IT IS my birthday and, after working too many weekends lately I have taken the day off to catch up on both life and allotment.
Yes, of course the weeds have done their stuff over the past few days – lots of mare's tails and dandelions bushing out around the box beds – but lines of vivid red and green lettuces greet me, their leaves so shiny it is as if someone has been polis
hing them with beeswax. Celery, too, is sprouting fast and furious in self-possessed little clumps thanks to recent rain, while the mangetout row trails the ground long past the pea sticks stage.
My neighbours wish me happy birthday and walk around the plot with me, commiserating over the weeds and marvelling at the mini figs and kiwi fruit now appearing on plants I put in back in my first season seven years ago. I was reminded of a residential art course I once went to, at which the umbrella title of my end-of-course exhibit was "Don't Give Up the Day Job". I was the most popular student because, frankly, I made everyone else look so good. I wonder how much consolation my time-poor allotmenteering gives my fellow plotholders!
My neighbour stops to pick up a minuscule weed from a box bed and, pointing to it, wisely remarks that it is never easier to get rid of a weed than when it is this small. Prevention is always better than cure. This remark suddenly brought home the skewed way we count. Prevention is never expressed on any balance sheet, for we only ever count the cost of outlay expenditure and outcomes. And so parental energy and care is never expressed as an item in national expenditure for bringing up a child who is secure and happy and not dealing drugs or throwing bricks through windows, but the expenditure of keeping a young person in a remand home is. So in our personal lives, while we can review our bank statements with varying levels of equanimity, we never count or value what we do every day to prevent weeds of all varieties gaining ground in our lives.
Then and there I make a birthday resolution: I shall start counting the value of what I prevent, as much as what I manage or fail to achieve, reclaiming the hitherto invisible silent accruals off-balance sheet in a new, more connected mathematics. Very soon the bottom line of this epiphany shows I am richer than I thought, and that the allotment, as usual with its magical capacity for promoting creative thought, is as good as money in the bank.
The full article contains 447 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
