29.1.26

in the soil

After the bramble, this week it is the raspberry’s turn to be cut down – less of a struggle than the blackberry, with straight-grown canes which just need neatly trimming at the base, quite close to the ground. To prune is to be reminded just how different a plant is from an animal, that you can hack off the dead wood or the growing ends enough to make a nice shape, perhaps, or enough as leaves nothing living and visible above the earth and leave behind a creature that is not just fine but in fact healthier than it was before, freed from constraints; you have to understand that the self of a plant is not centralised or ruled top-down but spread right out through the body, each part as important as the other. I believe with the philosopher of botany Stefano Mancuso that our ideas of the hierarchy of the body (top-down, ruled by the brain) and therefore all our ideas about hierarchy in general stem from the simple physical fact that we look out of the same place that we think, and so locate our selves there, at the top of things; how differently might we treat the world if our eyes looked out of our gut, an older and more useful organ than the grey matter filling our skulls? How differently again if we had no eyes at all, and got our viewpoint from every inch of skin, or from the clouds and trails of scent which surround us, bleeding one self into the next, backwards and forwards in time – yes, to prune is to be reminded how a plant might think, in spreading coils under the earth.

in the kitchen

After the Christmas cake and all of the chocolates have gone January means Burns Night, which as I’m sure I have written before is one of the few satisfactorily food-based festivals we have in Britain, straightforwardly so after the presents and rituals and baggage of Christmas itself. Yes, it is a celebration of the Romantic poet and folk-song collector Robert Burns but practically speaking it is mainly a celebration of the haggis, warm-reekin’, rich, perfect for the weather at this time of the year and also for Organuary, a month-long celebration of offal I keep trying without much effort or success to popularise in the face of Dry January or Tryanuary. Although I have vague plans every year to make a haggis lasagne (white ragú of haggis with chunks of swede in it, oat-milk bechamel) I never do, something we only eat once a year doesn’t need much elegant variation although there are always leftovers. A series of Irn-Bru sponsored recipe cards I pick up at Sainsbury’s includes haggis tacos (featuring Irn-Bru hot sauce) and haggis mac and cheese (featuring Irn-Bru pickled jalapeños) and a haggis toastie (I forget how Irn-Bru was involved here). A friend made Irn-Bru ice-cream this year but we forgot to eat it and just had the crumble and custard my wife made. As well as the lasagne I always I intend to remake this ice-cream for Burns but never organise myself in time, although there is no real reason not to make it any time of the year, perhaps especially while it is still winter to go with a steamed marmalade pudding.

one day I will write about supermarket and sponsored recipe cards

on the page

In the bookshop at the airport on the way back from Italy at the start of the month I picked up a collection of Umberto Eco essays called Serendipities, which turned out to contain many of the ideas (about signs, about what a perfect language might look like, about real discoveries born of false assumptions) he would dramatize and explore in The Name of the Rose, which I then reread, and was reminded that 2026 is the eight-hundredth anniversary of the death of Francis of Assisi, a big year in the Catholic Church! It must have been disappointing for many and perhaps a relief to others that the last pope did not manage to last another year to mark the occasion. This in turn as well as a desire to rid my shelves of books I haven’t read made me pick up what I thought was a life of Francis by the French historian Jacques le Goff, in fact a series of essays analysing the sainted friar in the network of the world he lived in, its social structures and norms, looking back to the Middle Ages, forwards to modernity. What is striking is how disputed the facts and meaning of Francis’ life are, how a man who when it comes down to it seems to have mainly wanted to be left alone can find himself dragged back and forth by the Church as they tried to subsume and neuter his genuine radicalism, by modern thinkers angry that he was in fact a medieval Catholic man; there are stories in which he seems to do nothing but weep and pray, and others which make him a holy fool, jester of God, depending on what point the author is trying to make. Really it makes me think how hard it is to write of someone else’s life, and how perhaps every biography or even every story should contain within itself an apology for existing.