Albert Camus, fat balls, River Phoenix and a stupendous cranberry and caraway flapjack

Abundance: 22 January 2025

The wind is cold and from nowhere comes a craving for flapjack. I stare at the garden and have no urge to be in it. Judging by its diminishing stock¹, the birds are clearly enjoying the bird feeder, but even they can’t be arsed at the moment. Other than a lardass of a pigeon failing to balance on the top, I’ve seen a house finch; that’s it.

The ridiculousness of gardening has filled my mind for a few days. Why do I spend so much of this one precious window of consciousness creating a tribute band of a space, a supergroup of environments and species drawn together in a mockery of nature? Shouldn’t I dedicate those weekends and evenings not to tending a peculiar creation but to walking the coast path, to striding the fells, to lowering this unpleasant frame into a loch or lake; aren’t there plenty of places on this ridiculous spinning rock yet to amaze me? And yet I waste my time a few feet away.

We are, as Joni so perfectly put it ‘only particles of change, orbiting around the sun’²; walking compost, worm food in waiting, atoms temporarily agglomerated in what we hope is a package attractive enough to distract someone else from their Sudoku long enough to jump on us in pleasure once in a while. We do anything to distract ourselves from the unseeable view of our finite nature: we swap endless precious days for a shinier car, tick yet more evenings off the spreadsheet of life in search of something to rival The Sopranos or Detectorists³, we wake each glorious morning to stroke the glass hamster in search of affirmation and connection. And we garden.

Am I - are we - I wonder, players in a Truman Show of our own making, pulling in the boundary ropes of our own existence, using screens to take us elsewhere, creating gardens to keep us from exploring the planet; whatever it takes to distract us from living with our mortality, from being afraid, and - as a consequence - prevent us being more fully, truly, alive.

Every time I play Joni’s Hejira - a perfect love song to travel and the search for whatever - I realise I should be elsewhere; living that truly whole life and all the experiences it has to offer before the unseeable view lays before my eyes.

Albert Camus wrote that when we travel we are looking for a fresh, deep connection to the eternal: ‘when we are so far from our (home) . . we are seized by a vague fear, and an instinctive desire to go back to the protection of old habits…At that moment we are feverish but also porous, so that the slightest touch makes us quiver⁴ to the depths of our being. We come across a cascade of light, and there is eternity’.

As a man striding through the middle years of his life with little idea of whether he has the same again or will rupture something crucial courtesy of a couple of ill timed sneezes, that cascade of light sure sounds more deeply appealing than once again filling up that green bin.

And yet.

There is a theory that rather than us having domesticated the apple, it domesticated us. Bribed by the deliciousness of its fresh and fermented fruit, we did its work, spreading its genetic material far and wide, adjusting its character to better suit us and more effectively facilitate its global colonisation. So completely has this occurred, that almost every culture regards the apple as its own. It came from Kazakhstan, but what is more English than apples and cider; what’s that, says Romania, are you unfamiliar with our apple heritage? And so on.

Every winter, when the wind comes and I wrestle with the ridiculousness of gardening, I wonder whether we are not similarly domesticated: upright woodlice, here to build topsoil on which higher organisms - worms, soil micro-organisms, and the rest - might thrive. Is this urge to garden perhaps a higher calling, drawn to a close by surrendering our temporary agglomeration to its one true purpose?

As I write this, my eyes are drawn upwards by a pigeon briefly interpreted in its blurred flight past my window as a sparrow hawk, the sunrise catches the soft slopes of the Sid valley, picking out the gentler green slopes - fields of permanent pasture - a solid line above which a mix of conifer tangles with the deciduous. I should walk it more - of course I should - but it occurs to me that all of that middle distance is an interpretation of the opportunities and constraints of the geology, soil and topography, a cultural painting of how we scratch an existence from what circumstance dealt our little corner of the planet. On this peculiar island, almost nothing is natural in its truest sense: a scrap of the Cairngorms, the uppermost Walnut Whip of a Highland peak perhaps; the rest is what - for good or ill - we have made of it. Whether by tractor, chainsaw or rake, almost all of it is gardening of one kind or another.

