Should I find a shirt or other top that suits this regrettable frame, this bag of spanners, this duffle bag of candlesticks, this carrier bag of sweet potatoes, this haversack of Rubic’s cubes, then it’s perfectly usual for me to buy two, perhaps 3 if it comes in another colour I favour. Why do I tell you this? Because it occurred to me when looking at the homepage of this collection of paragraphs and films, that it appears as if I might have just two tops. Let me reassure the anxious it is otherwise.

Talking of colours, my eyes seem to be finding striking natural comings together of colours every time I leave the house. The other morning - walking the dog on a loop pleasingly punctuated by a cinnamon roll - as if Moses approaching the burning bush, as if Emlyn Hughes climbing the stairs to lift a gleaming European Cup, as if walking up to the school canteen hatch for seconds of chocolate sponge - this glorious oak greeted me: olive-lime new leaves on an old tree against a blue spring sky. As an affirmation of life, of light after dark, of movement after stillness, of wakiness after sleep, it could not have been more complete. Nor did it fail to infect the photographer with a sense of rightful perspective on the relative deservedness of our place on this planet.

Yesterday, with evening creeping across the valley in long shadows, we took to the hills where I took this self portrait in gorse, its yellow flowers waiting for 16°C for the pollen to fly, and with it a more intense coconut scent that attracts both the winged and the two legged in the form of your correspondent, picking flowers for gorse flower rum, syrup and the piña colada that makes excellent use of both.

Still too cool to give more than the occasional soft waft of coconut, the flowers are still of a perfect shade to complement the lush spring grass across the valley, the rougher ground above it, the blues of sea and sky and the dashes of sandstone at the cliffs. If you were a believer in an all-seeing hand looking to extend a convincing argument, this natural swatch would do as well as anything.

This morning, walking the dog, ball in mouth, towards the pleasure of excellent coffee made by another’s hand, I was held up by a beautiful threesome of three cornered leek, dead nettle and bluebells, with their respective white, yellow and blue flowers. The effect is entirely the reverse of that shown in the mediocre picture below.

There are great swathes of three cornered leek beautifying the feet of trees, the unmowable borders of allotments and understories on the landscapes around here, and while dead nettle and bluebells are inedible, three cornered leek is one of the best wild harvests. I wrote about using them a couple of years ago. With luck, you might get 4 months of the year to enjoy them: they’re especially good with wild garlic, and greatly its superior, in my unhumble view.

I’m particularly happy that it forms a frothy carpet beneath the lime tree that in a few short months will light up with blossom that I’ll turn to the finest cordial there is, and I say this as a man who will happily live on Ribena, and elderflower, for the weeks of Wimbledon.

I have a developed a weakness for being uplifted by such moments; moments that in the not wildly distant past would have been as invisible to me as the ultraviolet light bees use to navigate to the prime landing strips of this soon-to-appear lime flowers. These moments bring a genuine antidote to the eternal nonsense.

I got into the car earlier, that sense of uplift not entirely drained from me, and Paul Simon came on via a streaming service: not something from his Garfunkel back catalogue, nor even his wonderful 70s and 80s recordings, but the second track on his most recent album. I’ve been listening to it, as in a few short weeks I’m going to see Paul Simon - I’m obviously very happy about that - and, along with many of his earlier brilliances, he’s going to play that album in its entirely. The first track, The Lord, is extraordinary - honestly do have a listen, and a read of the lyrics2 - but it wasn’t this one that came on: it was the second track, Love Is like A Braid. I love how he sings these days: there’s something vulnerable and true in the same way there was with Johnny Cash’s later recordings. I like the image of love being like a braid, and these moments that I seem incrementally more receptive to feel in some way more of a braiding with life; less of a skirting or skating than perhaps was the case before. I put that down in no small matter to writing here, I really do. That weekly commitment has given me the reason that life didn’t previously present, to dedicate to being more observant, to prioritise an uncluttered mind. So to those of you who are here, regardless of my lack of resemblance to peak Mickey Rourke, thank you: writing here has transformational in more ways than I suspect I’m aware, and I was hardly unhappy when I started, but without you reading, commenting, and adding to whatever finds its way onto these virtual pages it would have no point nor pleasure.

By ridiculous coincidence3, the only other song I know to reference braiding came on immediately after Paul Simon’s. Aldous Harding’s The Barrel contains the almost painfully true ‘When you have a child, so begins the braiding, and in that braid you stay’, and as if the universe was watching - which of course it isn’t as I am walking worm food with no more importance to the greater whatever than the Caramel Magnum wrapper in the gutter next to the front wheel - my daughter rang at just that moment to see how I was doing.

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Celery, white bean and onion stew

Despite the sun’s occasionally cheering appearance, the wind is cold and my mind turned to this, a recipe from my book Vegetables.

It is a quiet prayer of thanks for celery’s shelf life: buy a head for a stalk or two for soup, and chances are the rest is still in good order a fortnight later when you need it. Celery is so often like that most excellent of friends who helps, advises, consoles and generally lifts others, who even if its presence isn’t obvious, is there so that everything else can shine. Here, it most certainly is present, its earthy bitterness perfect against the buttery sweetness of beans and onions. Today, I added two leeks that needed using and because I fancied their oniony squeakiness.

Serve with greens and/or excellent bread.

Serves 4-6

2 heads of celery, leaves cut off and reserved, the base and any rough outer stalks removed
60g butter
4 cloves garlic, finely chopped
2 onions, finely chopped
small sprig of thyme
2 bay leaves
150ml white wine
150ml vegetable stock
salt and pepper
200ml double cream
2 x 400g tins cannellini or butter beans, drained and rinsed
A big pinch of ground nutmeg
Coarse or flakey salt and freshly ground black pepper
4 or 5 cooked chestnuts, if you have them - no tears if not

Preheat the oven to 190°C/170°C fan.

Slice all the celery stalks into 3cm pieces on the angle. In a large, heavy bottomed pan over a low-moderate heat, cook the celery and onions in the butter with the garlic, thyme and bay leaves for 10-15 minutes, until softened. Add the wine and simmer vigorously for 2-3 minutes until the wine reduces by half. Add the stock, a good pinch of salt and pepper and bring to a simmer, cover tightly and cook in the centre of the oven for 25-30 minutes until completely tender.

Meanwhile, blend or very finely chop the celery leaves with 2 tsp coarse or flaky salt to create a wet mix.

Add the cream, white beans and nutmeg to the stew and bring to a simmer and cook for 5 minutes until thickened. Season generously with pepper and nutmeg. Serve with the chestnuts finely grated over the top and with a big pinch of the celery salt.

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I’ve been mistaking birds for bags. On the river Avon the other day, I was convinced an egret was repeatedly, somewhat theatrically, settling itself down on a waterside nest, before realising it was an unbranded white carrier bag flapping in the breeze1. This morning, the crow struggling with a worm reluctant to leave its cliff edge hole was in reality a dog poo bag caught on a fallen twig. What next, a bin bag snagged on a rock that I’m convinced is Nessie2?

On a day of mixed weather, my wife and I walked underneath Bristol, from Pill to Keynsham along the river Avon: 16 flat, often muddy miles of path alongside the riverbank where white carrier bags nest, punctuated by stops for ham and mustard rolls, powerballs3, and a sausage roll. I’ll write more about the reasons for the walk another time, but it had me thinking about the packed lunch.

When occasionally required to bring lunch for a school trip, everyone’s comprised:

• a sandwich cut corner to corner or across (depending on how posh you were)

• a packet of crisps

• a biscuit bar

• and (if you were from the nice villages) a piece of fruit.

Simple. Everyone had the same currency: if you had sandwich spread, someone might swap for a cheese and pickle; if your crisps were salt and vinegar, there might be a fool who would exchange for smokey bacon. The biscuit bar - by which I mean neither a biscuit nor a bar of chocolate; for instance, a Club, a Breakaway, a United (my word, how I loved a United) - was almost always something you wouldn’t swap. They generally came in packs of 6 or 7 and you’d have begged your parent/s for your favourite, perhaps a pack of Orange Clubs, or Trios: there were almost no circumstances under which you’d swap. Let us strip to their ill-fitting underpants and pelt with over-ripe tomatoes and out of date eggs any parent who thought adding a mini Swiss roll to their child’s packed lunch was a good idea.

No-one had biscuits in their packed lunch: their lack of wrapping meant they were for home. The old man wasn’t one for biscuits. A packet of bourbons occasionally; a festive tin of assorted biscuits perhaps. Everyone else had excellent biscuits. The first time I went around to a new friend’s house to play Buzzcocks and UK Subs singles, his mum brought us a plate of Digestives that she’d adorned with buttercream swirls. The sophistication! I genuinely couldn’t imagine anything fancier.

My oldest friend’s mum kept an outstanding biscuit barrel. An early adopter of the Hob Nob, she could be relied on to pop the biscuit barrel on the table whenever I popped around to see my friend.

Does anyone keep a biscuit barrel these days? Let me say, I daren’t: as much as I love a biscuit, a biscuit barrel would shorten my life considerably. My cholesterol would escalate like Sid James’ pulse, I’d spend afternoon’s dozing on the sofa in a post-carb comedown, and I’d very quickly resemble a snake that swallowed a fire extinguisher.

