The grandchild (6) has figured out reading - properly - and has taken to it with much energy. We are now being read to on a daily basis and with great gusto and dramatic effects. All involved have agreed that books are great treasures and while we - regretfully - will never be able to read all the books in the whole world, there will be a new book every day and most importantly, a book can be read again and again.

Today, we were read poems by Michael Rosen and were told that he is surely one the best poets and story book writers discovered by the grandchild to date.

This was our favourite poem of the day (from A Great Big Cuddle by Michael Rosen) we discussed it in detail and found it perfect in every way.

 

Coming Home

Here's a house
Here's a door
Here's a ceiling
Here's a floor

Here's a wall
Here's the stairs
Here's the table
Here's the chairs

Here's a bowl
Here's a cup
Open your mouth
And drink it up.

tomato is a fruit

 

We've been away. It was a good break, great weather, good scenery, mostly no internet, long walks up and down hills and meeting people, old friends, long talks into the night about trying to make sense of the world around us, our place in it and how to handle this whole shit show.

 

There were castles and forests and streams and valleys and vineyards and old towns and tourists. 

There was listening and laughing and also feeling sorry for ourselves and overwhelmed by the tasks at hand but not alone. There were reports on actions and learning and showing up for others, too detailed to share but so very hopeful. That now is the time to escape commodity and replace it with community (paraphrasing Richard Powers) so that our capacity for empathy remains intact. 

 

And so today, after the laundry has been done etc. I am so very tired. It's been a lot. But R made apple crumble and there are still some pears and grapes to harvest.

Somewhere someone mentioned something like this as an approach to the endless feed of news and dystopia and schadenfreude and blaming and told-you-so and well, all of social media especially before sleep:

• Check if what you are reading is facilitating more understanding or more confusion.
• Check if it's adding to your awareness or hindering it.
• Check if it's contributing to your knowledge or making you feel more hostile and out of control. 

Because the biggest problem is actually a very trivial one: we refuse to believe what we do not want to believe, even when we are confronted with clear warnings.

We have suppressed the fact that each and every one of us bears responsibility. We have lived in a kind of paradise for 20 to 30 years, at least 80 per cent of the population. And we thought it would always be that way. We thought we could buy security with money. Today we are learning that we will have neither endless time nor enough money. 

 Jeanette Winterson (not sure, thanks for pointing this out, Steve)

You know what to do. Because as a wise woman said ages ago, knowledge is recognizing that a tomato is a fruit, whereas wisdom is knowing not to put tomatoes in a fruit salad. 

 

the King of las Bromas de Fartos

If you’ll allow me a crude metaphor (as I’m sure you, the King of las Bromas de Fartos, will): a guy comes into a dinner party, takes a dump on the rug in the living room. The guests get all excited, yell in protest. He takes a second dump. The guests feel, Well, yelling didn’t help. (While some of them applaud his audacity.) He takes a third dump, on the table, and still no one throws him out. At that point, the sky has become the limit in terms of future dumps. 

George Saunders (Love Letter)  

We should make it a habit to read the complete short story here or listen to the author reading it here. Every morning for a week.

Here's another bit from it:

Every night, as we sat across from each other, . . . , from the TV in the next room blared this litany of things that had never before happened, that we could never have imagined happening, that were now happening, and the only response from the TV pundits was a wry, satirical smugness that assumed, as we assumed, that those things could and would soon be undone and that all would return to normal—that some adult or adults would arrive, as they had always arrived in the past, to set things right. 

And then there's that, from a guy called Mike Monteiro:

Mostly, though, we’re sorry we gave up. It all seemed very hard. We let a lot of stuff go by. We were going to fix it all in the next election. Also, we read something on Reddit about how the best way to fix it was to let it all crash, and then rebuild, and there’s a certain logic to that. We didn’t think about all the people who’d get killed on the way to the collapse. So yeah, I think we might’ve fucked that up. Getting to tomorrow felt like more than we could handle. 

