6.2.24
in the soil
At last, it seems, although the wind blows and it is not warm, the hazel is fringed with catkins, the rhubarb pops up acid pink beneath its forcing bucket and along the branching arms of bramble new growth bunches, dense with life. It is not warm but digging the soil over you get warm, it is not frozen clay or sodden clay but a fine tilth beneath a top crust and worms and centipedes squirm amongst it and it is good at last to dig the earth over, to give the hazel its yearly trim, to tie the bramble into place and to look the ground over and see what needs doing still. For the first time this year my mind moves forward towards summer and I think about the cucumbers that will sprawl there where I have dug, the warmth, their cool pale green.
in the kitchen
Rhubarb aside it is still the old winter vegetables we are dealing with, at work we make a pasta sauce of cauliflower boiled and then cooked down in olive oil with oregano, chilli, capers and crushed olives, I char some pieces of Romanesco, pale green and fractal cauliflower and mix those through the pasta with grated cheese, pasta water. I like it but I don’t know if I like it that much more than just simply boiled cauliflower glistening with olive oil and salt crystals; I always think there is something very end-of-wintery about some simply boiled vegetables, chunks of potato and carrot glistening with olive oil and salt crystals, sprouting broccoli moving you on into spring.
on the page
As a teenager and a younger man I was enthralled by the Beat writers and in particular Jack Kerouac who I now realise is / was extremely problematic; I still buy a copy of Big Sur which I see in the charity shop and which I have for some reason or another never read. It is quite chilling and somehow impressive to be able to write so clearly and honestly about a debilitating alcohol problem – about the fact you are (to put it bluntly) an often obnoxious drunk, about a drinking habit that is leading you to a nervous breakdown (eventually of course to your death) and certainly costing you friendships, to be strong enough to write about this and yet too weak to do anything about it. I don’t know what lesson there is to be drawn here really aside from don’t do that.