We have an allotment where we go to walk on green and dig. We plant potatoes and turnips (short summer here in the far north) and the kids run between the rows. It reminds me of The Good Life, a show I watched when I was a kid.
The Good Life ('Good Neighbours' in the USA) was a BBC series that ran from 1975-78, about Tom and Barbara Good, a 40-ish couple in the morgage belt of London. He works as a draftsman, she keeps house. They are both unhappy in their own ways. Tom is something of a zealot, who gives up his job of 8 years and becomes "a son of the soil", cultivating his own garden and getting an alottment with the plan to be self-sufficient.
In pursuit of this good life, they dig up their front and back gardens and convert them into allotments, growing soft fruit and vegetables. They introduce chickens, pigs (Pinky and Perky) a goat (Geraldine) and a cockerel (Lenin). They generate their own electricity, using methane from animal waste, and they even attempt to make their own clothes. They also work at selling or bartering surplus crops for essentials which they cannot make themselves. They try to cut their monetary requirements to the minimum with varying success.
Their actions horrify their kindly but conventional next-door neighbours, Margo and Jerry Leadbetter. Originally, Margo and Jerry were intended to be minor characters, but their relationship with one another and with the Goods soon became an essential element of every episode. Under the influence of the Goods' homemade wine called "peapod burgundy", their mutual, intermingled, attractions for one another become apparent. Both couples are childless.
Six Episodes of The Good Life:
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