in the soil
The year is clouding over, hot bright summer giving way not to cold – not yet, although in the morning you can smell the autumn on its way – but only to a static closeness, the air hot and heavy, and the seedlings of radicchio, mustard, beetroot and chard, the cauliflower plants, the tomatoes, cucumbers and courgettes do not seem to have moved an inch since the last time I was here, the fruit perhaps a little riper, the leaves a little drier, I feel we are just waiting for one season to end and another to begin, for something definite to happen. The weather does not want to be definite, though, the kind of weather there are folk rhymes about, mackerel sky, mackerel sky and so forth, the soil on top is dry and dusty, damp under the spade, when I trim the grass a frog hops out of its cooling shadows.
in the kitchen
It is certainly past time to start thinking about preserving what is left of the summer gluts, I should probably begin to address my several-kilo freezer stash of blackberries (a shrub, I think, for some) and resign myself to another year of finding things to do with green tomatoes. I thought I had saved somewhere my friend’s grandmother’s recipe for chutney but if I had it is gone, slice them and layer them and salt them, it began, I think, and boil them up with golden syrup and a number of spices – in any case I have barely enough for a jar.
on the page
For some reason I had never read Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle until yesterday – although I must I’m sure have read “The Lottery” in the course of my degree, mustn’t I? Canon changes, I suppose – and did so with great pleasure; wrapped within the novel’s casual witchcraft, its agoraphobia, its creeping horror is a little idyll of gardening and foraging and pickling and preserving, the cellar with its neat jars of jams and jellies and canned vegetables left untouched while the world burns.