Allotment: The Race Against Time

Never mind the 'interfaith' prayers: The Pope did servile work on a Sunday

Well, with a warning letter from the Council having been received through the post and the heat well and truly on to 'cultivate' my allotment, today, on Trinity Sunday, I started digging.

I know that Sunday is traditionally a day of rest, but I don't have much time due to work, so I went up to my plot and hit the ground running. Some friends very kindly came and assisted me and it now looks a lot less like a jungle than it did.

At Wyevale Garden Centre, I bought some leeks to plant. I also bought some aubergines. I'd love to buy seeds, since they are cheaper, but I guess that Brighton and Hove City Council want genuine 'evidence' of cultivation, being empiricists, so I thought I had better buy actual plants. All in all, having an allotment is getting quite expensive and I have not even yet purchased a statue of Our Lady that I saw at the garden centre. If only I was retired, having an allotment would be so much easier to maintain.

"I would like an allotment built in my honour"

So heartening to see, among the quite rather vulgar garden statues, a nice statue of Our Lady - just one, mind, which means she obviously belongs in my allotment. I need Our Lady to watch over my allotment and to ward off the predators at the Council who obviously want to take my allotment off me for reasons which can only centre on the Council's anti-Catholicism. There can surely be no other reason for their ultimatum.

I would like to take this opportunity to invite the Israeli Prime Minister, the leader of the Palestinian authority, the Greek Orthodox chap and His Holiness Pope Francis to come and volunteer on my allotment, but only to do some light weeding and sing sweet solemnities to the Mother of God. I don't want any heathen prayers nonsense on my plot and certainly not on a Sunday!

I do really appreciate my time at the allotment - when I get the chance to go that is. I won't bore you, but there is a really beautiful view out to the sea and the Roedean area. You can see right out to Seaford, or perhaps it is Eastbourne. I have to take the van that I hired over the weekend (for a princely sum at that - can I invoice the Council?) back tomorrow, but in order to get my money's worth, maybe its worth going up before I start work tomorrow and doing some more bits and bobs around the allotment. We were turning over quite a bit of earth and attracted a little Robin who came looking for worms. So cute!

Removing this bird involved major hand surgery

All I need to do is catch him and glue him to my finger and I can do an impression of St Francis or Pope Pius XII who, when he wasn't being kind to Jews and ordering monasteries and convents to hide them, almost always had a chaffinch on his finger.

I hope and pray that readers had a peaceful, relaxing and blessed Trinity Sunday. It is so sad to see that the efforts of His Holiness to foster peace and concord among the different religions yield little peace and concord for the people - and especially the Christians - of Iraq.

May God and Our Lady be with them, strengthen them and grant them the grace to accept martyrdom for the love of Christ. May God bring an end to the horrifying bloodshed there in northern Iraq and grant to Tony Blair and George Bush the grace of true repentance. Apparently, Muslims in the region saw Blair and Bush as 'Christian crusaders'.

The truth is, of course, that the Crusades were launched initially not as an exercise in global hegemony, but in defence of Christians being slaughtered by Muslims on the way to pilgrimage in the Holy Land. As time has gone on, it has become more and more apparent that in Europe, the UK and the US, the defence of Christians is now - and has been for a long time - pretty low down on the list of priorities. We are considered as the refuse of the World, but then I guess the Franciscans of the Immaculate are considered the refuse of the Church.

God help and heal Iraq and may God have mercy on us all.