8.7.25

in the soil

Digging up the red- and white-skinned onions to lay them out drying on corrugated plastic I am pleasantly surprised to find the soil around them fine, just-damp and crumbly, the kind of soil which weeds slip easily out of and seeds go easily into; unfortunately I have no seeds with me to sow, I should have some turnip seeds somewhere, I make a note on my phone, turnip seeds. The weekend's storm has not stopped the garlic in its process of drying, these I make a fumbled attempt at braiding but if anything they are a little too dry, stalks snap off and my fingers get confused putting which under what, over where, in the end I tie them together with string and shove them in my backpack along with one onion gone to seed which if left to dry would not but instead rot along its middle, the green growing part. It is too hot for the amount of sleep I have had and so up in the shade of the hedge I take my time erecting a sort of rickety pagoda for my cucuzze to grow up and to hang down from like snakes in sinister trees.

in the kitchen

Cacio all'argentiera, silversmith's cheese (cue apocryphal and improbable origin stories) is a Sicilian or specifically Palermitano dish of cheese (caciocavallo or sometimes tuma) baked or fried with garlic, oregano, red wine vinegar and maybe anchovies; turning this into cheese on toast is an easy win. Garlic rubbed on sourdough, cheese on top of that, oregano sprinkled, grill, red wine vinegar (the good stuff) afterwards. I didn’t do anchovies but if I had I think I would have put them under the cheese to avoid the scorched effect you get on anchovy pizza. I do think I could eat toasted cheese or just bread and cheese or cheese and crackers or cheese sandwiches for almost every meal if I wasn't careful, in fact I accidentally (I rarely go into town on a Monday when almost nowhere is open) have toasted cheese again in the afternoon, in the form of a Red Leicester and kimchi toastie, so when my wife suggests pizza for dinner maybe Thai? I say.

on the page

Reading The City and the World by Gregor Hens (translated by Jen Calleja of Goblinhood fame) I am caught up short by the introduction as probably the most prominent English practitioner of psychogeography of Will Self who I had almost forgotten existed let alone imagined might hold that title - I suppose English there is deliberately excluding Iain Sinclair. Apparently he is still a professor of psychogeography at Brunel but I think of Self more as a last self-conscious gasp of high modernism, although more recently he seems to have become dedicated to his own sneering irrelevance; hard to recover from your own son pointing out that you keep writing think-pieces about the death of the novel because nobody is buying yours.