13.5.25

in the soil

I forget, always, that the distance from the seaside inland makes the difference of at least a couple of degrees and that if I am too warm at home even in vest and thin trousers with holes in them then at the allotment I will definitely be too hot. Because of this heat and because we have been getting imported spring-summer veg for weeks at work now I forget there is still plenty to do here before a summer abundance and (for example) that here at 1pm on this too-hot day I still have to dig over where I want to sow my cucumbers and turn manure into the soil, without even a satisfying harvest to take home with me. The ground is beginning to bake hard in the sun but I have been quite good (I tell myself) at keeping it covered with weeds or woodchip or wool or in this case the pulled-up cauliflower plants piled on top, and so underneath things are still fine and moist and wormy; everything growing already is growing well, the foliage on the potatoes doubled in size, onion and garlic stems thickening nicely. I am pleased particularly that the agretti I cut back is sprouting more and bushier growth, a good crop (touch wood) coming.

in the kitchen

The same it's-spring-but-it's-summer-but-it's-not feeling pervades my cooking, so that one moment I am craving burnt aubergines and peppers and bits of fish, the next something poached and pale green. Mostly (the real summer feeling) I don't really want to cook anything. I leaf through Elizabeth David's Summer Cooking and imagine menus:

terrine of rabbit / baked trout, sauce verte / apricot ice-cream

globe artichoke, melted butter / Italian fricasée of chicken / geranium cream

jellied consommé / pig's head in jelly / green gooseberry jelly (perhaps a bit silly, this one)

although mainly what I want to eat is potato salad, dressed in créme fraîche with bits (capers, shallot, herbs) or with lots of vinegar and parsley or (surprise hit) some leftover hot sauce from a takeaway.

on the page

I had somehow forgotten, despite a youthful obsession with alchemical theory and despite an (obviously) ongoing obsession with fermentation, that besides its various other meanings the term fermentation refers to one of the stages of alchemical progress by which (depending on what is meant by alchemy) the base metal is transformed into gold, or the soul is transformed into the divine, or death is conquered, or any combination of those processes. I have a feeling I would have understood Ithell Colquhoun's Goose of Hermogenes rather better or at least differently if I had remembered that as well as the rest of the sequence, although I am not sure I would have enjoyed it more. Colquhoun was variously a Surrealist, a Kabbalist, a magician and an associate of hermetic groups and the book drips with images rich in esoteric symbolism (birds-that-are-women, horny ghosts, spontaneous rivers, towers and nuns and so on) which could, I imagine, be exhaustively mapped out, linked backwards and forwards and scried for meaning; or you could simply (more in the spirit of the thing) move through the chapters like a dream.