16.7.24

in the soil

2024 has been – will be and is – the Year of the Slug, everybody you speak to who has any passing interest in the soil will tell you, the slugs have been terrible this year, they’ve had my beans – my cabbages – my lettuces – and despite the use of organic pellets, of eggshells, of wool, of some gluey substance that rings our seedlings in magic circles offering scant protection here in the endless summer rain they are back again and this time they have had my cucumbers, all grown in the soil from seed, healthy and thriving, nipped off at the stalk and gone. The courgettes are gone too but they were weedy plants to begin with, someone else’s cast-offs. They can all be replaced, these feeble losses, and no-one in any case will starve for the lack of my pickle crop, this year or any other.

in the kitchen

A few weeks after their traditional harvest date my green walnuts are ready and delivered in a large box which for some reason has a sequence of airholes poked into it as if it contained instead of or as well as the walnuts some medium-large animal but no, it just contains 15kg of still-green fruit, blackening where it is damaged. This is the second year I have made this nocino professionally, the fourth or fifth year I have made it at all, and it is still a surprise, the transformation of the things – the sharp smell of soap, the clear green juices blackening on the chopping board and on the knife, the steady darkening of the liquor.

on the page

Taken over by what summer we have I have not been staying in and reading but out and about at the beach, at the cinema, we go to see the poet Amy Key talk about her memoir Arrangements in Blue with the writer Eli Goldstone and about ambivalence and love and what it means to make art out of the facts of your life, I think about what we might owe the people - the dead - whose lives we write down.