Today I was moved to investigate and found a couple of chaps outside a van called chamonix who were only too happy to explain to me that the field had been turned into allotments for the use of the people living on the housing estate which had been built on what was West Park Hospital, presumably part of the package which the developer had signed up to with the council. He said that he thought that around 30 of the 60 plots had been taken, although he had not seen any gardening activity to date - just an older gentleman taking a couple of hours to pick himself some grass seeds. Presumably a chap with cage birds, careful enough with his money to prefer spending time picking rather than spending money in a pet shop. Unless, that is, he was a former resident of the hospital paying a sentimental visit to one of his old haunts.
He also seemed to think that not being a resident was no disqualification and that if I got in touch with the chamonix people at reference 2, maybe they would sign me up. I was rather tempted, the plots looking quite small, a lot smaller than that I used to have next to Stamford Green School. Much more suitable for the older gardener. Maybe the hour a day I try to spend walking could be spent gardening instead? Quite enthusiastic for the remainder of my walk, which I spent thinking about low maintenance gardening. Would there be rules about what could be grown? Would I, for example, be allowed to grow pampas grass, bamboos and big aloe-ish succulents - all things which I rather like, which do not need much attention once established, and which are too big for my part of our garden proper? What about trees and huts? Garden benches? Who would be responsible for dealing with the deer problem - it only being few weeks since I last saw a couple of deer in a nearby field? Quite a lot of stuff about my previous experiences with deer at reference 3.
Calmed down a bit now - but I shall reflect further.
PS: I had thought to include this fascinating stuff in a comment to the original post at reference 1. But a couple of experiments with comments containing the search term 'beelzebub1' (of which there are now two) suggest that the blog search offered at the top of the blog does not look at comments, reducing the value of comments as text of record. Which I why I have opted, on this occasion, for a whole new post.
It is possible that it takes a while for the blog indexes to be updated with stuff from comments, but I am not sure that there are any indexes, that it would be worth indexing the blog at all. The blog is quite small by the standards of modern search engines and a scan without the support of indexes would probably be quite fast enough.
And if I get really bored I can start testing the performance, if any, of blog search on word roots, capitals and plurals, all that good stuff which google itself is quite good at. Also the supplier of the picture from chamonix included above.
Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/long-grove-park.html.
Reference 2: http://www.chamonixgroup.co.uk/.
Reference 3: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=deer+fence.
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