4.6.24
in the soil
I dream – one of those woke-up-early-and-fell-back-asleep dreams where you dream a version of your day to come, a busy shift at work, a journey – that it will not stop raining, that the soil becomes black and swampy, the green weeds and grasses encroach upon the bare earth, the slugs multiply and take over; in my dream my garlic has been dug up to dry in the sun but there is no sun and it rots by the path, I harvest blackening pods of swollen beans, drenched artichokes. In daylight although the air is humid and the grass is making its rain-fed way among the broad beans and the garlic is spotted with rust actually everything is bright and dry and the beer traps are filled with dead slugs. The first soft fruit is ready, redcurrants that seem to have their own inner light and drop off without resistance into your hands.
in the kitchen
Between various other commitments and a minor injury at work I do not feel fully present and inspired in the kitchen, it has also been half term which brings with it a particular kind of busyness in the restaurant (endless spaghetti al pomodoro or al burro) and the weather has been all over the place so a morning planning bean soup for staff meal becomes a rice salad by the end of lunch service. Luckily there are classics to fall back on, one of ours is a crab spaghetti which involves making a bisque and a tomato sauce and toasted breadcrumbs and picking out crab claws and sometimes samphire (not yet) or seaweed or wild fennel or tame fennel or artichokes or I don’t know what else. I always look forward to having it on the menu and then remember that every single part of making it is a faff – one of our chefs is allergic to crustacean shells and hates the smell of them roasting, the KPs hate the bisque detritus filling the bin, I always cut myself cracking the crab claws – but somehow a joy.
on the page
The stories or vignettes or prose-poems that make up Mercè Rodoreda’s Journeys and Flowers (translated for the first time into English by Gala Sicart Olavide and Nick Caistor, a proof of which Daunt Books kindly sent me) each operate with their own peculiar but perfect logic which is exactly the logic of dreams, built up in a few lines and discarded or mutated as soon as the narrator (of the Journeys) moves on to the next village, as soon as another flower is named, not just the logic of dreams but their crisp and bleached reality.