I have been thinking about what would fill my biscuit barrel should I have one, and I suggest the following as the ideal make up, in equal parts.

• dark chocolate Digestives

• plain Hob Nobs45

• shortbread, ideally fingers

• a Nice, or Malted Milk, or - at a push, a Lincoln biscuit

• if you must: a sandwich biscuit, preferably Bourbons

Let me also say, a biscuit barrel is no place for the following, on grounds that a barrel should house only bare biscuits:

• a wrapped biscuit (Viscount etc)

• a biscuit bar such as a Club, United, Breakaway and so on.

Let me also say, a biscuit barrel is no place for the following, on grounds of good taste:

• anything involving wafer (never eat a biscuit that floats)

• anything involving jam (a biscuit should be a treat, not a punishment)

I hope I need not expand on that.

As much as I love many of this genre, I don’t think a barrel should house a Glamour Biscuit, by which I mean those biscuits too regal to be allowed to touch each other. We should allow them to keep their royal distance. I wrote this some time ago, and it covers my thoughts on the Glamour Biscuit: ‘Just when we were starting to get used to the idea of chocolate chip cookies - small, excellent rounds studded with nuggets of chocolate and nut - their bodybuilding brethren barged on to the shelves. Rather than maybe 20 two-inch rounds to a packet, you got 8 or so plump, rugged biscuits, each held - in a mark of respect and reverence - separate to its neighbour in a compartmentalised tray. These were biscuits substantial and wide enough to have terrain, to have contours. I’d run my finger over their troughs and ridges, breaking one in half to observe how the chocolate peaks that broke the surface were, like the fillings they cause, even larger beneath.’

Alas, the leading Glamour Biscuit of the time - the Boaster - is no longer available. A while back, I came up with something that might pass as a Glamour Biscuit, and I can feel the urge to work on something that might double as a dark chocolate Hob Nob. Expect more on this soon.

Simple as they often are to make, I find biscuits don’t like it if you aren’t in biscuit making mode: to make good biscuits, I seem to need to have to make a few in a short space of time, to be in that biscuit baking zone.

And so this weekend - before working on something new - I’ll be warming up my biscuit making fingers by making something that - if I could risk having a biscuit barrel - would be a consistent fixture: caraway shortbread. As much as I love a plain shortbread, I can’t not add spice. Occasionally fennel, sometimes wattleseed, once in a while cumin, but it seems I am - as Billy Joel almost said - in a caraway state of mind at the moment. Its peculiar cumin-mintiness makes me happy whether in bread, on roasted vegetables or here, in biscuits.

So, if you see me in the coming days walking another 16 miles misidentifying bags of varying kinds as wildlife as I try to walk off a wobblier middle, remember it is in service of your pleasure that I do this holy work.

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Caraway shortbread

This is my default shortbread recipe - it’s shorter than a bookie’s pen - and while it likes to pretend it won’t come together, it will. If you make more than you need (and I advise you do) make into a sausage shape and roll up in cling film, twisting the ends to make a tightening sausage that you can freeze. When ready for a few biscuits, use a sharp knife to cut 5-7mm discs and bake as below: they may be a little less uniform (as you can see below) but it’s an excellent way to give yourself biscuits on demand and stop ourself making a load that you eat in 14 seconds.

Makes 12-16

100g sugar
200g unsalted butter
300g plain flour
pinch of salt
3 tsp caraway

Preheat the oven to 160°C.

Cream the butter with the sugar. Sift in the flour, salt, and caraway and combine. Roll out to around 5-7mm thick and use a small cookie cutter to create circles of shortbread. Place the shortbread circles on a baking sheet and cook until just thinking about turning lightly brown - around 15-20 minutes. Sprinkle with a little more sugar and allow to cool for 10 minutes before transferring to a cooling rack, where they will firm up as they cool.

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Blackbirds tend to live for 3 or 4 years before one of the many environmental, feline or avian threats does for them. It’s not as long as you’d hope but the odd lucky one gets to a dozen years or more. It’s perfectly possible that Original Blackbird has died, or been encouraged elsewhere by a new, livelier blackbird, and I’d be none-the-wiser.

In my sleepy state I wondered if there’s any way to easily identify a particular blackbird from the rest; quickly followed by the realisation that we are the only creatures with hairstyles. And that a hairstyle on any other animal would be ridiculous. Almost everything is familiarity: I remember when I first saw a footballer wearing non-black boots and being genuinely shocked at how wild it looked.

I bargained to myself, that if I’m still awake in 10 minutes, I’ll get up. I hadn’t taken into account that while my brain was awake my body was perfectly asleep.

Of the many thoughts tickertaping across my mind like so many cuddly toys on the Generation Game conveyor belt, uppermost included but were not limited to:

1. is it true that your ears keep growing after you die

2. how did I go this long without knowing Gil Scott Heron’s dad used to play for Celtic FC

3. where’s that - what sounds like an old Maxi - going this early in the morning?

4. what shall the subtitle of the next book be?

5. will somebody, somebody, not please sue the rail companies for noise pollution or some other infringement of human rights for incessantly jabbering on over the speakers into our ears

6. do crabs go to sleep?

7. I wonder if they’ve started filming the next lot of Small Prophets yet?

8. why are they called red onions when they are purple?

9. I must read about nuthatches. And stop being so amused by calling them nu-thatches

Eventually, at 6.20 something, I got up, dressed, and headed for the hill with the hound. He has reached a point where it takes him a couple of minutes to shake his legs into place, to stretch what was once supple into readiness, yet once steady, he’s very happy trotting along with his favourite ball between his teeth. I wonder what my favourite ball equivalent will be should I reach his age of gentle crankiness: maybe I’ll return to my childhood liking of humbugs, sherbet lemons or blackcurrant Menthol Lyptus, perfectly happy with my lot as long as I’m sucking one.

More about peregrines, a recipe for Spiced cauliflower frittata, and more besides, below

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In June 1967, a Canadair C-4 Argonaut passenger aircraft crashed in the centre of Stockport. The victim of a structural fault that was common to all aircraft of this kind, two of the engines, starved of fuel, failed. 72 of the 84 on board died. Mercifully, no-one on the ground was injured, thanks - it seems - to the actions of the pilot, who survived, steering a largely out of control plane to a small clearing between buildings.

A few months later, perhaps influenced by the disaster a few yards away, 3 Waterloo Road, Stockport, was sold to Billy J Kramer and the Dakotas’ former road manager Peter Tattersall, who invited one (Eric Stewart), then two friends (Graham Gouldman) to join him in turning the former warehouse into a recording studio. The two friends were joined by Kevin Godley and Lol Creme in a partnership writing songs for other recording artists. Gouldman bumped into Neil Sedaka (a very nice man, according to Rosie Millard) in New York, who realised Gouldman had written a song he liked the production on, and a few months later, Sedaka came to this most un-New York road in Stockport to record what would become many of his most well known songs. The experience galvanised Stewart, Gouldman, Godley and Creme to form 10CC.

For a good while, Strawberry Studios was largely 10CCs place to rehearse and record, though others, including McCartney, used it too. In 1975, 10CC recorded I’m Not In Love, a song so at odds with the music of the day that it still sounds unusual. If nothing else, it kept Windsor Davies and Don Estelle’s Whispering Grass off the top spot. Months later, another song in its vein: Bohemian Rhapsody. I’m not sure the latter happens without the former drilling the pilot hole. Both songs in their different ways owed much to the peak of prog rock at the time, and both might claim to be parents of Radiohead’s emergence from their rockier beginnings in the mid 90s.

A year after I’m Not In Love, the Sex Pistols played the Free Trade Hall in Manchester to an audience of 40 people. Of those few, it seems almost all went on to form bands that were hugely successful and influential: Joy Division, New Order, Buzzcocks, The Fall, Simply Red, The Smiths, Magazine, John Cooper Clarke and so on. If you were looking for an antidote to Whispering Grass, Showaddywaddy and Gary Glitter, Holidays In The Sun was the medicine you needed.

Of those forty, four working class lads from Salford and Macclesfield formed Warsaw, learning to play their instruments as they went. They were perfectly ordinary. A name change to Joy Division and at some point something clicked. As their bass player said, ‘the first time we played Transmission everyone in the whole place literally stopped what they were doing to listen and to turn round and watch us. It was an absolutely bizarre moment. It really made the hair on your arms stand up and shivers down your spine.’

In April 1979, over 3 successive weekends (they all had full time jobs), Joy Division recorded their debut album, Unknown Pleasures, releasing it just two months later. A few months after that, in May 1980, having recorded a second album, and on the eve of leaving for their tour of the States, Joy Division’s singer Ian Curtis, took his own life. Beginning to end, their whole recorded output was done in 11 months. A few weeks after Curtis died, Love Will Tear Us Apart was released, a single as perfect as any. The album they’d just finished was released a few weeks after that. I played it endlessly. It had a peculiar beauty that I couldn’t quite get my head around.

From their ashes, New Order. The remaining band members joined by the drummer’s girlfriend did much to strangle the backside out of new wave until it coughed up dance music.

