Wild About Garlic

Saturday 9th April

Day 352

It’s the perfect day to wash all the blankets and get them dry in the garden. I make a vegan chocolate cake for my brother who is coming next week - to belatedly celebrate his 60th birthday. And a Spicy Brazil Nut and Millet Roast for tomorrow’s village walk. Every now and again I look up from my cooking and see the blankets, soft gold and rust coloured flags, swaying in the wind. Overnight the tiny pink blobs of apple blossom have turned into white flower sprays, shining like fairy lights in a blue sky.

It’s really too hot to have soup - left over from the charity lunch on Wednesday - but we do anyway, the sun burning my face. While we eat my husband explains our pension options but I get lost in the intricacies of annuity and draw down. I don’t want to think about being old without him.

Later we walk along wide paths bordered with dense clumps of wild garlic just coming into flower - spikey white stars on tall stems. New bluebells stretch out like sheets under giant beech trees, their leaves still tight curled. We stop and listen to a tiny bird high up on a branch trilling its heart out. I don’t know if it’s a cole tit or a chaffinch or something else. My husband says he wouldn’t know anyway.

‘What’s the worst thing about forgetting?’ I ask him.

‘I don’t mind about not knowing the names of trees or birds anymore ,’ he says, ‘but it’s the people I can’t remember.....’

He’s had a chatty email from someone we used to know in London many years ago. Even when I fill in lots of detail about this friend, he can’t place him or find a face for him. So we let it go, and pick a huge bunch of wild garlic to take home. Even though there are green swathes of it everywhere, it still feels like stealing and I hope we don’t meet anyone on the way back to the car.

It does taste wonderful, though, chopped up and swirled into thick Greek yoghurt with a teaspoon of mustard, a squirt of lemon juice and a scrunch of sea salt. We dollop it on top of smokey grilled salmon fillets and settle down to watch Mama Mia on the telly. A nostalgic comfort blanket.