The 2011 BBC* Veg Personality of the Year Awards

* Bullshit Blogger Champion

Yes folks….it’s Christmas Eve and that can only mean one thing to the discerning veg showman, the annual Smithyveg Awards Ceremony, where a coveted gong can set up a grower for everlasting National fame or infamy. So switch off your phones, bolt all the doors and windows, kick off your shoes, pour yourself a stiff one (or handle one if that’s how you roll!) and sit back as I reveal this year’s runners and riders, losers and schmoozers, winners and sinners.


We start off with one of the more prestigious awards of the evening, that of Luckiest Bastard of 2011, and this year it goes to Medwyn who won tomatoes at Llangollen (below). If I hadn’t made such a monumental balls-up with my own plants, setting them away too soon, I WOULD have won this class myself. As it is I shall just have to make do with winning at Malvern next season …..along with peas of course.

Now to Bum of the Year! For most of 2011 it looked as if Pippa Middleton would walk this one as teenage boys across the land did trouser tent impressions at the sight of her perfectly formed posh padding. But then there was a late entry, a different type of ‘bum’ entirely as NVS stalwart John Trim gave this faultless performance of contented sozzlement, pickled as he often is from the inside out !

That’s also because he also wins the award for best pickled onions 2011 (see http://www.smithyveg.blogspot.com/2011/09/problem-solving-on-daily-basis.html). I have now made several bottles to JT’s brilliant recipe. Believe me these are the sweetest tasting pickles you’ll ever throw down your throat and the perfect accompaniment to your Christmas cheese and biscuit board as you browse the 2012 seed catalogues in front of a log fire. Well done John!

The next award is the best joke or wind-up in 2011. I’ve awarded myself a 3rd in this category for a brilliant piece of improvisation at the Edible Garden Show back in March. As part of the team on the NVS stand at Stoneleigh Park I was introducing my colleagues to a potential new member. “This is David Thornton, National Secretary. This is David Allison, National Editor and I’m Simon Smith, National Disgrace.” Everyone laughed nervously, probably because it isn’t far from the truth!!!


I was very definitely the butt of the joke for the 2nd placed winner, David Thornton, when he advised back in early Summer that the yellowing on the tips of my potatoes meant they had wet crack and my spuds would be dead within a fortnight. Distraught I googled ‘wet crack’ at work to see if they could be salvaged. The list of pornographic websites that flashed up on my screen set off that many alarm bells in the IT Dept that they thought a fucking fire engine had gone past. Bastard.


But the ‘winner’ has to be Messrs Stocks/Cameron/Taylor (et al) for their audacious wheeze of getting Medwyn Williams to present me with a wooden spoon at Llangollen for services to gobby non-achievement. Rest assured, there will be justifiable retribution upon the main protagonists later on in this awards ceremony!

Bonus of 2011 was seeing how much my good lady enjoyed being at Llangollen, after dreading it beforehand, thanks mainly to the ladies of the NVS who I have now termed the WAGS! Whilst I was talking veg they were all cackling away ripping their menfolk to bits so my thanks to Linda, Jean, Jacquie, Sarah, Unni and Fiona for making Leesa very welcome. Along with their menfolk you’re friends for life! And that’s as gooey as I’m gonna get!


There were some monumental cock-ups in 2011. Contenders include Paul Bastow for entering 8oz onions in a 250g class and getting NAS’d for being too heavy (tosser), Frank Taylor for failing to put an exhibitor ticket next to an entry (tit), and myself for daring to take on the might of the Scottish Pea Growing Mafiosi (what an arsehole....I’ve agreed to do the same in 2012!). But there really could only be one winner of Biggest Cock-Up 2011, and it goes to David Thornton for travelling all the way to Llangollen and forgetting to take his tomatoes after having droned on to me all the previous week that he thought he was in with a good shout of winning. There are many ways of displaying tomatoes to their utmost effect, but the last time I checked ‘in a box, in a greenhouse, in Derby’ wasn’t one of them! I’m only upset that I couldn’t witness first hand the sight of his face as it dawned on him what he’d done. Apparently it was pure poetry. So well done Dave, 2011 Dipshit of the Year.

In this PC world in which we live in, we have to be ridiculously careful about what we say and how we say it, especially in the work environment. For this reason I spend large parts of my working day with my mouth well and truly shut. That way I don’t get into any trouble, and I can then use my humble blog to rant to my heart’s content. Therefore, my Hero of 2011 is Jeremy Clarkson who suggested in November that striking teachers and civil servants (f***ing paper shufflers) should be lined up and shot. I’m a bit of a do-gooder at heart (no, really!) so I would actually have them ordered to do a proper day’s work first of all to see if they can change their ways. Send them down a pit, or tell them to get up at 3am to do a milk round. Milk some cows at 7am on a Winter’s morning. Put them on the front line in Afghanistan, or stacking shelves for a pittance in Tescos. That should make them realise how overpaid and mollycoddled they really are. And if they didn’t….THEN I’d shoot the twats. In the bollocks and tits first then in the head.

