My secret garden

It was those trips to the Balkans that started it. As we hard-core Europhobes know, one of the main joys of leaving EU Europe is that the food tastes incomparably better wherever the writ of Brussels does not extend. Although the hard-skinned, white-membraned Dutch tomato has already started to colonise the humble Skopje salad in Bulgaria — agriculture in the bread baskets of Eastern Europe is being comprehensively closed down in preparation for EU membership — there are still pockets of resistance south of the Danube, particularly in the former Yugoslavia, where a cucumber does not taste the same as a carrot. There, I consume vegetables with something bordering on obsessiveness — a craving, indeed, which is equalled only by a concomitant dull rage back in England, where the only green beans on sale in mid-summer come from East Africa, and where all vegetables are stale and tasteless. A demanding palate demands exceptional measures, and so I decided to apply for an allotment.

Within a few months of having put my name on the waiting-list, Esther rang from the local association and said a plot was free. An appointment was fixed; it was a bright and crisp November Saturday morning. A short cycle-ride from the rumble of Hammersmith to the suburbs of Stamford Brook, and the payment of a £5 annual rental fee later, I was the proud tenant of a patch of earth the size of a sitting-room and a rather rusty filing cabinet which serves as a tool shed. The previous tenant of the plot had evidently devoted his Sunday-afternoon energies to burying hundreds of plastic bags from the local supermarket, but these were duly exhumed and seeds inserted in their place.