Field Study's Man in E11 tries to unbutton his plums

While I have been celebrating the last picks ("pics") of our assorted fruits and vegetables - particularly how the fruits of some plants wither and decay ('giving up the ghost' - not an apt phrase?) my attention has also been grabbed by the apparent novelty of some plant phenomena. My eyes widened with all sorts of smut and saucy innuendo when I found these plums (or this plum?) hanging in the wasp ridden shade of our plum tree. There I was, carrying on like an enthralled and be-togaed Frankie Howerd in a 'seventh heaven' of fruity pleasures. You might wonder at the formative and psychological effects of having grown up on a cultural diet of 1970s television (UK). For, as I tried to titter me not at the conjugal spectacle, my mind was the site of a strange orgy of camp comics. It might have been 'Larry Grayson' telling me to shut that door but, what door 'Larry' darling?

In the course of researching this post I discovered that the imaginary door 'Larry' wanted me to shut was one of the doors of perception. According to Wikipedia, Frankie Howerd used LSD to treat his depressive state due to his problems with being homosexual. Here I am reproducing or regurgitating what may only be a sort of tittle tattle however there may be some relevance, if not necessity, to this association in the context of how, recently, a generation of public figures in the entertainment industry has been revealed as being morally corrupt - historically and otherwise. Associating and likening homosexuality (and the use of LSD as a prescribed treatment?) with paedophilia is wrong. This is to say that Frankie Howerd being homosexual and taking LSD was not morally corrupt but that this knowledge is cause for a sort of cultural and psychological adjustment of perceptions of a canon of establishment light entertainment figures. 'They' have rather become characters in a field of dark entertainment. 

It may be sad that the mind I bring to the allotment site, a little 'Eden' (or Elysium) of sorts, is perhaps more defined by the (LSD induced?) utterances, manic facial contortions and quirky genuflections of a 1970s comedian, than e.g. the poetry of John Clare. Of course I am doing my bourgeois best to deal with my psycho-cultural dissonances to make this an appropriately informed blog of referential repute. Somehow, perhaps by 'LSD' induced associations 'Frankie Howerd' became 'Will Farnaby', as I am reading, 'Island' - Aldous Huxley's story of a threatened Utopia. I imagine myself as being one of the novel's parrots uttering catchphrases. "Attention!"  

   

There is a link here - about the phenomenon of buttoning of which I think this specimen of a plum might be an example.