There's a tiny corner in Chiswick, west London, where the soil has been turned for hundreds if not thousands of years. I have been growing food there for a mere half-decade, and until reading Caroline Foley's history of allotments, the questions that preoccupied me were rather basic. Why do I only have three carrots when I sowed enough seed to relieve the siege of Leningrad? Why does comfrey smell like halitosis when you soak it in water? Do all the other plot holders think it's their robin? How many smokes could you get out of a clay pipe?
For the most part, I don't ask myself questions at all. For me, working the allotment is to be abstracted from the usual laws of daily life, fenced off from its (OK, my) neurotic demands and intricate delusions, suspended in a benevolent miasma of non-thought. The spade goes in and the robin, hearing the call to worms, appears soundlessly and waits for the catch of the day to be brought to the surface. A rackety bee wobbles over a flower that is also wobbling in the breeze, and by some complex agreement the two wobbles cancel each other out and the bee is able to land. These tiny events repeat themselves until time seems gently to dissolve into what Yogi Berra called "deja vu all over again".
Continue reading...