21.5.24

in the soil

Everywhere I go it seems I am bothering somebody. Clearing the fennel bed of teasel and dandelion I disturb a large brown spider clutching beneath it a white ball the size of its abdomen, looking I suppose for a safe place to nest – disturbed from its safe place to nest by this thoughtless ogre – while pulling out the grass that insists on creeping its way into the pond to colonise the water with roots and the beginnings of soil I see the miniature-sea-serpent crest of a newt, scared or at least displeased by the commotion, break through the pondweed and descend. The ants that farm the aphids that strip the stalks of the broad beans and leave them to blacken and die I am happy to disturb, to pinch out the leafy tops they gather in, to wash a hundred corpses off my fingernails. Whatever the ants are getting the aphids to harvest for them from the broad beans they harvest also from the artichoke which sits next door but here I do not mind, they cannot hurt this sprawling perennial that bursts each year a metre high from its root-ball.

in the kitchen

Although I have written before in praise of stock, broth, chicken soup in simple dishes of rice or vegetables – not so much the flavour of it but the weight – I would like to revise my opinion and here write in praise of water. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, Emerson once said, without exactly explaining himself. When you have vegetables like the first broad beans straight from the pod, a bunch of artichokes so young as to be still all heart, a green garlic or even just a decent onion, it is nice to make a brothy pasta dish or a chunky soup just by cooking them first in oil and then in water, nicely salted, and between the water and the oil and the vegetable juices and the added potato make something which tastes very well of everything in it, without the weight of bones but with its own.

on the page

Some books I like to read once a year or so, not for the sake of finding something new each time or for relearning something I had forgotten but simply for the pleasure of reading those words in that order, of seeing what perfect (there is no such thing as perfect) writing might look like. An Instance of the Fingerpost, The Debt to Pleasure, The Rings of Saturn I have all read five or ten times or more and can pick up almost anywhere and get joy from. Finding it nestled between two larger books on the shelf I would like to add to this rotation Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium, written as a series of lectures on what he considered essential qualities of literature as he saw it; he was to die before giving the lectures, or even completing the series – the collection, despite its title, lacks the sixth essay / lecture, on consistency.