19.7.26

in the soil

It is that time of the year when even the grass has given up and the only plants showing green that are not being actively watered are those deep-rooted weeds it is impossible to be entirely rid of, the bindweed, nettles, teasel and ragwort (though this last has been stripped bare by caterpillars) that edge and criss-cross the plot, the plants of the hedgerow and my semi-cultivated bramble, two rows of it now, which each summer explodes out of its theoretical bounds, sending suckers across the path to my mother’s plot, across the other side to my neighbour’s plot, up and down my own to try and colonise the bean patch, the currant bushes. At one end is a thornless variety that fruits slightly earlier than its wilder cousin, slightly elongated berries with a warm and heady scent; enough today to eat a couple as I pick and take a little pot home to snack on. Although they seem to come earlier every year the main crop of blackberries are still a few weeks off at least; plenty coming, though, the thick vines heavy with flowers collapsing around green fruit. Because I spent so much of May and June away and also because of my general disorganisation I do not have any of the summer glut the rest of the allotment are dealing with, no tomatoes, no cucumbers and no courgettes to pick as often as possible and come up with recipes for and try to palm off on other people - I saw someone online describe this process as the “great courgette redistribution. Instead I have the late summer to look forward to, the summer of dark fruit and endless beans and squash to come, all to dry and pickle and bottle up against the future.

come on little squash plants, you can do it

in the kitchen

Having said that I do still have the produce from our veg bag and from my mother’s surplus to use which has meant lots of dinners involving baked or fried or stewed and room temperature vegetables, such as

courgettes grated and salted and mixed with cheese and formed into kolokithokeftedes by my wife while I went and bought some pitta from the corner shop

aubergines and courgettes browned and chopped up and cooked in a sauce of tomato and red peppers alongside some olive oily smashed up new potatoes and a bit of monkfish wrapped in ham

aubergines and courgettes diced and deep-fried and mixed with raw tomato and garlic to go with pasta

while in the oven at the moment is an aubergine my wife has cut in half and stuffed with its flesh sautéed with anchovy, tomato, capers, and mixed with breadcrumbs

all of which are perfect now it isn’t quite so hot and it’s ok to have the oven on for a bit in the afternoon.

on the page

When Peninsula Press sent me a copy of Too Little, Too Hard it immediately got categorised as a bedside table book - reserved for non-fiction that I want to savour and take in properly rather than race through (my longstanding bedside table book being David Graeber’s Debt, which I have been in the process of reading for years). It is fascinating to see how the diverse selection of writers approach the idea of value in the creation of literature - whether that means the social value of political art, the artistic value of different forms of writing, the value which neoliberalism can extract from writers as content creators, the value to the writer in terms of the money they can actually make from their craft, or of course some combination of all of those things - especially (self-centredly) as I am in the middle of working out if and how I can make a living mostly as a writer. What could be a purely depressing read against the background of rampant authoritarianism and the dismantling of the arts and humanities in fact engages through its insistence on the power of collective action, organisation, and of literature itself to make a change for the better.