*MY late father was a keen gardener and I suppose that some of his accumulated knowledge must have rubbed off on me.

Bank your spuds at all costs, use washing-up suds on blackfly, pinch the tops of runner beans… that sort of thing.

Mind you, some ideas – and this is very much an ‘old chaps’ thing – are a bit extreme in my extremely humble opinion.

After all, what is the point of planting three parsnip seeds in a barrel, only to remove two and allow the remaining root to grown to an inedible several feet long?

Or how about mixing radishes with carrot seed so that the removal of the former will effectively thin the latter?

It’s all a mystery to me.

*THERE’S never any shortage of people recalling the heyday of Worcester mail order company Kays.

My abiding memories are the early 1960s catalogues which I would scan for such items as ‘Beatle boots for 39s 11d, pay 1s 6d per week’ or adolescent curiosity taking me to the lingerie pages where I tried to fathom out how a lady could ever don a girdle, let alone get out of the strange contraption.

Yes, Kays… not so much a company, more a way of life.

*IT’S one of life’s little ironies that the vast majority of my working days have been spent indoors.

As a child, I dreamt of a life in the open, toying variously with being a cowboy, farm labourer or sailor. It was not to be, yet there is still an echo of days in the fields of north Warwickshire in the form of insisting that I eat my ‘Ranch’ midday meal in the shed.

Farm labourers were never allowed into the ‘Big House’, you see. It’s habit… real, imagined or maybe some form of inherited memory.

*THERE’S a bend on the Teme where the stream has formed a deep and wide bay.

Unless an angler has bagged this little lagoon first, I can often be found here on sunny days, happy in the knowledge that time is a river and we are the passengers on its banks.