Potatoes

I rushed back from work to dig these in time to make supper for an old friend who is up in the lakes with family and we’d arranged to catch up this evening. Pleased that I managed to get a fire going and have some idea of what I was cooking all within 10 minutes of getting home and his taxi arriving. We were trying to remember when we last caught up ... thank goodness for blip...https://www.blipfoto.com/entry/2237847957380530758

Lots to catch up on with lives and jobs etc. We go back 30 years now and we were acknowledging how our old boss was a good fast track lesson in working with remarkable and, remarkably difficult, people. Still not sure I understand reinventing macroeconomics but I’m sure it’s a thing. We all dig in our various ways.

Digging - Seamus Heaney

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.