Frydmania

Seedy weedy seeds

Dear Mr Fischbacher,

I am not trying to nick your song lyrics - in fact I listened to them again last weekend.  But I need to overcome my fear of gardening.  I know that the seeds may be seedy, but I fear I am weedy (the grass certainly is) when it comes to getting on with planting things.

This might otherwise be entitled ‘Missing the bus and visiting Poundstretcher (again)’ - there’s a rather convenient shop near the bus stop I use when heading home after work.  Rather than stand at the stop for the next 14 minutes (bus comes every 15 anyway), I nipped in, and came out with lots of packets of seeds.

I am actually thinking of them for a friend as part of a Christmas present.  But they had multiple types of seed in each packet, including a Mexican one with seeds for peppers and chillies, a Chinese one with pak choi…you get the picture.  If I combine my love of things international with my devotion to food, it might get me back to the soil.

Even better…they turned out to be a bargain!  Each packet was meant to be 99p, but for some reason, they sold them to me for 49p a packet.  I now have 15 varieties of seeds for £2.45!  All of which should help if a few of them fall on rocky wocky soil, or that kind of thing.

Spoke to my gardening friend at work, who informed me that I can also plant garlic and onions at this time of year, plus broad beans.  Not a fan of broad beans, but the other two, always useful.  Garlic, I’m told, is as easy as taking individual cloves of garlic, sticking them in the ground one by one, pressed down by your thumb.  You could even mark out a bat shape if you wanted them to be particularly effective, I guess.  (I decided to pass on jokes about staking them out.)

Hopefully, now I’ve got your interest in my gardening potential, you can reply, and shame me into planting them.

And for Mr Fischbacher’s song writing talents…find out more about what happens when seed falls on goody woody soil: www.fischy.com (It’s a Noisy World album)

Add comment November 16th, 2007

Write of reply

Here I am, chugging away at the blog, and all of a sudden, there’s two comments in a couple of days.  Someone, nay, two somebodies, are reading what I’ve written!

Now I know this is part of the point of a blog.  You can have lovely conversations about the same things - or violently disagree - or deploy increasing amounts of punctuation to form faces, smiles, beards, polar ice caps, that kind of thing.

Probably there’s a sneaking concern about people reading what I write.  Yes, this blog is probably meant to read a bit like a newspaper columnist, but really it’s a bit of a diary too.  And who wants to have someone reading their diary? 

I still have my teenage diaries, and I have to work out whether to keep them for historical purposes (what were people watching on TV 20 years ago?), counselling ones (can this help us work out how our kids might be feeling in the future?), or burn them before those same teenagers find out how much time I spent worrying about boys.

In the case of these two comments, the trick seems to be to write about someone important to the commenter.  The only difficulty is, this could get complicated.  My reasons for writing about the people in question were personal, spur of the moment celebration of them.  To go round the houses, writing about people you know - yes you, person reading this! - is unlikely to keep working.  I may get completely the wrong take on your auntie you’ve mentioned, your brother I met once, and so on.  And having just captured you as a reader, I’m hardly going to want to let you go, let along have you run headlong from these pages.

But write a reply…go on.  Even to the naff puns about Wispas.  It allows me to keep my little dream that maybe, somehow, one day, someone might even pay to read what I write.  And the longer you indulge me in that dream, the cheaper it remains for you, eh?

Alternatively, post your latest photos on Facebook, and I’ll be over there like a shot.

Add comment November 16th, 2007