Relaxing on the sofa, the windows open to let in the breeze, we like nothing better than to hear the birds sing on a summer evening. Some days, though, their chirruping is briefly interrupted by the less than sonorous strains of Norwegian supergroup, A-ha or some other corny 1980s or early 90s pop hit. We no longer have to hunt, either high or low, for the source of this so-called music, because there’s only one person we know who ever plays that stuff in his car: a close neighbour whom we have long referred to, just between ourselves of course, as ‘Boombastic’, after the pop song by Shaggy.

We even have a little song of our own about it and it goes like this

They call him Mister Boombastic
He hinks he’s fantastic
Keeps his car keys
On a bit of elastic

Now, though, we think we know where Boombastic goes to choose his tunes. Not for him the discount racks of HMV, Woollies or Poundstretcher: passing some nearby allotments recently, we saw more than a dozen CDs hanging all in a row from little bits of string attached to a horizontal bamboo cane, all doing their bestest to scare the local birds away from someone’s prized lettuce seedlings. We didn’t stop to look at the titles; we instinctively knew we’d found Boombastic’s secret stash of ICE. (That’s ‘in-car entertainment’, in case you were wondering.)

Since then, whenever we hear high-volume Eighties pop approaching (and to be fair, at least with those old songs, you can hear all the words) we always refer to it as the latest hit from ‘the allotment Top Ten’.

Greetings, pop pickers!