9.7.24
in the soil
It pours and shines in alternating weeks, it seems, as if a series of fickle but well-meaning deities were attempting to bless the harvest each to their own light, they need sun – they need rain – they need sun – with the result that it is wet enough for the weeds and the grass to grow (the things that want to be here) but not warm enough for courgettes, the tomatoes and the cucumbers (the things that I have put here) to do much more than survive, shivering in the unasked-for breeze. Do they know, I often wonder, somewhere in themselves, the sun of Sicily their cousins thrive beneath, do they resent us? Elsewhere the lovage – not native to this soil as nearly nothing is – is coming into yellow flower, is crawling with copulating orange beetles, has nothing to complain of.
in the kitchen
If I am honest I am uninspired in the kitchen these weeks, the weather dislocating us from the passage and from the desires of the seasons and I find myself tired of cooking from the same palette, I leaf through recipes and think about going on holiday. For a while I am interested in cold soups, first when it is hot enough on gazpacho and its variants, then on chłodnik, a cold Polish soup of beetroot I see on Instagram, then on a recipe in Vittles for pappa al pomodoro, one of those Italian dishes (not just Italian) it is impossible to translate or describe in an appetising manner, you have to just make it and feed it to people, mangia mangia, the proof in the eating. I make this with good (imported) tomatoes and good (local) bread and it is delicious.
on the page
Emanuele Coccia’s Philosophy of the Home (translated by Richard Dixon) offers a digestible blend of curious facts (such as the convolutions by which the showers of the flats of East Berlin tower blocks have ended up in their kitchens) with what seems to me a genuinely radical animism, an insistence that the key to happiness in the world we have created for ourselves lies in the acceptance that what we call our soul or even our mind is diffused throughout the objects, the plants and the animals with which we share it, the photographs, furniture and knick-knacks, the towering monstera as much as the resentful tomato.