11.6.24
in the soil
The briefest of visits, this week, the plants and the seeds that I want to be in the ground are in the ground and protected as far as they can be from birds and from slugs, the few things ready to pick are easily picked, my back is too painful to do much in the way of weeding or cutting the grass or any of the endless endless tasks of growing; in any case it starts raining as soon as I get there and so I pick the few things ready to pick and tut at the state of the aphid-ridden broad beans and then I leave again, the whole visit a brief rest between walks.
in the kitchen
June has crept up on me, it feels like we have barely wrung the best out of the asparagus and the broad beans and already it is time to start thinking about strawberries and gooseberries and cherries and about cucumbers and good tomatoes and plates of food that just involve acquiring and seasoning a handful of very delicious things, or at least it should be but instead we are in for the wettest summer in a hundred years, a taxi driver says, everybody says, and the pot of chicken broth on the stove at home does not feel out of place, nor the artichoke and taleggio lasagna my partner (my wife, I should say) cooks and serves with the trainees at a local charity. In town afterwards shall I have an ice-cream I think but no, it is too cold.
on the page
Instead of the ice-cream I go into the bookshop where the salesperson tells me to buy Boy With A Black Rooster and as she is more than capable of talking me out of buying books she doesn’t think I would like I follow her advice and I read it very quickly. It feels like a fairy-tale directed by Werner Herzog, the passage of one good and pure soul through a nightmarish landscape made pestilential by idiocy.