Every one's a winner

Anyone who happened to be lurking outside the kitchen window at the back of Dixon Towers last Friday night would have been (a) trespassing and (b) mystified.

For what would the putative lurker have made of the sight of the householder, on his knees with one of those strap-on torches on his head, peering through the murky glass door of the oven (cleaned by Mrs D only four short weeks ago), and conducting a close inspection of the interior?

Enough riddles – the answer is obvious. Having rashly decided to enter the scone-baking competition at the Weston Village Flower Show the following day, and having never baked a scone his life, the bloke with the torch was doing a trial bake.

And it wasn't going well.

Mrs D had gathered together her vegetable crop ready for the next day's competition, and was standing by with helpful advice. "Read the recipe twice before you start," she said. 

No time for that, we're on a deadline.

"Ten minutes to make, ten minutes to bake," she said, recalling the wisdom of a long-retired Domestic Science mistress."Knead it gently," she said. But how can you when it's thrashing around on the worktop like a disgruntled moray eel?

We eventually counted the first batch in, counted them out, and decided they were "All right".

Scones. Or Scowns. Or Sconns. In a tea towel. Last Friday

Although whether "All right" would be enough to compete with the doughty bakers of the assembled TGs and WIs remained to be seen.

Saturday dawned, and with it a second round of scone-baking, even more stressful than the first. You know how scones are supposed to be flat on top? Well these went in flat all right, but came out slanting.

We displayed our produce in the village hall that morning, and stood by for the results.

Mrs D swept the board with her veggies, and is now the proud holder of the Nelson Wiltshire Memorial Trophy (the gardener's equivalent of the World Cup). Not unsurprisingly, the scones came nowhere.

There was some consolation. Yours truly won the guess-the-name-of-the-teddy competition. He's called Merlin. He's brown and fluffy. And he's a lot more cuddly than a scone.

Glut feeling

So here are again. Back from the hols with little more to show for it than a couple of fading mosquito bites and that warm feeling you get when you know you’ve helped pay off a significant portion of the French national debt.

All we have to do now is avoid reading depressing features on the BBC website with titles like The Ten Worst Things About Post-Holiday Blues, keep our heads down and wait for the bills to start rolling in.
Of course, September does have its good points: mists and mellow fruitfulness, yours truly’s birthday, kids off the video games and back into what is apparently known these days as a “learning environment”. What’s not to like?

Plus the added annual excitement of the Weston Village Flower Show, for which entries had to be in just a couple of days after we got back from foreign fields, thus causing a flurry of activity around the allotment as Mrs D and self tried to find six straight runner beans, an unfeasibly long stick of rhubarb and three matching onions.

The chum who had kindly volunteered to keep things watered while we were away had done a sterling job, but she obviously didn’t have much of a taste for courgettes.

Because there, among the burgeoning sweetcorn, the rampant pumpkins and the glistening tomatoes were two of the biggest specimens ever to miss out on being made into soup. Or omelette, or ratatouille, or zucchini surprise, or any of the many delicacies you can make out of said squash.

Imagine if you will (or even if you won’t) a pair of monster courgettes, each as long as your arm and exuding dark green vegetable malevolence from every pore. Hold that thought and you’ll have a fraction of an idea of what these courgettes were like.

Unfortunately there isn’t a prize for the biggest courgette in the entire universe at this Saturday’s show (September 7, 2.30pm, All Saints Centre, Weston, Bath). And a big courgette is an inedible courgette. So our two beauties had to go  into the compost –  ready to feed next year’s crop.

All aboard the Victory Dive Bomber

You can always tell it’s autumn. For a start, the sun comes out, the temperature rockets above 17°C for the first time since March, and you get a chance to wear the shorts you bought back in July when you still optimistically thought you were in with a chance of a tan.

Other signs of the changing season are more subtle, but nonetheless telling.

A text arrives from a certain teenager on his first day of sixth form, asking what time school starts.

A certain dad wonders if there are evening classes in how to avoid becoming a helicopter parent.

An email arrives from the alma mater, reminding former students that Christmas is only four months away and that the college online store will soon be open for the sale of cards, souvenirs and other festive knick-knacks.

At least one former student nearly succumbs to the temptation to (a) dig the degree certificate out of bottom of the filing cabinet; (b) ceremonially burn it; and (c) post the ashes back to said alma mater without a stamp.

