WILL the Big Allotment Challenge – the newest TV reality show – get us rushing to get mud on our boots and grow our own cabbages or mange tout?

Probably not. Shame.

Allotments are wonderful and in an ideal world they’d be available on the NHS. Years ago, I had an allotment which saved my sanity – and my liver – at a particularly chaotic time in my life. Digging, planting, weeding and watering provides great physical exercise. Much better than the gym. And things grow. And you get to eat them. What’s not to like?

The satisfaction to sitting down to meal that you’ve grown from seed yourself is amazing.

Not just healthy, but a huge boost to a fragile self-esteem.

I’ve never eaten sweetcorn or tomatoes as good as those I grew myself.

Our parents and grandparents just took it for granted.

Al most everyone had an allotment or a veggie patch, maybe a few hens or a pig. They didn’t need a 24- hour Tesco as they had most of what they needed outside the back door. All it needed was a bit of effort.

Now the allotment has joined Bake Off and Sewing Bee as a glimpse into a rapidly vanishing world. It’s almost a new form of porn: we’re awash in a miasma of folksy nostalgia when people could actually do practical stuff. A strange yearning for the old skills that our grandparents needed just to survive, now reduced to passive entertainment – while we sit in our ready-made clothes, eating our readymade meals and outside our gardens come ready-made in pots from the DIY stores.

It makes you wonder what aspect of today’s life will be ripe for nostalgia in our grandchildren’s day. Maybe they’ll enjoy queuing at a supermarket checkout, dealing with a call centre or waiting hours for feeble broadband to work as somehow more “authentic” than their whizzy modern ways Of course, if we all got off our bums and actually grew some veg instead of watching other people do it, wouldn’t we, and our children, be a lot better for it?

PRIME minister David Cameron has said he enjoys shopping in Waitrose as he gets a chance to chat to people.

Mmm very nice, and we know the sort of people he’s likely to find in Waitrose...

Meanwhile, more customers are pouring in to discount supermarkets, including plenty of would-be Waitrose shoppers who, in recessionary times, have been forced to discover the many bargain delights of Aldi and Lidl.

If Mr Cameron really wants to know how most voters think, he should abandon Waitrose and get himself down to Aldi.

He’d save a bit on his shopping bill too.

SO one in eight workers has fallen asleep during a work meeting.

Sounds sensible. Why were the other seven wasting their time?

Meetings account for nearly 40 million office hours a week. Goodness knows what that does for our productivity figures, but not much.

Most meetings are unnecessary. In any organisation most decisions are made by two or three people who actually know what’s going on. A meeting is only to make a show of democracy, to make people feel involved – and to spread the blame afterwards.

(“Well, you were there. You agreed to it.”) It’s probably safe to say that we could cancel 99 per cent of meetings and the world would still go in exactly the same way.

That just leaves that on per cent that actually achieve something.

Trouble is, we don’t know which one per cent it is.

Maybe we should stay awake after all and find out.

I SHALL be in Shildon this Thursday morning, Maundy Thursday – drinking coffee and judging Easter eggs at a coffee morning at the Cop-op Funeralcare in Church Street.

It’s all in aid of local animal welfare organisations. Maybe see you there. They’ve promised chocolate cake.

OVER the years I’ve got used to being bullied by my cars – beeping at me angrily to fasten seat belts, check tyres, mind the car behind, fill the windscreen washer, make a U-turn when safe to do so and book in a service – but character assassination is a new one.

Every now and then the screen in my new car flashes up a message: “Sharon Griffiths is disconnected.”

Trouble is, I think it might be right.