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Getting an allotment in the heart of the city has taught me a lot about patience — we spent 10 years on the waiting list. But it’s taught me about something else, too: thankfulness.
For example, I’m much more thankful for London’s leaden skies. It doesn’t rain nearly as much as people think, but when I throw back the curtains in the morning and see it tipping down, my first thought is no longer: “Great. What shoes do I least mind ruining today?” But rather: “Great! No need to water the pea seeds after work.”
I am also thankful for John, one of the East End’s many Irish Catholic cockneys, and someone I’m almost guaranteed to bump into whenever I pop by the lottie.
John is not everyone’s cup of tea; mainly because he sees it as his duty to feed the feral cats that have made their home under the arches that run through the middle of our allotment site. However, it pays to keep John sweet because he is also a dab hand with a hammer and nails.
And so comes another crossover lesson from my career as a business reporter covering start-ups — the basis for this column — never overlook the value of a good partnership.
Light construction skills are not something I possess. I am still haunted by the time I found myself in the car park of a B&Q in Greenwich one Saturday afternoon, sawing lengths of decking board to size so that I could transport them back to the allotment. I was trying to fix the canopy-covered area at the back of my plot and had badly miscalculated how bulky the boards would be to take on the Tube.
Thankfully, B&Q sells a selection of both tenon saws and rulers. It also helps to have two embarrassed teenagers who could hold down the wood while their frazzled dad hacked them to the necessary lengths.
Next to the decked area is a wooden shed that I share with my allotment neighbour. It’s pretty, constructed in what I like to think of as classic English garden style. The problem is: it’s falling to pieces — the wooden floor has rotted and the torn roof felt is no longer keeping the rain out.
With the car park incident and the look on my youngest child’s face still fresh in the memory, I did not try to fix it myself. Instead, my neighbour and I approached John.
Not only did he rebuild the foundation with a stone base and latticed wooden floor, but he fitted a metal sheet under the roof felt to ensure that not a drop of rain now gets inside. The structure is possibly better than it has ever been. And John didn’t want anything in return — though I did convince him to take some of my wife’s homemade banana cake — but I’m sure there’s something that will come up.
The allotment is not a place of commercial exchanges, but there is a system of barter: an exchange of no-longer used tools for seedlings, for example. We have an agreement with the women on either side of our plot that we will water each other’s flowers and vegetables during our respective summer breaks.
Admiring John’s handiwork, I was reminded of Go Ape, a business that creates outdoor activity courses high up in the treetops. Husband-and-wife co-founders Rebecca and Tristram Mayhew hit on the idea during a family holiday in France.
The problem they had was that neither had the necessary skills to build stuff. So, like me, they found someone who did. In fact, they pitched to the person they knew could build their adventure spaces because they went to the company that had constructed the place they saw in France: Altus.
Unlike John, Altus did need paying, and not in cake. This almost proved fatal for Go Ape when the Mayhews’ bank was late processing a loan application, meaning the couple did not have the funds available when the first payment deadline came due.
To the Mayhews’ relief, however, Altus responded with a shrug and said pay when you can. “If they hadn’t done that . . . we would probably have gone bust before we even started,” Tristram told me. Altus has since built all the 37 Go Ape sites across the UK bar two, which an internal team constructed because they do not have a traditional adult Treetop Challenge course.
I’m only hoping my partnership with John can flourish in a similar way. I’ve offered to be on watering duty for his shrubs, as well as keeping the feral cats fed, when he is away.
After all, the canopy above the decking still needs to be made waterproof — it might also be time to pick up an extra bunch of bananas from the supermarket.
Jonathan Moules is an FT writer and newsletter editor
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