Page 1 of Rough Around the Hedges

1

ROSE

Hanbury Allotments

“Behold my schlong!”

I stabbed my trowel into the raised vegetable bed in front of me and stared over the fence at my neighbour. “George, I’ve told you not to talk about your marrows that way. I’ve already had to calm Carol down three times because her grandson told all the ladies at church to ‘behold his schlong.’”

“That sounds like Carol’s problem,” George said nonchalantly, shrugging his drooping shoulders.

“It’s mine when she complains to me as the head of the allotment committee,” I pointed out.

“I know I’ve used it frivolously in the past, but I mean it this time. Look, Rose.” He leant over the waist-high fence and held his monstrous tiger marrow out in front of me. “It’s fuckin’ massive.”

He wasn’t lying. He needed two hands to hold it, and never had I seen a man so proud of one giant vegetable.

Size really did matter, it seemed.

“Mind your language,” Susan said from the other side of my plot. “And stop referring to your vegetables as genitalia, George. It makes it sound like you’re overcompensating for something.”

“I don’t need to overcompensate for anythin’.” George huffed, hugging his marrow to his chest. “Just because you aren’t getting any.”

“I’m seventy-one. What am I supposed to be getting? The bloody flu? Backache? Cataracts surgery?”

That was a bit dramatic of her.

She wasn’t that old.

She was practically middle-aged these days. And the picture of health, thank you very much.

Then again, Susan wouldn’t be Susan if there wasn’t a little drama in her day.

“Sex, Susan. Sex,” George said, enunciating each word. “S-e-x.”

“Psh.” She waved her gloved hand through the air in front of her. “Who has the time for sex? What’s wrong with a good cup of tea and reruns ofThe Chaseto fulfil all your needs on a Friday night?”

Well, a cup of tea, for a start, but if I said that out loud, I’d be chased out of the country.

“What needs are being fulfilled byThe Chase?”

“Bradley Walsh.” Susan licked her lips. “Now, there’s a man I’d let sex me up.”

Disgust contorted George’s aged features, and his jowls wobbled when he shuddered. “I don’t come to the allotment for casual sexual harassment like this.”

“You’re the one calling your marrow a schlong.”

“That’s less harassment than saying you’d sleep with Bradley Walsh.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I bet Bradley Walsh would.”

“How do you know? You haven’t asked him.”

“I don’t need to ask him to know what he’d think.”

“What about Gordon Ramsay instead, then? He’s a tasty thing.”

---