23.7.24

in the soil

A day of small victories, as although the courgettes have been eaten to the ground and two more of the borlotti have been savaged beyond I think recovery and although in fact this morning’s rain left the grass unstrimmable and the soil unweedable and the visit as a whole from one point of view a total waste of time the ragwort is covered with the striped bodies of the caterpillars of cinnabar moths, merry in their yellow and black, there are bees and soldier beetles and other pollinators at work over the cardoons and the fennel and the comfrey and the fig tree is finally growing consistently and a tiny cucumber forms on the middle plant of the three that remain and in any case, I tell myself as I leave the plot behind after this cursory inspection, it is good for a body to spend time doing something it is bad at, failure a protest against the relentless commodification of our time.

in the kitchen

For a few days over the weekend we have the kind of heat we still despite the evidence of recent years insist on calling proper summer weather which drives the town a little wild. Enjoy the weather this weekend! everyone says to each other, except everyone who works in hospitality. On the hottest day I have an ice cream for breakfast and another for lunch and on the others I make meals to be served mostly at room temperature, a stew of green beans and potatoes in tomato, a salad of tomato and cucumber and long green peppers left to marinate for a while and we have gazpacho with pickled melon in it.

on the page

I have a bad habit when it is hot of starting books and leaving them around in various parts of the flat and however much I am enjoying them putting them down somewhere and starting another book, at heart maybe I think all summer books should be sweaty little slices of heartbreak like Bonjour Tristesse. At the moment I have started Pachinko and The Gamekeeper and Verdict of Twelve and got a few chapters into reading an Inspector Montalbano book for the fifth time before getting bored and I am still reading Sontag on photography and Ask The Fellows That Cut The Hay and for some reason in the midst of this I decide that rereading Austerlitz would be the thing and have a long and confusing nap-dream set largely in railway stations.