We watch the polls, in the last month we moved from every fifth to every fourth person wanting a fascist party in power in Germany. I sit in my favourite coffee place at the farmer's market and count, one, two, three, four. I wish my parents were alive, just for comparison.

I know I will not be able to just hang around watching and quoting disillusionment beautifully crafted by educated writers, I am working on it. We are grandparents.

In other news, here is a picture of some of the grape harvest, 16 kilo, ready for wine.

 

And last week, I finally figured out how to properly cook tofu thanks to my Japanese neighbour. She just laughed when I told her about cubing and marinating and the resulting somewhat tasteless rubbery consistency.

This is what she taught me.

First you press as much water as possible out of a block of firm tofu by wrapping it in paper towels and putting three to five heavy books on top of it - in Japan, you would use a snazzy tofu press - for at least 30 minutes. 

You prepare a marinade of choice while you wait. Following her suggestion, I mixed equal parts of almond butter (because there was no tahini in the house), soya sauce and apple vinegar, added a dash of lemon juice. 

Next, you tear the tofu into pieces, you do not cut it into cubes. And you totally ignore the marinade for now. Instead, you fry the torn unmarinated pieces of tofu in sesame oil until everything is nicely browned, the browner the better she said. Be patient, take your time. When everything is nicely brown, you turn off the heat and only then do you pour your marinade onto the fried brown torn tofu and toss the lot. If need be, you can sprinkle some roasted sesame seed on top. And then you eat it.

 

 

hello there September

The tomatoes are all harvested, either eaten or in various stages in the freezer or dried, I canned most of the pears with lemon, cardamom and cinnamon, the not so good ones I slow cooked into a thick pear sauce for winter porridge. 

Every morning R measures the sugar content of the grapes while the wasps are having a feast. When the time is right, he will make wine.

And the plumeria is going full blast.

 

In the greenhouse, we are harvesting black, red and green peppers. I forgot to take pictures. I have started to roast them, hoping that I can digest them. I made apple sauce this morning from the windfall apples down by the fence and we ate some of it with Greek yoghurt for dessert. It is currently making its presence felt in a not so pleasant way as it passes through the dark tunnels of my digestive system.

So yes. Food wise, I am in the trial and error phase, some days are great, others not so good but miles better than what life has been pre surgery. I am working my way slowly back to the ususal life with all that chronic illness stuff. It looks like it will take a while, I couldn't say I am on top of it.

At this time of the year, our gardens and parks are taken over by harvest mites (Neotrombicula autumnalis), tiny red bastards, some call them chiggers, that make it their live's work to jump onto a human body and sit there until you are in your nice comfy bed asleep and then they bite and give you itchy hives. Hours later, mind you, not while you are in the garden so that at first you think it must be bed bugs and you frantically change all the sheets and power clean the bed inside out. 

But, the trick is to have a hot soapy shower every time you come in from the garden and change all your clothes and obviously never scratch any of the bites but of course you must because instinct and out comes the antihistamine gel and this goes on until the weather changes and the nights become cool enough to kill these bastards off once and for all. 

For years I suffered stoically and then suddenly, they stopped bothering me completely and whenever neighbours complained I offered a mild smile with a slightly condescending shrug. Also, R has never ever had a single bite. Apparently, babies are immune as well. But he is not a baby, just a hairy monster.

Anyway, this year, I am back among the victims and I feel very sorry for myself and currently I am in this in-between stage where part of me wants to completely avoid going into the garden and another part of me say, feck this, it's only an itch and off I wander with my first cup in the mornings inspecting the beauty, watching the green parakeets feasting in the sunflowers and the big hornbeam. 

On Sunday, we sat and listened to a debate between the various local candidates in the upcoming state election where the audience was asked to select the topics for discussion beforehand. This was done via a snazzy device and shown in real time on a screen. Top issues were housing, school buildings, roads, taxes and culture. Climate change was a no show. The guy from the neo fascist crowd tried several times to raise something about parallel societies, the latest terminology for people not white or German, but got nowhere - at least that.