大象传媒

On Saturday, I went to visit my friend Julian at his allotment. It鈥檚 an unpromising scrap of South London tucked in behind a pub; a chaotic patchwork of plots nestling alongside the waterworks in the shadow of a prison.

We sat for a couple of hours by Julian鈥檚 shed, hemmed in by peonies and ranunculus, with two flasks of coffee and plenty of time.

As we sat, I saw the order in the patchwork: the carefully-tended pathways between raised beds of salad and vegetables; water butts catching rain from enterprisingly repaired sheds of great antiquity; the produce and growth, the fulness of life.

And the trees. 聽Town trees like planes and limes; shrubby elder, ash and sycamore; and fruit trees: pears, apples, cherries, plums, figs.

Allotments are divided up using Anglo-Saxon measurements more than a thousand years old and, even though these allotments were much younger, there was still the feeling that this was an ancient place. 聽It was in the reuse of everything from timber to bricks to old windows and string; it was in the exact placement of a pear tree or a bed of garlic according to the daily journey of the sun, the annual rotation of crops.

Thousands of years ago, the prophet Isaiah had a vision of the world as it should be; fruitful, just and peaceful. It was a vision so beguiling, so optimistic, that Isaiah says 鈥榯he trees of the field will clap their hands鈥�.

Sometimes, I think, we come across places where we encounter that world, the world as it could and should be; where we produce what we need and collaborate with our neighbours, where seeds and cuttings, fruit and vegetables and flowers are shared. 聽

You don鈥檛 need an allotment for that but it is a just and hopeful thing to see that deep potential in a scrap of nothing in the middle of a city or town. It鈥檚 a glimpse of what happens when the world is right. It鈥檚 where you can hear the trees clap their hands.

Of course, the coffee didn鈥檛 last forever and so, because it would have seemed rude not to, we went to the pub. 聽And there, we sat over a pint, doing what friends do in pubs and exactly what we鈥檇 seen the allotment doing all morning: we put the world to rights.