5.8.26
in the soil
I feel I am repeating myself as we move into August, my allotment visits settled over the last few weeks into a familiar routine - a walk around to look at the fig tree and check if the dry grass needs cutting (it doesn’t), two watering cans each for the beans, the squash, and the cabbage seeds, then a once-over of the brambles for ripe fruit; more today, if not quite enough to do anything particularly useful with. Standing at the top of my plot I look up and see that the elderberries are ready, wine-dark bunches weighing the branches down, and so I fish out a bag and a knife and cut thirty heads of them and the same number of nearly-ripe damsons from the tree below, enough to mix with the blackberries and a couple of fig leaves for a test run of a hedgerow liqueur. This done I have nothing much more to keep me here, but I give the beans and squashes another soak and spend some time just looking at everything, the hazelnuts slowly browning on the tree, the dance of insects over the bright stamens of artichoke and cardoon, the yellow sway of the Sicilian fennel, the lovage’s skeleton seed-heads rattling in the breeze.
in the kitchen
The community gardens are producing an incredible glut of tomatoes, at fifty or sixty kilos a week more than they can sell through their veg bags or the market stall, and so we spend a couple of days processing some into salsa pronta, ready-sauce, jars of cooked and seasoned passata that can be opened and slung straight into some pasta without further ado. This is honestly the first time I have encountered British-grown tomatoes of a quantity and quality to make the process worthwhile, and despite the resulting heat and humidity it is a joy to fill the room with the ripe sweet smell of fruit and basil as the tomatoes putter away, and pleasing too to pack the jars into the only pan we have which is tall enough to hold them covered with water, to seal them completely; not quite the quantity we were getting through when I attended the tomato workshop at Anna Tasca Lanza in Sicily, but worthwhile nonetheless. I see on Instagram that Melek Erdal has managed to make sun-dried tomato paste in her garden this year, impressive and cool and also rather worrying that it has been hot enough and dry enough to dry the puree into that brick-red grainy gold.
on the page
I am reading a novel about Walter Benjamin’s last days, as an exile in Paris and on the run through France, interspersed with the story of a young Spanish soldier who finds himself similarly displaced from his homeland by the rise of fascism, a book called The Angel of History by Bruno Arpaia, translated from Italian by Minna Proctor. It is very good if an obviously troubling read and particularly revelatory (to me) on quite how badly Britain and France screwed over refugees from the Nazi and Fascist regimes in their failed attempts to appease Hitler and Franco and prevent a wider war as well as the spread of left-wing radicalism, treating them as either potential enemy agents or communist agitators or simply as free labor and cannon fodder. A reminder that the powers of Europe have always treated certain people as expendable in the great game of empire.