The Great Rhubarb Robbery of 2014

Hello! I have returned from the land of the computer-less, having spent the last ten days adrift in an ocean of disconnect, where everything was bleak and lonely and there were no books of faces for me to look at. Apologies for the hiatus. Business as usual has returned.

This week is a glorious, warm, thing. There seems to be a large yellow orb hovering over the city providing much warmth, most are calling it the “sun”, I however am not beyond believing it is actually a UFO emanating heat waves in an attempt to burn our freckly Irish skin to melanomic proportions in a slow bid to take over the world.  Clever aliens are playing  a long game with this one.

The soil is dry, the air smells like coconut (I am yet to see evidence of this being from sunscreen and am leaning on the theory that the aliens are planting coconut trees in Ireland in order to ruin our ecosystem with a foreign species should the skin burning plan not work out).

Gardens everywhere are blooming, there are dahlias, foxgloves and sunflowers everywhere and cabbages seem to be growing at an astronomical rate (Aliens? Anyone? The evidence is stacking up here). Unfortunately for me, I have been trapped in the office all day everyday, longing to go out to the plot to bask in the heat rays, to pick some veggies, water my plants and get my daisy dukes on while I do some hoeing.

My toe is finally on the mend after the toe breaking incident. Yep, only seven weeks later and it’s nearly not broken anymore. As you can imagine, my poor plot has suffered as a result. The polytunnel is more or less empty, the weeds are running wild and there’s not as much planted as I would have liked. This wouldn’t be all so bad if it wasn’t for the gross crime that seemed to have been committed last weekend.

It was a dull, warm Saturday evening, I was going about my business socialising with some friends, engaging in some mild dancing, indulging in some not-so-mild beverages, oblivious to the fact there were two ruffians invading my plot to steal some of my glorious rhubarb. Word on the grapevine is that two unidentified individuals entered my allotment, looking a bit shifty. One, a dark man, with a Tom Selleck style moustache, only more glorious; the other, a female with dark curly hair that bounced as she giggled. The story goes,  they made a beeline for my glorious rhubarb patch, the crowning glory of plot P26. Stalks that reached to the sky, pink stems thick and proud, large umbrellas of leaves providing shade for the royal Victorian stems below.

These two individuals are said to have committed regicide, tearing through the royal rhubarb court at speed, pulling up the rhubarb stems, discarding the leaves into my compost bin and taking off into the summer night with armfuls of fruit, giggling like princesses. What a royal pain in my……neck.

On a completely unrelated note and I’m sure this is just one giant coincidence, my parents seem to have gotten their hands on twenty fresh jars of Rhubarb jam. Yum.

The investigation continues….