Jeremy Corbyn is incensed at Angela Rayner’s latest plan to sell off some of Britain’s beloved allotments – I hate to admit that I agree, writes Vanessa Feltz.
Vanessa Feltz disagrees with Angela Rayner’s plan (Image: Getty)
Never once in my 41 years as a columnist did I think I’d find myself in passionate agreement with Jeremy Corbyn. So profoundly do JC and I inhabit the same ideological page on this issue, I’d even join him on a pro-allotment picket line.
Mr Corbyn is incensed at Angela Rayner’s plan to sell off some of Britain’s beloved allotments to facilitate the building of much-needed housing. I acknowledge our lack of habitable homes, but tarmacking over allotments is a move so myopic that the entire cabinet ought to be urgently dispensed to Specsavers. Dear Government – get a grip.
Vanessa urges the government to listen to Corbyn (Image: Getty)
We are constantly told, to save ourselves and the NHS, that we should get outside, exercise, breathe in bucketloads of free fresh air, move our muscles and – above all – step away from pizza, doughnuts and ice-cream and consume a diet rich in vegetables and unprocessed produce.
Angela, joining the dots here is hardly MENSA-level. Where are we guaranteed our prescribed diet of physical jerks and personally harvested fare if it isn’t on our adored allotments? Why, if they are surplus to requirements, are there over 100,000 people on waiting lists pining for a chance to till the soil and bestow bountiful crops of marrows and tomatoes on grateful chums?
Open your eyes. Punnets of strawberries picked after months of working up a healthy heart-pumping sweat aren’t the only harvest. Every allotment is woven into the local community. Allotmenteers share tips and tools, brew sustaining beverages in their sheds and provide one another with the sort of old-fashioned social networks lacking in our lonely society.
Sell off allotments and a delicate structure of neighbourliness and companionship instantly comes tumbling down. Isn’t the point of history to learn from our mistakes? Selling off schools’ playing fields was so gross an error that successive governments have been struggling to stem the epidemic of child obesity ever since.
Playing fields were exactly what we needed. Their loss short-changed generations of children, and we have never found a way to make it up to them. Allotments occupy an identical place in our nation’s DNA. We love and appreciate them so fervently that we are prepared to wait years to get one.
They are a boon to health, fitness, mental wellbeing and community. If you don’t listen to me, listen to Corbyn. Use your loaf, Angela, and get your mitts off Britain’s allotments.
Princess Anne turns 75 on Friday (Image: Getty)
Happy Birthday, Princess Anne
Princess Anne turns 75 on Friday, and we all have cause to thank her. The Princess Royal has put her shoulder to the wheel and done the very opposite of working “indefatigably”.
That’s the point. Where lesser women would be prostrate with exhaustion, Anne is just getting cracking. She toils when tired, bored, frustrated and browned off. She has dutifully and politely declared umpteen things open, launched enough vessels to block the Suez Canal, listened to legions of tuneless children warbling and planted sufficient saplings to provide cover from Land’s End to John O’Groats.
Tough and robust, she crisply responded: “Not bloody likely!” when the armed gunman who shot her bodyguard, chauffeur, a police officer and a journalist demanded she go with him. She accompanied her late mother’s coffin from Scotland to its final resting place, stoically describing what most people would consider an emotional ordeal as “an honour”.
She recycles 40-year-old outfits, does her own makeup without recourse to a mirror and is boundlessly loved by her children and grandchildren. When I was presented to Princess Anne, she joked wryly about her 1971 trip to Kenya with Blue Peter’s Valerie Singleton. I won’t repeat her jokes, but they were adult, unexpected and delivered with impeccable timing.
I’m a fan. Never has so much graft been uncomplainingly supplied by someone so keen not to attract attention. Happy birthday, Ma’am, and many happy returns.
Good Night Oscar
If you’ve heard the phrase “virtuoso performance” but never had the good fortune to behold one, may I direct you to London’s Barbican, where Tony Award-winning Sean Hayes, who played Jack in Will And Grace, is starring in Good Night Oscar to such devastating effect that some of the audience forgot to breathe.
The play’s about a true moment in American popular culture when piano-playing polymath Oscar Levant was sprung from a psychiatric hospital to make an appearance on a late-night TV talk show. Watch it and weep, holler and laugh your guts out.
Listeners loved Steve Wright
Radio 2 controller Helen Thomas writes to a newspaper: “Steve (Wright) was deeply loved by the Radio 2 family and listeners”. It’s true. Listeners loved Steve.
His audience figures and approval ratings were stratospheric. So why did Ms Thomas decide to remove him from his magnificent afternoon show when he was clearly at his peak? Losing his programme broke Steve’s heart. Does she really treat deeply loved members of her fold with such callous brutality? If she does, how fortunate we are not to be part of the “Radio 2 family”.
Naga Munchetty called out over marmite incident (Image: Getty)
Marmite
It is suggested all is not sweetness and light on BBC Breakfast where presenter Naga Munchetty is said to have reduced an intern to tears when she objected to the butter to Marmite ratio on her toast.
Before you rush to condemn Naga for delivering diva-like demands, please pause to consider the demands of live early morning TV. There’s no time for please, thank you and other niceties. Without ad breaks, BBC presenters who have been up since 3am are forced to swallow sustaining snacks at speed while producers bark directions in their earpieces and hair and make-up staff descend to tweak and twiddle.
Naga can’t leave the set to make her own toast. She probably wishes she could. If it’s rendered inedible by a surfeit of savoury spread, she must go hungry. A swift, mildly rattled “could you go easy on the Marmite?” might sound hostile to an inexperienced intern, but the chances are it’s not meant to be anything but short, sharp communication from someone harangued and hungry.
Moaning is healthy
Research proving that having a good old moan works wonders in alleviating back pain is welcome, but goes against the grain. We Brits are taught that keeping a stiff upper lip and soldiering silently on with best feet forward is the best way to deal with all that ails us.
Stuff and nonsense. Letting loose a stream of self-pitying whingeing is the right recipe for recovery. Once we’ve unleashed a litany of complaints, we feel so guilty and embarrassed that we have no choice but to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps, put a sock in it and spring straight back to rude health.
