30.1.24

in the soil

There is a line down the plot overstepping slightly the path which separates my mother’s plot from mine which marks the shadow the hedge casts and stops the low winter sun from warming during the day the soil, the plants behind that shadow line from shaking off the frosts of the night; in short all my mother’s broad beans are dying and mine are not. They can be sown again when the soil warms but the plants that have not seen off a winter and furthermore are a couple of months behind in their growth struggle when infested as they will be in the longer days by ants and by the aphids they farm, marching up and down the stems and leaves to harvest sap; this is a worry for longer days. The worry now is not for what is growing now but for what will, for dead-looking wood and thorn, greyish or blackened, in the low winter sun not really cold but grey and damp we cut back and we burn.

in the kitchen

It sounds stupid now I come to write it down but in the shorter days and poor light of winter it is difficult to find time to take decent photographs of new dishes to post on my Instagram and so (this is the stupid part) I also don’t find much time to think about new dishes to cook, to eat; also of course the flow of interesting vegetables slows down and many of the new dishes I might potentially think about would be studies in beige and brown, as was a plate of pork belly (beige), crackling (brown), potato and mushroom cake (beige and brown) with the braising juices strained and with grapes cooked in them and a little grape molasses added at the end (brown), and by the time I had done all of that the light had gone.

on the page

I read all of Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics (translated variously by Martin McLaughlin, Tim Parks and William Weaver) in a handful of sittings, in the parts I do not understand letting the language crash and wash over me. There is a lightness to his writing (translated variously by Martin McLaughlin, Tim Parks and William Weaver) which renders enjoyable, fun even, a story stripped almost entirely of the anthropic, reduced to the condition of formal logic, or from the perspective of a dividing cell, there are sharp turns into emotional weight, flashes of silliness; in the end you accept readily the narrator, immortal and universal not in form but in a point of view.