A deserved winner of the Biggest Exaggeration Award is Pretentious Photographist Richard Walton of Surrey who spent all year referring to himself in correspondence to me as Dickie Nine Inch. He reminds me of a pal whose wife actually threw him out for measuring his own cock, unusual but a poor reason to cite in divorce papers I think you’ll agree? For the record it was the roughly same length as her sister’s throat.

The award for Biggest Bastard took a lot of deliberating over, as 2011 was a vintage year for complete tossers, so I decided to award 5 placings.


In 5th position was the referee who sent off a Welsh player in the semi-finals of the Rugby World Cup back in October for a powder puff tackle on one of the French players. I don’t normally follow Wales but as the opponents were the soap dodging garlic eaters and my wife has watered down Welsh blood I found myself touting for them. It was a shocking decision.


4th biggest bastard goes to the holier-than-thou idiot who thought it would be a good idea to prevent me from putting up for election to the ‘board’ of a charity because I swear a bit. Well hush my mouth vicar. Despite his apparent outrage he also showed that he must visit my blog on a regular basis. Perhaps he secretly enjoys it? All he succeeded in doing was preventing that charity from benefitting from my enthusiasm and huge brain full of brilliantly spiffing ideas. So well done on your award and all I’ll say is let he who is without sin……..

In 3rd place are the faceless bueaucrats who have decided that we gardeners are the spawn of Satan and who will be making sure that we can no longer use peat from 2020 in order to protect our peat bogs from extermination. In the course of my countryside ambulations I have often strolled into or across a peat bog (photo of one such below). Believe me, they are the most miserable, slimy, pox infested shat’oles you will ever visit and quite why anyone would ever see fit to protect them is f***ing beyond me. It could be a thriving industry employing hundreds and Mother Nature would soon move into to colonise the nakedness created on the landscape. But no….we are going to have to use composts with roughly the same nutrient content as the dust from a witch’s titsack.

In 2nd place are the increasing amount of toilet scum, very often so-called fellow exhibitors who frequent the end of our shows and who swipe the fruits of our labours. At the Llangollen National last August, Raffles would have been proud of the way one of Andrew Jones’ onions was snaffled as the call came up to collect your veg. There were also instances of stolen veg at Scottish Branch and Harrogate although thankfully Malvern took steps this season and cordoned off the aisles so that only exhibitors could gain access. Way to go. Be warned though…..we’re all getting increasingly pissed off and will be more vigilant from now on. Perpetrators will be named and shamed in future, no matter what your previous standing in the world of showing might be.

But the Bastards of the Year 2011 are the traffic cops who have nothing better to do than point their stupid little Star Wars guns at otherwise law abiding citizens who might have the misfortune to creep above the speed limit in a moment of absent-mindedness, and in particular the officious turd in a van outside Llanberis on April 30th of this year. Presumably he was pissed off at not being at home for the Royal Wedding so thanks for ruining what was otherwise a brilliant walking weekend. Thanks to you I now drive with my eyes on my speedometer again rather than the road ahead. How safe is that? I hope someone buttf*cks you with your own truncheon one day. Still, my license looks very colourful thanks to all the pretty letters and numbers scrawled upon it by various of Her Majesty’s Constabularies.

Next up is the ‘I Wish I’d Grown Those F*ckers’ Award, for the exhibits that I really wished had been mine. In 3rd position are Ian Stocks winning stump carrots at the Llangollen National. I was very proud of mine as I’d staged them and could see they were better than the few sets being staged around me, so I really thought I was in with a shout of a ticket. However, when the Stocksmeister uncovered his it showed me how much further I had to go.

In 2nd place were Ian Simpson’s long carrots as part of his tap root set at Harrogate. The same carrots won the individual class at Malvern a week later.

But the exhibit I really coveted above all else were Eric Craik’s winning set of 5 leeks at Llangollen. The foliage was so lush and green and the shafts were so absolutely gun barrel straight that many folk (including myself) thought they should have got best in show.

Reigning National pea champion Ian Simpson of Scottishland wins ‘Most Gullible Person Award’, narrowly pipping myself over the wet-crack affair! He admitted to me at Llangollen that at one point during the year he was genuinely worried that I was a contender because of all the boasting I was doing about winning peas at the National. He obviously didn’t know me very well, but is now sleeping peacefully each night knowing what he does now, that I am a gobby buffoon who generally talks a good game but who cannot grow exhibition peas to save his life. Or can I????

