I should have had more faith in the potatoes. I was worried they might have had blight after brown patches appeared on the leaves, and although I suspected those patches might equally have had something to do with slugs or butterflies nibbling them, I wasn’t entirely sure.

So Sunday’s great unveiling was undertaken with some trepidation.

They’ve been growing in a dustbin, a trug and four dedicated potato bags, the latter of which have better drainage, so we picked the bin batch and dragged it over to the earthy patch on the lawn that’ll be turfed over in the autumn, and tipped it over to empty the soil.

The earth spilled out and, with it, the first three potatoes of the crop. They were perfect beauties; well shaped and with smooth, blonde skin.

We pulled on gloves and dug through the damp black earth, and the deeper we dug, the more we found. Potato after potato after potato, until ten minutes later we had a crop of 55 spuds of all sizes, tipping the scales at 2.75kg (6lb).

We rubbed off the soil and left them in the greenhouse to dry while we had some lunch, then wrapped them in three lots of newspaper, sorted according to size, and put them in the fridge to start eating tomorrow.

There are six batches of potatoes in total, and if we have a similar number of spuds in each then that’ll be 16.5kg (36lb) of produce.

The closest equivalent to these at Sainsbury’s right now are Charlotte potatoes, which are £1.79 a kilo, so all being well the whole crop should be worth about £30. Today’s output, would have cost about £4.48, which more or less covers the cost of the seed potatoes from which the whole crop of six containers was grown, so anything else from here on in is more or less free.

Rich at Wyken Vineyards

Now here’s a nice place to spend a Saturday morning. Wyken Vineyards. It’s about 25 miles from Ipswich, and if you go there on a Saturday you can wander around the little farmers’ market that sets up in an old barn.

Lots of freshly-baked bread, newly-grown herbs, unusual cuts of meat and just-dug veggies, all patrolled by clucking, strutting cocks and hens. Lovely in the sunshine, particularly if you have time to sit down by the llama field for a coffee, tea, or bottle of the home-pressed wine.

Bottles from Wyken Vineyards

Pet Shop Boys

I should have gone with my hunch.

Rich and I took an afternoon off work and headed to Newmarket for some racing and a concert. I’d never been to that course before, but it’s handy for Anglia, and is far nicer than many of the London courses, thanks to a healthy smattering of oldish buildings.

Anyhow, that hunch. We started off at the little loop where they parade the horses for all to see. Number six in race four was wild of eye and foaming slightly at the mouth, and I picked it out as a winner. He didn’t win, but he did come second, so if we’d put on a couple of quid for him to be placed, we’d have won.

Second race, I told Rich to take horse three, while I took horse four. Mine had a good start, and then fell way back. His came second, and he had his first win.

Last race of the night, I picked horse four again, but neither of us put on any money and, what do you know, horse four won.

So, I didn’t win.

Bah!

Anyhow, that was only half of the night. It was a Newmarket Nights event, where your ticket (a bargain at £22) gets you in to a night of racing plus a concert – in this case the Pet Shop Boys.

It was an excellent concert. Not a huge stage, but what they had they made the best of, and I was surprised how much of the material I already knew. I reckon there were only a couple of songs (certainly no more than four) that I didn’t already know well.

It was loud and flashy, and the live versions of Suburbia, It’s a Sin and Always On My Mind were fantastic. The only downside was being behind three fat investment bankers, whose dancing consisted largely of flailing arms, and hips that span like obese tumble driers.

They were even worse they sound, and then moresome.

I’d see them again, though (the Pet Shop Boys, not the bankers or whatever they were) and the night as the races reminded me how fun watching horses could be. Only trouble is, the rest of the season is peppered with the likes of Wet Wet Wet and Ronan Keating, so perhaps next time it won’t be Newmarket Nights for us, and tonight was a lucky, happy coincidence.

Pet Shop Boys, with two mysterious men in anoraks

The BBC launched the iPlayer today. After months of user testing (or non-testing in my case, since I was sent a beta test invite some months back but have yet to take it up), it reckons it’s ready to go. Roll-out will be carefully managed, and ramped so that progressively more applicants gain to the service over time.

It’s already been well publicised (and well debated and well criticised) that the system needs Windows XP to run. Open-source advocates, Mac users, Microsoft critics and Vista users have bemoaned the fact that for the moment they’re all locked out, despite being license fee payers, and the BBC has promised to include one and all just as soon as it can.

