On arrival at a friend's allotment, I stop dead. There is a neatly parked car … with a personalised number plate. On an allotment! And not any old plate either, we are talking your expensive single-digit variety, historically associated with celebri
ties or senior professionals, predominantly male, usually engaged in the riskier brand of investments when not skirting around the shores of a midlife crisis.
Now I am sure the new plotter is as keen to get his tatties in the ground as anyone and of course I shouldn't leap to conclusions. And yet, I cannot but think the notion of an allotmenteer having a personalised number plate is pretty interesting. For surely allotmenteering is the antithesis of ego, a robust expression of authenticity; getting your hands dirty, triumphing against everything nature can throw at you.
Years ago when I lived in London, I would risk life and limb twice daily doing the school run, fighting my way round Shepherds Bush Green and up Holland Park Avenue. Frequently I would find myself stuck at the lights behind certain well-kent entertainers in their personalised number-plated vehicles. I always wondered whether the owners realised how conspicuous the number plates made them and what a giveaway – and not just of their identity.
Yet on reflection, perhaps they needed to keep both spirits and profiles high, for back then when I was braving the west London traffic, we had arrived at pretty much the same point in the economic cycle as we seem to be now: the 1980s were tipping unhappily into the Nineties with 15 per cent interest rates, plunging stock markets, job losses and property prices slumping as chains broke down. Of course history never repeats itself in the same way, and so, today the UK faces new challenges – sky-high fuel prices, a fuel strike and eye-watering levels of personal debt. There is also talk of food becoming scarce, rice is being rationed across the globe, while on this island growing local food is the new national conversation. Which begs the question, are allotments now being repositioned, not just as a must-have for the Green minded middle-classes, but more seriously as a valuable commodity to feed the haves through the bad times? Might we one day even see the beginnings of a black market, not just in food but in allotments, with people pressured with cash to give them up? In such a futuristic nightmare, one would then definitely need people with posh personalised plates to drive the blighters off the plot.
The full article contains 431 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
