6.3.26
in the soil
It smells of spring as much as it feels like it, the smell I suppose of pollen drifting in the air, of cut grass, the sharp scent of nettles as you approach the edges of the plot, and it is warm enough to work in just a t-shirt, knees muddy in the soil to - finally, after the torpor of winter - neaten and weed and tidy, pulling patches of chickweed and grass out from among the wild garlic and the bed of sleeping asparagus, tut at the creeping buttercup which spreads its way right through the soil, dump the other weeds back on top in the hope that their shade will choke it out; warm enough when my back starts to ache to just sit a while in the sun and to carry on whittling a length of hazel into something I am thinking of as a pilgrim’s staff. There is frogspawn among the wire netting covering my mother’s pond in her plot next door, birdsong in the hedges and, as I squat to pick a bagful of new nettle tips, the first greens of the year, to blanch and have creamed with roast chicken, the sound in the orchard beyond of an argument between a walker and a dog-walker, who like many dog owners seems to believe that rules about leads and control and so forth apply to every other dog except their own - all the sounds and signs of spring.
in the kitchen
Last week I picked three or so stalks of the rhubarb that was knocking over its blanching bucket and when I got home chopped it and macerated it with sugar and cooked it very gently in a little water, jewel-pink and tender. This is a good sort of preliminary thing to do with rhubarb, it keeps quite well while you are thinking what else you might do with it, but often I get no further than that, unable to decide what exactly should be its final form; a cake, a crumble, stirred through braised pork or duck for a little sweet-sour tang? Luckily my wife is more proactive about such things than I am and goes and buys a pot of cream to whip for a rhubarb fool, sweetened with the syrup from some candied ginger, and some chocolate and ginger biscuits to go with it. This we eat from the little silver ice-cream bowls we keep for eating such things from while watching Small Prophets and I remember how nice whipped cream can be, with some sharp fruit to set it off.
on the page
Sometimes - I am sure I have said this before - sometimes a book you have either bought and left on a shelf or picked up and put down on several occasions at a bookshop suddenly appeals to you and you ferret it out or buy it and realise you are reading it at just the right time, that you would not have really appreciated it as much as you do now had you read it when you first bought it or when it first came out. This happened twice this week, with Brian Dillon’s Suppose a Sentence (picked up and put down on several occasions at a bookshop) and Jane Reichhold’s Writing and Enjoying Haiku, both of which made me think about short bursts of language rather than more lengthy structures in a way I hadn’t consciously done in a while as well as (along with Ursula LeGuin’s Steering the Craft, also bought-but-not-read a while ago) how I will go about teaching the craft and practice of writing when I begin to offer classes, as I intend to later this year.