We have moved into our flat in Hampton (hence the silence, sorry) and I am thinking of getting an allotment. We went to Bushy Park Allotments on Sunday, to see if we could get in and at least get a good view of them, and there was a couple opening the gate carrying in a compost bin. We stood a way off looking at all the plots; they were untidy, shabby even, but there were also a lot of trees, and it looked both unkempt and rather beguiling; little portions of garden side by side as far as the eye could see.

The gentle hum of an engine, and I looked back at a man in a very low open-top car, with a bucket in the back and heaps of pink geraniums. He too looked unkempt and rather beguiling. He hadn’t sounded his horn, just sat in his very low down slightly rusted car waiting for us to move. He had shoulder-length sandy hair and was what people used to call rakish. My grandmother would not have trusted such a man; she would have said something about him being ‘freelance’. But there was a glamour about him and that he’d given us just the right amount of smile, to show he didn’t think we were in any way an irritant, made him alright.

The car rattled through the gates and disappeared into the thick brush of trees and stalks and general vegetable matter. That’s when we could have gone, but the couple smiled at us now and so I went up, leaving Joe to loiter, and said hello. Can I put my name down for a plot? (‘Put your name down!’ ‘Have you put your name down?’ has been a mantra of my mother’s since childhood). “Yes, you put your name down,” the lady nodded. And then they gave me advice along the lines of: make a nuisance of yourself, wear them down, and eventually someone will break and give you a piece of earth. “You need to not be afraid of hard work”, she said, looking me up and down in the way people do, thinking they’re being subtle.

They didn’t have much to do; it was cold and rainy and a few minutes later they’d emerged. ‘Put your name up on the gates and ask if anyone wants to share a plot’, the lady who was called Roz now said. I have to put my name up now as well as down. She said they’d picked some roses and they had some nice kale and they were done for the day. It seemed rather a bleak enterprise; coming to pick kale. I like roses but it wouldn’t occur to me to grow them on an allotment.

I think if it was me, I would take my lead from the freelancer driving through the gates and plant things with colour, a bit of rakishness, and some sweetness, some fruit, otherwise it all gets a bit Eastenders. A bit Arthur Fowler.

When I started this blog in LA I wrote about lemon curd. The curd was made from the very few Meyer lemons I’d eked from the tree we’d bought from an extremely rakish garden nursery on Fairfax and Santa Monica. We were promised ‘lemons in abundance’ from  the nice stoned man and although the tree was initially heavy with fruit, it never fulfilled its promise. As Joe Queenan likes to say, it wrote a cheque it couldn’t cash. But the sweetness of those lemons, their strange hybrid flavour and the thin mellow peel, started me off. I loved the colour too, a happy, acid yellow. I was never devoid of fruit thereafter. I fell in love with fruit, probably because there was an awful lot of it about in LA – orange trees mainly and their rampant, swooning blossom – and it was the first thing I genuinely liked about being there. It was growing, it was nature, it was beautiful to watch.

Perhaps I have not got the point of the allotment quite. Although I would be happy to share a plot and I wouldn’t be shy of digging, I’d need to insist there was a splash of colour, some orbs, some blossom, a cage, a tree, some espaliered plums and some brickwork to keep them warm. In the meantime I think I can live without kale, a terrifyingly healthy leaf.