(From this ask meme that purports to be For Adults)
9 - smallest bill you pay
My smallest monthly standing order is the £5 a month I automatically donate to each of three causes/charities.
Each of these causes can do vastly more with that £5 than I could by myself for £5. I budget them as bills, and part of the cost of living.
It’s more than some, and less than a lot.
10 - a small responsibility you get excited about
As an adult living in Britain, I have achieved a certain rite of passage: an allotment.
Allotments don’t really exist in the same way in the USA. Picture, in the middle of densely compacted European towns and cities and villages, where space costs thousands of monetary units per meter, a huge lot of highly desirable land. But this land is covered in rotting sheds, disreputable greenhouses, infinite rows of runner beans, and Very Carefully Maintained Boundaries. Each carefully delineated plot is picked over by a person - usually a retired middle class white British person in wellies - who has a worrying personal life, like when you talk to them you inevitably find out that they’re the champion grower of giant cucumbers in the county and have been arrested 6 times for vandalizing the town hall with graffiti. There is usually a terrible sort of clubhouse, to make tea in, and some kind of small lawn area for drinking in the daytime the tea and keeping the bees. The whole thing is an eyesore, and has likely been for generations, all while smugly occupying a prime piece of real estate in some overpopulous area, and it is ridiculous. Endless “dalek” compost bins, water butts capturing the rain from Dr-Suess-like guttering arrangements nailed to sheds that collapse in three directions at once. The local houses crowd around and stare; and the local developers grieve for the profits lost; and the local teens press themselves fitfully against the fences, crying out to smash the greenhouses and gnomes, to fuck in the tempting clubhouse; and they can all do nothing. There is nothing they can do. It is The Allotments. It has too much weight, too much power, too much permanence. Against its serried ranks of cabbages have crashed generations of greater hungers, fiercer desires than their own - grumpier homeowners, greedier developers, rowdier teens; two world wars, empires rising and falling, social revolutions - and they have all gone away, and The Allotments Remain.
And now they must turn their gazes away quickly, for Roger has spotted them, and is coming for them with a muddy mug of tea to shout at them about cucumbers.
I now have a small-yet-horrifyingly-large allotment a few minutes’ walk from my home. For this privilege I pay £29 per year and must keep it weed-free, or face tremendous social censure and the irrevocable loss of the plot.
I find this strangely exciting.
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