23.10.23
in the soil
It is finally wet as an English autumn should be wet, not just in heavy rain but in a dampness of the air and a week of this dampness has made summer’s earth black and friable, it smells fertile when you turn it over to the blind dance of worms, the cinnamon threads of millipedes disturbed and scuttling across it, dew-glazed cobwebs in the furrows. It is funny to see what grows green amongst this damp brown, while the rhubarb rots away to nothing and last year’s artichoke collapses in a mass of thistle next year’s comes up new and strong in the bones of the old as does the cardoon, the lovage, the young cicoria flourishes, bitter leaves all looking towards bitterer weather to come.
in the kitchen
A persistent cold puts everything I taste at one remove and accompanying blocked ears do the same for the rest of the world; I am not ready yet to dive into the hearty blandness implied in comfort food. Instead I want everything I cook to have toasted chilli in its bass or pickled chilli in its treble, I want flavours of grill and blackening and bonfire, we buy a bag of chestnuts and roast them hard in the oven. The fishmonger has British-caught bluefin tuna and I buy a thick slab to rub with oil and harissa and roast – I wish we could grill it – while my partner makes a salad to a recipe from a Tunisian friend, peppers and potatoes and egg all fried and chopped up together into a spicy savoury mess, topped with olives and caperberries, oily and good, and this hits all of the right notes.
on the page
With fiction I am an all-in-one-sitting kind of reader and I read very fast to the point where I don’t always really take everything in and so I am also a habitual rereader, three goes through say letting me really get my teeth into a book; I tell myself that that is how we experience life, too, we don’t always grasp everything that is going on around us without going back over it, thinking it through, but really it is just a bad habit. With non-fiction on the other hand I like to go over it slowly, little bites at a time. At the moment I am nibbling at In Italy by Cynthia Zarin, a collection of the kind of wandering essays you want to sink into, slowly.