19.3.24

in the soil

I feel I have been writing of nettles for weeks, I see I have been writing of nettles for weeks, the excitement some cooks keep for asparagus or those tasteless French strawberries of the early spring I expend on nettles; perhaps I should have been a nettle farmer, my father used to say. Nettles grow everywhere disturbed by man, I read somewhere, or at least everywhere disturbed by man and then abandoned. Here it means they grow out from the hedges and on the pile of rubbish on the plot opposite and in the mossy ground underneath skeletal teasels in what I call my wildflower meadow but is mainly grass, daffodil, goldenrod. From the left of the compost bin sprout a patch of dead-nettles, stingless leaves fragile in the light, none of the iron strength of their fighting doubles.

in the kitchen

Nearly chocolate egg season, at work we import Italian ones, miniature eggs filled with ganache and flavoured with hazelnut and Strega, the witch’s liqueur flavoured with mint and saffron and fennel – witches fly on twigs of fennel, do they not (I cannot think where I have read so) – but mainly stridently sweet especially against the fruity dark of chocolate. I like to buy new or special edition commercial chocolate bars whenever I see them and so I get a bag of chocolate orange Mini Eggs and also a bag of white chocolate orange Mini Eggs and as for Lent I am not drinking eat both of them mindlessly in an evening I might otherwise have occupied mindlessly with wine and feel slightly sick although not as sick as when I eat a white chocolate Cream Egg which feels like encountering sugar for the first time after a lifetime of salt.

on the page

A flying visit to Norwich and North Norfolk prompts a reread of The Rings of Saturn, perhaps the fifth or tenth, a book which even if I am not obsessed with still on each reading prompts a fresh reason to reflect. This time (mostly on the train there, the rest in an evening in our riverside hotel) I think how in Sebald’s account he does not allow his own ancestral guilt at the German holocaust to let him treat it as a unique kind of event in the history of human devastation, rather as a chapter unique in scale alongside those (to take two of his own examples) of the Belgian destruction of the Congo and the massacres perpetrated for political and mercantile ends by various agents of the British Empire; a wider lesson to be learned.