But logic and good reason prevail. It might still come in useful in the event of a career change. (Fat chance of that, mind you, this far into middle age. But you’ve got to be prepared for anything these days.)

On a jollier note, there’s a funfair in Victoria Park this weekend. And not your ordinary disco-blasting diesel-fume-belching type of funfair either.

No, this is a steam funfair, Carters by name, and it offers such nostalgic delights as the Yachts, the Chair-o-Planes and the Galloper.

Plus white-knuckle attractions like the Wall of Death, Carters Rock’n’Roll Dodgems and the Victory Dive Bomber.

Which comes complete with RAF roundels and a beautifully painted warning that  “pregnant ladies, customers under the influence of drink or drugs, people with weak hearts, or a nervous disposition should not attempt to ride”.

There’s the Mini Octopus for the tinies and the Sensational Giant Octopus for the not-so-tinies.

And if those don’t tickle your fancy then you could try the Lightning Skid, Jollity Farm or the Scenic Electric Dobbies.

They’re all original fairground rides, some dating back to the 1920s or even before, lovingly maintained and restored and full of nostalgic charm.

One of the payboxes that was going up in the park on Wednesday bears the legend “A Show for Young and Old that Never Fails to Please”. And if that doesn’t beat the autumn blues then nothing will.

Except perhaps the Dixon family’s showing at the Weston Flower Show.

If you read last week’s offering you may well be interested to know how the cake got on. If you didn’t, then you may not, but stick with us.

It won a Highly Commended, which isn’t bad for a second foray into the arcane world of sponge baking, although it was probably the inclusion of Mrs D’s strawberry jam that swung it.

 Her runner beans and sweet peas carried the day.

As did Miss D’s Animal Crossing knitted toy.

And then there was Herman, the comedy carrot who looked a bit like a hermit crab and who has since been fed to the guinea pigs.

You  had to be there, really.

How to have your cake and eat it

What goes around comes around, they say, and nothing with more regularity than the annual Weston Village Flower Show.

It takes place this Saturday, September 1, at 2.30pm at the All Saints Centre, High Street, Weston.
And preparations around the Dixon household have been, shall we say, fervid.

Of course the trouble this year is that we’re just reaching the end of the Summer That Wasn’t, and things horticultural aren’t as far ahead as they might be.

Indeed, reports have reached us from other parts of the country of gardeners resorting to performance-enhancing skullduggery in an attempt as they struggle to bring their veggies up to scratch.

The case comes to mind of the woman from East Anglia whose tomatoes were so unripe on the night before a show that she whipped out the nail varnish and gave them a surreptitious coating of scarlet.

And then there was the Yorkshireman whose pumpkins were so flabby that he took a bicycle pump to them in a misguided attempt to inflate them  to regulation size. He ended up in Casualty, peppered with pips.

Of course there’ll be no such monkey business at Weston this weekend, and even for those who don’t aspire to high honours in the vegetable stakes, a quick glance down the list of classes in the programme offers all sorts of alternative challenges.

What’s this in the Homecraft section? “Class 9: MEN ONLY, a Victoria Sandwich baked in a seven-inch tin.”

Hang on a minute. MEN ONLY? Why isn’t there a WOMEN ONLY section? With classes like unblocking drains, sealing baths, strimming allotments and other tasks which might otherwise be considered the domain of us chaps?

There’s only one response to this reverse sexism: bake that cake.

First, it’s off to the supermarket to top up on self-raising flour, baking powder, eggs and caster sugar. Then it’s back to Dixon Towers for a practice run, only to be subjected to a well-meaning blast of back-seat cooking from Mrs D.

“Read the recipe before you start,” she says. “And warm up the oven while you’re mixing.”

So far, so flipping obvious.

Because this is easy. Weigh it out, mix it up, realise you should have beaten the eggs before you put them in, decide it doesn’t matter, slap the mixture into the tins, re-read the recipe for some light entertainment, realise you’ve forgotten to add the baking powder, decide it does matter, scoop the mixture back into the bowl and stir in the magic dust while Mrs D mutters dark imprecations about “not rising properly” (whatever that means), slap the mixture back in the tins and stick them in the cosy oven.

