A belated Happy New Year. My last posting at Christmas was about mistletoe on Radio 4, and so I’m continuing the theme here:
If you’ve been listening to The Archers* over the last couple of weeks you might have heard Joe Grundy’s plan to sell cut-price mistletoe grow-kits to the local suburban housing estates. Plus Eddie Grundy’s scathing appraisal of his Dad’s plan.
One of Eddie’s objections, interestingly, is that he doesn’t want the locals to grow their own, as that will undermine his regular Christmas income from selling fully-grown cut mistletoe each year.
This being the Grundy family, such scams are commonplace of course, but Joe takes an interesting new line with Eddie on this one, pointing out that as mistletoe takes quite a long time to get established, he (Joe) will be long-dead before any new growths interfere with Eddie’s trade. A point which didn’t, for some reason, make Eddie any happier.
But why is Joe talking about Grow-kits now? Well, that’s because the sowing season is coming up fast – February and March are the time for planting mistletoe.
But you can’t buy a kit from Joe Grundy, he’s not really real (or is he? – I’ve actually met Eddie, and discussed his mistletoe harvest, and he seemed real enough, though he did claim his proper name was Trevor Harrison).
You can, however, buy a kit from the English Mistletoe Shop at www.buy.mistletoe.org.uk.
*For readers elsewhere on the planet, or Brits who haven’t been listening to any radio in the last half-century or so, The Archers is a long-running (50+ years) BBC Radio 4 ‘Soap Opera’ set in a farming community in Ambridge, a fictional village in the English Midlands.
(links updated 27th Jan)