I was one of only two kids in my Singapore state school to join the gardening club. Yes, I was deeply uncool from a very early age. After lessons each day, we had to move around great sacks of sand and dig it into the sticky clay soil under the tropical sun. We were taught by our stern teacher, Mr Lau, that this backbreaking work was necessary to help improve the drainage of dense, heavy soil, which was prone to turning into an impenetrable mass of mud in the rain and baking rock hard in the sun.
