20.8.24

in the soil

A slow abundance is finally coming, a race now of whatever is left of the heat against the shortening days. This morning I woke up, windows open in these still muggy – coagulated, they say in Sicilian, I read on Instagram – these still muggy nights, woke up in the first breeze of dawn and felt it autumn-cold, the first harbinger of a seasonal depression it is hard to shake off, but I fell back asleep and woke again to a hot day, hot and close and good for not much more than watering everything, not the blackberries which seem to draw on their own infinite reserves but the cucumbers, the swelling beans, the pot of scrubby tomato, not forgetting the bare earth which hides wild garlic, dense roots of asparagus, not forgetting to water for the season after the season after next, that almost unthinkable spring.

in the kitchen

Looking back over these notes I see that the first one nearly a year ago at the start of last September has a recipe for pickling cucumbers, which last year I had in great supply throughout August and into the next month from two plants sown directly into the soil and four transplanted from seedlings, the former two sprawling wider and more fruitful than their cosseted pot-stunted siblings; this year I have so far five small fruit from the two plants left of the I think eight I had, the first four sown direct and eaten to the ground, the second four again transplanted and barely surviving the summer of the slug. These fruit and whatever else comes I will pickle to the same recipe I used last year alongside fennel seed heads, horseradish leaves, blackcurrant leaves and garlic all from the plot, a new ritual begun.

on the page

I finally read Amy Key’s Arrangements In Blue which is as brilliant and as sad and as beautiful as everybody says it is and which also sends me (as with all of my favourite kinds of writing) in all sorts of different directions, to the album Blue which I find I have never really listened to properly before, to the writing of her friend and mentor Roddy Lumsden, to the circle of poets he taught, a book of open possibilities rather than closed answers.