Patience Is Key.

It started off as one of those days; the sort I guess we all have – and would happily manage without. I am no longer a member of our allotments committee, which met earlier this week. But was certainly surprised to have an e-mail from them that, I believed (and still believe) suggested that the path running from the central roadway to my two plots (as far away from any water as it is possible to get without being in a desert) was unsafe.

Perhaps I was feeling a little paranoid anyway, but the un-necessarily officious tone and words had me sending a reply, seeking some clarification and suggesting a meeting on site this morning. 9.30 !

Quietly getting ready this morning we then discovered we could not find either set of our keys. How was that possible? I had been up to the allotment on Wednesday evening, having collected some stable sweepings on the way home from Tamworth – and via the monthly Reading Group meeting at the local library (this month’s book: The Little Book Thief). It had been dark as I opened the gates, but the yellow friendly light of the “street lights in the yard of the neighbouring house made it possible to see so easily what I was doing. I must have had the keys or I could not have got through the always-locked gates. The following day I had cleared out the car to visit our daughter. A fine day out, lunching on a decently sized burger in a tea-shop with broken down central heating.

This morning? Searched high and low. Several times. Then decided to take a chance, hope there was someone there to let us in (and out) to resolve the issue.

To find out that the lock on the gates had been smashed and – at least four – people have had rotavators stolen from locked sheds on site. Process demands that each plot holder reports the crime to the police separately, presumably each being given a crime number.

Chairman agreed our paths were no threat to life and limb, the secretary explaining that it would be helpful if, with the guy next door (where the slabs are actually like see-saw planks … and worse still if wet or frosted) get together to “sort it out” between us. I am not sure if that is actually practicable: we rarely bump into each other and I should not “trespass” on his plot … that may be the basis of another post (watch this space).

But we were let out and returned home to search – once again – for the keys. At the back of my mind a nagging worry that I may have left the keys in the padlock, some blackguard had found them, used them to let themselves in with a flatbed truck and help themselves to property. I was sure it hadn’t happened that way, but I was once sure that female robins did not have redbreasts.

Searched. Clothes, cars, garage, garden shed, bedrooms, magazine rack. Looked. Under furniture, beneath cushions on the three piece suite, behind the bookcase in the hall.

Eventually they were found. Both pairs of keys. In my car. In the “ash tray”.

I breathed again. First we do not need to pay for new keys. Secondly we do not have to dismantle the shed and fit a new padlock. Thirdly, most importantly I was not responsible for the theft of equipment.

I returned to the plot this afternoon. A bit more over-digging, weeding; had the camera in case that robin that had done the traditional sit-on-the-spade-handle and take worms from the soil appeared again. No. Noticed even more frogspawn in the ponds and popped a couple of teasels into the “wildlife patch”. And hazel catkins swinging crazily in the spring breezes. Dogwood prunings are on site ready to serve as pea sticks and the soil is beginning to dry out from the saturated state it has been in.

It was the first truly warm day of the year; we have had sunny days before but none so extravagantly hot! The birds are collecting nesting materials; magpies have built two nests, one in an ash and the second in a silver birch at the back of our house and two robins regularly feed together at our bird table. Crocuses are flaunting their beautiful colours and nectar and a few lucky honeybees are getting the benefits.

Potatoes are chitting in the downstairs loo. So many of them the room is out of order for “usual business”.

All in all maybe Saturday did not end so badly.