What emerges, after cooling, sandwiching with jam, sprinkling with sugar and inspecting for leaks, is tested by assembled family and friends and judged to be “All right.”

Which isn’t bad for a first attempt.

So the second attempt will be on display at the All Saints Centre Weston on Saturday afternoon.
Unless of course it’s rolled off the plate and smashed a seven-inch hole in the floor.

In which case we won’t be taking it home with us for tea.

Skullduggery in the vegetable patch

Ahh, September. The month when the clouds of August roll back, the winds die down, the rain subsides and the sun bursts forth once more, just in time for everyone to go back to work.

All that remains of the summer holidays are memories, blurred photos of the family huddled miserably in the lee of a Welsh slate quarry, and bills.

Let’s not be gloomy, though. Because apart from meteorological schadenfreude, the end of summer also means the start of the vegetable show season.

Growers everywhere are preparing their prize specimens for display, and the methods they use to ensure success make the mind boggle.

Some competitors swear by secret potions. If you’ve ever wondered how that prize-winning pumpkin got so plump, then it’s probably thanks to regular doses of tea leaves, scrumpy and Bovril, drip-fed straight to the roots.

Some resort to furniture polish. It’s a well-known fact in horticultural circles that a quick spritz of Mister Sheen will give your best King Edwards the glossy shine they need to catch the judges’ eyes. And noses.

Some resort to trickery. Without giving away too many secrets, tying little kitchen weights to the ends of your runner beans is a favourite way of getting them to grow straight and true.

And while frowned upon in the bean-growing fraternity, the practice isn’t exactly illegal. As long as you don’t get caught.

No, the world of prize vegetable growing is a tough one, with no quarter asked or given. And anyone who enters it had better keep their wits about them.

It’s thus with some trepidation that we Dixons view the approach of this year’s Weston Village Flower Show, which takes place on Saturday, September 3 in the All Saints Centre, starting at 2.30pm.

Not that any of the competitors would stoop to skullduggery, you understand, but because our family reputation is at stake.

Mrs D has had some success in the past, but she’s already blaming the hopeless summer on a lack of winning produce. So perhaps this Saturday her two-year run as Onion Queen of Weston will finally come to an end.

And yours truly? Well, just read the introduction to the show programme. This year’s celebration of fruit-, flower- and vegetable-growing expertise will be opened, and the prizes presented, by none other than... Hugh Dixon, columnist with Ye Olde Bath Chronicle.

Ooh heck. Everyone gets their 15 minutes of fame, but this is taking the mickey. It means getting up on the hind legs and making a speech in which one tries one’s best to sound knowledgeable and entertaining about subjects about which one knows next to nothing.

Including chilli-growing, if this year’s miserable crop of duds is anything to go by.

Quite seriously, though, please don’t let this rare public appearance by your humble columnist put you off going. As all good gardeners will tell you, every rose has its thorn.

Double yellow peril

It started more than a year ago, with a circular from the council. There was a proposal to extend the parking restrictions up from the bottom of our road.

It was called the Various Roads, Outer Area, Bath: Prohibition & Restriction of Waiting Order 2009.

And as is right and proper in a democratic society, we were offered the chance to comment.

Which we did. And delivered our comments by hand to the wrong letterbox in Keynsham, two hours before the deadline. (Thanks, kind Keynsham person, for sending them on.)

The months passed, the council considered the views of objectors and supporters, and eventually ruled in favour of the original proposal. Not only was democracy done, but it was seen to be done. All very right and proper, even if our objections were overruled.

We sat down (metaphorically) to wait for the yellow lining lorries to arrive and lengthen the existing double yellows.

Then the winter came, and the snow, and the potholes. And still the yellow liners didn’t come.

Spring passed, and summer too. The potholes got worse, the yellow lines stayed the same length.

Then, in late summer, a second notice arrived from the council: the road was to be resurfaced. Regular readers will know all about that episode: casual browsers will be spared the gripping details.

Anyway, the road was resurfaced, and we waited for the double yellow lines to be replaced. In our naivety we thought that someone might do some joined-up thinking and implement the Various Roads Order.

They didn’t. Here’s what actually happened.

The coning people coned off an area which didn’t match the  order but did bear a vague resemblance to what had been there before.

On one side of the road, a driver parked their car at the top end of the  cones.

