One thing that distinguishes middle age is the slow abandonment of hope. You buy trousers in strange new sizes because you’ve abandoned hope of a respectable waistline. You listen to Radio Four because you no longer hope you’ll hear new music that makes your heart soar – you’d just rather it was less noisy. You buy Le Creuset with the money that should, in happier times, have gone to a drug dealer.
In a painful admission that my wife and I no longer intend to spend our dotage trekking around the world, sipping cocktails in the palaces of sultans and emirs, smoking Sobranies and swapping bons mots with an ever-changing coterie of disposably beautiful young people, we’ve got an allotment. Not for us the glittering lights of the cities of the world, grabbing street foods in favelas and slugging rum in dive bars, not when there are rhubarbs to be cloched.
We put our names down in a flurry of lockdown earthiness, on hearing that people with allotments live longer, then promptly forgot about it. Just before Christmas we got the call telling us we’d made our way up the waiting list and could visit our new plot. Where we had dreamed of neat rows of veg, heavy with produce, we discovered one twentieth of an acre of rubble, teeming with drenched triffids. Nettles taller than a man (specifically, taller than me) were packed together in what had once been a fruit frame. The remains of a water butt gurgled foul, brown liquid as we passed.
This, then, is the time of year when I am meant to be seeing the first shoots of the future emerge, the first emerald indications that the winter is over and better times are on their way. I’m meant to be repotting seedlings and revelling in the abundance of new life thrusting from the earth all around. Instead, I’m tearing out weeds in the drizzle, trying to rescue drowning seed potatoes, and desperately swaddling everything in black plastic in the hopes of getting some sort of control. Allotments don’t make you live longer, they just make it feel that way.
Despair, however, seems to be the order of the day. No matter how much politicians tell us this is a new start, the country seems to have abandoned all hope. The best we can expect at some point is Keir Starmer – a prospect so underwhelming that even he seems vaguely apologetic about it.
The best we can expect at some point is Keir Starmer – a prospect so underwhelming that even he seems vaguely apologetic about it
Much as the prime minister’s people strive to suggest Rishi Sunak represents a break with the governments of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, it’s hard to forget he was in one of them. Boris Johnson might have been the only sitting prime minister to have been fined by the police, but Rishi Sunak was the only sitting chancellor to have broken the law and, on becoming prime minister, promptly became the second sitting prime minister to receive a fixed penalty notice from the police (by not wearing his seatbelt when he was making videos in the back of a car).
And just when Sunak wants everyone to talk about his new deal with Europe, Johnson looms from the deep, encrusted in barnacles, reminding the world how he and Rishi spent the summer of 2020 guzzling extremely-work-necessary drinks at definitely-not-parties. Johnson went for the David Brent defence: his only crime was to be too good a boss. It was essential he be allowed to properly thank people for their service at a difficult time. If anything, he was too yielding, too biddable, too accommodating: a pliant haystack.
This isn’t change, but then the people of Britain have grown too calloused to expect change. No matter what happens, the world is going to deteriorate, and worse and worse people will be rewarded more and more for helping it happen. It’s hard to take Sunak’s fresh-start government seriously when the people gathered round the cabinet table are the same ones who sat there under leaders they now accept were intolerable.
Household income hasn’t increased in real terms for the last fifteen years. The last time things were getting better was when Gavin and Stacey was on air – because then at least we could look forward to it being cancelled. Less than half the people in the country are satisfied with their health or their leisure time, according to the Office of National Statistics. As a country, it feels like we’ve given up on hope. Aiming for a better life has been beaten out of us by the 2010s. Hope floats, but so does shit. Emily Dickinson said “Hope is the thing with feathers”, although she may have been thinking of a parrot.
As we sit in our allotments over Easter, celebrating the rebirth of Jesus and the world by watching a grey sky empty itself onto sodden, unyielding clay, it would be easy to succumb to despair. The Easter Bunny’s dead from Brexamatosis.
However, you only have to dig a little to find what’s really going on. Underground, where no one can see them, things are growing. We know the people of Britain are not flowers luxuriating in the sun, but perhaps we are tubers. We’re surrounded by darkness, but full of potential. We just need to reach the light…
Nathaniel Tapley is a comedy writer and performer on the TV shows you hate
