As we tentatively edge out of the worst of the pandemic, it’s extremely on brand for the universe to serve up not just a roaring cost of living crisis, but also, a potential war. Truly ambassador, you’re spoiling us! Colin the Caterpillar hasn’t managed to topple the current government (yet,) and yet we’re still unveiling Downing Street lockdown parties at roughly two per week, so you’ll excuse me if I have very little faith that we have grown ups in charge of either of the above potential catastrophes. However, I completed the jigsaw! We’re a mere five weeks away from the clocks going forward! NYT haven’t ruined Wordle (yet!) There is hope! This week I talk about heading in to the garden to warp time along with another round up of Really Good Reads™, however no recipe, as my brilliant, magnificent, nan turned 90 this weekend and I’ve essentially been existing on cake and Bailey’s. Not too shabby for Naomi!
My legacy, the completed jigsaw.
Renewal.
It’s happening. The sky is getting bluer, the daffs are daffing and before we know it Winterwatch will merge into Springwatch. Snowdrops are nudging their heads up and saying hello in their muted white, allowing our eyes to adjust from the bleak griege of winter, ready for the full colour assault of spring. Time moves forward, twas ever thus.
One of my best pals is terrified by the passing of time. Timehop brings her out in hives, and she still refers to us as “in our early twenties”, despite our next birthdays putting us quite firmly in the mid-thirties bracket. Me and our other best mate would take the piss, but recently the fear has crept up on us too. Time is relentless, even in a pandemic, even when things get back to semi normal.
However, time in the garden is circular, not an ongoing march toward death. If you fuck up, and you will, try again next year. Gardening as a hobby takes away the immediacy felt by most things in the modern world, and it teaches patience, things you plant today may not bare fruits for months, sometimes years. It also removes the girlsbossification of leisure time that’s crept into every day - there’s no metrics to measure your success by other than does your garden look nice and did you grow something edible.
I currently have a grape vine taking over the greenhouse, it won’t give me grapes for a few years and even then, they almost definitely won’t be edible and certainly won’t be enough to make wine, but it’s a nice, low stakes project either way. It’s died right back and looks like a brown twig at the moment, but should start coming back to life in the next few weeks. We’ve also bought a fig tree and are debating where to plant it - again it’s nice to tend to something purely to see what happens.
We’ve already started saving toilet rolls for seedlings, we’ll do cucumbers and tomatoes again this year as the abundant crop from last year made me a bit giddy with joy. I’m at my most smug in the kitchen chopping up a crunchy salad for tea that we grew ourselves, even better if there’s herbs scattered over the top from the herb patch. And this year I’m going to attempt dahlias. I’m biding my time until after the last frost, but I’m already fizzing with excitement at the thought of the house and garden being taken over with big blousy corals and dinnerplate cafe au laits. Any tips are greatly welcome!
I’m not capable of being competitive about it all because everything dies back in the autumn and we get to try again next year, repeating whatever worked and tweaking what didn’t. I am, however, heavily invested in the big veg scene (from afar!) and if your twitter timeline needs a little bit of light-hearted joy, go and follow Gerald Stratford who is - per his bio - “heavy into growing big veg.” (Cheers!) Comically big veg is my Achilles heel and I can only imagine the thrill of wheelbarrowing a marrow the size of a calf into the tent for it to be judged alongside other mind bendingly large produce as spectators look on in awe. We have 21 National Veg Society award medals of my great uncles hung in the kitchen, and each time I pass them I yearn for a Midsomer Murders style drama based in a quaint village with a yearly veg show but no murders, just sly and underhand produce growing and balls out carrot combat.
So it’s been (another) long winter, but we’re almost through languishing season once again, and have even more reasons to be hopeful than last year. We certainly didn’t expect the vaccine roll out to be as smooth or successful for one. Maybe, more of us will get to go abroad this year, after two of years of really hoping British weather holds up whilst we’re at a caravan. I’m not sure things will ever go back to “normal,” but I think we’re definitely heading somewhere much better than where we’ve been.
Micro Doses of Joy
Wordle continues to bring us all together, and potentially, saved a life! I got my first guess in two last week and I’m still fairly high off it. If you’re a geography buff (or, like me, only know where a maximum of 18% of the worlds countries sit on the map) Globle could be a great addition to your daily group guessing game. Each day there’s a new mystery country which you have to guess and that country will appear on the globe in a colour indicating how close you are. I got todays in seven and I’m pretty pleased with that!
"Surgery is really just a bit of high class carpentry." I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this line from Janet Cravens surgeon, who was part of the team who gave her prosthetic ears which helped restore her hearing.
I’ve just made this rhubarb crumble cheesecake from Jane’s Patisserie cook book and it is delicious! We’ve been growing some for a little while and I can’t wait for it to be ready later this year for more baking.
Rhubarb Crumble Cheesecake
Really Good Reads™
Charlotte Clymer on the Joe Rogan / Spotify nonsense is great. “And we can still choose where to spend our money and time and where to offer our artistry. That is not "oppression". That's agency.”
Tara Westover, author of Educated, once again showing more grace and self-awareness than pretty much all of us put together, on student debt and why she is not proof of the American dream.
One time photographer, now wannabe chef, Brooklyn Beckham has what lots of us dream of, his own cooking show. Not to dunk on him, because he seems like a sweet, if extremely un self-aware lad, but 62 members of staff per episode?! Privilege really is a racket huh?! “It could be that Brookers got it into his his head that he’s a kitchen whizz because his circle of mates seem so clueless about food that you half expect one of them to wander in, pick up a carrot and go: “What’s this? Beef?””
“Marx may have foreseen many things with prescient accuracy, but the rise of Gregg Wallace was not one of them.” This weeks Vittles, on Mechanical Reproduction in the Age of Gregg Wallace, is a corker.
Finally, the greatest Valentines story ever written, The Gift of Owls, of course by David Sedaris. “Then I quit smoking and decided that in place of cigarettes I needed, say, an eighteenth-century scientific model of the human throat. It was life-size, about four inches long, and, because it was old, handmade, and designed to be taken apart for study, it cost quite a bit of money. “When did Valentine’s Day turn into this?” Hugh asked when I told him that he had to buy it for me.”
Thanks for reading once again, and if you have any gardening tips, please drop them below. Big Veg pictures are especially welcome! If you think someone would enjoy this newsletter, please feel free to share. N xo