The power of ALLOTMENTS

After suffering burnout from her high-powered, stressful job, Kathy Slack, 41, found that the best therapy was in her garden

- RUTH ADDICOTT

It was 6 am and Kathy Slack, then aged 33, was about to drive to work, when she found herself sitting staring at the ignition.

‘I couldn’t remember how to start the engine,’ she recalls. ‘I called my husband Paul from the driveway in a panic, thinking that I’d had some kind of stroke. I said, “I haven’t got time for this. I need to get to work. I can’t let people down.”’

Kathy had a fast-paced job as Global Strategy Director at a London ad agency. She earnt a six-figure salary but, in return, she had to be ‘on’ all the time. She’d frequently get up at 4 am to do a work call to China and once had to cancel a holiday to Canada because of a meeting. ‘Even when I took time off to visit my mum who was ill in hospital, I took a work call,’ she says. ‘Everything was at the mercy of the client.’

At the time, Kathy was living in a basement flat in London with her husband Paul, 43. In 2009, they moved to the Cotswolds to get some peace and space from their jobs, but it meant a two-hour commute to and from London each day, on top of constant trips for work to the US, China, India or Mexico.

‘Some mornings, it would take me a moment to work out which country I was in,’ she says. ‘I was permanently stressed and jet-lagged. I didn’t know what day or month it was without looking in my diary. I remember lying awake in Beijing one night. I was in this palatial hotel suite and I just felt desperately, desperately lonely. Back home, I kept crying for no reason. I thought: everyone else is coping, so I should too.’