Dig in for a better world (From Bradford Telegraph and Argus)

Dig in for a better world

1:41pm Monday 5th March 2007

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Happening to catch the last few minutes of Gardeners' World on BBC2, while waiting for the Wild West docu-drama about Billy the Kid, I had a revelation.

While politicians and historians argue about what defines Britishness or Englishness there, in front of me, was the example that rarely gets a mention by anyone: allotments.

In the 1950s in which I grew up there used to be something like 1.5m allotments. Providing home grown food for the family table grew out of naval blockades, first by Napoleon and then by the Kaiser. Britain's islanders learned to fend for themselves.

Now, however, there are only an estimated 250,000 allotments; the others have been swallowed up by developers for housing and other things.

What moved me most about the programme, though, was the sight of groups of young people who had clubbed together to share and work an allotment. Never having had a strip of land worth cultivating since the early 1980s I found myself envying them.

Novelist and poet Boris Pasternak used to say that the strongest drug of all was good health and demonstrated this by tending vigorously to the garden round his dacha outside Moscow.

It's not accidental that some of the English language's finest poems and songs feature plants and flowers although no-one eminent, to my knowledge, has written in praise of cauliflowers, runner beans and carrots, although Lewis Carroll did link cabbages and kings in The Walrus and the Carpenter.

Anyway, doubtless impelled by the images I had seen in Gardeners' World, that Saturday afternoon I equipped myself with a neighbour's rake, a pair of battered marigolds and a black plastic sack.

I spent three-quarters-of-an-hour clearing plastic bottles, glass bottles, crisp packets, discarded plastic wrapping, beer glasses and even a body-bag from part of a little waterway near where I live.

It was back-breaking work. But out in the fresh air, in the sunshine, under a blue sky and high scudding clouds, all the worry and pre-occupations of the week vanished.

Others can fill the world with hot air about global warming and the imminent destruction of the planet.

Getting rid of that rubbish from the stream was my little contribution to a better world.