I ought to have mentioned this earlier, but better late than never. 2008 is the International Year Of The Potato. So whether you champion Accords or Belle de Fontenays or Caras or Carlingfords or Charlottes or Desirees or Duke of Yorks or Dundrods or Estimas or Fiannas or Golden Wonders or Harmonies or Kerr’s Pinks or King Edwards or Marfonas or Maris Bards or Maris Peers or Maris Pipers or Nadines or Nicolas or Ospreys or Pentland Javelins or Pink Fir Apples or Premieres or Rockets or Romanos or Roosters or Santes or Saxons or Vivaldis or Wiljas, be sure to devote much of your time and energy this year to potato-related activities. Hooting Yard will be getting into the groove with a series of potato-postings as the months go by, so keep your eyes peeled.
Hooting Yard
I champion the Maris Piper: every third Thursday a crooked-backed mountebank deposits a Hessian sack full of these “apples of the earth” down the chute which adjoins one of the stilts upon which my home is built.
Whenever I need feel the desire, all I need to do is lift the appropriate flat in my space-age pod-home and allow the motorized hydraulic shovel-arm to lift a few of the tubers onto the clockwork bucket-conveyor.
The potatoes are gently catapulted through a sort of brush-lined funnel mechanism which cleans, fumigates and eventually peels and dices before depositing the spud in a huge cauldron of boiling water. The peel is sent back down an entirely seperate chute where it is devoured by a herd of ravenous goats bread spesifically for this purpose.
Someday every home will posses this kind of labor-saving technology, but until then I proudly invite all of the world’s orphans to gaze with slack-jawed awe at the futuristic gleaming wonders of this modern world.
Sorry, that should read ‘flap’ and not ‘flat’ – the thought of potato contraptions makes me giddy and inaccurate.