Leaving Waitrose today I saw some pots and trays of veg plants and herbs, marked down in price and in desperate need of help. I gathered up two tomato plants, a pot of rosemary and a tray of beetroot seedlings, went back into the store and handed over 40p for the lot.
I loaded them into the boot and drove off, swearing as usual at my daft touchscreen music player which usually causes you to select entirely the wrong thing because your finger aims incorrectly as you bump over a pothole. I tried three times to choose Here Come the Warm Jets and whilst doing so I admit my course down the dual carriageway was probably less than straight.
The pedestrian crossing lights were red and a car pulled up alongside me in the outside lane. The driver gesticulated excitedly at me, and I thought he was probably going to give me a brief but strongly worded driving lesson. It only took me about fifteen seconds to work out how to shut Brian up and wind down several wrong windows. When I found the right one the driver shouted ‘you had a plant tray on the roof! It blew off, back there!!’ and drove off at the green light. I had managed to forget to put the tray of beetroot seedlings in the boot.
I drove back round the block and saw the tray in the gutter outside Aldi. I parked and went to retrieve it. No beetroot seedlings inside. The tray must have hit the ground, jettisoned the plants and then blown along the road in the strong breeze. I spent ten minutes walking up and down the road looking, but it was no good. I drove back home, grumbling at myself all the way. It wasn’t so much the 10p - I can probably still scrape together enough for a nightly bowl of gruel for the rest of the week - more the thought of my poor little rescue plants coming to a sticky end on the dual carriageway. And even worse was the grim realisation that I now seem to do something equally stupid and memory-lapse based several times a week.