11.3.25

in the soil

If you want broad beans in the late spring then if you are wise you will sow them in the autumn with the intent that before the winter cold arrives they will have grown a handspan or two and will happily sit like that until the sun comes back, ready to leap up in the warmth. Like this you get plants which produce early and are also strong enough to resist to a degree the inevitable infestations of blackfly – in theory. In the actuality of the soil the last two years have seen the autumn-sown beans destroyed by either the weather (too warm at first so they grew too tall, seen off by a cold snap) or by wildlife, the tiny mice that live in the hedgerow dig up and make a feast of the beans which are almost as big as their bodies or just neatly snip off the plants at the stalk; slugs finish off what is left. So now I am preparing the earth for a spring sowing, not digging it but just rootling it up with the point of a trowel to imitate the rootling a wild pig might give it or the scratching of chickens and am pleased to find beneath the slight crust of the surface a fine tilth, the holy grail of soils, perfect for seeds.

in the kitchen

We go for Sunday lunch at the house of some friends and are presented with a feast of quesadillas, totopos and pozole rojo, food mostly unfamiliar to me, the latter a rich broth of pork and pepper that belongs to that loose genre of customisable soups – ramen, pho, bouillabaisse – which are some of the best food for feeding a crowd; increasingly I think a perfect restaurant would be one which instead of a wide array of dishes offered one done extremely well, with instead a wide array of garnishes to let each guest finish it to their liking, a world away from the perfect-platefuls of restaurant cuisine. This soup came with

tortilla chips

raw shredded white cabbage (a very sweet and good one)

raw finely diced white onion

raw sliced red chilli

coriander leaves (cilantro, our hosts American)

sliced and seasoned avocado

fresh lime for squeezing

sour cream

two kinds of hot sauce

so that each bowl – each spoon – could be made different, and it is fun, too, to put a little bit of this and a little bit of that into your soup, and to crush handfuls of crisps at the table.

on the page

Despite it being at one point a favourite film of mine I had no idea that David Lynch's Wild At Heart was based on a book or that the book was itself part of a longer sequence of books on The Wild Life of Sailor and Lula which I am nearly two books into. As is often the case with books you have seen the films of it is slightly jarring to read as so-far word-for-word dialogue changes, as the plot meanders along not-quite-identical paths, although perhaps the most jarring element is the lack of Sailor's snakeskin jacket, a symbol of my individuality and my belief in personal freedom, which apparently Nicolas Cage insisted on his character wearing. There is always something alluring in this kind of fantasy Americana where no-one drinks anything besides beer or coffee or cola and where the desert sun beats down on an eternal summer.