in the soil

Now the last of the yellow leaves are gone and the fennel’s perky feathers have collapsed into cobwebs and even the grass, rampant through the rainy autumn, has almost stopped its growth for the year and so really there is very little to do at the allotment except admire its calm and to plan for the season to come; through the skeleton of the hazel I watch another plotholder wrestle the backbone of a greenhouse into place. The garlic is all up and the broad beans are up and the kale I tentatively placed between them has survived and so the human work is done for the year, barring storms or vicious frosts. I have been reading sceptically if with interest about the folk tradition of dowsing for water or gold or for space or for memory and so I spend my time – grass trimmed, beans checked – constructing a pendulum out of a short length of hazel wood and some string and then holding it over various parts of the plot, observing how it changes from a slow oscillation over grass to a wide gyre over open soil, wondering why that might be.

in the kitchen

On the island of Burano where my wife is from they make risotto di go’, a soupy rice cooked in a broth made from little muddy lagoon gobi simmered with garlic and a little tomato, a few spices, bone and flesh pushed through a sieve for a denser soup. At the fishmonger’s here they have plump bull-headed underrated gurnard so I buy one for a fiver and use a couple of fillets from the freezer to make sort-of the same thing, to my mother-in-law’s instructions – garlic and parsley in oil first, exactly three cloves, a glass of brandy (I have to go out and buy the brandy), risotto di gu’ or risotto di go-nard I call it in my head, a somewhat compromised dish. Apart from the fish itself it is difficult to find good risotto rice in this country, certainly in supermarkets (always chalky in the middle, collapsed outside), but a soupier risotto is less reliant on that perfect texture and anyway it will have to do.

on the page

I have been reading very slowly recently and worry that I am getting old or that I am overtired or that I need my eyes tested again but then I pick up Olivia Laing’s The Silver Book and read it in two sittings, an hour before bed and then the following afternoon. It is quite short to be fair and also pacy and noirish and messy and chic but also just very good, a kind of glittering enchanted telling of a murky and decadent time, very physically present in its settings, the Po Valley fog, the hot nights of Rome, a New Year feast of jugged hare, skewered larks, golden polenta and zamponi sewn up like a glove.