By this time, I had left home. For reasons unknown, a landlord allowed one student, one employed person and two that were signing on to take on the lease of a house on the banks of the river Exe. It might be the most expensive house I’ll ever call home.

Let me make clear, I was perfectly content being unemployed. I had seen enough of the world to know that exchanging most days of most years for someone else’s gain was the last thing my teenage brain could handle. I played records, subsisted on Beanfeasts and Vesta curries, went to gigs, and talked rubbish with my oldest friend. I remain very hard to beat at pool.

Music was more than important to us all. It was one of the few things that gave me a light into the world, that calmed a sense of formless fizzy anxiety. As good as things were day to day, I felt lost in a world not made for me, for the unambitious, who wanted no part in the usual business of working 48 weeks so that I might frazzle for 4. The release of a new record, of a blinding piece of genius cutting through the ordinariness of Thatcher’s Britain was a rope by which I felt better tied to the side. I was not alone in this: my oldest friend, similarly blessed with a semi-detached dad, felt the same. It is a story as common as cheese.

Those two, three and four chord songs, themselves the result of a hot night in Manchester’s Free Trade Hall, had many children of their own. To those too young for 1976 Sex Pistols, Joy Division and New Order showed you you could do it: I mean, I could teach the dog the bass line to Transmission, but simple is so often perfect.

One random Saturday, in a music shop in Exeter, the owner asked if there was anything I was looking for. A Shergold 6 string bass, I jokily replied - there were very few of these 70s obscurities still around. He smiled and raised a single finger towards the ceiling. I looked up. There in pieces awaiting a respray, a Shergold 6 string bass, just like the one Peter Hook of New Order played. The owner was looking to sell it. £155. My friend leant me the money. Two months later - a two months existing on baked beans on toast - I had repaid the money, the guitar was ready, and more importantly it was mine.

I spent idle days recreating its unique twang, learning the parts on Blue Monday1, This Time of Night, and more besides. I realised - like those at the Free Trade Hall - that it wasn’t that hard to make music.

In 1986, 10 years after that Sex Pistols gig that kickstarted so much, that friend and I (along with a good handful of others) squeezed into a transit van - 3 in the front, 11 loose in the back - driven by the only one of us with a licence and by some distance the best looking, to make the long long journey from Devon to Manchester for an all day festival to celebrate those who had come from that night in 1976.

If you have read Andrew O’Hagan’s Mayflies or seen the TV adaptation, this was the same gig around which that story centred.

£13 got us New Order and The Smiths at the peak of their powers, A Certain Ratio, The Fall, OMD, John Cale of the Velvet Underground, Pete Shelley of Buzzcocks, John Cooper Clarke, Howard Devoto of Buzzcocks and Magazine, Cabaret Voltaire and Sandie Shaw.

I still have the ticket, which proves that the impossible - that I was once so young and so idle. You can spend £13 on a couple of crap coffees and a stale bun, or you can also spend it on one of the days of your life.

We returned full of cider and touched by something great.

Last week, forty years after we were there, my oldest friend and I stood outside that beautiful arched venue - what was GMEX, and before it Manchester’s Central train station. Apart from a glassy monstrosity added to the front, it was largely unchanged.

What we didn’t know then, was that the Free Trade Hall - the spark for it all - was just 43 seconds walk to GMEX: the apple falling no distance from the tree.

We took an unplanned train to Stockport. There was a piece of jigsaw between 1976 Free Trade Hall and 1986 GMEX that needed slotting in place.

A handful of minutes outside Manchester, and a couple of minutes walk from the station at which Bowie - after a gig in 1970 - slept the night, we were stood outside Strawberry studios, now the home of numerous office businesses.

In those few rooms, part way down a remarkable unremarkable road in Stockport, This Charming Man, Love Will Tear Us Apart, Unknown Pleasures, The Smiths first album, I’m Not In Love, and a whole lot more were recorded. That I am stood here, with some kind of direction and idea about how I’d like to spend my life owes much to the sounds that came from inside those four walls.

There are those who believe Joy Division would have gone on to be huge. It seems initially unlikely given their often dark intensity. And yet here we are, 50 years from their similarly dark beginnings and The Cure are enormous and more loved than ever. And it was to Strawberry Studios that a young U2 came to observe the recording of Love Will Tear Us Apart, Joy Division being their favourite band, and subsequently inviting its producer Martin Hannett to produce their next single. He would’ve gone on to produce their first album had he not been bereft at Curtis’ death.

You might argue that these songs would’ve seen the light of day elsewhere, and that is possible, but recording studios and producers have - and impart - a personality2:

At Strawberry, producer Martin Hannett somehow captured the bleakness of a 70s Manchester still in decline after being heavily bombed in WW2, and wove the sounds of the studio (including the sound of the lift) to make what we know of Joy Division’s sound. In Ian Curtis they had a singer who left nothing in the tank at the end of a song, and - in a stroke of genius - he was encouraged to sing like Sinatra when recording Love Will Tear Us Apart, and as unlikely as it sounds, it worked. It was at Strawberry where so much magic occurred, and without Joy Division and The Smiths, a very great deal of the music that is made now simply wouldn’t exist3.

Standing opposite that studio, we googled photos of Joy Division at Strawberry Studios and after some backwards and forwardsing managed to line up a few of those photos with the much changed backdrop of today. The blocked up garages over stripy-shirted Steven Morris’ right shoulder, a distant building and above it the peaks of the church on the far skyline the only anchors. It was only later that we learned of the air crash on the treed area just behind them in the far right of the photo 12 years before those Joy Division pictures were taken and 59 years before today.

Why do they look like they’ve just finished a shift at a fairly dull job? Because this was not instaland: they were skint, and those were the clothes they had for work and as well as when they kicked about. These were times, as Ian Curtis sang, ‘when routine bites hard, and ambitions are low’.

When I stood on a bank opposite to take that picture of Strawberry Studios, I discovered a plaque indicating that where my feet were planted was once a building called the Tabernacle Club, a venue where Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie, Sly and the Family Stone, The Small Faces, The Temptations, Pink Floyd and more played at the same time that the building over the road was being turned into a recording studio.

All of this going on at the crossroads of ordinary roads running through a northern town, a very few yards from where in the most terrible fluke a plane came to a disastrous rest.

I’m writing about all this partly as that’s where I’ve been and it’s filling my head - four ordinary lads who, for once, left the pub to go to the Free Trade Hall for less than an hour, had their lives changed, and as a result changed so many others - and partly as I’m deeply fascinated by the breadcrumbs that take each of us past sliding doors, along right angled turns, towards whatever awaits.

Without that peculiar string of events, I have no idea what my life would’ve looked like. I imagine it very unlikely I would be here writing this. I wouldn’t be surprised if you have a similar line of unlikely dominos, musical or otherwise, that toppled just so.

I’m also lightly tickled that Neil Sedaka’s Love Will Keep Us Together and Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart were recorded at the same place, seven years apart. And that maybe, without Neil Sedaka there would be no 10CC, and therefore no Radiohead, and maybe no Joy Division or Stone Roses and all that jazz.

And yes, if you were wondering, forty years later, I do still have that bass.

Don’t worry, I’ll get back to the usual territory next week, promise.

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Devon spiced beans

A year ago, I came up with a version of Boston spiced beans and today it feels the most appropriate thing to be eating, being as I subsisted on the tinned version of the very most ordinary kind for those long weeks paying off that bass. I hope it helps you through greyer days as we head into the light.

Serves 4 on toast

240g can of borlotti beans, drained
2 tbsp olive oil, plus a little to drizzle
1 large onion, finely chopped
3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
½ tsp ground cloves
1 lantern or 3 strands of mace, or a very generous scratching of nutmeg
1 tbsp yellow mustard seeds
1 bay leaf
a few sprigs of thyme
400g tin chopped tomatoes
about 7 sloshes of Worcestershire sauce
½ tsp chipotle chilli flakes
2 tsp chipotle paste
2½ tbsp maple syrup
sea salt
freshly ground black pepper
juice of half a lemon
Parmesan, optional
a sprinkling of chopped coriander

In a large pan, fry the onion in the olive oil over a medium heat until soft and translucent. Stir in the garlic, cloves and mustard and cook for a minute. Add the bay, thyme and tomatoes and simmer for 5 minutes or so.

Slosh with Worcestershire sauce, stir in the mace, chipotle flakes and paste, and season well. Simmer for another 10 minutes or so, adding a dash of water if it gets too thick. Add the beans and simmer for 5 minutes to warmth beans through.

From this point, it’s all about tasting and tweaking: stir in the maple syrup, season more if needed, add as much of the lemon juice as you need to brighten the whole.

Eat in front of a lively blaze, on toast, swizzed with a little olive oil, sprinkled with coriander and a generous snowfall of Parmesan.

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I first heard Are Friends Electric? on that radio. I stood open mouthed, the toast burning under the gas grill, wondering what on earth was going on. I turned the bread over, and stood still. ‘What the fuck is that?’ I said aloud to an empty house, taking two steps towards the radio. I turned it as high as it would go without distorting. I couldn’t take it in. Here, pouring from its crap little speaker was the new wave I loved but dunked in the chocolate of the future. It was as if aliens were making music. Every note of it, every fizzy sound, the unsettling something1. The distain.

