What is it about vegetables that make grown men go mad? says Atticus. Last weekend was the National Vegetable Society Championships, a fiercely contended annual competition that pits vegetable against vegetable, or rather vegetable grower against vegetable grower. It can get brutal. Recently, a local show in Torquay was marred by a late-night attack on the local allotments during which a number of edible contenders were horrifically wounded.

It reminds me of the allotments in the small village where I grew up. As children, we weren't averse to a spot of trespassing – except, that is, on the dreaded allotments. Presided over by "Gord"  – the formidable self-designated "village character" who'd apparently never stepped beyond the county boundary and was unable to read or write – the allotments were a place of muffled West Country growls and crooked and crotchety figures turning the soil.

Chief amongst our childish concerns was the roughly scrawled sign on the gate, "Trespassers will be shot." In fact, this sign, which is still there now, went down in local folk law (aided, no doubt, by Gord's very great willingness to repeat it down the local with a pint of ale in his hand) when Gord saw off a local policeman who had come to investigate the possibility that firearms were being employed on the premises. Gord had apparently explained that the sign meant that you would be "shot by a camera" and sent the policeman packing with the line "I 'spec you feel a bit of a fool, coming down here now, don't you?"

Whether or not this story is true, I do have it on good authority that Gord's prize vegetables achieved their particular lustre and succulence from an unusual fertiliser – one that he'd obtain by squatting behind a wicker fence with a bucket. Perhaps that, and not the threat of being shot, was the reason none of his vegetables ever got vandalised.