It's a man thing

DESPITE all the progress with gender stereotypes, there are a few character traits that still distinguish the male.

- Mark Diacono

We may place keys anywhere about the house and they are still in the ‘correct’ place; we (and we alone) know which answers in quiz games have been superseded since publication— and we are incapable of opening a packet of courgettes without sowing them all.

Every year, I do the calculation: there’s myself, my wife and our daughter: two plants, three at a push, plus one for the slugs, makes four. And then I sow all the seeds in the packet and spend the summer complaining to anyone (left) who will listen about us swimming in courgettes.

This is trebly troubling because I like to grow three varieties. I have come up with a solution. Or, rather, my wife has: she opens and confiscates the packets once I have extracted a few seeds of each. I’m not proud it has come to this.

Every year, I grow three kinds: a familiar cigar variety, one that produces round fruit and a yellow option. The familiar cigar type changes often. This year, it’s the excellent and reliable Sure Thing, with a couple of Tromboncino— a beautiful old Italian variety— as a second sowing. Soleil is the never-changing yellow fruiter that I love both cooked and raw.