Without deciding, I knew I wasn’t going to school. I’d never skived off but there I was, radio under my arm, heading up to my bedroom. I sat on the sill with my feet hanging out the window, looking down at the remnants of the haircut the hedge took at the weekend, wondering if humans would ever be able to fly. Could I jump to the lawn below and be ok? I shuffled to the edge of the sill, when Kay next door - a pretend auntie - shouted up from her garden that I shouldn’t be sat there. I shuffled back in and sat with my legs along the wide sill.

As whatever music that wasn’t what I wanted to hear played, I watched the bus head up the road to the village shops, giving anyone in the road just enough time to reach the shelter before it would turn around and head back towards town for us to catch. I counted: on 474 the bus passed the house on its return journey.

From here, I could see across the road to my old primary school. A workman was lifting the manhole cover outside the entrance. Just before big school, just before Mum left, I had a spell of telling lies, including one where I’d avoid getting wet if it was raining by lifting a cover in my garden and walking through the tunnel to school and come out at that manhole cover. One of my mates asked a teacher in the playground if it was possible, and when he was told that it might be but that I’d be covered in shit as it was a sewer, everyone took the piss for days.

The radio followed me about like a pet all day. I knew each DJ played a song only once a show so it wouldn’t be on again soon, but I had to hear it, to know I hadn’t dreamt it, that it was real.

When finally it came on, something slipped into place, a crucial brick in the wall, like seeing a face gradually reveal in one of those optical illusions.

There was something bleak about the song, but it made me feel alive, and a little less like I lived in the grown-ups’ world. I imagined the singer as an astronaut, from another time, perhaps even another planet. It was as if the singer had come back from the future to visit us, to visit me. And if he and it was from The Future, it meant there was a future, and that future might be different to the ‘normal, minus Mum’ we were living. Duvets, pasta, Smash Hits, Not The Nine O’Clock News, Moonraker, and now this: everything was changing. And none of it was for the grown-ups; it was for me.

A few years ago, after a couple of decades in the attic, the radio was brought into the light2. I’d been sorting my office, moving a box of the old man’s things, the radio included.

In picking up the radio my thumb rested on the ribbed volume dial and clicked it from off. A tinny wall of static scratched out of the speaker. I jumped. A ghost. I nudged the other dial a few millimetres - it had been knocked a little off station with the years in that box - and there it was, as it was every morning and Sunday lunchtime when I was a kid: Radio 2, AM, muffled and washy.

Unbelievably, 22 years, 8 months and 2 days after he took his last breath on the fourth stair of the house where he’d lived the last 34 years of his life, the radio still had what he did not: a little life left in the battery.

Today, I couldn’t resist turning that dial: only the merest hint of a distant static cough. Or maybe I imagined it. Either way, it’s about time that radio sat on the shelf in my office and stayed in the light.

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Aubergine curry

I made a version of this during the week with leftover curry, and very nice (and simple) it was too, but I think I prefer the aubergine original, below. It is as quick and delicious as you’d like a curry to be on a Thursday evening when you just want the weekend to arrive. Of course, you can make your own Thai red curry paste, but if you can’t be bothered, no-one’s judging; there are many excellent jarred versions.

Serve this with rice or flatbreads if you fancy, but often as not it’ll be rice noodles for me.

Serves 4

2 aubergines, cut into bite-sized wedges
juice of 1 lime
coconut oil, for frying
salt, to taste
400ml coconut milk
3 tbsp Thai red curry paste
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp palm sugar or brown sugar
1 red pepper, sliced
1 onion, thinly sliced
2 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
2 tbsp finely grated fresh ginger
1 tbsp olive oil
mall bunch Thai Basil leaves
1 lime, cut into wedges
a good handful of cashews nuts
1 red chilli, thinly sliced

Heat the coconut oil in a deep pan or wok over medium-high heat. Fry the aubergine pieces in batches until golden and crisp. Use a slotted spoon to transfer them to a plate lined with kitchen paper to absorb excess oil. Sprinkle with salt taste and squeeze over the lime juice.

In a large pan, heat the olive oil over a medium heat. Add the garlic and ginger, and cook for about a minute until fragrant. Add the onion and red pepper and stir fry for a couple of minutes until they start to soften. Add the coconut milk, curry paste, soy sauce, and brown sugar and stir well. Bring to a simmer and cook for about 5 minutes until rich and thick.

Add the aubergine pieces and gently stir to coat with the sauce. Simmer for 2-3 minutes.

Serve scattered with Thai basil, cashews and red chilli, with lime wedges on the side.

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Bowie has been in my head for much of this week. Even when out taking to the coast path before the weather turned, he often popped into my mind. There are a handful of musicians I actively miss - Bowie, and Mark Hollis among them - not just because I loved what they did, but because they helped me make sense of the world. And I miss Bowie, at least in part, because his later stuff was so very good which hinted that there was much more to come.

How can Bowie have been gone for an entire decade? It seems like three years, two months and eleven days at most.

More words and a recipe for sherbet lemons below

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The rain on the Velux sounds like scrunched cellophane stretching itself back out. It is just before 7am, and I feel like I’m being slowly hauled out of a deep, deep well.

I’m tired. How much of this is due to the easy-to-prepare end of the day carb-heavy diet that coincides with a fortnight of (excellent and very lovely) builders and their dust, mess, the squishedness of furniture and other detritus to free up the rooms they’re working on, and how much is just the urgh of short-day winter, who knows.

I get up solely on the grounds that the weather forecast is that the rain will stop by the time I’m dressed. The forecast is right, the sun is bright, the storm passed: the dog snores. When I take him for a loop, my shadow is cast hard against the gorse - still in flower, though without the necessary mid-teens temperature to encourage its coconut scent to take to the air. It is a gorgeous day.

These pre-Christmas days are starting to take on a pattern: an early walk and a late afternoon walk - the sun at a similar place in its lift and descent, providing two excuses to be in the limited light - with work between and after. And later, the comfort of multiple crumpets, heavily buttered: later still, an early evening bath.

I’m reading ’s Night Life - a book about walking after dark, and perhaps more about what it is to be human and experience ourselves differently in the wee hours. It is proving to be the perfect book for these first days of trying to read more, especially in the bath, and to minimise the hand stretching for the phone1.

Reading at the time (or location) a book is set is a pretty good way of falling more deeply into it, which is a terrible thing if you are into historical novels of the Caribbean and live in Scunthorpe. Thankfully I am not.

Reading this in an evening bath, perhaps 5 hours after the last of the sun headed off in search of Australia, makes me want to walk at night. And with some of it set on or near Lewis-Stempel’s farm, it makes me miss keeping animals - not enough to actually want to take it up again, but enough to yearn for the pleasure of it from the warmth of a deep bath.

Below, more about walking, a recipe for a very special Venezuelan eggnog and more besides

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Time, said Woody Allen, is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once. Frankly, nature’s not been doing such a fine job of that lately.

Still, in two and a half weeks it’ll be Christmas, and much as I like Christmas - and will doubtless once again fall pregnant with a cheese baby - I’m already craving the sweet optimism of New Year’s Day, perhaps my favourite day of the year; a day of no expectation, where bright sun, cold still air and an afternoon pint by an applewood fire are about the best ingredients I can think of to start the year.

Until then, it’s on with the wood burner, the beer stays out of the fridge, mince pies warming in the oven awaiting the last of the double cream, and working somewhere warm.

This is how an old man wishes away the year - by anticipating away the weeks and months, as well as by calling himself an old man before time. Although that’s how I feel when it’s so sodding hard to get up in these dark mornings, and there has been so much death recently. Five in as many months, and only two of them older than me. The arrival of new year, windscreen wiping - at least to a degree - the year that went before, will be very welcome.

Talking of dead people, the by-all-accounts extremely likeable Steve Cropper, guitarist with Booker T and the MGs has died. Not only their guitarist, he was part of the Stax house band playing on an almost endless stream of wildly successful tracks. Not only that, he was an incredible songwriter, co-writing Dock of the Bay, In The Midnight Hour, Knock On Wood, Soul Man and so many more. It was perfectly usual for him to play the perfect simple guitar part that would elevate whatever song he was playing on1.

I was lucky enough to see him once.

Below, more words and a recipe for Creamy caraway sprout and pea gratin

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I’m writing this sat on the bed of a hotel by a McDonalds, by a petrol station, by a roundabout, by a small-to-medium Hampshire town, not too far from a park where, in a few hours, the gathered will be doing our best to celebrate the early departure of one of the sunniest people you could meet.

The sky is heavy, the car park dotted with hire cars in default paintwork, the gloom lightened only by a string of dangling lights strewn from the foyer entrance. Today might be asking a lot of us on the celebratory front.

I have been away for a week, most of which has been spent talking about Abundance1. People have left the house on rainy evenings, into the drizzle, out in the dark, to come along and I’m never not amazed that they do. Earlier in the week I was briefly in Brighton (‘briefly’ is how I like Brighton best) for an evening that was recorded as a podcast (more on that soon), and I took a walk through Hove with an old and very loved friend.

