As it's Sunday, I went on another walk to the allotment gardens nearby. The sun was fierce, and on the way back I saw two smaller clouds in the mostly blue sky, one of which dwindled away in size as I watched in what I presumed was evaporation. But because I had waited until 3 p.m. to set off, the shadows of the buildings, fences, hedges and trees were reasonably deep and — after acclimating to the heat — I felt it was not so bad.
The news and private conversations are full of droughts in Berlin, Brandenburg, the Rhine River valley, France, Spain and Portugal; and it would take a very hardened skeptic indeed not to believe in the severity of global warming.
I saw further berries shrivelled on the bushes, crispy leaves partly turning brown, the silky hay-like grass that is of course however no oddity in August, and smelled the dust in the air.
In the allotment gardens the aspect was greener, of course, due to rather wasteful water sprinkling even in the middle of the day. Growing up in the rain shadow where the coastal British Columbia mountains siphon off most of the moisture before it reaches Victoria, I became familiar early on with drip hoses, which I think should be adopted more often here. My paternal grandfather (who had studied agricultural engineering in Vienna while on leave from the army in World War II) also faithfully watered his garden only in the evening, after the sun's shadows were so long that they reached to the end of the neighbour's yard.
Grapes are ripening and turning purple on many of the vines, the Virginia creeper berries are still green, and a few late roses remain in pale pink and deep red. Spurs of other vines and tree branches create rather pretty arcs of shade at the fences and gateways.
While in the past weeks the fruit trees reminded me of solemn, stern Baroque paintings of fruit, in the style perhaps of Arcimboldo, this week they were splashes of colour. Purple plums with their paler dust, red-cheeked apples and pears bursting on their boughs, paler late apples and quinces still dusty on the boughs, and a few yellowy peaches surviving the thinned leaves on their own trees.
Hibiscus bushes are in flower, often a lilac colour but darker where the overblown blossoms shrivel; sunny echinacea flowers with their brown centres like a little dog's nose; a few of the sunflowers have already been harvested. I also saw a pumpkin hanging on a raised vine, still green and lightly speckled as a pale marrow.
I took home a few apples, underripe, to make another round of jam or Rote Grütze.
Recently I took some of these windfall apples, diced them peel and core and all, boiled them for around 30 minutes with enough water to cover (all of this taken from a recipe in the blog The Spruce Eats), drained them overnight, and then boiled the pectin-laden dripping liquid gently with a little sugar and many blueberries, red currants, strawberries, and blackberries.
When the berry sauce was thicker, I took it off the heat. Then I poured it into a yoghurt tub when it had cooled; and I kept it in the refrigerator, where the aroma of the berries ripened and sent forth a nice scent whenever we opened the tub. It was lovely to eat stirred into yoghurt.
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In terms of news events, I was shocked to read that Salman Rushdie had been stabbed in New York State. I'm old enough to remember his novel Satanic Verses from the 1990s.
In Britain, the news that Liz Truss is likely to become the next Chancellor is not invigorating either. Her opposition to Brexit originally is evidence of some grains of sense. But Rishi Sunak seems to have a firmer grasp of reality in general.
If what I heard in a news analysis podcast from the British magazine New Statesman is true, Boris Johnson is heavily angling against him using his press connections, out of a sense of political revenge. (Liz Truss has still staunchly defended Johnson, which bewildered me until I heard that podcast.)
What surprises me is that both candidates are now embracing the kind of prolific government spending that the Labour Party was sharply (and from what I could tell, sometimes fairly) criticized for a decade ago.
I'm also disappointed that transphobia was used as a tool against Penny Mordaunt's candidacy, and by Liz Truss. It's never a good sign if one picks on a relatively defenseless minority, when in fact it's the best test of a liberal democracy if minorities have equal rights that suit their specific needs.
Lastly, I hope that the next American presidential election won't be another shocker. I think it was appropriate for the FBI to retrieve files from the golf course of the 45th President. From what I've read, military men and civilians who worked closely with him are pretty much universally shocked with his cavalier approach to national security. So I think it is also important to make sure that he cannot become a presidential candidate again.
Otherwise it's like the Labour Party MPs who were absolutely convinced that Brexit will ruin the British economy for decades to come, but on the basis that a thin majority of their electoral district voted for Brexit, insisted on voting for self-annihilation in Parliament 'for democracy!'
It also seems to be a worldwide trend to be so navel gazing that one blames one's current government for high gas prices and for other phenomena — which, surprise surprise, are actually also problems in most other countries and have no magic solution. Which is I guess a big risk in the re-election of Joe Biden, or of another Democratic candidate.
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