The Appeal of Mrs Toogood

I returned home from work this afternoon to find a brown parcel leaning rakishly against my front door. I wasn’t expecting anything else, so I immediately assumed it must be my copy of the National Apple Register of the United Kingdom and dived inside with it clasped lovingly to my chest. It was heavy. That was a good sign. Packed full of weighty awesomeness, no doubt.

Once inside, I took to unwrapping it with fervour. Never before in the field of human parcel wrapping has one book been given so much protection. Two layers of sturdy brown paper, a double wrapping of bubble wrap and then an actual box later, I was just a thin layer of plastic away from the Register itself.

Once inside its hallowed pages, I leapt immediately to the William Ingall entry, excited at what I might find. I ran through a gamut of emotions.

Anticipation as I flicked through the first three hundred pages, fatigue (not strictly an emotion) as I flicked through the next three hundred and then relief as I found the entry, lurking near the bottom of page 615 and running over onto page 616. Tragically, my elation turned to resignation and a little inevitable guttedness as I read, and I quote in its entirety, “Status: Exhibited 1933 (only record), Pre: Exhibited, and probably raised, by William Ingall of Louth, Lincolnshire. Description: Season early.” And that was it.

Probably raised? Probably? That was even more vague than I already had.

Worse still, it was suspiciously similar to the entry on the free list I had downloaded from the East of England Apples and Orchards Project, almost as if the experts compiling the list had thought to check the register themselves. Nervously, I checked another entry.

Again, it was basically the same. It looked like I had shelled out my hard earned £45 on something heavy and admittedly very cool looking but which offered me nothing more than a freely downloadable pdf file. It felt awesome though and, with it weighing down my spindly arms, I pictured myself as very much the classic fruit-based Indiana Jones.

After scanning some of the other far more extensive entries in the register, an admittedly beautiful book that I am genuinely over the moon to own, a plan started to form in my head. Maybe I could combine the search for my beloved lost varieties with a slightly more promising side quest for other apple varieties that weren’t strictly lost but which were just a bit unusual and not available in mainstream supermarkets. That way I could spice up my search with some actual progress and plant some trees in my otherwise empty orchard field thing.

Is that wrong? I suppose it changes the nature of this blog but at least if I only mention it here, no-one will ever know.