I was reminded of the Robert Frost poem "Mending Wall" the other day. We'd bumped into Tomato Seedling Man on our way home. He was upset, really upset.
"Look at this," he said, leading us onto his tidy plot, past his greenhouse where this year's tomato seedlings were growing unbothered by snails and frost, unlike mine. His plot neighbours had put a massive fence up all along the long side. Out of pallets. Chest-high.
"It's taking all my light away," he complained bitterly. "And they had to get onto my plot to do it. They trampled on my onions." We'd have told him to complain to the committee but the problem was that the culprit was a bigshot ON the committee.
He told us the whole saga. It sounded gruesome and very messy. I began to regret some of my voting decisions back in February.
Talking about it perhaps helped Tomato Seedling Man and he soon moved on to other, more fascinating topics, like his gun. We've got a vermin problem on the allotment -- vermin being anything animal that eats what we want to grow for ourselves, e.g. muntjac deer eating cabbages, foxes eating chooks, pigeons eating fricking everything. Tomato Seedling Man thinks it would be a good idea to go a-banging with his rifle. Well, one of his mates down the allotment has already been and done that, and the dead pigeons are now hanging from poles in amongst his produce -- pour encourager les autres no doubt.
Tomato Seedling Man then told us a great story about going hunting in the fields with a mate of his and disturbing a massive bull and his herd. "It was huge," he said and pointed at an imaginary height of double the pallet fence. "And very angry. So we figured," and he finally started smiling, "that we could never outrun a bull like that if he decided to charge. So we retreated, very slowly, with our guns ready." I looked at OH who probably knew what was coming, "Because we figured that our gun insurance would cover the cost of taking out that bull."
The bull and his calves and cows survived. I'm sure there's a lesson here somewhere.
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