20.2.24

in the soil

We want to think it spring as the first bright colours of spring come through, coiled with life, the ramsons below the hedge, the forcing rhubarb, the shoot of raspberry an inch barely tall but dense, dense with its potential growth, the first pre-leaves of the elder and in neglected patches carpets of goosegrass to clear, the persistent rootings of teazel and dandelion, all of this tells us it is spring. Kneeling in the soil to clear the goosegrass, uproot the teazel, the cold comes up through the earth, a damp and aching cold through the knee and the sole of the shoe and I nestle wool around the tiny just-there artichokes in the knowledge that despite these signs of spring another frost could come, knock all the fresh green down.

in the kitchen

Working at the allotment in (unusually) the company of my brother who is off work for half term we are surprised to hear through the hole in the hedge Hey! That isn’t the Eagle twins? and to see there an old primary school friend we have not seen in decades who lives in Greece as a beekeeper, is home briefly staying with family and offers us some of his fir honey which is dark and resinous and delicious; I think to ferment my first forced rhubarb in it but in the end just cook that gently with a little sugar and eat the honey with a spoon. It is remarkable, I often think, that there is really only one food comparable to wine in its complexity, its variety, its expression of the unique ecosystem from which it arises, and that food is made by bees.

on the page

Werner Herzog’s The Twilight World is dense and brief and fevered, a history not of exhaustive fact but of little telling detail. Among the many remarkable aspects of the Japanese soldiers’ long war it strikes me for some reason as particularly impressive – more than their survival, by and large, without illness, more than the monotonous seasonality of their diet – that they are able to work out from first principles how to extract oil from green coconuts in order to keep their ammunition and weaponry from rusting in the constant exhausting humidity of the jungle.