Forty tomatoes

I'm sixty-one and I have grown a tomato and I'd like to talk about it. Not a tomato. Tomatoes. Forty-odd, off six plants, in a polytunnel on an allotment outside Galway that I took on in March after my wife said, in the tone that means it's been decided, that I needed something to do that wasn't the television. I'd never grown anything. My father grew potatoes because that's what you did, and I'd sworn at the age of twelve, standing in a drill in the rain, that I would never again put a thing in the ground on purpose. Held to that for forty-nine years. The plants came from a man three plots down called Frank, who's eighty if he's a day and who gave me six seedlings in yoghurt pots and told me I'd kill four of them. "Water them in the morning. Not at night. At night they sulk." That was the entire instruction. I killed two. The other four went mad. By July they were taller than me and tied to canes with bits of my wife's old tights, which was Frank's idea and which she's still not happy about. Little yellow flowers, then little green marbles, then, sometime in August, I went down on a Tuesday morning and one of them was red. I stood there like a fool. I picked it. I ate it, standing in the polytunnel, warm from the sun, and I'm not a man for describing food, I've eaten the same sandwich for lunch for thirty years, but that tomato tasted like tomatoes are supposed to taste and never do, the ones from the shop, which I now understand are a different thing that happens to have the same name. Then there were forty of them. All at once. That's the bit nobody warns you about. My wife made a sauce. Then she made another sauce. Then she looked at the bowl on the counter, still full, and said, "You'll have to learn to make the sauce." So I did. Frank told me how. You don't skin them, he said, life's too short, you just cut them up and put them in a pan with oil and garlic and salt and you leave them alone for an hour. "Don't stir it. Don't poke it. You're not helping." It's the same advice as the watering. He's a man of one principle.

I've made it four times now. I gave a jar to Frank, who tasted it and said "not bad" and meant it, and a jar to my daughter, who put a photo of it on the internet with a caption I didn't understand. The plants are dying back now. Frank says that's normal. He says next year I should do eight, and try a cucumber, and I said I'd think about it, and he laughed at me, because we both know. There's a jar in the fridge. I had it on pasta last night. Sixty-one years old and I stood over the pan while it heated, watching it, like it might do something.