There’s a fortnight every September when an allotment makes a man look like a genius. The beans come all at once, the tomatoes finally turn, and Graham, 57, from Chesterfield, walks up the hill most evenings to plot 12 with a carrier bag and a legitimate reason to be out of the house.
His wife doesn’t come. She did once, in his first summer up there, looked around and said it was “a lot of mud for some lettuce.” Which was fair. And also, though neither of them knew it at the time, the whole problem in one sentence.
A shed is a dangerous place to think
Graham took the plot on three years ago, after his firm restructured him into a job with less travel and more afternoons. Everyone said it would be good for him. And it was — the digging, the radio, the over-the-fence chat about slugs with the retired teacher on plot 14. What nobody mentioned is that a few quiet hours a week in a shed gives a man an awful lot of time to notice things.
What he noticed was this: he and Kath hadn’t had a conversation in about four years. They’d had exchanges — bins, boiler, whose turn it was to ring her mother — but nothing you could honestly call a conversation. Thirty-one years married, both kids gone, and the house so quiet in the evenings that he’d started staying at the plot until the light went, just to shorten the part of the day spent sitting in it.
He wasn’t angry with her. That’s the bit outsiders always get wrong about marriages like this one. There was no row to point to, no slammed door, nobody at fault. “We just ran out,” he told us. “Like a pen. You keep pressing for a while, then you stop.”
The profile typed with soil under his nails
He’d known about Illicit Encounters for years, the way most people do — a headline here, a raised eyebrow on a radio phone-in there. Knowing about it and sitting in a shed one wet Tuesday actually typing a profile on your phone are two different things, and the second one took him most of an hour. Rain on the felt roof, thumb hovering. He describes the feeling as less like doing something wrong and more like admitting something true.
It took him another three weeks to message anyone. Elaine, 54, was the other side of the M1, near Sheffield. Married, and quietly so, in exactly the way he was. Her opening line asked whether his username meant he actually grew things or just liked the idea of himself in wellies. He sent back a photo of a courgette the size of a draught excluder. It went from there.
They met at a garden centre café off the A61, roughly halfway between them, which he chose because it was the one kind of place he could stand in without looking out of place. He arrived twenty minutes early and studied shrubs he had no intention of buying. She clocked him straight away. “You looked like a man pretending to read a label,” she told him later. They were still talking when the staff started stacking chairs.
Half right
That was fourteen months ago. It’s Tuesdays now, and the occasional Friday when her husband golfs. The family still says the allotment keeps Graham sane, and they’re half right — it did the noticing, but Elaine did the rest. Nobody at home has spotted a thing, except that he hums while he cooks now, which his daughter mentioned at Sunday lunch as a curiosity, the way you’d mention a cat learning to open doors.
He’s easier to live with, by his own account. Kinder, more patient, quicker to laugh at the telly. We hear that from members more often than anyone outside would believe — that being properly seen for a few hours a week doesn’t take something away from the house. Oddly, some of it comes home.
The beans still arrive all at once every September. He gives most of them away — the woman at number 40, the postman, the teacher on plot 14. And a bagful goes to Elaine, who says he’s the only man who has ever brought her runner beans instead of flowers, and that she knows exactly which she’d rather have.
Because sometimes it isn’t the marriage that needs digging over. It’s just that a person needs one small patch of the week that’s entirely theirs. If that sounds less far-fetched than it did a year ago, you already know where to find us: illicitencounters.com.
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