in the soil

It is quiet at the allotment and I am tired from two busy weeks of work, I plod down the rain-sodden path to do the few things I have to do. The garlic needs poking in, fifteen or so cloves spaced more-or-less evenly in recently turned earth, and really everything needs attention, neatening up for the winter, but certainly the garlic needs poking in if it is going to get growing in time and so I do that and I strim my way around half the plot before my wrists – already sore from chopping and from tossing pans - get tired of the vibrations of the machine. I forgot to order any seeds of winter salad or mustard or green manure to use as a cover crop for all my soon-to-be-bare beds but pulling up the beans and the cucumbers I see that fennel has seeded itself everywhere around them and decide that will do well enough, perhaps I will have bushy green fennel on the go throughout the winter as they do in Sicily, perhaps it will all die back in the cold. An artichoke or perhaps a cardoon has popped up in the asparagus bed and so I rootle that out and move it one along to where the kohlrabi used to be and again I have the thought that maybe my whole plot here could be perennials, fill in the spaces between the hazel tree and the wild garlic bed, the red and black and whitecurrants, the blackberries and the raspberries, the artichoke and the sprawling cardoon and the herb bed and the fig tree and the rhubarb with more of the same so that instead of turning the soil over and over each week I could just come and see what had grown, a lazy thought for a tired day. It is still quiet when I leave, only the archaeologist two plots down digging away, and I surprise a green woodpecker from its perch on a post on the side of the path to go laughing its way to the safety of the elder in the hedge.

in the kitchen

After a full week of work and then cooking for a wedding dinner my wife and I fulfil a long-standing dream of cooking together at the community gardens – not the classes and workshops and dinners that we have run there but just everyday food for the families who attend it; a no-brainer really, given the range of produce they grow and the number of people who come, but it has taken a while to pull together nonetheless, both of us busy and staff away for the summer and all of the usual obstacles to getting things done. There are all the stresses you might expect of an improvised kitchen in the outdoors – temperamental Calor gas rings alternately flaring and turning themselves off, too-short benches to chop on, constant trips back and forth for utensils or to wash your hands or to pick ingredients or to find something to use as a bin, a cardreader on the blink – but then everything is ready and the sun is shining and we ladle out pumpkin soup and barley salad to I-don’t-know-how-many people and it all seems worthwhile! Then I have to go back to work the very next day. After all that feeding it is a pleasure to be fed by Melek Erdal, cooking at Quality Wines, real homely cooking but so precise – chicken perfectly juicy, chickpeas plump and sweet, pastries crisp and buttery, deep roasted tahini, sharply seasoned cucumbers and piles of herbs, one of those lunches you think about for a long time.

on the page

I have absolutely no head for horror, I hate jump-scares and noises in the dark and looking in mirrors at night but for some reason I always decide to read something spooky at this time of year and then regret it as it takes up space in my head for weeks to come. I am warned off The Lamb before I even buy it, the first line made me gag says my friend at the bookshop but I like folk-horror and retellings of fairytales I think and so I get it anyway and yes it is gruesome, quite creepingly horrible and gruesome, but in a way that is quite straightforward and honest from that first line in and somehow gets in your head much more than a story self-consciously full of plot-twists and jump-scares, the horrible inevitability of a well-loved fairytale that you know must always end the same way.