7.10.24

in the soil

The day after the wedding I notice there is samphire, salicornia in Italian, salt-horn, growing out of the brick of the canal, reaching out into shrubs rather than huddles of sea-grass; in the sunny gaps between boats tiny neonates, all eye and flesh, feed at the surface. The patch of lawn around the fountain by the boat stop is thickly carpeted with marsh-mallow, and even a little rain inland or a wind blowing the Adriatic into the lagoon breaks the water of its banks and up over the pavement, everything is against these islands built by men out of hubris and stone and strong piles driven deep into the swamp. In the late September sun they stand out clear against it, bright houses and tall towers and clean laundry, as the fog rolls in they slump within it, edges dissolved in mist.

in the kitchen

I’ve barely cooked a thing in two weeks and I do not feel the worse for it, I have been fine thinking vaguely about the coming ingredients and weather without getting much further along the line to actual dishes to cook and tweak and repeat. I roasted a few early Crown Prince squash and mashed them roughly with salt and minced garlic and olive oil to serve with mozzarella and a little pickled chilli, a little fried sage, which was very autumnal and satisfactory in return for very little effort, although the squash could maybe have done with a week or so on the curing shelf – I thought of adding honey – and I read and I thought about things like rabbit and little game birds and cooking onions for a very long time and the bag of bone marrow in the freezer for a rainy day.

on the page

I finally pick up Olivia Laing’s Funny Weather from the slightly teetering pile of books to be read it has sat in for the last few years and am immediately engrossed, its essays the perfect length after the slightly-too-long historical-adjacent novel I have just slogged my way through. There is a peculiar pleasure in reading about the work of artists I am not familiar with, in seeing it through the writer’s eyes before I have seen it with my own, a pleasure too in adding context to work I only know visually – perhaps I am too caught up in words – but in any case what has stayed with me most so far is closest to home, an image of Derek Jarman’s improbable garden on the edge of nothing, a dream in the desert.