But what about those of us who have no licence at all? I don’t have a TV in the house to which I’m moving, which annoys the fee collectors no end, to the extent that they sent out investigators to bang on my door and check I wasn’t lying.

They went away disappointed.

So if the iPlayer blocks access to viewers outside the UK, who can’t possibly have a licence, should it also block access to me? Am I any different to an Australian, who can listen to BBC radio, but shouldn’t really be watching BBC TV?

Maybe.

But what I’d rather see is a levelling of the playing field, whereby anyone, anywhere in the world can buy a licence and watch TV through the iPlayer. It would provide a massive, welcome boost to the BBC’s coffers, which could be ploughed back into programmes like Coast, How We Built Britain and The Proms.

Programmes like these would the iPlayer an invaluable asset in an online world otherwise dominated by the 30-second frippery of YouTube.

The BBC launched the iPlayer today. After months of user testing (or non-testing in my case, since I was sent a beta test invite some months back but have yet to take it up), it reckons it’s ready to go. Roll-out will be carefully managed, and ramped so that progressively more applicants gain to the service over time.

It’s already been well publicised (and well debated and well criticised) that the system needs Windows XP to run. Open-source advocates, Mac users, Microsoft critics and Vista users have bemoaned the fact that for the moment they’re all locked out, despite being license fee payers, and the BBC has promised to include one and all just as soon as it can.

But what about those of us who have no licence at all? I don’t have a TV in the house to which I’m moving, which annoys the fee collectors no end, to the extent that they sent out investigators to bang on my door and check I wasn’t lying.

They went away disappointed.

So if the iPlayer blocks access to viewers outside the UK, who can’t possibly have a licence, should it also block access to me? Am I any different to an Australian, who can listen to BBC radio, but shouldn’t really be watching BBC TV?

Maybe.

But what I’d rather see is a levelling of the playing field, whereby anyone, anywhere in the world can buy a licence and watch TV through the iPlayer. It would provide a massive, welcome boost to the BBC’s coffers, which could be ploughed back into programmes like Coast, How We Built Britain and The Proms.

Programmes like these would the iPlayer an invaluable asset in an online world otherwise dominated by the 30-second frippery of YouTube.

The unwritten rule of writing news is that news is news. Not comment. News. Facts, facts, facts and reportage, but never, ever, comment.

The BBC is very good at this, as evidenced by the fact that it can be self-critical in its own reportage without any sign of irony, defensiveness, or watering down of the facts, no matter how painful.

Sometimes, though, you wonder whether its reporters are slipping in a sneaky one behind a sub-editor’s back. Here’s a good example, from a story published yesterday about L’Oreal being knuckle-rapped for giving Penelope Cruz false eyelashes in an ad for mascara that made your eyelashes look 60% longer.

It also ruled the adverts “did not make clear that the claim referred to an increase in the ‘appearance’ of lash length”.

In the commercial for L’Oreal Paris Telescopic mascara, Cruz stood on a terrace next to a telescope and said: “Imagine, lashes that could reach for the stars.”

That, in its most subtle sense, is a direct news translation of the phrase ‘and if you believe that you’ll probably believe anything’.

Good old BBC.

The original story is here.

With all this wet weather and warmth, the garden is heading for overdrive. I did a little stock-taking tonight, and was pleased to see that the beans are having a mini renaissance, although there’s still not enough there for more than a few plates, and of course the dwarf French beans we planted at the weekend aren’t popping any heads up above the soil just yet.

I have one solitary red tomato in the greenhouse, but it’s amid a veritable forest of green ones. I hadn’t really thought through the implications of hanging on to so many good plants rather than throwing out all but three or four when they all germinated, and now I have a dozen sturdy specimens simply bristling with fruit.

If each plant were to produce only 40 tomatoes (and believe me, there are far more than that on some of them) then I would have almost 500 fruits. Can you imagine how many quiches, jars of tomato chutney and pots of tomato sauce that would make?

Reckon I’m being over-optimistic? Not at all. Here’s a truss hanging from just one branch of the least-developed plant at the cooler end of the greenhouse.

