19.8.25

in the soil

The burnt-out dirt bike is still there, now with a notice from the council giving the owner TWENTY FOUR HOURS to remove the vehicle before it is impounded and then destroyed, a rather hollow threat given that I do not think its OWNER or whoever dumped it there and set it on fire did so with any intention of retrieving it and also that the notice is already a week old, its handwritten portions fading in the sun; nettles are growing through the rear wheel. On my plot the cucuzze is really out of hand, twining its way to the very top branches of the elder, and so standing on a chair I build its frame a metre higher and tie the questing shoot along it to grow forwards into the sunlight instead of up into the tree – hopefully; climbing plants in my experience do what they like. The plant at least is covered in flowers, a promise of a few fruit to come. If I doubt it will produce like courgette and other summer squash produce it does not quite do as butternut and pumpkins do, concentrating all their energy into one swelling fruit, and anyway in the case of the cucuzze the leaves are half the point, floppy and tender, a juicy late-summer green. The blackberries are producing well but not quite at their peak, a weekly treat rather than a glut demanding bottling, it is interesting to see that the older bramble which has been here since I took the plot on gives fruit more than twice the size of those on the younger plant just-established in the former raspberry bed, juicy and heady with summer, on the edge of fermenting, the strength of them that comes up from below.

in the kitchen

A customer at work complains that the mussel and courgette pasta is over-complicated, confused, which annoys me far more than any I-think valid criticism might have done as far more people have told me my food is simple, too simple, where's the rest of it, it needs something else while I am always thinking what you might take away from a dish and still keep its essence. Here are the ingredients of the mussel and courgette pasta:

Mussels

White wine

Chilli powder

Courgettes

Garlic

Oregano

Lemon

EVOO

Pasta (flour and water)

Parsley

Toasted breadcrumbs

of which I suppose you could lose the parsley and the breadcrumbs, everything else being essential to the sauce or really just seasoning. Toasted breadcrumbs (actually deep-fried in olive oil and drained well) are an automatic addition to fish pastas as grated cheese is to meat ragu and I often wonder if we could do without them especially if the pasta is already topped with (say) crab meat or bottarga but there is something very good about the way they soak up the sauce and help you really savour the dregs of it and anyway they are correct and so they stay. You can't please everybody, I suppose, and nor should you try to!

on the page

Having enjoyed those of Deborah Levy's novels I have read and waited eagerly for the paperback of The Position of Spoons I was a little disappointed in these pieces which I do not think are well served either in their collection together or in the glowing quotes which decorate the cover; forewords and introductions to new editions of much-admired works, extracts from longer essays, texts to exhibitions shorn of their visual context, lose rather than gain when gathered together, seem almost perfunctory in their large print in this rather short book. Only a few longer essays intended as essays stand the treatment, as in "The Psychopathology of a Writing Life" where Levy turns inward, explaining her conviction that fiction is a good home for the reach of the human mind.