Why a Simple Day at a Farm and a Walk by the Sea Filled My Heart More Than I Expected By Vanessa
- thevoiceofdomesticworkers
- 1 hour ago
- 6 min read
There are trips that you plan carefully and trips that simply unfold beautifully on their own, where everything falls into place not because it was perfectly organised but because the people you are with and the places you find yourself in combine into something that feels, by the end of the day, like it could not have gone any other way. Our day trip to Felderland Farm on the fifth of July was the second kind. And from the moment we arrived to the moment we sat down together for a final meal before heading home, it gave me more than I had anticipated walking in.
The first thing we did when we arrived was gather for a group photograph. That might seem like a small detail, but I think about it now and understand why it felt important in the moment. A group photograph is a declaration. It says we are here, together, in this place, on this day, and we want to remember it exactly as it is. For domestic workers who spend so much of their time as the unseen people in someone else's story, choosing to document our own joy, to place ourselves deliberately in the frame and say this moment belongs to us, is quietly significant. We took that photograph and we were all in it, smiling and present and real.
The farm itself was everything the countryside is supposed to be and so rarely gets the chance to be in the middle of a busy life. Open fields stretching generously in every direction. A peacefulness in the air that the city does not offer and that the body recognises immediately and responds to with a kind of grateful exhale. We walked through it together, taking in the space and the quiet and the particular quality of light that belongs to the English countryside on a summer afternoon, and I felt something in me slow down that had been moving too fast for too long.
The fruit picking brought a different kind of joy, more active and more immediate. Fresh fruit waiting on the branch, ready to be found and taken and eaten with the satisfaction of having gathered it yourself. There is something in that act, simple as it is, that connects you to something older and more fundamental than the rhythms of domestic work. Something that reminds you that the world produces good things freely and abundantly, and that you are allowed to reach for them. We picked and tasted and filled our hands and our baskets and our afternoon with the pleasure of it, and the excitement in the group was genuine and unforced and completely lovely.
After the farm, some of us made our way to the nearby beach, and the transition from countryside to coastline felt like the day offering one more generous gift before it was done. The sea breeze reached us before the water came into view, that particular salt freshness that does something immediate and good to the lungs and the spirit. We walked along the shore together, the waves moving in and out beside us, taking photographs and talking and simply being present in a place that asked nothing of us except our attention. The water was beautiful and the sky above it was wide and the afternoon light was doing everything it could to make the scene as perfect as possible, and largely succeeding.
Walking by the sea is one of those activities that seems too simple to be as restorative as it actually is. There are no instructions and no requirements. You simply walk and breathe and look at the water and allow the rhythms of the sea to gradually replace whatever rhythms your body arrived carrying. By the time we turned back from the shore, something in the group had shifted into a deeper and more settled happiness, the kind that comes from having been genuinely restored rather than merely distracted.
That restoration is something every domestic worker deserves and something that the right to change employer without restriction makes more consistently accessible. Because the ability to restore yourself, to step away from work and genuinely recover, requires that the work itself not be a trap. A domestic worker who cannot leave a situation that exhausts and diminishes her is carrying that situation with her everywhere, even to open fields and seaside walks. The freedom to choose differently, to move to an employer who treats her with fairness and respect, is also the freedom to arrive at a beach on a July afternoon and feel the sea breeze without dread underneath it.
Before we headed home, we stopped together for a meal. The table was spread with food and laughter and the particular warmth of people who have shared a good day and want to hold onto it a little longer before it ends. We talked about our favourite moments from the trip, which is one of the loveliest things you can do at the end of a day, to name aloud what mattered most and hear what mattered most to the people beside you. Every answer was different and all of them were right, because a day like this one gives different gifts to different people and all of the gifts are real.
That shared meal was about more than food. It was about the kind of community that the Voice of Domestic Workers has built over years of showing up for its members and creating spaces where domestic workers can come together not only to advocate and campaign but to simply be with one another in the ordinary and extraordinary business of living. The right to renew the Overseas Domestic Worker Visa is what allows that community to keep its members. What ensures that the people sitting around that table can sit around many more tables together in the years ahead, rather than being separated by visa expiries and forced departures that cut connection short before it has had the chance to fully deepen.
This trip was not just about visiting a farm. That line stayed with me after the day ended, because it captures something true about what outings like this one actually are for domestic workers. They are about friendship and belonging and the reclaiming of joy in lives that have often prioritised everyone else's joy above their own. They are about the right to settlement in its most human expression, the right to plant yourself somewhere, to build connections that last, to accumulate memories on a particular piece of ground until that ground begins to feel like yours.
And they are about the right to British citizenship in the deepest sense. Because the woman who stood in that group photograph at the start of the day, who picked fruit and walked by the sea and shared a meal with people she loves, is part of this country. She has brought her laughter and her culture and her care and her community to British fields and British shores, and she has enriched them. Citizenship would simply confirm what that photograph already shows. That she belongs here. That this place is hers. That the memories made on the fifth of July have a permanent home in a life that is permanently and rightfully here.
Great friends, beautiful places, and unforgettable memories. Those words are simple and they are exactly right. Felderland Farm will always have a special place in my heart, not because of the farm itself, beautiful as it was, but because of who I was there with and what we gave each other on that summer afternoon. That is a gift worth treasuring. And a life worth fighting for.
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