I think it was Gore Vidal2 who said ‘Never pass up a chance to have sex’. Thankfully - for all concerned - I have often not taken Gore’s advice, but I have reached the time of life when my version of his advice might be ‘Never pass up a chance to buy excellent cards’. There is always someone with a birthday, a book published, another celebration, or - as is happening far too often at the moment - someone losing a loved one.

I took exactly this advice when finally having the chance to visit Hove’s excellent CookBookBake - a shop dedicated only to food books. A full rucksack and more days of travel meant I couldn’t leave with any actual books, but excellent cards: yes. Btw, who looks at their newborn and thinks to call their child ‘Gore’? Perhaps his middle name is ‘Innards’.

Which brings me, via a day working in a favourite cafe in London, to Thursday evening’s event at Honey & Co, in their studio in Lamb’s Conduit Street, London. Everything Itamar, Sarit and the team does is soaked in love and feels unfailingly uplifting. Eat there when you can, read Itamar’s beautiful writing when you have a chance, and cook from their books whenever the opportunity arises, and you’ll be happier for it. They have a special magic. If ever I had an evening of warm conversation in excellent company, a roomful of inquisitive, laughing people, last night was it and it couldn’t have been any more welcome. There was singing, much laughing, a chin wobble or two, and excellent food. Of course there was.

And so today, I wake to a gloomy car park view and the prospect of seeing many more excellent friends, all of us celebrating the gift of the one who is missing. We were asked to take something sweet for the picnic celebration, and there can be nothing more perfect for that than the panetonne from Honey&Co that sits on the anywheresville bed in this anywheresvillehotel.

Let me tell you, that we managed to laugh as well as cry, that - as invited - we sang along to the chosen music: I somehow remembered all the words to The Real Thing’s You To Me Are Everything, a song that lit my childhood radio up in the days when people rushed home not to miss Top of the Pops. Another excellent friend, his toes thankfully horizontal rather than perpendicular, was my partner in the bittersweet duet. We all ate cake, we raised a glass and we laughed at memories one of the very good guys, and made promises to ourselves and others that only these kind of occasions elicit. I hope we keep them.

At last, I am home. More ginkgo leaves fall and yet the same number appear still attached to the tree. There will be weeks of this. Gutters full, and yet - like those morning rush hour tube trains I used to catch - somehow more squeeze in.

I haven’t wandered around the garden for too long. The pineapple sage flowers bring a welcome slash of crimson to the greenery, lush after so much recent rain and a lack of proper cold.

The yacon leaves show no signs of giving up their vibrance - which means the temperatures are nowhere near what they usually are now, and that the tubers developing beneath may get longer than usual to grow and sweeten.

And thanks to the perennial kales - a mix of Daubenton’s, Taunton Deane and Sutherland - succulent leaves is not something we’ll be short of this winter. If east Devon had its own version of the Japanese tradition of dividing the year into 72 distinct micro-seasons, each 5 day window characterised by a poetic description, this one might well be ‘Droplets of rain cling to soft green leaves’.

Winter will be welcome for more time at home, more time in the kitchen, more time in the garden, and more time writing. A new book has been waiting on me turning up for it, and I think it has been patient enough.

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The best porridge

Last week, I took the excellent picture at the sea where I call home (at the top of the post) and paid the down-to-my-kex price. Nevertheless, it was very much worth it. I warmed myself through with an excellent porridge, from my book Abundance, most of which found its way from here to its pages, but this was written to go with a new year entry that was originally without a recipe and it starts the book, so I felt like maybe you’d be interested in enjoying it. No need to get a good soaking to enjoy it though.

Anyone can make porridge, but can you make porridge? Like makin’ lurve and parallel parking, people are often reluctant to receive instruction from someone who is confident in their mastery of a thing people like to think they are already familiar with. Immodest as it may be, I am happy to extend the benefit of excellence in (sadly only) two of these areas, one of them being porridge.

Texture is as important as favour here: this method of adding the oats in two stages gets you gloss with bite; the lack of sugar in the porridge itself lets the nuts, cream, jelly and syrup do the sweetening work. I used to think it had to be demerara sugar, but once you use excellent maple syrup there is no going back. I used Flahavan’s organic oats (the best and they are not too large), along with oat milk for a deeper oat flavour.

Serves 4

180g rolled oats
360ml milk
25g lightly crushed nuts (I used walnuts)
25g lightly crushed seeds (I used half sunflower, half pumpkin)
double cream
maple syrup or mugolio
jam or jelly3
sea salt

Stir 300ml boiling water into a pan containing 100g of the oats. Allow it to rest for 5 minutes. Place over a low-medium heat and bring to a simmer. Add a very good pinch of salt.

Stir in the milk and return to a simmer. Add the rest of the oats, stirring frequently to prevent them sticking to the bottom of the pan. Allow the porridge to come back to a simmer and cook for 2–3 minutes at most, adding a touch more milk if you need to get to something a little more mobile than a dropping consistency.

Spoon into bowls, dash with nuts and seeds, then slick with cream followed by maple syrup and a dollop of jelly or jam.

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Despite the rain having stopped, and as if I’m under a cartoon black cloud, huge drops fall on me, and I imagine the mini-drama above; all those small drops falling all those many metres from a sky cracking with early light into the yellow upper reaches of these beech and oaks, agglomerating into slim rivers flowing slowly downwards, along branches and across increasingly green leaves, gradually making their way in intermittent, descending increments, as if in Disney’s April showers, as if liquid coins being pushed by the last 2p piece off the ledge of an arcade game towards the me beneath, tens of metres below, until the point where no leaves lie beneath the water, and it reaches the critical point where one single large blip peardrops off a leaf and falls, the wake of air created by the passing lorry not withstanding, to perfectly coincide with the tiny gap between the neck and collar of your correspondent. Wakey wakey.

Right now, in my corner of south west England, the world - when viewed from the middle distance - is adhering to a strict order of three stripes: yellow higher up, green in the middle, brown carpeting the floor. And with everyday that passes, more of the the greens turn yellow, more of the yellows to brown, and more of the browns to softly falling confetti to lose themselves in the camouflage beneath1.

The dog has come into his own. It is his time of year. Camouflaged in those browns wherever he goes, his rusty tones vanishing him against the leaves, he furtles about perhaps unaware that he fits in better than usual. A rotting chestnut here, a nugget of something less savoury there.

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Well, it seems the French are still a bit shit at coffee if my few days in Paris is anything to go by. Hello wrong type of coffee beans, and WTF UHT. Howsomeever, the mighty swing to the caffeine roundabout (as I was reminded on my return to the UK) comes in the French not mithering rail travellers with endless noise pollution in the form of seeing, saying, scraping your own pancreas out with the plastic coffee lid left by the previous occupant of your seat.

Despite the rail announcements, it’s good to be home.

I’ve been thinking of medlars. Even while in Umbria and Paris last week, the small tree in our garden - 1150 miles away as the car drives - popped into my mind now and again. And today, after a fortnight of wondering whether it is still carrying its fruit, I’m relieved to find all but 6 medlars remain attached to their mother1 , with most approaching their perfect point of ripeness.

If ever a tree - with it beautiful irregularity, the flavour of its deep winey fruit, and its turning leaves resembling river basins seen from space - sang of autumn, it is the medlar.

Beautiful as trees and delicious in the eating, I’m also attached to medlars because of a famous2 victory. As any middled aged man will tell you, tiny wins witnessed by almost no-one is all we have left. I claim excellence in only two arenas - the pool table and the Scrabble board - and, knowing this, a friend challenged me, using his son as his knight, to a Scrabble match. I was being soundly thrashed by his genius offspring until the final go of the game where I managed to place BLETTING (see below) with enough triple letter and triple word embellishments to win by the narrowest of margins and retain my status as Scrabble champion. Without it, who knows where I’d be.

Anyway…where was I…medlars. If you aren’t familiar with them, this film might help: a trip to Totnes3 a few weeks ago threw up something special; an avenue of medlars in the churchyard that revealed itself during a backstreet explore. With luck, some of the fruit will still be on those trees, so if you can make it to Totnes, pick a few while leaving plenty for others.

For the most part, medlars aren’t eaten when hard as a conker, they are allowed to blet. Bletting (from the French ‘blettir’ - to make soft) is a process of gentle decay that takes some fruit - such as medlars and sorbs - from hard and unappetising to a sweeter, creamy delight.

Clinging to the tree even when the leaves have coloured with autumn and dropped, medlars need a good hard frost or two for the cell walls to buckle and bletting to begin. The firm pale flesh softens incrementally to a deep brown pulp. This can happen without frosts, over a good long season, as it happening right now in the UK.

So what do you do with medlars, you may ask.

My default is to half them and cook on the laziest of simmers in enough water to reach halfway up the medlar halves. When they have surrendered to a soft buttery pulp, push through a sieve/mouli to separate the seeds and any undissolved skin (discard both) from the pulp. Freeze in 200g batches for the sticky toffee pudding below, and other desserts.

Secondly, you have to make medlar jelly - it really is the prince of jellies. The recipe is below, too.

For something altogether quicker, bake a few bletted medlars in a moderate oven for 15 minutes, spoon out the soft pulp (discarding the 5 large seeds) and try it with a little honey and cream (or with blue cheese) and a glass of Tokaji or other sweet white wine. Or a smoky Islay whisky. A wintery fireside treat if ever there was one.

