Advice and how to ignore it

Yesterday I went to the allotment and started digging at 8 a.m. At 10 a.m after soaking their roots, I planted the two cheapo grape vines, carefully as per instructions, which involved banging two scaffold poles a foot deep into the ground. Then I did some more digging. At 11.30 I got another blister to add to the two I got over the weekend and my digging down foot started to hurt a bit so I stopped digging and paced out the plot, marking out my three main planting areas with a mottley collection of canes and scraps of wood. (It's all precision and technicalities at Plot 87). Then I did some more digging.

At 12.15, the old geezer from the plot across the way from ours arrived and we had a blokey conversation about soft fruit and rhubarb, onions and potatoes. And the lack of toilet facilities at the allotment (although Old Geezer said he'd got a 'toilet arrangement' in his shed which ran underground into his plot, and really after that I thought there was way too much information, fascinating though it was). I mentioned that I'd ordered 3 new crowns of rhubarb from a well-known seed company and, 4 weeks on, they STILL hadn't arrived. At 1 p.m the old geezer reappeared with a crown of rhubarb from his second plot at the top end of the allotment.
'Ere you are!' he said, waving the crown at me. 'Plant that. Don't know if it'll survive. It might. It might not.'

I agreed with his gardening philosophy, thanked him for his kind donation and planted Rhubarb Two next to Rhubarb One. I sorted out my maincrop raspberry bed and made a note in my gardening diary to get some more canes to replace those that hadn't taken the previous year. (Yes, okay, I admit I have a gardening diary. Problem????) Then I checked the compost bin for dead rats and horses head but all I found was a slow-worm which was nice.

At 1.30, my body was screeching 'Go home! Now!' So I walked the mile and half home wearing my red fleece and carrying the last of the leeks. It was a very warm walk. Once home, I thought, shower first, then a spot of lunch. So I had a shower and as I was getting out, the phone rang.

Now, I knew exactly who it was on the end of that phone call. I just knew.
'Hello!' trilled Vera, from France.
'Would you like to know EXACTLY what I'm doing at this precise moment in time?' I said
'What?' said Vera.
'I am crouching, commando-style, on the landing, dripping wet with no clothes on because I've just got out of the shower,' I said. 'I can't stand up because the phone is by the landing window and I don't want to give the neighbours an eyeful.'

Vera laughed. Extensively. I don't know why, because from where I was crouching in my damp puddle on the carpet, the situation wasn't very amusing at all. I didn't like to mention that the cats were both staring at me as if to say 'When you've quite finished larking about, we need feeding...NOW!'

'I'll call back,' she said. Which she did.

After chatting to Vera about various issues to do with the technicalities of growing veg, I went to write my blog. And then, I don't know why, I had the urge to go outside because I felt SOMETHING HAD HAPPENED. And there, in the middle of the very raised bed I had just been blogging about, was Mrs Miggins.

'How did you get in there?' I said, because I couldn't see any gaps in the netting or evidence of scissors, pliers or digging equipment.
'I have no idea,' said Miggins, 'but I've had a good dig about in your freshly planted rows of seeds and I'd quite like to get out now please.'

And what I'd like to say, Vera, is that you can read all the books and magazines and listen to all the advice in the world about planting and growing seeds, but at the end of the day none of them take into account random acts of God (or in my case, chickens) and you might just as well fling things in regardless and hope for the best. That's what the Old Geezer does. And it seems to work for him.