23.6.26

in the soil

I return from a couple of weeks away to find everything run riot. Although my mother has trimmed the grass (worried I might otherwise get a letter of warning from the committee, who have been doing their annual inspections to check that all plots are under cultivation) it has shot up again, going to seed in places, as is the clover, the vetch, and the plantain, the nettle, the lovage which is taller than me and covered in beetles - there is much to be done. The leaves of the garlic are turning to rust so I carefully lever the bulbs out of the earth cracked by their swelling, now dotted with the beans I sowed between them, alternating rows of borlotti and a flat yellow bean called Marvel of Venice, both saved from last year’s pods or the year before’s. I have to soak the earth with four watering cans worth of water to make it soft enough to get my beanpoles in, a frame of bamboo and string for the plants to climb up in that strange intelligent way they do, swaying this way and that in their quest upwards. My cucumbers which last year did so well have not germinated at all, or if they have then they have been entirely eaten by some animal or another, so the earth there gets a hopeful soaking in a last-ditch effort to wake the seeds up; if there is no sign next week I will stick something else in the ground. The solstice past, we have moved into summer’s second stage - I cut what will probably be the last artichokes of the year, leave the last broad beans on their plants to dry out and save for seed, dig up the first few potatoes and pick the first handful of currants. At the top of the plot, the little fig tree is blowsy and glorious, leaves sprouting from the original wood, from the second shoot it put up last year, in new shoots from the ground, flopping everywhere, their scent an echo of the heat to come.

in the kitchen

It is very hard to find the motivation to cook anything, both because of the heat and because my wife is still in Italy, and it never seems worth the effort to make a nice meal just for myself; tempting just to live on ice cream and takeaways, but I resist the urge and subsist instead on little bachelor meals of an omelette with some kimchi, or rice with sautéed broad beans and little chunks of liver sausage and cheese, or duck broth from the freezer seasoned with fresh chilli and garlic and bulked out with stewed courgettes and a handful of passatelli also from the freezer, a bowl of brown deliciousness in some ways entirely unsuited to the weather, but also somehow perfect. Other than that I have been pickling, in my capacity as Open School East’s Community Cook, working with their youth programme to make canapés for the opening of the school’s degree show - sauerkraut and rosemary oil on Peter’s Yard crackers, little skewers of pickled beetroot and snaked-over dilly beans described affectionately by a friend as nightmarish.

on the page

There is something very pleasurable about finally reading a classic not because you should but because you really want to, and finding that it is exceptional. I hadn’t read any Isabel Allende at all, shamefully, but picked up The House of The Spirits from the charity shop on the assumption it would be a good holiday book to really get stuck into, which of course it was - nobody needs me to tell them how brilliant Allende is, the book’s beguiling mix of woozy spiritualism and shocking brutality.