15.7.25

in the soil

I worry about my cucumbers – although the plants are growing well and sprawling out as you would expect like the courgette next to them they seem to be struggling to fruit, flowers form and wither while the little stub of flesh beneath just sits without swelling to eventually fall off. A quick Google makes me anxious about pollination but surely not, there are bees and butterflies everywhere and flowers enough for all of them, maybe I have not fed the soil enough or let it rest between plantings but it has had manure and compost and comfrey and I chop and drop weeds to rot there on the surface, maybe I just need to be patient and not expect too much from these plants in the summer's drought. There is a hosepipe ban which this year we are told definitely does apply to the allotment, it is true that we should try to water less or try to grow plants which need less coddling through our seasons but also true that the water company here are robber barons who have singularly failed in their duty to keep up with need – in any case I potter about with the watering can despite the sporadic rain and hope that the fruit will swell after all, next week or the week after, on through the summer.

in the kitchen

A week more of interesting eating than of interesting cooking in two trips to London, firstly to eat ice cream and jelly at Quince (milk ice cream with tayberry [my favourite], Greta peach creamsicle, cherry and fig leaf stracciatella slice, another peach filled with verbena jelly, loganberry baked Alaska, red gooseberry ice cream sandwich, watermelon jelly and cream) followed by a much-needed savoury meal at Sông Quê Café, then again the next day for the launch of the KIDNEY issue of Offcuts to which I contributed a recipe for rabbit offal sugo; this they had prepared as crostini for canapés, using chicken offal as getting hold of enough rabbit offal would have involved getting hold of at least a few dozen rabbits. It's quite rare that anyone cooks anything I have written a recipe for, and I found it strangely flattering. I didn't just eat offal canapés; man cannot live by vol-au-vents alone, in the words of John Cooper Clarke, and before the launch I went up the road to Come Back In and had some really excellent chow mein.

on the page

I enjoyed Tabitha Stanmore's Cunning Folk a lot partly because it is full of very entertaining anecdotes but mainly for its refusal to make judgements on the people it describes for who practical magic is very much a real and present part of life, neither dismissing everyone in the pre-modern era as credulous fools nor attempting to rationalise everything into a modern understanding with theories of rye-blight or mass hysteria or whatever – the point is that people acted then very much as if magic was real. Always the question with historical fiction is how exactly to portray magic, religion, superstition; must heroes seem modern in order to seem intelligent, relatable? As I have just started watching The Mirror and the Light I was amused by the idea that Wolsey and Cromwell himself might have both owed their status to magic rings, demoniac knowledge, although in the case of these two low-born overachievers envy must have played at least as big a part as actual beliefs or fears. Still, I would like to see Mark Rylance's calmly competent Cromwell engage in some light astrology, or make a poppet to torture Thomas Howard.