in the soil
At this time of year my plot – which in the usual run of things must be amongst the messiest of the plots under active cultivation – rises to meet the others at a rough average as after all I do come once a week, more or less, to cut the grass and pick up stray chairs and strewn branches and reinforce my more-or-less vain slug protections and generally just to potter about and to breathe a different air. Even the archaeologist, usually working the soil in all weathers, in the case of heavy rain doing whatever he does in the expanding complex of sheds he maintains by the hedge, seems to have abandoned his strip of ground for the winter, windfalls piling up under his apple tree. The one exception is T. on the plot next door to the archaeologist, who has for whatever reason decided to start entirely afresh, digging up his mature asparagus beds and his vast rhubarb plants – roots there for the taking for anyone who wants them – and everything else, a neat strip of fresh earth among the weeds.
in the kitchen
Although it is tempting in winter to succumb entirely to heaviness in the form of chunky soup and rich broth, stew, pot-roast, pie, steamed pudding, hours-cooked ragú, for myself at least I need a little lightness to cut through it all. It is the season of citrus and bitter things, good leafy clementines, puntarelle alla romana on the restaurant menu, a pomegranate and lime sorbet in the freezer, and for afterwards a surprisingly light cake of walnuts, bitter chocolate and nocino liqueur, light because it contains only the whites of egg and no butter or oil and only a very little flour – rice flour, because the flour is not there for gluten and then more people can eat it – and we serve it with quince cooked a deep ruby in the oven for hours.
on the page
I do not know why you would take a book called in Italian The Happiness of the Wolf which is about appetite and ambition and mountain people and life and love in the mountains, about the seasonality of love, and rename it translated into English as simply The Lovers, but then I am not a translator or a publisher or marketer of books and in any case it worked as I bought it and read it even if overall I found it a little vapid, too light for its own good. There is something about novels about writers that makes me look at them harder, more aware that they are crafted things, and here is a crafted thing that aims for beauty but ends up merely charming.