#15 Autumn autumnal
I spent a month on Sifnos, a Greek island reading, writing, walking, swimming, and cooking. It was restorative. One of the many highlights was learning how to make rivithia, a Sifnian chickpea stew. I tried to make this at home a couple of years ago, but failed miserably. Turns out two key ingredients are a) a clay pot with a lid and b) a wood-fired oven.
Soak 1kg chickpeas overnight, then put them in the clay pot with 4 or so onions, bay leaves, a good glug of olive oil, pepper (no salt at this stage) and enough water to cover. Around 8 pm, take the clay pot to the communal wood-fired rivithia oven two villages over from your village. Give the old guys who are stoking the fire 5 euros. Return the next day around noon to pick up your clay pot - you need to remember what your pot looks like so that you can use the giant metal hook to drag your pot out from where it’s been sitting alongside the 20+ other clay pots. Take it home, stir in the burnt bits on top. Eat.
Honestly, chickpeas have never tasted as divine.
But that was then and this is now. The clocks changed here this past weekend. I’m embracing the darkness.
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I read a lot while I was away. Best by far was James, by Percival Everett, which is on the current Booker Prize shortlist. James is a revisioning of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, the slave who travels with Huck in Twain’s novel. Everett’s novel is as hilarious as it is brutal, a fantastic read, clever and revealing. Highly recommended.
The worst novel I read while away is also on that shortlist (here’s an epic takedown of that novel from Brandon Taylor in the LRB). So be it. As mentioned previously, I wrote a piece about my experience of prize shortlists and hideous epic takedowns for the current issue of Australia’s lovely quarterly, the Griffith Review, Dying of Exposure. It’s behind a paywall.
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