30.7.24

in the soil  sea

I overload my week with things to do and have no time or make no time to go and see how my plants are doing now in the heat – I imagine the blackberries swelling glossy, the little cucumber I saw last week grown by now past the point of pickling – and although I spend a day pretending to forage herbs, berries, walnuts saved in the fridge for the camera I do not feel I am doing anything useful in the outside world. Instead spare hours and evenings are spent at the beach or rather the steps next to the beach which at high tide make of the bay a private pool. I am no swimmer and squeal at the sight of jellyfish – ten, twenty of them, beached and drowning in air – it is good if nothing else to cool down, phone at home, pause the brain from its relentless thinking, and if my plants need water then so do I, so do I.

in the kitchen

There is a freedom in following a recipe for a dish from a cuisine about which you know nothing, a freedom in obeying it to the letter. If I follow a recipe say for an Italian pasta then I skim it over to get the ingredients and the gist of the method – perhaps there is a little trick, something out of the ordinary – and then go ahead and make it the way I would have made it anyway had I just heard the dish described, or eaten it, or seen somebody eat it on the TV, while presented with not just an unfamiliar list of spices, herbs, aromatic vegetables but also a method which seems out of order because conceived with different ideals in mind I simply make sure all of my mise is en place and then do what I am told. Farokh Talati’s Parsi kheema may look in the end like mince with peas?? as my brother’s partner remarks or ragu coi piselli! as my wife jokes but it is different not just in what it is made of but in the way it is put together, this and then that and then this.

on the page

I read two books both set in the aftermath of some terrible event, Forgetting Elena older and too clever I think for its own good, Land of Milk and Honey new and worryingly relevant in too many ways (the climate crisis / industrial farming / the fragility of capitalist monocultures) but in the end neither is quite as unsettling as the introduction to Alice Vernon’s Night Terrors which for some reason I decide to read in bed on a hot and (it turns out) sleepless night, its description of the author’s parasomniac hallucinations, its reminder of the horrors which lie on the edge of sleep; I look forward to finishing the book in the light of day.