Sweet tomatoes

It is an almost daily ritual this time of year to stop at one or more of the many roadside fruit and vegetable stalls for a punnet of vitamins...50p for a bag of apples, 80p a sack of tomatoes, £1.50 for raspberries that taste superior to anything the Quik-E-Mart can offer. Like most of our neighbours we should probably grow our own, but the allotment remains an elusive aspiration. Truth to tell I’m hardly Monty Don, one of the horny-handed sons of toil. Yet how difficult can it be to plant a seed in the ground and dose it with water? And gardening comes with a shed – somewhere to hide, to muse away my leisure hours. I suspect that’s the principal attraction.