by Henry VIII applies for an allotment and discovers that growing your own vegetables now requires the patience of a saint
I once granted an entire estate to a loyal courtier over a single dinner. My local council has placed me at number forty one on a waiting list for a plot the size of a modest rug.
The Application
I submitted the application online, a form asking for my address, my reasons for wanting a plot, and my availability to attend the site for maintenance, questions I answered honestly, listing my reason as a general desire to grow something that does not require a supermarket loyalty card, an answer the confirmation email did not appear to find remarkable in any way.
The List
The council informed me by letter that I currently sit at position forty one, with an estimated wait of four to seven years depending on turnover, a timeframe I found genuinely staggering given that I once acquired more farmland than most European nations combined within a single decade, admittedly through methods the allotment society would very likely frown upon.
The Site Visit
I visited the existing site out of curiosity and found it tended by a community of gardeners with a seriousness I found genuinely moving, several of them retired, several clearly treating their plots as the primary structure around which the rest of their week was organised, a devotion I recognised instantly from my own approach to hunting, minus the actual killing.
The Waiting List Chairman
A man named Reg, chairman of the waiting list committee, explained the process transparently, plot by plot, and told me that positions rarely move quickly because, in his words, once people get one, they never give it up, a sentence I found genuinely poetic given how few things in my own reign people ever managed to hold onto for more than a decade, including, on occasion, their own heads.
The Patience
Reg suggested I put my name down for a smaller starter plot, which moves faster, and I have done so, currently sitting at number six on that particular list, a position I check obsessively, the way I once checked reports of enemy troop movements. I have decided that whatever plot I eventually receive, however many years it takes, I will grow nothing but tomatoes and possibly a small stubborn grudge against Reg’s entire waiting list system.
The Consolation
Reg has since added me to a smaller mailing list for last minute plot availability, explaining that occasionally a plot becomes free with little notice when a holder moves away or, in his gentler phrasing, is no longer able to maintain it. I check my phone for that email the way I once checked for word from Rome, hoping this time the answer arrives considerably sooner.
I have taken to walking past the existing plots on my way home most evenings, simply to look, the way a man might window shop for a life he has not quite been granted access to yet. It is, in its own quiet way, simply a modern extension of my hunting habit, now aimed at tomatoes rather than deer. Further reading on the wider chaos of modern Britain: Burnham’s own plan to nationalise bricks before Britain reinvents one, the proper London pub where history finally sat down, the full eyewitness account of how I came back in the first place.
