22.10.24

in the soil

Now as the autumn weather – days of heavy rain, days of straining sun – has turned the most carefully cultivated soil back into the heavy clay it has always really been, clay that sticks to your boots, to the spade, to your gloves, when even a gentle excavation sends centipedes and worms scurrying this way and that, not expecting such disruption – a Ruby Tiger caterpillar runs quicker than I would have imagined possible out of the harm’s way I have put it in – when, in short, it seems that the season for growing here has long past, now is actually the time when I would, if I was better organised, have everything neatly squared away for the winter. I could have my leeks in to grow plump in the rain, bitter leaves to help the soil along and for their welcome green, late onions in swelling sets but I am not organised – I poke my garlic in with clay-covered fingers, and try to remember to order some broad beans.

in the kitchen

We have an excellent meal at the newly opened Yellow Bittern which is notable among other things firstly for being almost entirely a uniform shade of beige and secondly for containing nothing that needed cooking to order – no searing and torching and boiling, just a succession of assemblies (lettuce + egg mayonnaise; radishes, salt + butter) and gentle braises, as gentle as beige, both of which set me thinking about what a restaurant can be, about the kind of cooking I would like to do, and incidentally by its absence (I remember Hugh Corcoran, the cook and proprietor of said restaurant, posting a few days before to ask if anyone could recommend a good fish supplier, the answer presumably being no) made me crave fish, in the gentle and beige form of a soup, which I will start cooking soon.

on the page

I was expecting Jen Calleja’s Goblinhood: Goblin As A Mode to be very funny (because her original pamphlet GOBLINS was, because goblins are inherently funny) and also to be strange, playful, clever, but was not expecting it to be quite so moving as her scattershot, meandering descriptions of the GOBLIN in popular culture in all its forms, of the GOBLIN mode of behaviour (too many of which had me nodding along) worm their way around and coalesce into an examination of neurodivergence, of mental health, a lament for her mother. I read it very quickly, and will go back again to gnaw upon it.