Why the July Fruit Picking Trip With My VODW Friends Was the Happiest Day of My Year By Gin

If you ask me what the happiest trip of my life has been, I will not hesitate even for a moment. It was the fifth of July, fruit picking with the Voice of Domestic Workers, surrounded by every single one of my friends, laughing so much and so freely that I almost forgot what it felt like to carry anything heavy at all. That day was everything. And I mean that in the fullest possible sense of the word.

There is something that happens when you are with all your friends at the same time, not just one or two but everyone, the whole group gathered in one place doing something joyful together. The energy multiplies. The laughter becomes louder and more constant. Every moment feels more alive because there are more people alive in it with you. That is exactly what the fruit picking trip felt like from the very beginning, like being inside a happiness that was bigger than any one person could contain alone and that kept growing the more people joined it.

We picked fruit together under the summer sky, and the weather was generous and warm in the way that makes you want to be outside and stay outside for as long as the light lasts. I have said before that I want to make the most of the good weather here, to take every opportunity the season offers and squeeze every drop of joy from it, because the warm months are precious and they pass quickly and regret is a much heavier thing to carry than tired legs from a long day of picking and laughing and living fully. On the fifth of July I squeezed everything I could from that day and came home with hands full of fruit and a heart full of something even sweeter.

The laughter was constant and genuine, the kind that starts for one reason and continues long after the reason has been forgotten because the laughter itself has become the reason. We laughed walking between the fruit trees and we laughed taking photographs and we laughed at each other and with each other and sometimes at nothing in particular except the sheer pleasure of being together in a beautiful place with no obligations waiting for us. That laughter is one of the sounds I want to remember about this year. It belongs in the collection of things that prove that life, even a life as demanding and sacrificial as the life of a domestic worker, is still capable of producing moments of pure and uncomplicated joy.

And then we swam. Getting into the water with your friends on a warm summer day is one of those simple pleasures that reveals itself to be not simple at all but actually quite extraordinary once you are in it. The cold of the sea and the warmth of the day and the sound of everyone laughing at the shock of the water, all of it together creates something that stays in the body long after the day is over, a kind of aliveness that lingers and reminds you, on the harder days, that you are capable of feeling this good.

That aliveness, that freedom to swim and laugh and pick fruit and be completely present in a joyful day, is something every domestic worker deserves and something that is only fully accessible when the conditions of your work and your life allow you to truly rest. The right to change employer without restriction matters precisely here. Because a domestic worker who is trapped in a household she cannot leave, whose days off are uncertain and whose freedom to participate in community life is limited by the control of an employer who holds her visa status over her, cannot arrive at a fruit farm on a July morning with her whole heart open to the joy of it. Freedom from that trap is freedom to be entirely present in days like this one.

I want more trips like this one. I said it simply and I mean it completely. More chances to gather with all my friends in beautiful places and make the most of the good weather and laugh until the laughing becomes its own destination. That desire for more, for a future full of days like this one, is what the right to renew the Overseas Domestic Worker Visa protects. Because more trips require more time here. More summers require the security of knowing that this summer will not be the last, that the visa will be renewed and the community will still be gathered and the friends will still be available and the fruit will still be waiting on the branches next July and the July after that.

The fundraising group made this trip possible, and I want to say that clearly because gratitude deserves to be named as specifically as the thing it is grateful for. The work of organising and fundraising and making these experiences available to VODW members is not invisible to us. We see it and we feel it in every trip that would not have happened without it, in every day of joy that was made possible by people who believed that domestic workers deserve beautiful experiences and worked to create them. Thank you. From the very bottom of a heart that came home from the fifth of July fuller than it has felt in a long time.

And to the Voice of Domestic Workers, the gratitude runs even deeper. Because without this organisation I would not have had this community to go on the trip with. I would not have had these friends whose laughter filled the orchard and whose company in the water made the swimming feel like celebration. The VODW did not just give me a day out. It gave me the people who made the day worth having. It gave me belonging in a country where belonging does not always come easily, and it gave me the confidence and the knowledge and the support to fight for the rights that will make that belonging permanent.

The right to settlement is the permanence that all of these trips and all of this laughter and all of this community is building toward. It is the assurance that the life being lived here, the friendships and the memories and the fruit picked under the summer sky, has a foundation that cannot be removed when a document expires. Settlement means that the fifth of July is not a borrowed happiness but a genuine one, part of a life that is securely and lastingly here.

And the right to British citizenship is the fullest version of that security. It is belonging to this country in the same complete and permanent way that this country has come to belong to me, through the seasons experienced here and the friends made here and the trips taken here and the life built here day by ordinary extraordinary day. Citizenship would simply make official what is already deeply true.

Thank you for the fruit and the sunshine and the water and the laughter. Thank you for every friend who was there. Thank you for making me feel, on the fifth of July 2026, that this life is good and that the best of it is still ahead. I want more trips this year. And I am going to keep showing up for every single one.

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