• When there's only one other person in the elevator, tap them on the shoulder and then pretend it wasn't you.
• Push the buttons and pretend they give you a shock. Smile, and go back for more.
• Ask if you can push the button for other people, but push the wrong ones.
• Call the Psychic Hotline from your cell phone and ask if they know what floor you're on.
• Hold the doors open and say you're waiting for your friend. After a while, let the doors close and say, "Hi Greg. How's your day been?"
• Drop a pen and wait until someone reaches to help pick it up, then scream, "that's mine!"
• Move your desk in to the elevator and whenever someone gets on, ask if they have an appointment.
• Leave a box in the corner, and when someone gets on, ask them if they hear something ticking.
• Pretend you are a flight attendant and review emergency procedures and exits with the passengers.
• Ask, "did you feel that?"
• Stand really close to someone, sniffing them occasionally.
• When the doors close, announce to the others, "It's okay. Don't panic, they open up again."
• Swat at flies that don't exist.
• Tell people that you can see their aura
• Call out, "group hug!", then enforce it.
• Grimace painfully while smacking your forehead and muttering, "Shut up, all of you, just shut up!"
• Crack open your briefcase or purse, and while peering inside, ask,"Got enough air in there?"
• Stand silently and motionless in the corner, facing the wall, without getting off.
• Stare at another passenger for a while, then announce in horror,"You're one of THEM!" and back away slowly.
• Wear a puppet on your hand and use it to talk to the other passengers.
• Listen to the elevator walls with your stethoscope.
• Make explosion noises when anyone presses a button.
• Stare, grinning at another passenger for a while, and then announce, "I have new socks on."
• Draw a little square on the floor with chalk and announce to the other passengers, "This is my personal space!"
• Fart loudly then exclaim "Not I said the wolf"
• Jump up and down then look at the floor and shout "let go you bastard "
• Before the elevator door opens shout "DING" and then laugh and say "beat you again, Mr Elevator."
• Hire a Labrador, wear sunglasses and repeatedly walk into the walls whilst pretending to not hear the other passengers

• Wartime guides - the old dig for victory guides are still full of good advice - just update the weather information as things have changed weather wise sine 1945.
• Gardeners World - blogs from the newsworthy professionals - maybe not the best place to start as they know it all but a few good tips as you get more advanced
• Self Sufficiency - an interesting site with lots of relevant allotment information as well as uses for produce - I like this site
• The national fruit collection - time to look at the older types of produce before we lose things which are possibly more suited to different British localities.

Four warm days does not a spring make – as soon as I arrived at the allotment it rained, blew and acted generally miserable. However I stuck to the list of tasks designated for the day.

Firstly, move the wood pile. You mean every allotment doesn’t have a wood pile? This wood pile is for frames for raised beds and repairs to fences. Today it was for moving and stacking upright as I suspected that rats may have been using it as a den. I can’t prove the rat activities but I can prove that three million wood lice lived there. No doubt something else will find them a tasty meal.

Secondly, ensure that access to below the cold frame is no longer possible. It seems that I have succeeded in this with a generous application of planks from the wood pile and use of the trusty spade. There was some very irritable wild life on discovering that they could no longer hide there. Sorry family rat but you really aren’t welcome.

Thirdly, attend to compost heap. This was turned sides to middle about five weeks ago when a donation of pigeon manure was received. However Mr Blackbirds (all three) has been busy excavating for insects there. So a smart tidy up was in order. And then the large sheet of heavy duty black plastic was called in from elsewhere to cover the tidy heap and every brick available was found to hold it down. This should help to heat up the heap and rot it down more quickly. No posh compost bins here so far – just the continuation of the pile that was there when we moved in last year. The large sheet of black plastic used to line a trailer when moving farmyard manure last year has done many jobs on the allotment since then. I'm no fan of plastic but this plastic has done good.

Fourthly, attend to finding and filling pots for future use for carrot growing. Four large pots were found lurking inside the cold frame. A piece of duck board appeared from the wood pile and was stacked on top of two long planks to ensure that the top of the pots was well out of range of the dreaded carrot fly. Site chosen was the spare piece of now clear soil between the end of the parking concrete and that biggest sage bush in the world. The remains of some sacks of compost have filled up the pots. If it settles there is already a small amount of usable compost on the heap for refills.  One pot will need topping up.

Fifth and finally, shift the small amount of bagged manure to an out of the way corner – very well rotted and probably usable in the near future. It looks more like soil improver than manure.

The final job was to come home, get changed and put everything in the washing machine - a little mud goes a very long way on me.

The next list of jobs includes cleaning out the cold frame, creating a seed bed for potatoes, creating a seed bed for peas, creating a seed bed for onions, picking a day to have a bonfire which still hasn’t happened a year on and picking a spot to start another compost heap. Ho hum – and if spring ever arrives I’d like to plant some vegetables! As soon as the weather allows, there is the clover to plant under the fruit trees. The shears for the hedges need sharpening.

Oh Monday was a lovely day – shirtsleeves on the allotment. You could almost believe that spring had arrived.

It’s still very wet underfoot – very wet indeed and the soil is still not very warm.  But it seemed a good idea to finish the bean trench off so that the kitchen waste could start to rot down. There was also a small patch of soil between the garlic patch and the new rhubarb patch that needed to be worked down for use. I worked up as good a seed bed as you can get on the very reliable clay and topped it off with a layer of compost to make it a good starting bed. It was just big enough to heel in a few shallots.  So I thought why not? It’s a sunny area so any of the warmth will hit there first. I’ve added some netting till they get their feet down to stop the wildlife visiting.

It would be nice to have a greenhouse but at the moment there is nowhere cleared to put one and no money in the bank to pay for one. So I’ve put a few onions in a couple of seed trays in the line of the window in the shed to get started. Oh I know it’s late but the season up here seems to be late anyway.  We managed to get French Marigolds started that way last year so why not try again with something else is my logic.

I’m planning out where to put a row of tubs for the carrots at the moment. Tubs? Well it’s not so easy to get a seedbed going if you want straight ones on the allotments here (very good clay you see). One of the other allotment holders said that he had found it was easiest to grow carrots in a tub and that as his was 18 inches high, the carrot fly would not reach the crop either. As I have quite a variety of pots which are large enough for this trick all I need to do is to get the compost to fill them up!  As the carrot fly won last year I am all for adopting this very good idea. It means that I can sow carrots periodically and we can have a longer season for them without having to take up so much of the plot with just one crop.