28.1.25
in the soil
The driving rain of the morning and the knowledge that even in the sun which breaks out around lunchtime the surely sodden soil will not welcome any intervention in the form of weeding or digging over empty beds, the only work available on my plot at this time of the year – next door on my mother's there are leeks to pull if I wanted them but they too would come up with a great clump of mud in this endless wet – do not encourage me to make the walk across town to go and visit my slumbering plot and so I do not, stopping only at the market to pick up a few things. I always feel my world slightly smaller when I do not have a chance to visit the allotment, the only constant green and muddy space in my life – for something else I am writing I look up pictures of warmer drier months there –
in the kitchen
As the pre-Christmas period in hospitality is does not generally offer many opportunities for rest and relaxation we usually save our festive party energy for Burns Night, something to look forward to in winter's grey middle. Apart from anything else and with apologies to roast dinner fans the food is simply better, the holy trinity of haggis-and-neeps-and-tatties possessed of a clarity of purpose missing from the bloated decadence of Christmas dinner – although as the canapés we have by way of a starter increase year-on-year and as I have a habit of snacking constantly while cooking I barely have the appetite for one round of dinner, rich as it is, and the giant haggis our butcher presents us with, as long as my forearm, she tells us, and about as wide as mine, feeds thirty easily.
on the page
Peter Ackroyd was someone who I always felt I should like, somewhere between academic and artist, enamoured with the smoggy mythology of London, and so I found that I never did, putting down Chatterton and English Music and Milton in America without ever really getting into them, wanting I think something a little less clever than these patchworks of history and imagination and dense artistic allusion. I am older now and in any case more comfortable with things being clever and I very much enjoyed The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein and more recently Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, one of the few Jack-the-Ripper-adjacent stories has read that does not make me worry at the sanity and obsessions of its author.