It’s potato harvest day at the allotments – fifteen of us on our knees, up to our elbows in Kilburn’s loamy soil. And it’s a stupendous crop. They just keep on coming. Maggie’s son starts juggling from the pile to celebrate, three earth-caked beauties tracing a parabola around him, an infinite arc backlit against the late afternoon sun. We stop to watch beneath the shade of my wormwood bush, passing around the cider, and a comment from the anthropologist James Scott drifts into my head. There are two types of people, Scott explains in The Art of Not Being Governed: the governable ...
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