I have been on holiday. This is a rarity for your usual allotment dweller. Spent quite a lot of money, but had a good time… thanks for asking. I went on a road trip around Arizona, which wound up in a mucky mess in Las Vegas. Awful place. It was brilliant.

By the time the creaking 747 touched down in the fog at Heathrow — and my even more creaking frame had found the car again — it had been almost three weeks away from Oxford.

A day to recover and fight off the jet lag afforded the opportunity to return to the plot.

Wish I hadn’t bothered, but – then again – what did I expect?

You can’t vanish without trace and expect the elements to pay careful attention to your end-of-season crops.

I half expected to see Ray Mears foraging around for grubs and attempting to start a fire with a trowel handle and rabbit droppings. There were also some scarily large vegetables from a, frankly, obscene marrow to cricket bat-sized runner beans.

I had hoped to enlist a pal to offer temporary tender love and care in exchange for a few pints.

It seems this was not an attractive option. In the slightest. So, I headed to the airport and hoped for the best.

There is no doubt if you take this allotment malarkey seriously then you just don’t ‘do’ holidays.

Time away is for wimps. Time away is on the plot with a wheelbarrow for a suitcase, slug pellets for sun cream and wellies for a swimsuit.

Come to think of it, as I was pondering at the airport baggage carousel whether my bag had been diverted to Bogota, not many of my fellow weathered passengers looked like allotment types.

They didn’t have permanent dirt crammed under fingernails or scratches on the arms from grappling with a particularly aggressive bramble bush.

Nor were they decked out in ill-fitting lumberjack shirts, polished off with luminous Crocs.

No, allotment folk, don’t – can’t – do holidays.

And is it any wonder? Months of work brutalised in just a couple of weeks of neglect.

It’s just not worth the hassle.