28.8.24

in the soil

The hazelnuts which last week I looked at and thought two more weeks are gone entirely bar one tucked up in the top third of the tree, stripped with by squirrels or by the rainstorm which swept across us this weekend or by a combination of the two, the second year in a row I have lost the lot. I find that I am happier about feeding the squirrels than feeding the slugs, which is very mammal-centric of me, and even happier about feeding the (I think) wood or maybe harvest mice which hop out of the hedge to hide behind a bin, amongst the onions, camouflaged among the pebbles and bits of crockery which draw a fierce line between the cultivated plot and the ripe plums and the last of the brambles of the hedgerow, which together with the nuts and the squirrels and maybe the mice mean that summer is nearly done.

in the kitchen

That said the heat – rainstorms aside – is still enough to kill my appetite and my desire to cook much of anything I don’t actually have to cook and my wife is away so I have no-one to cook with and for and I find myself living on bits of this and that, yoghurt and ends of bread, yesterday morning I had a panzanella for breakfast and then a horrible sandwich. In the evening I pulled myself together and added half a jar of good chickpeas to some courgette I’d stewed in garlic and oil and put them on a plate next to some cold roast pork and some mustard and the first of the year’s allotment pickles and that all felt pretty good.

on the page

Marie Darrieussecq’s Sleepless as translated by Penny Hueston is a magnificent account of the novelist’s own insomnia as well as that of writers like Ovid, Proust, Kafka, Woolf, her struggles with various drugs and therapies to try and cure it, which widens itself from the autobiographical to a broader cultural study, of chronic insomnia as a condition of capitalism, of how a consideration of sleep can bring us closer to plants and other animals – I read it long into hot summer nights.