Having virtually finished the  reconstruction of this website I decided it was long overdue for me to check the emails. Buried amongst the unread Horoscopes and Daily Tarot readings  (you have to get your priorities right) was one from a seed potatoe supplier. Puzzled I opened it and read it to find that the seed potatoes I had ordered and then promptly forgotten about  are to be despatched and will be with me in the next 7 days. Back to earth with a bump ,that means that playtime is over and I have  no more than three weeks to turn the mankiest piece of ground you have ever seen into something resembling a passable veg garden. My dream was to try to virtually self suffcient in fruit and veg for myself and my two sons who are still at home with me, and it goes without saying that I imagined it fertile and just like the photographs of an award winning allotment I had seen some years ago. Now as everybody knows, today's dreams  are tomorrow's reality, or in my case next year's or maybe the one one after that. Unfortunately there are just one or two slight hiccups to my dream of living the good life, firstly, I haven't a clue  how to grow veg, secondly, any seed that I sow directly into the ground either disappears without a trace or comes up years later by which time I've forgotten I've sown it and think it's a load of weeds coming up and thirdly, I have no sense of spatial awarness. Which means I think that you can fit a double decker bus in a space that's only big enough to hold a mini until somebody gets a tape measure and  shows me otherwise. Now this is where my youngest son comes into his own. Well used to dealing with my little character flaws and some of my more eccentric ideas, he measured the piece of ground I am having as my "allotment" then he measured the lounge. A normal person might say ??????? but Jonothan is very clever and there is method in his madness, apparently they are both roughly the same size. He then got my gardening books out, worked out roughly how much ground these potaoes are going to take up then rearranged the furniture to show me how much ground I have left to grow a year's worth of veg in, approximately 5ft x 10ft. It looks like I made a slight miscalculation and if every one of these seed potaoes grows into a plant and gives me more potatoes, it also looks like we could be awash in spuds and not much else. I'm now wondering how many ways there are to cook a potatoe?