Highbridge: IELTS General Training Reading practice test

Saturday 12 July, 11.00, from the Market Square to Riverside Park. Schools, sports clubs and community groups lead the way, followed by the town band. Free to watch. Roads along the route will be closed from 10.30 until 12.30 and buses will be diverted along Mill Lane. Any group wishing to walk in the parade must register with the festival office by 30 June so that stewards can be arranged.

Saturday and Sunday, 11.00 to 18.00. Forty stalls along the river path, with hot food, baking and produce from farms within twenty miles. Entry is free. Dogs are welcome on a lead everywhere except inside the covered marquee. All stalls take cards; there is a single cash machine beside the bandstand, which makes a charge for withdrawals.

Friday 11 July. Gates 20.00, film begins at sunset, around 21.20. Tickets £8, or £4 for under-12s. Bring a rug or a low folding chair. High-backed chairs cannot be admitted, as they block the view of those behind. The screening will go ahead in light rain but will be cancelled if the wind is strong, in which case tickets will be refunded in full.

Saturday and Sunday, 10.00 to 16.00. Printing, clay and willow weaving, £2 per child for each activity. There is no need to book; simply join the queue. Children under eight must have an adult with them who stays for the whole session. Aprons are provided, but please note that some of the dyes we use will not wash out of clothing.

Saturday and Sunday at 10.00 and 14.00, leaving from the war memorial. Ninety minutes, £5. Booking is essential, as each walk is limited to twelve people. The usual route includes two flights of steps and is not suitable for wheelchairs or pushchairs; a step-free version of the walk runs on Sunday afternoon only.

Sunday 13 July, 19.30, in Riverside Park, with the town brass band and the Highbridge Choral Society. Gates open at 18.30. Tickets are £12 if bought in advance and £15 at the gate, if any are left. Please bring no glass bottles. Seating is on the grass; a small number of chairs may be reserved for those unable to sit on the ground, by telephone only.

You are working alone whenever you are working without close or direct supervision. This includes far more people than the phrase suggests: a receptionist left in a building after the offices have emptied, a driver on a long delivery, a care worker visiting a client at home, a technician finishing a job after colleagues have gone. It is the absence of anybody nearby who would notice a problem, rather than the nature of the job, that makes a task a lone-working one.

Your manager must complete a risk assessment for the task before it is first carried out alone. The assessment covers the work, not the individual, although anyone with a relevant medical condition should tell their manager in confidence. Some activities may never be undertaken alone in any circumstances: work at height, work in a confined space, work on live electrical systems, and handling cash at the depot after dark.

Agree a schedule of check-ins with the duty officer before the shift begins, and do not arrange it informally with a colleague instead, because a colleague may go home. If two consecutive check-ins are missed, the escalation procedure starts automatically: a call to your mobile, then a call to the site, then, after thirty minutes, a call to your emergency contact and a visit from a supervisor.

A charged telephone is the minimum, and it is your responsibility to start a shift with one. Staff who visit people at home also carry a lone-worker device with a button that opens a live audio link to a monitoring centre, which can hear what is happening and call for help without the device being answered. Devices are signed out at the depot and must be returned charged at the end of each shift.

Check the address record before you set out. Where the record carries a warning marker, the visit must be made in pairs, and no exception to this may be agreed locally. Park facing the direction in which you will leave. If at any point you feel unsafe, leave: you will never be criticised for ending a visit, and you should record the reason the same day so that the record is up to date for whoever goes next.

Report every incident within twenty-four hours, including those in which nothing actually happened. A near miss is the cheapest information the organisation will ever receive, and it is only useful if it arrives. Reports are read by the health and safety team and are never referred to in appraisals or in decisions about promotion.

An allotment is a piece of ground, rented by the year, on which the tenant may grow food for the household but not for sale. A traditional full plot measures ten rods, an old unit that works out at about two hundred and fifty square metres, which is roughly the area of a doubles tennis court and rather more work than most people expect. The land usually belongs to a parish or town council, occasionally to a private association, and in most British towns there is a waiting list for it. In some cities that list is measured in years.

The institution began as compensation for a loss. Between the middle of the eighteenth century and the middle of the nineteenth, the open fields and commons on which cottagers had grazed a cow, gathered fuel and grown a few vegetables were enclosed and turned into private farmland. The rural poor lost, at a stroke, the ground that had made the difference between a wage and hunger. Allotments were among the remedies offered, sometimes by landowners with a genuine conscience and sometimes by parishes calculating that a man digging his own potatoes would cost the poor rate less. The conditions attached to early tenancies show both motives at once: no work on Sundays, no growing for sale, and forfeiture for drunkenness.

The two world wars turned a charitable provision into a national policy. Public parks, golf courses, railway embankments and, famously, the dry moat of the Tower of London were broken up for vegetables, and by 1943 there were about one and a half million plots in Britain producing a substantial share of the country's fresh food. Growing your own stopped being a mark of poverty and became a contribution, and for a short period the allotment was as respectable a thing to own as a bicycle.

The peace undid it. Land on the edge of towns was needed for houses, vegetables became cheap in the new supermarkets, and a generation that had spent five years digging out of necessity discovered that it had no wish to spend Saturday doing it for fun. Plot numbers fell for forty years, and councils under financial pressure found allotment land an attractive thing to sell. The law was supposed to prevent this: a council has been obliged since 1908 to provide plots where six registered electors of the district request them in writing. In practice the duty proved easier to evade than to enforce, because a request can be met slowly, and land once built on is not recoverable.

Then, from the late 1990s, demand came back, and nobody entirely agrees why. Food scares and a general unease about how vegetables were produced played a part. So did the price of fresh produce, and so did the growth of flats without gardens in cities where a patch of outdoor space had become a luxury. Waiting lists lengthened faster than anyone could create new sites, and many councils responded by dividing full plots in two as they fell vacant. Beginners are glad of a half plot, which can be kept under control in a few hours a week. Long-standing holders have resisted the change fairly consistently, arguing that a halved site loses the rotations and the fruit trees that a full plot supports.

What the evidence shows is more modest than the enthusiasm. Studies comparing plot-holders with similar people who do not garden report better measured physical activity, more vegetables eaten and lower reported stress, which is about what one would expect from any regular outdoor occupation with a social element. The financial case is weaker than folklore suggests. Once seed, tools, water charges, the rent itself and the journeys to and from the site are counted, a plot rarely saves a household money, and the produce it yields is seasonal and awkwardly bunched. Anyone taking one on for thrift alone is likely to be disappointed, and most who keep one know this perfectly well.

Sites are also governed, and the governing is a frequent source of friction. Rules limit the size of sheds, the height of hedges, the keeping of hens and the lighting of bonfires, and most associations require that a plot be at least seventy per cent cultivated at inspection, with a warning letter and then a notice to quit for those who fall below it. Anyone who has attended an allotment association meeting will know that the community which forms around a site is genuine and that it can also be pointed, and that the same rules which keep a site usable are experienced by newcomers as a wall of unwritten expectation.

None of which explains the waiting lists, and I suspect the explanation is not horticultural at all. In a British town almost every piece of ground is either private, in which case you may not enter it, or public, in which case you may walk on it and nothing else. The allotment is the one exception: a patch of land over which an ordinary person, paying perhaps forty pounds a year, makes the decisions. What goes in it, when, and whether this corner is left to nettles for the butterflies is entirely up to the tenant. That is a rare thing, and it is worth more than the vegetables.