The carrots are now tall and tufty, with their green leafy stalks waving around in the breeze, just below the cultivated bramble, which is pumping out fat juicy berries almost as quickly as they can be picked. Tonight I plucked off 52 of them to add to the sizeable bag I’ve already thrown in the freezer.

And the last real development of note, not already mentioned here somewhere else, is the pepper trees, which although small are now starting to flower. I had thought that the buds were actually small peppers already starting to form (which, I suppose, they are), but now that they’ve beefed themselves up a bit it’s more obvious what they are. From this picture, though, you can see why I got it wrong.

GMTV was shocked and saddened to discover that between January 2003 and April 2007, some of our competition procedures were not carried out correctly. We found out that staff at Opera Telecom had been selecting finalists before the competition lines had closed. This meant that not everyone who entered had a fair chance of winning. (Source: GMTV press release)

I love the language in this quote. Shocked and saddened.

Shocked and saddened isn’t the kind of language you use when you find out some viewers may have been defrauded 25p in a premium rate phone-in competition. It’s the kind of language you use when a princess is killed in a Parisian underpass, an American president decides to overthrow an oil-rich dictatorship, or people in Gloucestershire get flooded out of their homes and then run out of clean drinking water.

It’s also the kind of language you use when you can’t quite believe the furore being kicked up over something so small. The kind of language you use when you realise the only reason broadcasters are committing hari kiri over the competitions scandal is that they want to appear more penitent than competing stations. The kind of language you use when you find out you’ve been found out. Oops.

Ofcom is almost certain to fine GMTV heavily, but the station is trying to minimise the fallout by not only waving off its managing director, who resigned this morning, but also running a series of draws for the unsuccessful entrants into its earlier competitions. That’s on top of a complex set of refunds, outlined in a claim form:

If you entered the main daily competition on GMTV: We will refund £1.30 for every phone entry, £1.10 for every text entry and £1 for every web entry.

If you entered the bonus competitions after playing the main competition: We will refund an additional 60 pence for every phone entry, 60 pence for every text entry and 50 pence for every web entry.

If you entered the GMTV2 competition: We will refund 25 pence for every phone entry and 35 pence for every text entry.

If that’s not complicated enough, it seems GMTV’s record-keeping is incomplete, and it’s missing details for a whole range of calls made between August 2003 and September 2004, so needs claimants to submit itemised phone bills proving their right to a refund.

The administration costs alone are going to be astronomical.

Let’s hope they don’t impact on the size of the donation it plans on making to ChildLine, which while the BBC puts at £250,000, GMTV merely calls ‘substantial’.

The total amount paid in fares by rail passengers has doubled since privatisation to more than £5 billion a year. But the total subsidy has risen even faster, reaching £6.3 billion last year, four times what British Rail received in a typical year. (Source: The Times)

If there were every any figures to damn the whole idea of rail privatisation, it must be these. Perhaps that’s why the government wants to see prices climb still higher: ‘the higher the prices, the lower the subsidy’ seems to be the theory, but the simultaneous hikes detailed above do little to support it.

Without clear information on the cause of these spiralling costs, we can only put them down to inefficiencies, for while the network is carrying 150% of the number of passengers British Rail once did, it is costs three times as much to get them anywhere. That can’t be right.

So while the government currently caps the rises on season tickets and cheap-rate fares, it looks set to dismiss calls for the practice to be extended into the future, which could lead to increases of up to 30% for season ticket holders on some routes. That would price many passengers out of their jobs, unless they were to move closer to work, or work from home.

The government’s argument?

‘The reality is that 6% of the population travels on railways. So why should people who don’t use railways regularly fund the people who do?’

Perhaps because it’s because of this lack of proper funding that only 6% of people use the railways in the first place. Give them the subsidised funding they require, reduce ticket prices, increase capacity and build news lines, and passenger numbers will rise, particularly off-peak.

Sometimes you have to wonder whether the government’s green commitments are little more than hyperbole.

A busy day in the garden. I mowed the lawn while Rich disposed of the remnants of the unproductive strawberry plants, then we got down to the planting.

The French beans, as I’ve already written here, seem to have thoroughly exhausted themselves, so we bought some dwarf French beans and dug them into the plot, then opened up the pack of squash seeds I’d bought at the agricultural college two weeks ago and dropped them into pots of manure-mixed compost. I was quite shocked to find that the