I met a Vietnamese-born Chinese woman on a Longevitology energy adjustment course in 2023, and found that she had an allotment in Woodford in east London (near Stratford, the site of the 2012 London Summer Olympics), so I started to help out there, just doing the weeding and watering. I say to people, "I'm only good enough to be the skivvy, not the chef."
For those who might not know what an allotment or a skivvy is:
(From googling)
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allotment: (British English) a small area of land in a town that a person can rent in order to grow fruit and vegetables on it.
skivvy: (British English, informal) a servant, in the past usually female, who does all the dirty or boring jobs in a house.
Unquote
It's a huge site, with 176 plots. (Standard size of plots: 5 rods / 125 square metres, or 10 rods / 250 square metres).
Since then, I've met two more lots of tenants (a Portuguese / Brazilian couple in 2023; and Donald, a Jamaican-born chap last summer) whose plots I help out on, on a regular basis.
Gardening is one of my Distraction Therapy tools (in addition to teaching and healing). It gets me out of the house and into the fresh air, so it's good exercise. When I'm weeding and watering the plants, I'm totally focused on the tasks to be done, which stops me from thinking about horrible things and horrible people. Perfect distraction for an ostrich.
Next to Donald's plot is a Bangladeshi couple, with whom I've crossed paths on and off since summer last year.
With the weather getting warmer and the growing season having started, I've been going more often, arranging with Donald to stagger our presence, so that he won't have to go that often. This means that I'm practically always there on my own.
The Bangladeshi woman told me last week that she had pain in her hands, making it difficult for her to do much on the plot, so I offered to give her a massage on site. We then arranged for me to go to her house to work on her bad back, legs and knees.
After the massage yesterday, the husband said to me, referring to Donald, "The man in the plot next to mine: do you know him?"
I guess it's not that usual for an Oriental woman to team up with a dark-skinned man, especially on a platonic basis -- the Oriental/White combination is more common. Or at least in this particular Bangladeshi man's experience anyway, being from a culture where it doesn't happen (much, if at all), and being Muslim to boot.
There's also always the possibility of his not expressing his meaning properly in English (even though he's been here for over 30 years, if not longer). He might've meant, "Are you friends?"
Given my perverse sense of humour, I was very tempted to say, "No, I just have the habit of sneaking into people's plots when they're not there, pulling up their weeds and watering their plants."
(London, 2026)
