16.10.24

in the soil

I was expecting more of a change after the weeks of neglect, the definite shift in the season brought on by wind and rain and colder nights but although a few of the hazel leaves are yellowing and dropping in the main there simply seems more of everything, and greener too – today in the sun it is hot, I am turning the soil and pulling up deep-set dandelion in t-shirt and cap and it almost seems a second spring, the nettles are fresh and lively, beneath the long grass are speedwell still and pimpernel – surely not, I think, the strimmer shreds them – although look, the moss is chasing grass away beneath the fig tree, in the shade of the hedge, and mushrooms streaked a queasy turquoise dot the paths between beds. I pull away the last of summer in the form of my collapsing bean-frame, heavy with pods, dig the earth for winter.

in the kitchen

Some of the borlotti, the few that have managed to get enough growth and enough water and then enough sun to swell and ripen and dry in the pod, I will save to sow again next year, some I will try and let dry at home for future use and some I will pod methodically and put in a pan with cold water, salt, a bay leaf, perhaps some tomatoes cut in half, rosemary – a few anchovies could melt away into the cooking liquid – cloves of garlic, some olive oil, peppercorns, half a dried chilli (not all of these things at once) and let them simmer away for 40 minutes or so. A handful of clams are soaking in salted water, I will open them in white wine and strain the juice into the bean pot and pick in the meat and maybe add some broken pasta – I meant to buy a potato – or maybe some rice, even on these warmer days the nights are getting cold.

on the page

I was put off reading Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over The Bones of the Dead simply by its length, which is probably unfair of me, and The Empusium, subtitled in its translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones as A Health Resort Horror Story, is the first book of hers I have read. Although I am an absolute coward when it comes to on-screen horror I will quite happily read stories and novels of that description, Gothic, ghost stories, folk-horror, whatever it is that Jeff VanderMeer writes, perhaps partly because it is often very funny alongside its horror, or because (as with The Empusium) often when written horror comes more from a kind of creeping hallucinatory quality than from jump scares, gore.