5.12.23

in the soil

That freak night in October aside, the first ice, making glass discs at the top of buckets of water and stone, glass panes in the water butts, although the pond with its carpet of green weed stays liquid; the air is cold and the ground is cold and the cold seeps through the soles of your boots, workboots worn once a week which are cold themselves when you put them on and bear traces too of snails and spiders. The few young plants of the plot seem suddenly fragile and I go round checking on them, swaddle young artichoke and bay in swathes of wool. A robin sits in the elder eying my procession, used enough to humanity that it does not balk or fly at the whirr of the strimmer, the cold leaving grass dry enough finally to trim, weeds to pull.

in the kitchen

As the town gets itself ready for Christmas I remember how as a child I used to make fudge or perhaps more accurately watch fudge being made for me to cut and bag and label and give out as gifts and think how I’d like to make more with the condensed milk I bought for its Cyrillic and smart blue tin which is easily done, milk and sugar and butter and heat. Cocky with the thought of a good recipe and a good heavy pan I burn it badly and then (to compound the matter) stir the burnt bits through the rest of the hot fudge, turning its rich beige to a denser caramel brown. I’ll call it smoked, I think, and pour it out to set.

on the page

Reading Thomas Browne reminds me of a class I took at university on seventeenth-century political and religious pamphlets and their seemingly endless sentences and sparks a moment of irritation at various editors who have (with some justification) cut mine in half or quarters but mainly impresses me with the wide erudition possible in a time which has not yet specialised and compartmentalised knowledge into science and art and philosophy and anecdote but hangs them altogether with religion in the general realm of intellectual inquiry. In young walnuts cut athwart, it is not hard to apprehend strange characters, he writes, and it seems like the most important thing I have ever read.