Summer, waiting for buses, shakshuka and the great Donald Sutherland
Abundance: Monday 24 June
And just like that, it happened.
It’s been skin-tighteningly hot for a few days in a row, and it’s only rained on one of them. I haven’t been tempted to light a fire or take a bath just to warm my bones. The grass has its feathers on, the tiniest grasshoppers have arrived, those little shitty aphids clamber along the upper reaches of the broad beans, and I couldn’t be happier to see them.
‘June’ is finally here, and it’s all my fault.
Last week, I drove past the patch of grass where decades ago - under the slightest encouragement from the weather - all the kids on the estate poured out of their homes to play cricket and football. Opposite, a bus shelter of that inverted L design, set at such an angle as to funnel the prevailing wind and all it brought with it directly at those who sought its protection. For three decades one of its four panes of glass was missing, allowing a lazy traveller the opportunity to park an idle backside in its metal frame. Should you be in a hurry, or be a little bored by the wait, there were two ways to summon a bus: start walking (a double decker would turn the corner at exactly the point at which you couldn’t quite make it back to the bus stop in time to catch it ), or light a cigarette. As soon as you drew that first luscious lungful deep into yourself - at precisely the moment a little tickle in your blood told you the nicotine was racing about your system, turning off the lights of its craving as it went - a bus would loom into view.
In exactly this way, I wrote about June’s absence last week and in so doing Sod’s-Lawed it into being1. Everybody owes me one.
Everything feels very different to last week.
A few of the potatoes have flowers, the glorious sign that below ground tubers are forming. Awful as I am, I couldn’t help winkling one or two from a few of the most well developed plants. Cooked briefly, drained and allowed to sit for a few minutes, lid on, a generous wodge of butter slipping into the two dimensional along with a few just-picked Moroccan mint leaves, they were every bit as good as anything I’ve eaten this year.
The first broad beans are picked, the floppy tops - a really delicious harvest - cut to remove the spot aphids love best. With the soil drying, there has been weeding, mulching, and a last wave of pea seedlings planted out in the hope they’ll avoid the slugs’ attentions2 in the drier weather. It feels like a midsummer, warm weather Christmas.
Everything feels very different to last week, and I like it very much.
Below the line, a recipe for Early summer shakshuka