12.8.25

in the soil

There is a burnt-out dirt bike in the hedgerow on the path into the allotment spilling glinting ash across the dry earth and although it is jarring to see it there black and skeletal it does fit I think these feral days of summer when in the heat everyone runs a little wild. There is not much for me to do here except to try and keep the grass down, longer and lusher with the rain we have had than I would expect for these August days, to water the tomato which sits in a pot by itself and which is coming slowly into green fruit and then to pick whatever is ready, giant inky blackberries, more beans and more cucumbers, I could take tree-loads of elderberries if I had anything to do with them. I decide this year to beat the squirrels and to pick a load of hazelnuts now as cobnuts, crisp and meaty, good on the kind of big tangled salad where every bite gives you something different or just to eat slowly one by one. The cucuzza now has outstripped itself and is hanging on to the elder above it, I wonder if it will ever stop this upward growth and settle down into fruit, I will have to build its frame higher – the bramble too has shot out metres across the plot with stretched and questing suckers and needs wrestling back into place, tying and staking down, if it is not to cover everything with rambling thorns and August fruit.

in the kitchen

A jelly-obsessed colleague has a jelly-themed birthday party and so (reasoning that there will be an excess of sweet food) I spend half the week making a great antique monstrosity of chicken broth jellied with beef bones and pig's feet, clarified with egg white leftover from all my ice cream, seasoned with lemon, Marsala, nutmeg and black pepper and suspending boiled eggs inside it, set in a Bundt mould in a great pulsing round; this gets mixed reviews. Toast would be the obvious accompaniment but instead a few of us get chips and cut pieces of jelly to put on the chips where they melt into a gravy and mingle with the vinegar and (in some cases) ketchup. Instant soup! Instant gravy! we exclaim, before realising we have reinvented the stock cube. The next day I wake up very hungry, chips and jelly not (it seems) being a particularly filling or substantial meal.

on the page

There is an Oxfam bookshop in Canterbury to which I attribute a slightly magical quality in that it always seems to throw out books peculiar to my current interests however esoteric, after reading Simon Critchley's On Mysticism for example I was able to walk in and immediately find a biography of Hildegard von Bingen and this week just gone regretting as the weather turned that, having spent the whole sunny morning in the Cathedral we wouldn't be able to visit the Franciscan Gardens I picked up immediately a book on St. Francis of Assisi and Nature, an attempt to place his attitude towards non-human creation within the context of the time it was a product of, revolutionary yes but not coming from nowhere, an idea that despite the hierarchy of nature began when Adam was given dominion over it everything does have its particular role, its way of existing which nothing else can match, the birds for example given voices to sing and the kingdom of the air to fill with sound.