Allotment folly, Gen Z bedtimes and the horror of long holidays

At last! Someone is doing something about the scourge of allotments.

- Lucy Mangan

Monday

Wait, what? Oh. Angela Rayner has been criticised for rules allowing councils to sell off allotments to raise money to meet day-to-day expenditures.

This - if you will forgive the lapse into technical jargon for a moment - is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. I feel quite strongly about this because there were (and still at the time of writing are) allotments at the end of my parents' road and they were how my dad first introduced me, in his customarily gentle way, to politics at the age of four or five. Who owned all the little gardens, I asked. The council did, he said, but let people - often who didn't have gardens of their own - to rent them pretty cheaply and they could grow whatever they wanted on there. Then when they got bored or moved away, another person had a turn.

This seemed to me exemplary sharing, of exactly the kind preached at this new thing I was trying out called primary school. I approved.

I still approve. Allotments are basically libraries for outdoor people. And, like libraries, if you sell them off, they won't come back. Do you know how far away we exist now from a time and culture that would re-establish such grace notes to national life? Further than we've ever been.

So if I were the deputy leader of a party supposedly (I think I read this somewhere) on the side of ordinary people - people without gardens, you might loosely say - do you know what I would do? Almost anything but sell their land from under them.

Tuesday