And where might you get fruit from should there not be a tree in your garden and you not be near Totnes?

The answer is from . Jane planted 115 trees, now the national collection of medlars, in her corner of East Anglia, known as Eastgate Larder. She has a minimum order of 5kg, but that gives you plenty to make sticky toffee pudding, freeze pulp for more later, make jelly and have a play. And you’ll be contributing to an unique edible landscape, where the trees grow entirely naturally on ground that is fed with Jane’s mix of homemade compost, leaf mould and wood chip, and where the picking and packing is done by her. A forgotten fruit, very much back to life. And you could do far worse than get her excellent book about the history, growing and cooking of the medlar (with numerous other recipes) at the same time. All from the Eastgate Larder website.

For smaller quantities, you might still get lucky at Hodmedod’s online shop before the bletting takes over and they get too soft to send.

And so below, three actual recipes, for your pleasure. I’m off in the vain hope my wife will agree to a fireside game of Scrabble.

Happy autumn to you.

Medlar jelly

Use a mixture of bletted and unbletted medlars here, or fruit that is only half way soft, as the unbletted portion has more pectin and ensures your jelly will set more easily.

Makes 4 x 225g jars, ish

500g unbletted medlars
500g bletted medlars
Juice of ½ lemon
About 500g granulated sugar
1 vanilla pod

Cut the medlars in half, put them in a large pan and pour in just enough water to cover. Add the lemon juice, bring the water to the boil, lower the temperature and simmer gently for an hour. Don’t mash the fruit, as this will make your jelly cloudy.

When the fruit is soft, strain overnight through a jelly bag into a bowl4.

Put a couple of saucers into the freezer. Measure the juice and pour it into a clean pan (you can use the discarded pulp to make the chutney).

For each 500ml of juice, add 375g of granulated sugar. Add the vanilla pod, split along its length, and warm gently, stirring, until the sugar has dissolved. Turn up the heat and boil, without stirring, for 5 minutes or so. Test the jelly for the setting point by dribbling a little onto a chilled saucer, leaving it for a minute and then pushing it with your finger – if it wrinkles, it’s done.

Allow another 5 minutes boiling if the setting point hasn’t been reached and test again. Repeat if necessary. Pour while still warm into sterilised jars and seal. The jelly will keep, sealed, in a cool, dark place for 12 months.

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Medlar sticky toffee pudding

Medlars make excellent jams and jellies but a Twitter chat with Xanthe Clay many years ago led me down the experimental road to creating this fine dessert. I made it for my father in law once - a man given to old school puds but most certainly not to effusive praise - and I thought for a moment he might shed a tear. If there was a reason I was brought to this planet, this may be it.

The brief grilling at the end is by no means essential, but it turns the top beautifully fudgy.

The best way to deal with medlars is to half them and cook on the laziest of simmers along with enough water to reach halfway up the height of the sea of medlars. When they have surrendered to a soft buttery pulp, push through a sieve/mouli to sieve out the seeds and any undissolved skin. Freeze in 200g batches for this and other desserts.

Serves 6

For the sauce:
125g unsalted butter
70g golden caster sugar
50g dark muscovado sugar
150ml double cream

For the cake:

200g medlar pulp
60g unsalted butter, softened
85g golden caster sugar
70g dark muscovado sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
180g plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp ground cloves
1/2 tsp salt

85g walnuts, crushed

Preheat the oven to 180°C.

Lightly butter a baking dish approximately 24cm x 20cm.

Put the sauce ingredients in a pan, and heat gently until the butter melts. Turn the heat up and boil for 5 minutes, stirring frequently, until the sauce coats the back of a spoon. Pour a little over half of the sauce into the dish, allow to cool and refrigerate to firm up the sauce.

Beat the butter and sugars together, then add in the eggs, one and a time and beat until combined. Stir in the flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda, cloves and salt until incorporated. Thoroughly stir in the medlar pulp and the walnuts.

Spoon the mixture into the dish, over the toffee sauce. Bake for 30 minutes.

Turn the grill on to a moderate heat. Make holes in the cake with a knife - just large enough to allow the sauce to soak in to the sponge - and pour over the remaining sauce. Grill for just long enough to crisp the top a little. Serve with a great deal of double cream or vanilla ice cream.

Medlar thing

I wrote this a couple of years ago, and it includes a medlar recipe you might enjoy.

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I have never been to the part of Italy where Tuscany folds into Umbria. Pale orange roofs of curvaceous tiles, shutters and strings of bright washing, lines of bitter leaves, clutches of dark brassicas, tomatoes in tight clusters held vertical with canes; vegetable patches ringed more often than not by fruit trees on semi-dwarfing root stocks. Along with apples, plums, pears and peaches, I saw persimmon trees, and the occasional domino-line of cardoons tied tight with compost bags to blanch the otherwise rough leaf ribs into pale, semi-soft submission. The big floppy-eared leaves were tobacco.

Autumn arrived in gentle increments over the week: Sunday, and my supermarket shortcrust skin felt tight under the sun; by Friday, early mist made islands of the hills like seashore rock pools, dissolving into the morning when no-one was looking. On the last day, we huddled in occasional clutches by the brazier. I’m not sure I’ve ever felt one season so steadily, definitely, irreversibly slip from one to another.

I was here to teach for the week1, along with Molly Wizenberg and Felicity Cloake. 20 people - from New York, Seattle, Peterborough, Rome and more besides - came in accidental taxi-fuls, drawn together by coincident flights and trains.

The teachers stayed in an 11th century castle sitting high above Villa Pia where those attending had rooms. Apart from a scorpion, a 7 foot wooden penis, and a ghost closing my door, our time in the castle passed without incident.

In the centre of the building, a room painted with stripes in the 14th century and the rest from the 16th century, courtesy of the School of Michelangelo. I can’t quite get my head around it having been there for so long, seen so much, and somehow escaped disaster.

It was an extraordinary time, where the shy exposed, the hesitant revealed, the confident dug deeper. Of the many (excellent) book ideas I heard, the wonderful Margaret’s about three generations of home cooks - ending in her - who worked in The Big House in her quiet corner of Scotland stuck firm, as did Tiffany’s outline of Paris sandwiches and loss. There will be many rewarding substacks to come from at least some of those who attended. It’s remarkable how much can change in a week when so many people throw themselves openly at it.

One season to another, the self diagnosed ‘lazy’ attendee already allowing herself to be ‘procrastinating’ instead by Night 2, and by the close of the retreat she’d become more than a little determined to turn her long hidden ideas into something that can be held in the hands, if only by her family. Half the group read their work to the rest on the final night, moving all to tears and laughter.

A week is a handy but ultimately unreliable unit of measurement when so transformational: it feel like a month immersed in pleasurable intensity, where I laughed and ate more than I can remember, with the most exceptional hospitality courtesy of Morag, Laurenzi and the Villa Pia team.

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I had a perfect day.

15 or more years ago I planted 50 or so sweet chestnuts along a bank of the river Otter in East Devon - each large nutted, easy to peel, full of flavour, mutually pollinating, French varieties that had every chance of thriving in south west England. That kind of number forms part of a landscape; here, so much of what I can see from the castle where I’m staying is sweet chestnuts.

Twenty minutes of the coach zigzag from the castle, stitching into the wooded hills, took us to Marinella’s. All I knew of Marinella was her preserving skills were by all accounts incredible, that she lived within a 50 acre hug of sweet chestnut trees, and that lunch would be excellent. I was not disappointed.

These were the hills where locals dug holes to bury themselves from the eyes of the fascists combing the hills for supplies and enemies. The trees felt like they had seen more than they would let on. And for as long as she could remember Marinella and her family had been coming into these slopes to harvest their nuts.

I had assumed blankets might’ve been laid out beneath the trees to catch the chestnuts, olive-like, beneath, but no. A huge hose - as if from a giant Henry vacuum cleaner - sucked the chestnuts into a back-of-tractor contraption that riddled them nut from husk.

Bagged, the chestnuts are later passed through a machine that automatically separates them from any hoovered detritus, while keen eyes flick the damaged and inferior to a channel to go for flour, while the best are sold whole. I wandered about kicking spiky husks, the light We Won’t Get Fooled Again-ing through the branches, and thinking about how it must have felt to try to conceal yourself for who knows how log in the bark, bugs, lizards and leaves beneath my feet.

The whole operation is between friends and family, using machinery that looked like even this simple creature might be able to repair it with an adjustable spanner.

I ate chestnut honey, I bought olive oil made from Maronella’s fruit, and I wondered whether this might not be the place - a place of serious significance - to spend the next big birthday.

My aunt - my dad’s sister - was endlessly frustrating to him. She’d pick random numbers on the lottery, very often in consecutive order, and win, while his unchanging selection scattered through the available numbers - and based on the birthdays of significant others - yielded little more than the clank of a scrunched up ticket hitting the metal bin at the end of the sofa where his empty fag packets unerringly landed. I think she was younger than him by a year or two, and despite the occasional blow up - the line down his forehead the result of a half-brick finally cast at the source of her annoyance - and the lottery injustice, they were close.

