9.4.24
in the soil
A brief visit, to see how the asparagus is getting on (it is), to scatter wildflower seed-bombs (which I forget to do) and to gather handfuls of lovage, the peculiar spiced-celery-scent of which stays on my hands for the rest of the day. I intend to stay longer, there is grass that could be cut and soil that could be dug, but a wind is blowing, not the wind we have at the coast streaming steadily in but one that whips and races back and forth, bringing one moment a hint of rain, the next a winter chill – I feel as dogs do in the wind, crazed with change – a world made up of air is blown apart.
in the kitchen
A visit to the Garden Museum in Lambeth and its café-restaurant gives us clean and gorgeous plates of well-put-together produce. Jay Rayner somewhere criticises – elsewhere praises, consistent as ever – a restaurant menu for consisting more of shopping than of cooking; a colleague of mine, on being presented at some iteration of Noma with a bowl of live shrimp says only it’s not fucking cooking, is it. Pheasant eggs with herb-green lovage salt are, it turns out, freshly cooked in their herb-green shells, and I think as we eat them of how nice it is to slowly dismantle your food, of what we lose when too much is done for us.
on the page
In A Very Easy Death (translated by, of all people, Patrick O’Brian) Simone de Beauvoir writes unflinchingly of her dying mother as her body is rapidly consumed by cancer, perhaps too unflinchingly, more than once her mother calls her intimidating, frightening; it is certainly not a very easy read. I perhaps think I am stronger than I am, to read such a book, and in the reading of incipient grief – as in the experience of it – it is the details the mind fixes on, unwilling to encompass the whole; it is the skin weeping uric acid into its bedsores, the small agony of that, and not the total breakdown of the body – it is the fact that the bustle of life goes on while sometimes a man entirely clothed in white appears … and there is blood on his shoes.