Your good life starts here!

“We all can recognise the promise of seed packets spread out on a table – we all know the sense of optimism that a few little seeds somehow project”

Although it was nearly 60 years ago now, the memory is still bright. I was visiting a family that lived in a tiny cottage in the village I grew up in. Money was tight, and I was the middle-class boy from a big house, but their doors were always open and we came and went from each other’s houses freely. That January morning – frosty, the ground bone hard and trees stripped of every last leaf – my friend was sitting in the kitchen with his parents and all three were staring silently at the array laid out before them. I have never forgotten that scene, nor the air of expectation and hope.