18.5.26

in the soil

T-shirt weather, at last, and time to cut back the grass and pull the weeds that have shot up and around in the two weeks I have been away, the creeping buttercup trying to take back the asparagus bed, the nettles interspersed with the artichoke leaves, vetch and plantain coming up next to two hazelnut striplings between the clusters of wild garlic, collapsing now into the earth to wait for next spring. I strim the grass as close as I can, leave clumps of clover as they are (good for the soil, I think, and they would be good for pigs too, if this were an ideal mixed smallholding and not a council allotment), cover the weeds in the asparagus over with a layer of compost, pull some up from around the onions - grass, thistle, dandelion - and throw them back down to cover the bare soil between the rows of potatoes, themselves still half-covered in the rhubarb leaves & comfrey my mother put down to protect against the forecast frost; the cold seems to have got to the asparagus, one spear half-dead with the same green limpness you get in vegetables pushed to the back of the fridge, frozen and stuck. I am about halfway down my plot when it begins to rain, although it passes in five minutes, and halfway through another task (helping my mother put together a compost bin) when it begins to hail. Even though this too passes fairly quickly, when it stops it is no longer T-shirt weather and the warm earth is turned into sticky clay; I abandon all thoughts of picking elderflowers and try a bit more strimming, the grass steaming in the sudden sun. We are right on the edge of the gluts of summer, the broad beans heavy with pods not quite filled out, the artichokes full of flowerbuds just peeking out, if you dodge the nettles and fold aside the giant thistle’s silver leaves.

in the kitchen

While I was away I was mostly being cooked for - and cooked for very well - which is never something to complain about, but it was pleasant after a week to meet up with our friends Rachel and Gaia and go shopping in Testaccio market with not much more of a plan than something-with-mussels and let’s-see-what-looks-good, which resulted in asparagus and peas and lovely fresh onions and apricots and cherries and a morning sat together podding peas and picking mussels and chopping things and drinking coffee and trying some mortadella and some cheese before a lunch of

a loose risotto of asparagus and peas, like risi e bisi but with asparagus and without ham

a tiella of mussels, rice, and potatoes (recipe testing for Rachel)

mussels stuffed with breadcrumbs and celery (recipe testing for us)

boiled asparagus with melted butter

cherries afterwards, to be shared with the tortoise

and I thought again how nice it is to have a big table in the same place as the cooking is being done, so that it is shared like this, the kitchen the centre of the house instead of banished somewhere backstage.

on the page

My usual habit when I travel is to buy two or three paperbacks from the WH Smiths at the airport (depending on whether they are doing three for the price of two or buy one get one half price) to read throughout my holiday or just at the airport if the plane is delayed enough; in an effort to spend less money I went instead to the charity bookshop the day before flying and was pleased to find what I thought was a Natalia Ginzburg novel that hadn’t yet been released in the current run of new editions from Daunt Books; it was only after reading quite a few pages (in my defence, I was very tired) that I realised that that The Things We Used To Say was in fact an older and rather freer (at least in its title) translation of Lessico Famigliare, which I had read before as Family Lexicon in Jenny McPhee’s translation. A somewhat disorientating experience, to read almost the same book again, to be distracted by its differences in vocabulary and exposition, shocked again by the book’s quiet heartbreak, the understatement of its trauma.