Last year I introduced the Gary Glitter ‘I love you love, you love me true love, I love you love me love’ award for services to vegetable bum banditry. Last year Paul Bastow and Dan Unsworth won it. Unsurprisingly, they’ve pulled it off for the second year running, although this year they did have some help this time around from their new and incredibly good looking dwarf boyfriend. Thanks for crouching for the photo lads. (Wankers)

To be fair one of my best moments of 2011 was seeing my Northern blogging pals win prizes in the NVS Northern Branch Championships at Harrogate. Dan got a 2nd in the 1.5kg onion class after I’d been on at him for a couple of years to have a go at a higher level. Paul got 4th in the very popular 250g onion class and could possibly have got better, the bizarre lighting at Harrogate doing the judges no favours whatsoever.



I decided to reintroduce the Best Newcomer Award (f*** me a serious award!) after some new names and faces made the breakthrough in 2011. There were many new young exhibitors who had great successes (I use the word ‘young’ in its most outrageously broad sense in some cases) such as Marcus Powell, John Ellis, Darren Blick, Mark Perry, Helen Vincent, Ray Ingram (told you it was broad!) and of course my perennial sparring partners Dan Unsworth and Paul Bastow. But the gong has got to go to Owain Roberts from Ceredigeeon Sheridogbone Cerrydiggeryknob a little village in North Wales who entered his first ever National at Llangollen and won the coloured spuds, beating the usually unbeatable Sherie Plumb. A cracking lad, he also won tickets in the other three spud classes and therefore won the Banksian Medal for most prize money in the process. He only looks as if he’s about 12 so it’s nice to see people so young (and nearly as handsome as me!) coming into the game and helping to ensure the future of our hobby. Follow Owain’s blog (if you can speak Welsh!) on http://garddiadur.blogspot.com/

This leads us into the Most Disappointing Moment of 2011. For most of the year it was the week in June when I was forced to pull up all my tomato plants and start again, and I suddenly realised I had no chance of getting a set of tomatoes benched at the Llangollen National after my success at Malvern the previous year. But this was surpassed when we witnessed the RHS throwing 60% of the exhibits displayed at the Westminster Show into a skip, including large onions and leeks. They reckoned ALL the produce left at the end of the show was given away to charity. It really left a bitter taste in my mouth and their half-hearted attempts at explaining themselves after I complained only compounded my annoyance. All that dedication and hard work thrown into a rubbish bin when 99% of it was still perfectly edible. It narrowly pipped the moment when I realised my suggestion to the NVS to have a 'best body' class at the National wasn't going to be adopted. I feel sure I'd have won although it has been suggested in some quarters that my dibber wasn't long enough.

The next award is the Camera Never Lies award, one that I’ve introduced for the first time this year to prove that not only am I still the best looking NVS male member, but that in general we veg showers weren’t built to be put in front of a lens, and indeed in many instances shouldn’t be allowed out during daylight.


In 3rd position is Gareth Cameron, snapped here having actually won something in the after show raffle at Malvern although you’d never know from the photo. He looks like he might be smiling but having personally witnessed how much he drank that night I can assure you it was wind. Gareth is now doing the after-dinner speaking circuit as Jim Bowen’s stunt double. Currently inseparable from his old mucker Ronnie Jackson I think someone should tell them that you don’t get anything for two in a bed in this game!

In 2nd place is Frank Taylor from Aberdeen. Although he is posing here having won his local DA collection, a magnificent achievement in anyone’s book, he still manages to give a faultless study in abject misery. He looks as if he’s lost a tenner and found an empty haggis bladder.

But the winner is 2011 National stump carrot champion and 2012 pea runner up Ian Stocks. I’m reliably informed that ‘smiling’ is number 653 on his list of things to do each day. Despite being snapped having helped JBA win a gold medal at Gardening Scotland he quite superbly succeeds in replicating the face of a bulldog licking piss off a poked wasp.

(That’ll teach you sods for giving me a wooden spoon!!)

Ian Stocks is the night’s second double award winner as he also wins the Anne Frank Award for most abrupt ending to a diary or blog. He started off great with regular entries but there hasn’t been a single posting on his Carrot Grower website since February. I reckon he’s solely to blame for my crap long carrots in 2011 as I was eagerly waiting the next instalments and didn’t know what to do next. Come on Ian….stop coiffuring that beard and get writing!



Best Achievement in 2011 was a difficult one to decide, as there were so many momentous events and milestones during the year. In 4th place are Manchester United who won their 19th League title, surpassing the haul of the Liverscum that had stood since I were but a snip of a lad. I didn’t believe it could happen in my lifetime.

