in the soil

Although you might still leave the house in glorious sunshine, duck into a shop to avoid a freezing shower, and walk home into a brisk wind - although the weather is still very much fickle the air itself is warm enough and there has been so much rain over the winter that everything now is shooting up tense and green; the broad beans a mass of flowers and buds, the nettles exploding from the hedgerows, the bronze feathers of the fennel in dense little bushes, the lovage beginning its yearly climb from soil-level to the height of my shoulder, and for the first time there are one, two, three, enough spears of asparagus up at the same time to be worth picking and tying into one little bunch. We have nurtured the plants for years, my wife planting the straggly roots in a trench I had dug for them, years of watering and vainly weeding and building up their bed with manure and compost and keeping an eye out for the asparagus beetles that are apparently such a pest. In a probably forlorn attempt to keep the creeping buttercup out of the bed I have raised it up a little with wattled-but-undaubed walls of hazel and willow twigs (freer draining, I thought, which I believe they like), the only bed on my plot to be distinguished in this way, and I am glad that the plants are enjoying their new status, there are more spears on the way, ready for next week perhaps. I realise that I have nowhere to plant the seed potatoes that I bought and left chitting at my mother’s house and slightly begrudgingly dig over the only currently free bed I have, two-thirds of a space partly taken up by the sprawling cardoon and some apparently self-seeded onions. Kneeling in the soil picking stones out of the tilth I am surprised by movement in the plants next to me, a little lizard that several people who know about lizards tell me is a Common Lizard, Zootoca vivipara, who sits calmly for a few photographs before scuttling off into the deeper shade of the cardoon.

in the kitchen

The first asparagus I ate this year was at the newish restaurant Franc in Canterbury, a late birthday lunch with my twin and our partners; for a starter, four spears of asparagus and a dollop of bright green wild garlic hollandaise adorned with the white star of a wild garlic flower and nothing else, exactly how I want to eat the first green shoots of the season - of the year. My own few spears are barely even enough to do this with, and anyway I can’t really see myself making a little plate of asparagus and hollandaise for myself at home. Instead I sauté the chopped-up spears with spring onion and lovage and scramble in a couple of eggs and eat it with a couple of chunks of sourdough. Eggs of course are very good at taking on and somehow stretching out the flavours of things you put with them and so are good for making something approximating a meal out of a little luxury, like the end bit of some good ham, or a scrap of fresh truffle, or the first produce of a long-nurtured asparagus bed.

on the page

I hadn’t read a really good chunky novel for a long time and so I really enjoyed getting my teeth into Q, a cloak-and-dagger blockbuster thriller set during the Reformation and its associated peasant uprisings, written by an Italian anarchist collective under the name of an 1980s footballer, Luther Blissett; perhaps unsurprisingly, Umberto Eco was briefly assumed to be behind the project. There is always something very pleasing about being able to immerse yourself so completely in a book which spans both decades and over 600 pages, and which happily switches between theological nuance, bawdy humour, swashbuckling battles, and a lengthy disquisition on banking and the smoke-and-mirrors nature of money itself.