Happy Friday! So the big news of the week is that both the European trophy finals will be all English. The Champions League Final is Liverpool vs. Tottenham (Ma had such high hopes of Ajax) and the Europa final is my beloved Chelsea vs. Arsenal.
This week there was a debate about the order of the English kings, so I had to play this to prove my point!
Here is are this weeks links
The rebel priest: ‘Gay people in the church are not going to go away’
More light, more sun: May brings gardeners the promise of an endless summer. May starts well and then ends up with me panic planting all the things….
‘Ireland is changing’: booze-free bar opens in Dublin
Sustainable tourism: why the Faroe Islands closed for maintenance
Male Loneliness Starts in Boyhood.
Table for one: how eating alone is radically changing our diets
Relegation blues: how a football team’s fortunes can affect a whole city. I guess this has never been a thing I’ve thought about. I grew up in the middle of Fulham (relegated from the Premier League this season), QPR (not relegated from the Championship but it was close, they finished 19 of 24 teams) and Chelsea (not relegated currently third but it’s not been pretty!) and it never occurred to me that it would really hurt the economy of where I was from. Although a friend did describe the Weatherspoons in Shepherds Bush (where QPR are from) as the ‘wild west’ and she wasn’t wrong!
Britain’s equivalent to Tutankhamun found in Southend-on-Sea
Are these the worst supermarket substitutions ever? I’ve never ordered a supermarket shop online, so this has never been a problem for me but some of these are fab (instead of a number 5 candle, she got two 2’s and a 1…)
Tech Is No Match for Human Grossness
Rachel Held Evans, Hero to Christian Misfits
“Death is a thing empires worry about, not a thing resurrection people worry about,” she told me in 2015. “As long as there’s somebody baptizing sinners, breaking the bread, drinking the wine; as long as there’s people confessing their sins, healing, walking with one another through suffering, then the Church is alive, and it’s well.”
Britain needs to recognise Palestine as an independent state
ANC corruption is a major cause of South Africa’s failure – and the polls will show it. I remember watching the first election, people queuing for hours so they could vote. To see that of 36.5 million people eligible only 27.7 million have registered to vote, that’s tragic.
So back to work. We’re about to have a ‘Cultivating Ealing’ judge come and look at the site over all, so I decided it was time to tackle the grass overgrowing on the path, in the summer it’s a fairly constant battle and with the strimmed grass and the shredded paper, we filled the black compost bin! We’ve watered it and with any luck it’ll rot down quickly. That and some weeding, watering, rescuing the blown away cloche and harvesting nearly 2 kilos of chard took about three hours and then we quit because being hailed on is not fun. I’m English I can do a certain amount of drizzle but not hail! This is the chard after the harvest, I think it knows it’s time is nearly done. The chard will come out this month and we’ll direct sow french beans, we’re going to have climbing beans this year, green and purple.
On Monday, we filled up three of the beds with compost, dug up more raspberries, they are popping up all over the place and finally planted out the last of the sweetpeas. 
They’ve been in the cloche for ages and although the longer ones are looking a bit weather beaten, they’ve all got good new growth coming through and just need some sun to start growing.
We also got to chat to our lovely allotment neighbour Joe who I inherited my plot from. Joe is having a tricky time health wise and some people are coming to dig his plot over later on this month but he’s asked us if we’d like to take on this space for the summer if he thinks he can’t cope with it.
We’ve said yes and if it happens, we’ll plant courgettes, tomatoes, cucumbers and extra beetroots and leeks, which we’re bound to have. We’ll look after them but Joe can just help himself to. It’s exciting to think about more space but sad that Joe can’t look after it as his care was the reason that my first year was such a comparative success, we’ll see what happens…
After and look you can see Dennis’ onions…
I know it looks a bit ragged now but it’ll recover and you can see that the rosemary is getting woody at the bottom and that will only get worse if it doesn’t get an annual chop.
The potatoes are all doing well, as are the gooseberries, rhubarb, raspberries, blueberries and plum tree. 
The garlic is strong but like all the other garlic on the site has rust. There isn’t really anything I can do, I’m feeding and watering it regularly and we just have to hope for the best! The broad beans have beans!
What is it about the first week back at work after a holiday that makes it so very tiring? This week I have been mostly exhausted, for no apparent reason! Last Monday was not a good day, because I started it by smashing my phone, £145 and three and a half hours at the Apple Store fixed it (I was ok with hanging around Westfield but only because I had a book!), but it wasn’t the best way to start a week, especially combined with 255 emails and someone in the office calling on my first aid skills because someone else was having a seizure. Smooth re-entry into the world of work, it was not..
This week is all about work, I need to focus, catch up and be ready for the weekend, which is another bank holiday and all about the allotment! I also want to make bread pudding, catch up on the ironing and have a no sweets/chocolate week, because it worked for Lent and after a week of indulgence, I’m ready not to eat them again!
Nic Dempsey 