19.11.24

in the soil

Elsewhere in the country it is snowing – not just snowing but settling, I am told, in the Midlands – but here there is nothing more exciting than a persistent grey drizzle and as I have no desire to go and stand in the mud in the persistent grey drizzle to try and cut wet grass I do not, even if not going there to fortify my defences means I may be abandoning the tiny, stunted radicchio and the healthier-looking winter lettuce to the slugs themselves fortified by the persistent wet, although perhaps the cold will see them off. The weather app claims that back home by the sea it feels like minus ten degrees centigrade which cannot be true (can it?) – I try and fail to remember the last time I was really cold, somewhere up a mountain probably in upstate New York – and I am glad to have a little haven in the soil further inland, where next week I promise myself I must actually do some work.

in the kitchen

I put together an Irish Stew to a recipe which requires nothing more than layering the various ingredients in a pan and covering them with water and a lid and placing the pan in the oven for three hours with no initial sweating of alliums or searing of meat and although it is not quite ready – two and a half hours into its three hour cook – so may yet be a disappointment but by its smell is not, and I wonder how many of the things we do to food, all that browning and poking and squeezing, are simply to satisfy the chef’s ego, and how much more we might gain sometimes if we just set things in motion and then, like the mystic reaching for God, got ourself out of the way.

on the page

Umberto Eco’s Baudolino translated by William Weaver has sat on my shelf unread for years for no reason other than that – I know this is stupid – it is big, a strange paperback-the-size-of-a-hardback edition, and slightly unwieldy to read one-handed. The same edition’s declaration of another medieval masterpiece implies something in the vein of The Name of the Rose which it is decidedly not. The impression is more of Eco writing an early Calvino novel, a boisterous fable which gets increasingly fantastical as the hero’s research into Prester John and the Grail grows into an obsession and finally a quest, like all quests inner as well as outer. Quite near the start of the book we are told perhaps the meaning of it, that Baudolino had not yet reached the point of his life, and that he was narrating precisely in order to reach it.