The lining folk came along  and painted a one-foot double yellow line behind the car, then left a car-length gap, then continued the lines down to the bottom of the road.

They painted more double yellows  further up the road, and then painted white Access Protection Markings parallel with them, so bits  of the road with dropped kerbs had two yellow lines and one white.

They left most of the opposite side of the road unlined. Drivers used the car-length gap as a parking space.

The coners came back and coned the gap and the opposite side. A driver parked among the new cones. (Can you guess what’s coming?)

The lining people came back and painted in the first gap and most of the opposite side, leaving a second car-length gap  opposite the place where the first one had been.

They covered up the white lines they’d painted a week previously with a thin layer of black gunge.

And then they went away, presumably feeling pleased with a job well done, and as of Wednesday morning they hadn’t come back.

Who said the circus had left town?

Wild, wild Weston

High noon in the Badlands. Small white empty clouds float motionless in a steel-blue sky. A harsh sun beats down on a dried-out gulch. Not even the tumbleweed stirs as the long hand of the town clock ticks, ticks, ticks towards 12.

A curtain twitches and a face appears briefly at the window, casts a worried glance towards town, then vanishes. The curtain flicks back and the dusty street is still once more. They’re coming. And they mean business.

Actually, if you believe anything you’ve read in the last 80 words or so, you’re the victim of what is known in the trade as journalistic licence. It’s time for a reality check.

We’re not in the Badlands of South Dakota: we’re in leafy Weston Village, Bath on Sunday lunchtime. It’s not a baking hot day: it’s about average for the middle of September. And it’s not even high noon: it’s one in the afternoon. Although strictly speaking it would be midday if we were on GMT and not BST. Let’s not lose track, though...

Because last Sunday, they were definitely coming, and they certainly did mean business.

“They” in this case meaning the road re-surfacers.

Ever since the cold snap last winter, our road has suffered from a bad case of the potholes. Driving down the hill has subjected the Dixonmobile (and every other  vehicle) to the suburban equivalent of a spin round the tank training grounds on Salisbury Plain.

Suspensions have twanged, shock absorbers have boinged, passengers have bounced and unrestrained parcels have flown through  windows every time a car went by.

But all the time, the promise has been there: “One day,” the handouts from the council have assured us, “we’ll come and mend your road.”

So at last the contractors arrived. All the parked cars mysteriously vanished (except for one), and a sweeper lorry trundled up and down clearing away the early autumn leaves while purposeful looking blokes in reflective jackets taped over the ironwork.

And everyone on the street came out to have a look. The excitement was palpable, we all had a  chat, and waves of community spirit drifted upwards into the September air.

At last the big moment arrived and a gigantic machine started spreading the micro-asphalt.

(Which, for the non-technically-minded, is a combination of aggregate and bitumen emulsion that restores skid resistance quickly and with minimal disruption to the carriageway user. Or so it says in this leaflet. What it doesn’t say is how to get the bits off your carpet.)

First the machine did our side. Then it did the middle. And then it went away, along with the road-sweeper and all the yellow jackets.

An eerie hush descended and we all started to wonder: whose was that car at the bottom of the hill? Would the asphalteers ever come back and finish what they’d started?

Of course they did, on Monday, and we now have a lovely new road.

It may not be the wild, wild west. But it certainly livened up Weston.

When vegetables go get weird

So that’s it then. No more bank holidays between now and Christmas. A three-and-a-half-month desert of work, weekend, work, weekend, work…

Meanwhile, of course, the clouds have parted, the wind has dropped, the sun is shining and it’s summer at last, just in time for the kids to go back to school.

You get the picture. We need something to cheer us up. Now and every weekend between until the festive season.

Well, we can start with the Weston Village Flower Show. It’s this Saturday, and it should provide enough fun and jollity to get us through the first week of the Long Hard Slog Through Autumn.

Wallace and Gromit fans will remember the climactic scene in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Rotten cad and all-round bounder Victor Quartermaine chases Wallace, who has been transmogrified into a gigantic and voracious rabbit, through the village fruit and vegetable show. Quartermaine has armed himself with an ancient blunderbuss, loaded it with golden bullets supplied by the vicar, and is out for bunny flesh.

Meanwhile, in the skies above the show another chase is going on. Gromit and his arch enemy, Quartermaine’s slavering hound Philip, are slugging it out in an aerial dogfight (geddit?) in planes untethered from a fairground ride.

