Friday, October 05, 2007

bookmarks, monsters, leaves

I like a bookmark which includes a clip to prevent it from falling out of the book. Better and less fussy is the kind (I have made many of them) that consists of a strip of light board, folded about a quarter of the way down. It hooks neatly over a page. The board may be illustrated or left blank for notes. I can't have enough of these, and they inhabit my library, like birds or squirrels.

Among the courgette plants, I keep finding a number of overgrown courgettes (become vegetable marrows) lurking like shadows among the still prolific leaves and cable-like stems. They are not much to our taste but fortunately there are a number of our neighbours who enjoy these great beasts, thick skinned and heavy with water.

Two or three dead leaves falling on to the stage to signify Autumn or time passing, is a theatrical cliche, which I recall from my theatre-going days. This morning, as the odd leaf drifts down, nature seems to be immitating art.

2 comments:

Lucy said...

It always seemed to me the English were wilfully determined to fulfil their continental neighbours' stereotyping as being clueless about food by insisting on only harvesting courgettes once they had become nothing but wood and water. We have largely mended our ways I think, but your neighbours are evidently holding to older ways! Useful of them to take them off your hands though...

Unknown said...

You're right. The neighbours seem to relish them. One says he finds them "sweeter" than courgettes. You can of course stuff them, as they do in the Middle East and in the south of France. But I would rather have stuffed peppers, aubergines or tomatoes. There is one practical use for marrows which I have not tried, but which I am told works. This is to bore a hole in the top and the bottom of a good sized marrow, hang the marrow over a bowl, add sugar through the top hole on a daily basis and allow the apparatus to drip over a couple of weeks or so. The rusult: rum, or something like it.