And as much as Joni’s Hejira is about travel, it is about how travel lights the flames of home a little warmer, and how neither way is the golden ticket: ‘You know it never has been easy, Whether you do or you do not resign, Whether you travel the breadth of extremities, Or stick to some straighter line’. Travel, or don’t: it’s all here, right now, if we pay attention.

As I pull the flapjack from the oven and Hejira comes to a close, in an almost ridiculous coincidence, The Whole of The Moon⁵ randoms from Spotify. As much as its repeated mini-series misuse has made it a cliche, a sort of 80s Let It Be about which to be cynical, it’s hard to convey the impact this glorious hymn to being present made to the acutely tuned ears of a 1980s teenager. ‘I wandered out in the world for years, While you just stayed in your room, I saw the crescent, You saw the whole of the moon’. It’s all here, right now, if we pay attention.

I turn it up, I open fresh seed packets - as good a feeling as Christmas morning - and I sow chillis, tomatoes and aubergines in hope as much as expectation, and I thank my lucky stars that the shift from unsettled, directionless, troubled man to purposeful, creative, grateful soul began the moment - the actual instant - I grew a little of what I ate for the first time.

Cranberry and caraway flapjack

Like The Whole of the Moon, I have the urge for flapjack once in a long while, and when I do nothing else will do, and when it’s done, I have no urge for it for another long while. I know the world is supposedly split between those who love crunchy flapjack and those who like it soft, but I sit - unusually for me - on the fence between the two. This is on the softer side: if you like it crunchier, up the temperature by 10°C and/or cook it a little longer, or use a slightly larger dish and its thinness will make it crisper.

You might be raising an eyebrow at the caraway: I promise you it is a delight, even without the other flavours, but the joyful sour tweak of the nose provided by cranberries and lemon is elevated by caraway’s weird minty-earthiness (a quality I think only it and shiso have), which in turn is elevated further when enjoyed with an excellent coffee.

Makes 16 laughable small pieces or which you will have two, so cut into 8

300g butter
65g demerara sugar
65g golden syrup
65g honey
450g oats
100g dried cranberries, roughly chopped
½ tbsp caraway seeds
zest of 1 lemon
a good pinch of salt

Heat the oven to 175°C fan.

If you haven’t run out of baking parchment, line a 24 x 24cm dish/baking tin; if you have, take your chances.

In a medium-sized pan over a low/medium heat, melt the butter, sugar, and honey together, stirring often. In a large bowl, mix together the oats, cranberries, caraway, lemon zest and salt. Stir in the sweet melted butter until fully combined.

Spoon into the dish and use the back of the spoon to press the mixture into the edges and corners.

Bake in the centre of the oven for 25 minutes, or until lightly golden. Remove from the oven, and use a sharp knife to cut into squares (or greedy rectangles) while warm and allow to cool completely and firm up in the dish before removing.

1. See how I resisted the temptation to make any ‘fat balls’ jokes

2. I know, I’m often quacking on about this line, but yknow

3. I’ll accept only well made cases for Northern Exposure and Better Call Saul to be in their company

4. There’s no doubt Joni was reading Camus’ Notebooks, 1935-1942 (Volume 1), from which that quote was taken, around this time given the lines below, from Hejira

I'm porous with travel fever
But you know I'm so glad to be on my own
Still somehow the slightest touch of a stranger
Can set up trembling in my bones

5. I had the very great pleasure of falling out of the back of the van into a Christmas Dublin in the late 80s and seeing The Waterboys at the height of their powers, and a few years later seeing Mike Scott (the singer) solo in a church in Salisbury, and both times The Whole of the Moon shone saccharin-free and glorious, away from adverts and mini-series misplacement. One day, ideally in a bar, I shall here it again, done like this