Popping weeds

Spent a large proportion of the day pulling up plants, which in some ways feels barbaric, but then if I look at my neighbours garden I realise why it is necessary. Our herb bed is looking so funky now; a few months ago and that was an old futon - we filled it with compost from our own composter too, which is now home to probably around a million ants. Hope they are good for it; as long as they stay there and not inside I have no battle with them. There is one herb in the bed which we have been using happily in our cooking without actually knowing what it is; I know it is a type of mint because I bought it when it was a babby, but I threw away the stick thing and cannot get a good match on the internet. Great herb, though, as they all are; we have more than we can use already. The 'fennel in the fence' is a few feet high now - it is growing up between the two 'layers' of the fence, and peeking its feathery fronds out enticingly; there are baby ones in the herb box too which will I imagine be easy to establish as well as fence-fennel. This is his third year and going for a five foot high I would imagine if not taller.

Spent the remainder of my valuable time off on the laptop editing my website; a slow and laborious task not helped by the sun smiling in at me over the beckoning trees...

Still, a job worth doing, and I have used the time to rediscover hidden gems from our music collection - just finished New Pornographers /Twin Cinema; we have a few of their albums and that is always the one I forget, but love.

Finally time to make for the studio - just looked at a friends new 'bit' on Facebook about her paintings and it looks great; I find it really helpful to be able to connect to people who are in the same boat as me so to speak. It is like egging on a friend at the school sports day.

Ah - spent some time on Haikus today - some days it just happens. This is my fave:

I ate a kipper

Who had the most stunning smile

Until I ate him

I would try a Haiku a day but that would spoil the spontenaity of it all - I have had to pull over the car to note one down before now, and then gone days without finding the right combination of words.

All my favourites have an edge of cynicism I think, but at base I am trying to say something about 'nature', 'our condition', da da, da da, so it is always going to be tinged with melancholy.

'Everything you have will be taken away', as Slaid Cleaves points out on his latest album. I tried to walk into his gig last year without showing my ticket - just wandered by like it was my living room - which seems to have become a bit of a theme. I hope this is the start of the demise; I could really handle being dotty and vague in that way, and maybe people will start 'making allowances' for me in my own little world.

Food wise, a big darn hairy cheat today as I found this fab picture from our hols in Tuscany and felt inspired and nostalgic all at once. This was one of Stu's last meals in the fantastic cottage we had in a working vineyard on top of a hill about 30k out of Florence. Truly awesome setting with more trees stretching into the mist than I could ever count (actually, there's a Haiku about that...).

This is one of those amazingly easy teas which are so satisfying; all that we used were some amazingly fresh bread, meats and cheeses from the Dicomano Co-op and some roasted vegetables, balsamic vinegar, tomatoes, herbs etc. Our hosts made their own olive oil, so some of that featured and it tasted so earthy and olivey I could have happily drunk it out of the bottle; we were also surrounded by rosemary, which ended up bruised and scattered over the top.