"To allot or apportion ..."

This month is the peak of the season for picking fruits.  The pigeons, snails, mice, deer, and any other non-invitees, may have attempted to eat you out of home and, well, allotment, but there is no greater satisfaction than a spell on your very own allotment at present.  That, if you have the time.  And if you don't you will lose this year's crop.  What fruits have you grown?  Maybe strawberries,  raspberries, currents in varied colours, gooseberries if you can overcome the spikes.  Later will come the blackberries, although I already have a few of the advance guard.  The hot dry weather is making it difficult for some vegetables to produce useful material for us, but, hey, we can't always win on all fronts.

St Albans abounds with allotments although there were many more grounds than exist today.  But then, allotments have always tended to be temporary in nature.  Camp district had vast swathes of former farms at Beastneys, Little Cell Barnes and Cunningham.  Hatfield Road sported allotment grounds to the east of the cemetery, and there were growing spaces in Burleigh Road, the Willow estate, Gurney Court Road, Chestnut Drive, on spaces between the houses on slow-to-develop housing developments between WW1 and WW2, and in a dozen other places.  They are the lungs of our busy lives, quiet oases (usually) where we can relax and think.  Long live allotments.

Sandridge parish of St Leonard is making preparations to celebrate its 900th anniversary in 2014 (before the 1100s it was part of the vast parish of St Peter).  I notice that the event now has its own website – www.sandridge900.com   You may like to keep an eye on it for further details of the ways the parish intends to celebrate.  After all, it's not every day that you get to celebrate your 900th birthday!

If you are reading this on Sunday 21st July before 8pm, you are just in time.  If not, there are always the ever-useful TV catch-up services.  Tonight there is finally a programme on Channel 4 about the plane which most people forget.  For once it is not the Spitfire which has caught the programmers' attention, but our very own 'wooden wonder' the Mosquito (Mozzie), designed and built by the de Havilland Aircraft Company, Hatfield.




And while on the topic of forthcoming events, the Magna Carta is coming to St Albans.  Although it sounds like a blockbuster movie,  the Cathedral is hosting this rare event, and if we book in advance, we get our own personal few minutes with the revered document.  I can't help feeling the emotion would have been completely different if the exhibition had been held in or around 1086.