss the option of vanishing into my greenhouse to talk to the plants as I gently prune them, encouraging them to flower and fruit. There is something very calming pottering about in this little plastic sheeted sanctuary; every man needs a place like this.
Now it’s time to clean it out and try to fathom how to batten it down so that I don’t spend the winter retrieving panels from neighbouring gardens and alleyways as the street lives up to it’s name of Windy Corner over the winter months.
Technical I am definitely not, so it will have to be the big boulder method once again.
Noble as it may appear to grow your own crops, the supermarkets need not fear. As gardeners we grow for minor victories, dismissing the multiple disasters as one big learning curve. Even Monty Don rarely gets it all right, every time.
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