22.4.25

in the soil

Still April in northern Europe and still not much to do here assuming you spent the winter preparing yourself and your soil, nothing else to plant or sow and certainly nothing to harvest yet; of the few people on the site this sunny and warm – hot, even, I am sweating and I take off my cotton jacket – day most are not engaged directly with plants but rather building various structures of wooden blanks and bamboo and metal poles, wire mesh and plastic, cages to keep the birds away from young plants or structures for them to grow up. I have nothing to build but once I have planted my seed potatoes in zig-zagging rows and built the earth up over them I think that I could do more with the height of my soil and so I build a mound up around the fennel to blanch the stalks and bulbs and dig a ditch along the asparagus partly I think to help drainage and partly to get the weeds out from the side, the creeping buttercup which is threatening to take over from two corners; I build a sort of earthworks around the agretti to help keep water in for this swampy plant and realise that I am really just sitting here in the sun and playing in the mud.

in the kitchen

Cooking for occasions I don't like to give myself any more stress than is absolutely necessary and it is good too not to have too much to do once your guests are there and demanding wine and water and attention generally and so one or two things which are happy to sit around in the oven and one thing which needs cooking last-minute is a good rule, I think. For an Easter Monday meal this means not pink lamb which is a faff and which somebody is inevitably not quite happy with the pinkness of but instead meat that has been sat in the oven for hours and is on the verge of collapse – half a shoulder of mutton, aged on the bone for three weeks I am told, rubbed with salt and oregano and put on a bed of garlic and lemon and onion topped up with water and covered with foil – and then a bulghur pilaf made in advance and reheated alongside the lamb and some rum babá sat in their syrup out of the way and then once my family arrived my wife made some fritters. Artichokes sliced and dunked in semolina-sparkling water and nettles blanched and chopped and mixed with spring onions and a risen batter to make kind-of-beignets-I-suppose. These we ate as they came out of the pan and drank fizzy wine and talked about the pope.

on the page

My friend who works in the bookshop convinces me to buy a book I have been half-meaning to buy for ages called Quinn, a novel by the Scottish poet Em Strang about a man of dubious sanity who is in prison for a murder he is convinced he did not commit; that the story is compelling and deeply satisfying without ever quite resolving what did happen is a strength, I have read too many desperately-poetic novels whose ambiguity seems to stem from the fact that the writer themselves does not know exactly what is going on which is not the case here, it has a madness which is real. The prose is precise and incantatory with repeated phrases that seem straight out of the darker reaches of folklore – things have been done that hurt the mouth to speak of; five years passed, or the sun and the moon tricked me – and holds you in place until you finish the book. Strang describes her novel as an exploration of male violence, incarceration and radical forgiveness and also as being about evil, about whether guilt is contained in one man or spreads itself throughout a community like a fairytale briar through the deep dark wood.