The old man never talked about the circumstances of their adoption. I have no idea how much he knew, other than what he knew came to him later than he would’ve liked and that he was unhappy about that. A few days after entering the world, he was adopted by his uncle and aunt, and so his Italian heritage got brought forward in the consciousness of others by becoming his, and hence my, surname.

I may not be obviously Italian is appearance - though Titian may have a word to say about that - but other than the rolling coast of Devon, the only places I’ve felt an undiluted sense of home have been in the south of Ireland (where I later discovered my father’s real mother was born) and the landscapes of these working, wooded hills where I’ve spent the last 8 days.

I’ll be back.

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Please excuse any poor formatting or general wonkiness - I’m writing this on the trains from Florence to Paris, while drinking San Pelligrino and marvelling that all of this uploads and seems to work on train wifi when texting my mum seems all but impossible on a UK train.

The spiders have dropped their lace hankies in the night, not that they were troubled - even delicate as they are - by Storm Whatever this morning. Neither did it seem to trouble the man sitting in his BMW watching the surfers, while he ate an early morning pasty broken only to dashboard-slap the drums along to In The Air Tonight, when they came in on his car stereo. It is at times like these that I thank heavens for a dog, his extended pee on the lamp post where the man was parked turning me from stalker to kind owner.

Everything is turning. This weekend’s wind has encouraged any leaves contemplating the short trip back from whence they came to get a shift on, and the streets are confettied with their loveliness. The last uneaten blackberries are now dry, matt nuggets, and everywhere there are trees there are mushrooms.

My mind turns to logs, ale out of the fridge rather than within, pondering whether my walking jacket is still waterproof, making stock, rosemary more than mint, caraway thyme more than coriander, and autumnal fruit.

Three weeks ago, a very good friend gave me a bagful of quince and Black Worcester pears. We met at an industrial estate at the intersection of roads we were travelling along as I headed north in pleasurable instalments. They sat in my car for 9 days while I travelled around talking about my new book Abundance, the scent of quince slowly developing and creeping across the seats to an incrementally happier driver.

For a week and a bit longer, the bag sat in the porch while I did my homework: Black Worcester pears are apparently best allowed to mature for a while, typically into new year, and so they’ve been wrapped in newspaper, to sit quietly in the garage, thinking about how excellent they’ll become in the shorter days1.

The quince have, at last, come indoors.

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…and for the first time in my life.

Why have I not been before? I have meant to many times - the first, to walk the West Hig…

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The tree wasn’t there this time - had I imagined it? - or, more likely, had it gone the way of the wooden boxes in the vicinity, and composted quickly into the soil.

As we walk and talk, I remember when she first went to university a year ago. I wrote about it on that day, and the wonderful Diana Henry has been kind enough to read the extract of it from the book ABUNDANCE.

And now my daughter about to return after a long hot summer at home. It seems less of a deal in most ways, and yet the house has been happily shaken by her sunny presence, noise and detritus these last sunny months and it will be a wrench.

A heavily laden crab apple - a John Downie, I’m fairly sure - lit up the grey stones and the just-recovering grass. In the hedges, damsons, hawthorns, sloes and conkers - only the last of which was of any interest to childhood me; now the reverse is true, though I regret my growing up too far to not wish for the pleasure of swinging conkers in combat, shouts of ‘STAMPSIES’ and the rush of tatty shoes to tread any opponents conkers that had fallen to the floor into the ground.

We came here as kids once in a while to mess about: we’d gather a few - but not too many as to rouse suspicion - of what I was convinced1 were emeralds on the graves. We’d be rich beyond our wildest dreams by the end of summer. My dad ruined our dream by telling us they were just green glass, but for a week or two we thought it was just a ruse to trick us out of our wealth.

Whatever the time of year, we were never in the graveyard after tea. Next to the shed belonging to the man who worked at the graveyard, a pile of clippings and other prunings was supposedly the spot where the ghost of a Victorian man emerged at 8 o’clock every night; a ghost that would drag any child he found back into the compost and back to his Victorian world. No-one believed it…but no-one was there after 8 either.

Half a dozen years later, this was where - after a few hours of playing whatever new music we had bought that week - me and two friends came to get to grips with smoking and drinking. The pub down the road had an off licence and a landlord taking too little out of season to be much concerned about our age: a can or two each, maybe a bottle of Woodpecker, a pouch of tobacco and we could see off hours talking about everything and nothing. Today, the cold hard seat of the churchyard gate is still as cold and hard as it was then, and - yet still oddly comfortable.

When we left, my daughter put ‘The Things That Dreams Are Made Of’ on in the car, a song from exactly that time of crawling painfully slowly to adulthood, one rollie, one magnificent new album, one nervous snog, at a time. Everything and nothing changes.

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Plum, and ginger ice cream

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The brilliant Diana Henry2 has kindly read that extract from the book, and I hope you enjoy it.

And if you have someone flying the nest, the soup below (also in the book) - which I made on that day a year ago - might just help.

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Tomato and rosemary soup

If ever two people made a soup, this is it, and if ever a soup sang loud of the end of summer, here it is.

Not only does it taste so completely of the essence of tomatoes - like childhood sickbed Heinz Cream of Tomato Soup (with its tomato soup moustache) does in your memory rather than how it does in reality - it is also the easiest, with everything cooked in the oven. I used ginger rosemary, but regular rosemary will be differently excellent.

For something more of a main course, warm the soup with a few spoonfuls of butter beans or white beans, add croutons, and Parmesan is most definitely your friend here.

Makes 2 litres - serves 6-8

1.8kg largish tomatoes
4 cloves garlic, cut into the same number of slices as there are tomatoes
8” rosemary, leaves shredded from the stem
2 leeks
Salt
Pepper
Olive oil
Double cream
Basil, thinly shredded

Wrap the leeks in foil and place them in the top of the oven set to 190°C.

Core the tomatoes with a short-bladed knife, using the thumb of your knife hand to prevent you cutting (the tomatoes or yourself) too deeply. Place them in a roasting tray, push in a sliver of garlic, a clutch of rosemary leaves and half fill each core hole with olive oil. Sprinkle with salt and pepper and place in the middle of the oven.

Check the tomatoes after 30 minutes or so: you want them softened but not collapsing, and before the skin has blackened. Allow to cool a little. Remove and discard the rosemary leaves.

Check the leeks - they are done when they take a sharp blade with no resistance: they may need longer depending on their size. Tip the leeks into a colander and allow cold water to run over them just enough to cool them to handle. Strip off the outer layer and the base.

Place a leek plus however much of the tomatoes your blender can comfortably take. Blend on high until smooth, repeating in batches until all is blended. Taste and season well.

Pour into a pan and bring slowly to a hint of a simmer, then ladle into bowls, swirl with a little double cream and olive oil and sprinkle with basil.

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The road up to the high woods has been resurfaced. Of course it has: a cynic might point you to the price of the houses. Even the tapering tributaries which once might’ve carried a milk float, and are now likely to see little more than a golf cart, are freshly done.

On the busiest stretch, the surface ripples, the gravel in waves, as if a dark tide is washing down the slope to meet you. Someone drove the big lorry past the big houses too soon for the tar beneath; chunky tyres immortalised for half a generation or more to witness. Walking on it sounds treading on eggshells. I close my eyes to remove the visual, to better listen, and take two steps. No: it sounds like fresh, deep snow.

The dog has, if not exactly a spring in his step, a willingness to at least only lag behind far enough that I can still actually see him. We stitch our way up the footpath, him distracted left and right by smells undetectable to his owner; his owner on the search for wild fruit.

On the top of the hill, out past the trees, having passed enough blackberries hard as Heaney’s knot to displease the noisy dunnock, the crabby crows and the chattering wren that kept me company, I found a stretch in better light, fuller breeze and sandier soil that were plump as babies’ toes. And there’s plenty still in the red for the weeks to come.

The garden blackberry couldn’t be more generous this summer, with fruit as luscious and winey as I’ve ever tasted, but these wild on the hill marbles have an older flavour, something from childhood, like the smell of beer on an adult’s breath that it seems we no longer pick up once in big school.

Tupperwareless, and low on the poo bags that so often double for it, I’m take only whatever my hand reaches as I dawdle past, to eat like sweets. In an effort to create the laziest of metaphors, the bushes along this path all hold their chubbiest, ripest, juiciest blackberries just out of reach.

I realise that proximity has me picking those flourishing in the garden for crumbles and stockpile, while laziness and busyness prevent me turning up on the hill with tub in hand and robbing the wildlife of their natural inheritance. I’m lucky to have the option.

It’s become so autumnal that to deny it is autumn is too contrary for most. To me, mid September is the crossover that feels natural, but there’s no denying it: the sky falls away earlier, the morning dog walk is full of cool air, and two days ago the curtains pulled bare to a thin layer of condensation.

The sun still breaks through though - hot at times it is too - which makes a cold drink (see below) still as welcome as in June. That said, I found myself humming Solid Air1 while walking the dog first thing today, and my thoughts are turning to stews and to the oven where a week ago all I wanted were raw tomatoes and whatever else to go with. I better order some logs.

