What’s on your one-day list?

The beginnings of the allotment ... photo by me

'Guess what?'

'What?'

It was early.  It was one Saturday morning last year.  It had been a busy week and I wasn’t quite ready for guessing games when the postman arrived.

‘We’ve got it!’

‘Got what?’

‘Our allotment’

‘Oh’ I said trying not to sound too despondent. My expectations from the excited ‘Guess what?’ question had been a tad more hopeful. Two round the world tickets? A lottery win, which is unlikely as we rarely buy lottery tickets.

‘Hurrah, three years of waiting and we’ve finally got our allotment’.

‘I thought you were joking … about having an allotment, I mean.’

‘No, I’m serious.  Don’t you think it would be great to grow our own vegetables’.

'If it makes you happy, I’m happy’. 

The phrase ‘our allotment’ was unnerving me slightly.  I didn’t recall signing up to this project. There was a slight recollection of a conversation somewhere in the dim and distant past a few years ago … possibly over a glass of wine one evening. It may have been added to the ‘one day list’ after the second glass.  If so, I missed it.  Two glasses of wine can be fatal. 

Do you have a ‘one day list’ in your family? Most families have one, our list grows steadily over the year - one day we’ll do this and one day we’ll do that. 

And so it came to pass that one day, today, we have an allotment. We’re in the early days of the allotment project.  There’s a shed, newly planted fruit bushes, beans, potatoes, carrots, parsnips and an endless supply of weeds.  The digging of earth and the removal of endless stones create a great keep-fit programme.  I may even give up my gym membership as the season progresses. Who knows? But I do look forward to the summer evenings when we can sit by the shed and admire our handiwork with a glass of wine in hand … one day….