3rd place goes to yours truly for winning the inaugural Bullshit Bloggers Challenge at Harrogate despite months of cruel jibes about my height and quality of my produce. He who laughs last, laughs a long, long time with bragging rights to boot. Looks like it’s going to be a permanent fixture on the Bloggers’ calendar so I look forward to crossing swords with the Northern Knuckle Shufflers for many years to come.

2nd place goes to Ed Milliband, a man so devoid of any discernible personality that he has managed single-handedly to make Labour unelectable even in the worst recession in living memory. Thank f***!

But there could only be one winner. In the 1980’s the record weight for an onion stood at around 5lbs. It rose steadily over the years and stood at 16 ½ lbs in 2005 until in September Peter Glazebrook smashed it by nearly a pound and a half to take it to 17lbs 15 ½ oz.

I visited Peter’s garden in July and you didn’t need to be Einstein to see that he was probably going to do it as I reckon his onions were already then nudging the record. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer bloke and his wife also makes a mean fruit cake.

Talking of fruit cakes, the award for the Sorest Loser in 2011 (and it gives me no great pleasure to make this announcement) has to go to my wife who even now is insisting that my winning fruit cake at Seagrave Show was burnt. Leesa managed only a 3rd despite having the whole day off beforehand, whereas mine was thrown together quite magnificently at 9pm the night before and may or may not have been a little….shall we say ….‘tinted’?

We all need to learn that the judge’s decision is final and it does us no credit whatsoever if we keep moaning about a result that hasn’t gone our way. Dave Thornton ran her close, coming in 2nd AND 3rd for whineing like a trapped cat about his shallots only coming 4th and 3rd at Harrogate and Malvern respectively. Put another record on Dave!



If it’s any consolation to my wife, this year I’ve decided to award the medal for Most Impossible Man to Live With to …..MYSELF. Quite how she puts up with me is anyone’s guess but next year she’ll have been doing it for 25 years so I must have a certain ‘Je ne sais quoi’! I guess living with me is like white water rafting as the Men Behaving Badly would say? And living with a perfectly conditioned natural athlete like this does have its perks. Know what?….I reckon I should have won Bum of the Year!

A new award this year is that of Funniest Man. Many people make me laugh. Ed Milliband makes me laugh a lot when he talks simply because he sounds like Wallace of Wallace and Gromit fame. Dave Thornton has me in stitches when he moans about his shallots not winning at Harrogate, a seemingly annual event these days. And I like listening to the chap I work with on the phone to his many women friends as he juggles his hilarious love life, his mind working overtime as he tries to remember what he’s told each one in the past. But the biggest laughs I had this year were listening to cauliflower king Jim Pearson’s various stories whilst on a boat trip along the Llangollen canal. All the more remarkable as I couldn’t understand a single thing he was saying with his broad Glaswegian accent. I wish I had a photo of him but I couldn't keep the camera still long enough as I was laughing so much!



I’d like to end the Awards on a very positive note with the Most Helpful Man in 2011 or any other year come to mention it. Since I joined the NVS online forum I’ve received an enormous amount of help from one guy in particular, a grower from Scotland called Paul McLeod. Thanks to him I’ve grown my best ever celery and long beet. He always has time for anyone else and is very generous with seeds and other ‘stuff’, is a stalwart of Scottish Branch and in my opinion should be given an NVS Gold Medal never mind a silver medal. Thank you Paul…you’re a star!



So that’s it, 2011 will soon be gone, a momentous year full of drama, intrigue and history changing World events. The year in which Osama Bin Bastard and Colonel Gadaffi Duck finally got their just desserts, when I made the leap to National level showing and passed the NVS Judges Exam, when Medwyn Williams got a lucky break after I stuffed up my tomatoes, a year when the World’s tallest and most miserable leprechaun was found alive and well and dwelling in Yorkshire…

….and when three growers in particular put themselves very much in the frame for a Smithyveg Award EVERY year for many years to come!

So what does 2012 have in store? It promises to be truly momentous. It is of course the year the Olympics will come to Britain, something we won’t see again in our lifetime or our children’s probably. The Queen, God bless her, will be celebrating 60 years on the throne. It will also be the year that a bald, fat English dwarf finally conquers the Scottish pea growers at Malvern.

So all that remains now is for me to wish a very Merry Christmas from all in the Smithyveg household to everyone who has been daft enough to follow this blog during 2011. You lot really need to get out more.


A special thanks to Frank and Jean, Paul B and Linda, Ian S and Linda, Paul W and Linda, Gareth and Jacquie, Dickie four point 2 Inch, Helen V and Geoffo who have been asking after Oscar during his various trials and tribulations. It's been a real tough year for him but he seems to be doing fine now.

That’s all folks!