It’s not spoiling the story too much, if you’re one of the few people who don’t know it already, to reveal that the good end happily, the bad unhappily.

Don’t imagine for a minute that anything quite as dramatic as that will be happening in Weston on Saturday. The show is a generally calm affair, with more than 100 classes for produce, crafts, cooking and art.

With one exception: the Humorous Vegetable competition.

Quite possibly this part of the show was inspired by Blackadder II. (Remember the turnip that looked like a thingy?) It may equally well have its historical roots in the odd-looking produce that were such a memorable feature of That’s Life.

Be that as it may, if you want to see contorted carrots and preposterous potatoes in abundance, Weston All Saints Centre is the place to be this Saturday afternoon.

Mrs D was going to enter her secret weapon: a tromboncino. For those who don’t know – and there’s no reason why you should –  a tromboncino is a monstrously mutated cousin of the courgette, with a curved body and a club-shaped blobby bit at the business end.

The specimen that Mrs D has nurtured lovingly from seed is now more than 120cm from nose to tail, and threw a system error when we tried to weight it on the electronic kitchen scales.

It also causes spontaneous and uncontrollable laughter in all who see it, and is quite rude into the bargain. We don’t really feel we can take it out of the house during daylight hours without causing a breach of the peace. So for now we’ll just stick with a comedy carrot.

Weston Village Flower Show, Saturday September 3, 2.30pm in the All Saints Centre, Weston High Street, Bath.

Big Boy's hot date

He was big, he was red and he was hot-looking. He was a cayenne chilli, and he was one of your humble (and hopefully horticultural) columnist’s best hopes at the Weston Village Flower Show last Saturday.
He had been tenderly nurtured from seed, coaxed through spring frosts and summer rains, protected from greenfly and sheltered from slugs and snails. He had been fed, watered, coaxed and cosseted from tender bud through burgeoning fruitlet to green, swelling pod to his final, fiery, glowing glory.
His name was Big Boy. And boy, was he big. At least for a cayenne. But then, he had a big job to do if he and his two slightly smaller companions were to win against all those other capsicums.
The show, which can trace its history back to 1892, goes from strength to strength, this year attracting around 500 entries from 100 or so people.
The title “flower show” doesn’t really do it justice, because not only are specimen flowers on show but also fruit, vegetables, paintings, photographs, floral arrangements, handicrafts, home-made wines, cakes, scones, pies and marmalades. There’s even a class for Humorous Vegetable.
The procedure for entering the show is nerve-wracking but scrupulously fair. Entries close on the Wednesday, when you have to make your initial decision about how much of your produce, cookery or craftwork is going to be ready to face the public on the Saturday. Mind you, with each entry costing the princely sum of 20p, if you misjudge the ripeness of your fruit or veg you’re hardly going to be out of pocket.
Bright and early on the Saturday morning you spring from your bed, gather your entries and trundle down to the All Saints Centre. It’s a bit of a scrum because every gardener, cook and craftsperson in Weston has got there before you and is busy setting up their display.
It’s a great chance to compare your offerings with those of your friendly rivals, and to indulge in a bit of pre-judging banter. And it’s now that doubts start to form in your mind. Is Big Boy really that big, especially compared with three chunky sweet peppers and some sturdy-looking jalapeños? Never mind, you think: size isn’t everything.
At 10.30 the doors close and the village enters a sort of vegetable purdah. While the judges go about their work you wait for the grand opening, courtesy of Weston farmer and poet John Osborne MBE.
The band plays, the raffle raffles, the tombola spins, and you walk the displays, putting off for as long as possible the moment when you find out if Big Boy has made the grade.
All life is here, with the exception of Dixon Junior, whose teenage cool disqualifies him from attending for more than a token ten minutes.
As you wander, you realise that it’s not you but your spouse who was first in line when they were handing out the green fingers.
Mrs D, in her second year of competition, comes away with a tidy haul of prizes including the official titles of Carrot Queen, Onion Lady and Chutney Mistress of Weston.
Eventually you get to Big Boy. There he sits, forlorn on his paper plate, without even a Highly Commended to his name. You console yourself (and him) with the thought that taking part counts more than winning. There’s always next year, and meanwhile Big Boy has a hot date. With a chicken Madras.