29.7.25

in the soil

I spend a sunny Monday mostly at home waiting for a parcel to arrive (it doesn't) and generally pottering around and so come in the next day to grey heavy skies but no actual rain; a cool breeze in the open, sweaty as soon as you start doing anything so that, sticky, the flying grass sticks to your skin when you strim it and so do a load of nettle seeds when a clump is accidentally mown down, itchy in the cleft of the elbow. I am very pleased with my companion planting, the cucumbers sprawl out across their bed and reach out towards the neighbouring ones with fennel sprouting in amongst them and rows of beans, Marvel of Venice rising above on bamboo canes, the first harvest of these this week, a fat handful to maybe stew with tomato and garlic or blanch and have with tahini dressing or a walnut tarator or maybe something else. Everything is reaching upwards; the cucuzze's tendrils nearly grasp the frame their fruit will hang from, the mallow has bolted and gone to flower and the cardoons, metres high, are collapsing onto my neighbour's plot and need dealing with. The flowers, which look even more like the thistles they are than do artichokes, are incredibly dense, the stalks massively top-heavy, engineered seemingly to teeter and prat-fall over, which must be good for them in some way I suppose.

in the kitchen

For a number of reasons I keep thinking about Greek food and soft vegetables rich with oil and I carry home a bag of those beans, agretti still doing well, some courgettes, herbs and tomatoes and potatoes from the farmer's market along with a good big wild bass thinking just to bake them all up together in some vaguely Greek-inspired way but in the end my wife takes charge of dinner as she usually does when fish is involved, she is simply a far more enthusiastic cook and eater of fish than I am at least at home. Fish dishes are usually my favourite to plan and cook at work, I like all the little tricks of lightly curing and drying and pickling that you can do with plenty of fridge space to play with but it is really not much a part of my home cooking repertoire, I was a picky child I suppose and then I was a vegetarian and then I never really got in the habit. Anyway the beans are saved for another day, the agretti is sautéed with fresh tomato and chilli, the courgettes and potatoes are roasted up together and the fish just stuffed with lemon and banged in the oven and it is really good, lip-sticking as good bass is, like turbot or braised trotter. All I do is make a tzatziki with one of my cucumbers (grown too large for pickling) and pour the wine.

on the page

Sometimes something you read takes you by surprise because it is something you have never thought of before and sometimes because it is confirmation of something you have been thinking but lack the intelligence or the vocabulary or the expertise to express it. In Olga Tokarczuk's Bieguni, translated into English by Jennifer Croft as Flights, one of the characters muses on the blind and powerful energy of life, noting (against Darwin) that

the longer and harder you look at the complex structures and connections in the biosystem, the stronger your hunch that all animate things cooperate in this growth and bursting ... give themselves to one another, permit one another to make use of them.

Life, this biologist thinks,

has a million traits and qualities, so that everything is contained within it, and there is nothing that might lie outside of it, all death is part of life, and in some sense there is no death.