LABP08 Festival

I went to work on Saturday morning. Something I don’t like doing because weekends are reserved for family/fun time.....yeay......and keeping up with the household admin/chores......boooo....

What with the credit crunch and so many colleagues up shirtz creak I decided it was probably not a good time to try and get out of it and so I made my way into grey old London Town (actually the sun was out) at stupid o'clock in the morning to assist in the migration of several thousand trades from one platform to another and provide liquidity reports from our sub ledger. The good news is that it went positively and I got paid for it.

How much of that last paragraph does the average green fingered blog reader understand? and What has that got to do with allotmenteering.....Burger all, except that if I can convince my wife I wouldn't have had that extra cash if I hadn't been to work she may let me spend it towards a rotivator, and it won't disappear into the dreaded savings account where it will be saved up for the impending rainy days or Steph's next assault on Bluewater shopping Mall.

Saturday the 18th October marked Leigh Allotments Autumn Potato bake party. I made it up there with Max just an hour before they were to begin.

Lots of other plot holders had been collecting combustibles for the fire and the pile was pretty impressive. But nobody was there so we decided to take down our bean wigwam.

I managed to pull the canes from the ground and cut the string which bound them together. Max was on bean duty; he dutifully sat down and ripped them off the stalks making three tidy piles of beans, beanstalks and the odd bits of string.

I began digging up the overgrown the bean area, it had become quite weedy because the wigwam design doesn’t lend itself very well to easy weeding so I had pretty much just snapped the bell bind as it began twining up the canes to keep the growth down. There was a mass of bell bind roots which I knew would be there. It took a good three quarters of an hour to dig over and remove the majority of it which was a long time considering it was a little more than a metre squared.


Anyroads, by the time we had finished clearing up the beans into the compost heap several thousand people had arrived for the event of the year. Robbie William's had flown in from LA and was warming up his vocals for the "BP08" Baked potato festival.

The pyrotechnics team were setting up the laser display to be headed by Jean Michel Jacques no less.

Unfortunately we had to turn away 6960 people because we only had a few baked potatoes and not enough sausage rolls to go around. Robbie and the lights fantastic got lost somewhere in the departing masses so we were left with thirty or so plot holders, a few visitors and a rip roaring bonfire.

Still it was nice to catch up with several people I hadn't seen in a while and Max won a pair of Bart Simpson sunglasses in the Childs raffle so he was well chuffed. Everybody agreed that Robbie was infact a nob with a silent k anyhow. The baked potatoes looked suspiciously like supermarket bought but I didn't eat there anyhow as my lovely wife had cooked a special meal of monk fish and curried mussels with some of my home grown leeks and celeriac. YU-um