'Good Morning, Sir. I was recently reading your blog, and I thought...
'No mention (in the Berwickshire News coverage of the Paxton Onions) of Huttonian - does your bounty extend only to soft fruit?'
writes a bloggee via the e-mail facility. Indeed there is an article in this week's
Berwickshire on the results of the Paxton Onion Club's annual show where 12 trophies are awarded in a variety of categories from very large onions in 'stands' to very large single onions and the heaviest onion-presumably wheeled into the hall on a very large wheelbarrow to avoid the risk of hernia. (Harvested with a mechanical digger?)
To answer the bloggee's question. Huttonian may be (this year) a dab hand at soft fruit but I fear onions are beyond him. So even if he was a member of the highly elite Onion Club (and bear in mind it is Paxton we are talking about) I doubt if he could compete in the size stakes. I may be wrong but I doubt if these monsters are organically cultivated. Certainly the wife's crop are small and perfectly formed (and taste good which I doubt applies to the steroidically enhanced) but you could get well over 100 into the wheelbarrow-if we got 100 so if size matters, we would be non starters.
By the way a former Huttonian (now in Duns)-used to go to the local school and live in the Hutton Castle Barns area asks have we noticed a distinctly different accent in Hutton and Paxton speech? I don't think my ear is sharp enough for this even when digitally enhanced and whilst there is a hard core of old time Paxton folk, born and bred the same hardly applies to this village. So the Hutton lingua may be joining the red squirrel and the pub smoker on the path to extinction.
