12.3.24

in the soil

So much for the droughte of March, one or another of my family will say whenever the month provides us as it so often does with relentless rain, to which in like a lion, out like a lamb is perhaps the appropriately proverbial response. Next week, I thought last week, next week I will pick young shoots of nettles and blanch them and squeeze them dry and make a green dough for pasta or a green bowl of chickpeas or a green risotto, as it turns out next week (this week) after a fine weekend I stay indoors and listen to clattering drums and pace around like an animal with more energy than room and watch the rain driving in and think of the slugs happy in the rain-sotted soil.

in the kitchen

On a rare Saturday off for both of us the weather is good and we go for a walk around the coast and take a picnic, sandwiches of frittata and romesco sauce, and while we eat and later while we walk we see the picnics of seabirds and scavenging crows, mussels in their thousands picked neatly clean, those long parallelogram-clams emptied, unhinged, a bright blue crab shell (eaten or shed?), I remember sea-snails foraged in cleaner Scottish water and look out for them but see none among the barnacles and the seaweed; a great black-backed gull has bullied off its smaller cousins to pick away at the carcass of a small monkfish, leisurely as a white-napkinned diner in some restaurant at the water’s edge.

on the page

I pick up Lines and Shadows in a bookshop having never heard of it but liking the cover – as black and white as its title – and its setting in the bleakness of coastal Suffolk where I used to live, its coastlines and beaches which move with every storm, the lines of the edge of the water never entirely defined, brackish marsh and sea and dune all bleeding into one another; I did not realise until I moved to Margate how even the neat pleasure beaches of sheltered resorts need constant maintenance, sweeping and ploughing back into shape, a constant fight to keep the sea where it belongs.