20.5.25

in the soil

Arriving with little to do (I think) apart from sowing my seeds of cucumber Mid. East Peace and climbing beans Marvel of Venice I think I will have a relaxed few hours of pottering about, strimming the grass, rooting out the teasels from the blackberry bed before they have a chance to shoot up and up, doing the admin side of things like moving the compost bin my neighbour no longer wants so that it is firmly in my plot. In the course of this I discover an entire fully-fledged ant nest, hundreds of eggs (so much larger than the ants themselves, I am surprised each time) and countless ants scurrying around. This we pick up with two spades to manoeuvre into the displaced bin, safe in the knowledge that the diligent ants will quickly rebuild the nest to their communal satisfaction. The slow-worms slither off who-knows-where, there are sheaths of their discarded skin that look at first like plastic, a baby one I find later underneath a brick in the warm dark. There are baby artichokes coming too, and baby broad beans on the broad bean plants, and the first redcurrants ripening in the late May sun.

in the kitchen

For the last few years I have had problems with my digestion (common among chefs, I think, who at work eat constant small amounts of quite rich things and few proper meals) which after being tossed around between doctors and consultants have been more or less resolved by daily medication and being generally told to deal with it; the consultant started telling me to avoid rich food, realised I was a chef, and told me instead to consider a reduction in the girth of the abdomen, which is advice I have not exactly taken. There are some things I used to eat all of the time which now have to be occasional treats, simple things like buttery scrambled eggs which with some time off work and a generally more settled diet I eat twice this week, once as Scotch Woodcock in a charming hotel, anchovy paste on the toast as well as anchovies on top of the eggs, once at home with spring onions and chard fried up in the butter, garam masala and turmeric and chilli powder too for curried scrambled eggs on toast with a bit of yoghurt which must help the digestion, right? and then I eat far too much pizza and feel ill for a day.

on the page

As a child I was entirely obsessed with the stories of King Arthur and his knights in all forms – medieval romance, modern retellings, "realistic" versions, films, poems, everything – and so I was mildly surprised to find in the charity shop a book I had never heard of, The Book of Merlyn by T.H. White, a kind of lost sequel or alternative ending to the much more famous Sword in the Stone and Once and Future King both of which I had of course read several times. In this sequel an aging Arthur is visited by Merlyn the night before the fatal Battle of Camlann and taken off for a final round of education as he was educated as a child, learning not just from Merlyn but from and in the forms of various animals; this is considered necessary in fact because Arthur and humanity in general are not thought to have realised how much they have to learn from animals, how blind, violent and arrogant is man. By way of a negative example he is transformed into an ant, a cog in a totalitarian machine, where he cannot even think words of disobedience and everything is either DONE or NOT-DONE; by way of positive he becomes a goose, wild and free and individual, yet working together. Merlyn's conclusion ultimately is that the ills of humanity come from statehood, the artificial idiocies of nationality, borders, passports that divide people against each other and stop them moving freely across the earth.