23.7.26
in the soil
The hazelnuts are tanning on their branches, the cheek poking out from their little green caps a deepening ripe brown while the rest is still pale, the hedges full of still-hard damsons, blackberries, dripping with plums; something has killed and dismembered a female blackbird, leaving only her head and shoulders for the bluebottles, and it is hard not to feel for a minute the cold breath of autumn on the way - but although the heatwave has passed it is still warm, hot even, and the leaves not burnt brown in the sun are still green, the first outdoor tomatoes not even ripe yet. Mostly there is nothing to do, I want to dig up the bed of fennel but I will wait to harvest its seed first, I want to prepare the ground to sow some sweetheart cabbage but it is baked too hard to dig. The currants have given up for the year and so I drag their netting off them to let the birds at the last few fruit and spend some time pulling up dry grass and dead weeds from around the plants, thinking not for the first time how good it would be to have more animals to share this space with, goats or a donkey to eat all this forage, chickens to help me scratch up the bare earth; against allotment rules, though, even if it were practical or possible, and so the grass all goes on the compost and the earth remains undisturbed for now.
in the kitchen
Over the weekend I did a volunteer shift at the community gardens, doing some gardening, running the market stall, and making a pasta salad for the children’s group that my wife runs, while they used different pasta shapes to learn about the life cycle of butterflies (giant couscous for the eggs, fusilli for the caterpillars, conchiglie for cocoons, farfalle [obviously] for the butterflies). Just pasta (a mix of caterpillars and butterflies), seasoned while warm with evoo and black pepper, and a mix of tomatoes from the gardens - sweet red and yellow cherries, larger juicy striped ones, a couple of San Marzano - finished with some basil that the children picked and delivered to me. Extremely simple but delicious with such fresh tomatoes, and I was embarrassingly pleased by how much the children like it, going in for seconds and thirds. It made me realise that while I don’t miss the restaurant grind I do miss cooking for strangers; the hospitality of it, and the different way that I cook when I cook in bulk, with an eye to precision and repeatability.
on the page
I haven’t finished it yet but I can’t remember the last time I engaged with a book so much as with Anna Chapman Parker’s Understorey. A year’s record of her drawing practice of making line drawings of weeds wherever she might be - the streets around her home, the park, on a walk in the woods, on a day trip to London, on holiday in Wales, it is also a long meditation on the practice of paying attention to our environment, and the difficulty of really looking at things as they are, without the mind getting in the way; it expresses a lot of what I was struggling with while writing The Allotment Diaries, and what I’ve been thinking about writing since, and has gone straight on the reading list for my writing course. I am arrested early on by the phrase conventions of summary, the draughtsperson’s tricks to suggest with a few lines what they do not have the room to draw, how they must be avoided if you want to make an accurate picture, and remembered how when I was writing the book I would stop sometimes and realise I was writing a shape that was easy to write and not one which was true, the constant vigilance and the almost trance state it required, so that words were on the page before the brain had time to edit them into dishonesty.