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Blackberry martini

This is a take on the mulberry martini in Abundance. It will have the odd person telling you it’s too much vermouth: knickers to that. The right amount of vermouth is the amount that suits, and to my mind these quantities bring out the best in all three ingredients.

Makes 1

80ml gin
20ml dry white vermouth
10 blackberries

Squish 8 blackberries in a glass. Skewer the other two berries on a cocktail stick.

Pour the gin, vermouth and squished blackberries plus their juice into a cocktail shaker along with a handful of ice. Shake for 30 seconds. Pour through a fine sieve into a chilled glass, lie the berry cocktail stick across the rim to admire it for a second, then allow it to submerge, soaking in just a little booze to be a delicious treat.

Enjoy in the garden if the sun is out, or where you plan to snooze if it’s raining.

Abundance reading

Continuing with blackberries and with my book Abundance published a few days ago, I asked some friends to read an episode. Here, my old friend, playwright, actor and author Seamus O’Rourke2 reads words from the book that I wrote this time last year, when blackberries stole my attention. What a way - even with someone else’s words - he has.

I hope you enjoy it.

Lastly…TODAY I’m doing a Substack ‘Live’ with the brilliant Farrah Storr

We’ll be talking about Abundance, how I wrote it here on Substack, perhaps how one became the other, and maybe about how Substack might become the place you make the most of as your writing home. Joining is easy: just click below and follow the few simple steps. It would be great to see you there.

Things Worth Knowing with Farrah Storr

I'm doing a 'live' tomorrow

Doing something totally new tomorrow evening (6pm BST), which is to say I’m throwing a ‘live’ book launch of sorts for Mark Diacono and his new book Abundance…

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8 months ago · 5 likes · 1 comment · Farrah @Substack

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I know I’m supposed to be taking an August break from here while many are on holiday, but I thought you might like to hear an extract from my new book ABUNDANCE, with (below) the recipe for the Fruit panzanella that accompanied it this morning - a variation of the one in the book.

I hope you enjoy it.

Fruit panzanella

Serves 4

ok olive oil
20 mirabelles, halved and stoned
10 plums, stoned and quartered
24 mulberries
4 slices of brioche
2 tbsp caster sugar
1 tbsp ground cinnamon
a dozen basil leaves, thinly sliced
4 fennel flower heads, torn into mini florets
good olive oil
80ml double cream
juice of 1 lemon
sea salt
freshly ground black pepper

Over a medium heat, warm a good slick of the ok olive oil in a frying pan large enough to accommodate two slices of brioche. Lower the brioche in when the oil simmers and fry it for perhaps a minute: check often as the sweetness of the bread means it turns quickly. Turn each piece over when lightly golden and season with salt and pepper. When golden on each side, remove to cool and drain on kitchen paper, and repeat with the other two slices of brioche.

While the brioche fries, stir the cinnamon thoroughly into the sugar. Place the fruit into a large bowl and stir through the lemon juice.

Tear the brioche into pieces and sprinkle generously with perhaps a third of the cinnamon sugar, more if you have a sweet tooth.

Tumble the fruit and brioche together on a serving platter, drizzle with half the cream, shower with basil and the fennel flowers, zorro with good olive oil, season with salt and pepper and serve with excellent coffee, and the rest of the cream in a jug in case needed, ideally in the garden.

I hope the sun is shining on you.

Some news. The book tour for ABUNDANCE isn’t far away. It feels particularly special as the book was created here, and without the community from around the world - you - that came together around it, it may not have become a physical object. And a very beautiful physical object it is too.

So, as if I were Willie Nelson, I am off on the road again, taking not the Midnight Train to Georgia, nor indeed the Last Train to Clarksville, but very possibly a Long Train Runnin’ to Edinburgh. And it is very possible that after the Honey and Co evening I shall be Down In The Tube Station at Midnight.

There will be dates in October and beyond, but if any of these are within - let’s say - 500 miles, I expect to see you there. Or else.

I will be signing and chatting, and certainly at some there will be cocktail tasters and nibbles (and if you know Honey & co, you know they’ll be exceptional).

I really hope to see you in a few short weeks.

Take care,

Mark

Click below for more info

HONEY and CO - ABUNDANCE with Mark Diacono

GARDEN MUSEUM LITERARY FESTIVAL - sold out but a waiting list

LUDLOW FOOD FESTIVAL - click for event details, and here for tickets for the day

TOPPING & CO, ST ANDREWS - ON ABUNDANCE, eating and living well with the seasons - early bird tickets available

TOPPING & CO, EDINBURGH - ON ABUNDANCE, eating and living well with the seasons - early bird tickets available

YEO VALLEY ORGANIC GARDEN FESTIVAL - part of the 3 day festival, with many great guests

Once upon a time, a man was expected to leave the house armed with little more than a sharpened stick hoping to return some days later dragging the carcass of an auroch on which the family might feast for months to come: this weekend, the modern equivalent; I emptied and defrosted the freezer.

Unbeknownst to me I have - seemingly for months, and yes, in some cases years - been living alongside an almond Magnum, a litre of exceptional olive oil and tarragon ice cream, an unlabelled curry, three slices of bread of the hardworking sort, an auroch’s worth of cooked chicken leftovers in assorted containers, numerous pie fillings, pink gooseberries saved in case I needed to reshoot a recipe out of season, blackcurrants frozen to make topping and tailing easier and then forgotten, a pair of pairs of kippers, 5 gluten free fish fingers, around 700g of medlar pulp so that at any point I am always only 90 minutes or so away from medlar sticky toffee pudding, and 817g of mulberries, picked in summer rain.

It occurs to me that a list of freezer contents might double relatively well as an obituary. It’s also a conveyor belt of promises to the future. A list of promises, it’s fair to say, that in part ended up in recycling through falling to the back of my mind’s notice, covered as they were in an avalanche of overestimated fillings and good intentions in food bags.

That 817g of mulberries is insurance against a year without: what if I break an ankle and am unable to pick, or unseasonal frosts do for the crop, or the zombie apocalypse takes the form of mulberry loving Frankensteins intent not on my flesh but on the finest fruit there is?

I’ve written before about Otter Farm starting with a planting list that read ‘Mulberries’ - these heavy, plump, dark, succulent berries are a good part of why I’m here writing - and in a not-so-much-leap-as-step-off-the-kerb of faith, I’m going to trust that the big tree in the park, and the handful of younger ones by the river that bisects this town will provide in the next few weeks.

For anyone who hasn’t eaten them, mulberries’ flavour lies at the heart of a Venn diagram including blackcurrant, blackberry, a deep red wine, and raspberry with a sprinkle of sherbet thrown in. That’s only so close, but it’s driven you to the right flavour post code at least.

They are here largely due to the dimness of a powerful male1: King James I, in his enthusiasm to start a UK silk business, imported mulberry trees - white mulberry leaves are the silkworm’s favourite dinner, after all - only he imported thousands of black mulberry trees. The delicious swing to the unsilky roundabout is that so many estates and historic houses in the UK have a mulberry or two still thriving in their grounds, even where those houses are now public, and - thanks to the tradition continuing - even the grounds of large buildings that followed, such as Devon County Council’s offices, have mulberries ripening as we speak.

A little scrumping while visiting a historic house or complaining about your council tax bill is very likely your best way to get a sneaky taste of the fruit. And the national collection is held in the gardens of Buckingham Palace.

Whether picking in your garden, while collecting an OBE, or scrumping in a public space, dress like Prince - in purple2 - or go in your birthday suit. At the very least wear scruffs. Pick only the very darkest berries: a little of the finest-flavoured is so much better than a larger harvest of under-ripe.

I’m not up for fannying around with mulberries unless I have the hugest harvest - give me them raw, eaten as they are, like the very best sweets; give me a larger harvest, and I’ll make ice cream or sorbet, or possibly a summer pudding. And so with the Pakistan mulberries long gone from our garden tree, I wait for the foraged ones for a week or two longer, and I’ll risk using these 817g now and trust the future.

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Mulberry and lemon verbena vodka

I wanted to make mulberry vodka3 this summer partly - mostly - to take a moment to better remember Pat in the best way I can, when the vodka she introduced me to reaches its perfect point. This variation is partly ’s fault: I was in conversation with her at the frankly astonishing Charleston House, as part of their Festival of the Garden, and she asked me to describe the flavour of a mulberry and I remembered the sherbetiness it has; we talked about lemon verbena shortly after, and I spoke about how much the scent if that of sherbet lemons - this morning I wondered if the sherbertiness of one might enhance the sherbetiness of the other, and brought them together in what I hope will be a holy alliance. Christmas will tell.

Makes around 2 litres

817g mulberries
1.7 litres vodka
200g caster sugar
60cm lemon verbena

In a 3 litre jar, stir the caster sugar into 500ml vodka until it is at east trying to dissolve. Add the mulberries, lemon verbena stems and the rest of the vodka.

Leave it for a few months, inverting the jar once in a while to encourage the sugar to dissolve and the fruit to let go a little more of its loveliness into the alcohol. Decant into a wide bowl, catching the fruit and herb in a sieve4.

Funnel into bottles and - if you can - allow to mature in the bottle for a month or two longer; over time it will mellow and develop, but really, it’s not easy to resist before it has the chance to.

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