5.2.24

in the soil

Despite the change of the page of the calendar – despite the days when the sun is warm on your back with your back stood against it – despite the days, alternating with the days when the sun is warm on your back, when rain comes down in sheets from a dull gray sky – despite the feeling which is more in your- (in my-) self than anywhere else that spring is here, finally, despite all this the soil is full of nothing so much as potential. Yes, the nettles encroach from the hedgerows, next week they will be ready to pick, yes, the broad beans and garlic and onions which have sat out the winter are starting again to grow millimetre by silent millimetre, but what catches the eye in the rain-drenched earth is the first tiny growths of lovage coming up amongst the skeleton of last year, a whole plant’s growth, so little space

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in the kitchen

While we wait for the actual Kentish seasons and the produce of our veg bag to catch up with our hopes of spring – in particular my partner’s longing for the artichokes, young onions, courgettes, the first peas, everywhere soon in Italy – we are eating a lot of cabbage, standard white cabbage. I keep meaning to make it into sauerkraut but I have made so much sauerkraut and written so much about making sauerkraut that I can never quite be bothered to do so, instead I make somewhat bloating cabbage salads. My partner has a recipe from her father, a kind of approximation of cooked sauerkraut for the ferment-averse or time-poor which involves shredding the cabbage and seasoning it with salt and vinegar and maybe caraway seeds (which my partner in the Italian fashion persists in calling cumin or mountain cumin) and then warming / steaming it in a bain-marie until it is limp but still crunchy and a good partner for boiled sausages and mustard.

on the page

I will not watch anything even remotely scary on film or television, I am a coward, I have nightmares, I hate jump-scares and dark corners and anything even creepy will stay with me for weeks (Jurassic Park left me with a terror of velociraptors, I would pelt upstairs to outrun any that might lurk behind) but for some reason although I never really intend to do so I keep reading scary books or at least odd, crawling Gothic ones which stay with me far longer than anything I read with more straightforward enjoyment – The Witches and the Goosebumps books haunted me for months, years. Verdigris by Michele Mari (translated by Brian Robert Moore) is never scary exactly and (in a Gothic tradition, perhaps) only gradually reveals itself as Gothic at all which it certainly is with its secrets, its monsters, its bones; yes, it is creepy but not scary at all until the ending hits you in the stomach like a nightmare you wake into.