on potatoes and compost

Back in England recently visiting family. We went to The Hepworth Wakefield to see exhibits by Caroline Walker (excellent) and Helen Chadwick (less so). There was this one Helen Chadwick piece that I can’t remember the name of now. Great start to a bit of writing. It was a perspex column filled with rotting food waste. All cabbage and carrots and bread breaking down into black compost at the bottom. Beige liquid bubbling now and again. Smells proper bad today, a member of staff said to my dad. She wasn’t wrong. That smell forced Megan away into another part of the gallery. It’s hard to describe it in terms other than what it brings to mind. Decay. My reaction to it was something felt deep within. As if millennia of surviving ancestors were saying this smell means death, avoid it. Google tells me that the name of the piece is Carcass. Seems pretty bang on.

I grow vegetables on our balcony in Amsterdam. As I write this, yellow flowers are dying off and small green tomatoes are growing in their place. The broad beans I planted in the autumn have been and gone. I removed the beans from the pods and boiled them for 2 minutes before peeling the bitter skins from the lime-green flesh beneath. We ate them with butter and mint and I felt smug. The strawberries we ate got sweeter as the days grew longer and warmer but most of them ended up with small bite marks in them before they even made it off the balcony. That stopped me feeling so smug. Two of the potato plants I’ve growing in old compost bags have delicate purple flowers now. We’ll be eating potatoes soon and I’ll be smug again.

I’ve been having a run of short story ideas that ultimately amount to nothing. I’ll write out a draft and sometimes even get a few drafts in before I realise there’s nothing there. At the beginning of April, I stopped writing completely. Usually when this happens I’ll read or make music but this time I got really into playing Elden Ring. Visually it’s a dark game which makes it hard to see when there’s any glare on the TV screen. So whenever I would play I would close the blinds and play in relative darkness. When I wasn’t playing, I would be on my phone looking into build and weapon guides on Reddit. Of course I had all the usual guilt around not reading or writing or making music but I really felt like I was done with it this time. I could feel any writing or music-making muscles decaying, rotting away. I must have been hell to live with.

Eventually I got stuck trying to beat Malenia. With other boss fights in Elden Ring, I would feel myself improving with each failed attempt. But that wasn’t the case with Malenia. I just wasn’t good enough. I stopped playing.

There’s a third potato plant on my balcony. This one is planted in a bin bag. I had high hopes for bin bag potato plant. It was the biggest and fastest growing but in the last week the stems collapsed and the leaves have grown yellow. I prodded at it with a trowel and the smell of death and decay and rotting vegetables filled the balcony. I thought about that Helen Chadwick piece and a bit of me wanted to vomit. Another bit of me worried that the neighbours could smell it. I probably won’t be eating those potatoes.

I sent a message to my mum about the third potato plant. She’s usually the first person I speak to about any crop failures. In return I’ll receive long WhatsApp messages with far too much information about pollinating cucumber plants with paintbrushes or she’ll tell me what Monty Don’s doing that week on Gardeners World. She even sent me a video tour of her greenhouse and garden a few weeks ago. She tells me that if the leaves are going yellow, it’s either a lack of water or too much water. I’ve been watering my plants once a day so it’s probably the latter. She tells me to compost it.

There’s something about a story not working out that feels very different to a plant dying. It’s the same when I can’t get anywhere with the music I’m trying to make. I have an idea in my head and when I try to get it down on the page in front of me or patch it into the synth, something goes wrong. And like with Elden Ring, it usually feels like a skill issue. With a plant I can just put it down to the conditions not being quite right. Maybe it was the weather. Maybe it was the soil. Who knows. I’ll try again next year. Compost it.

I sulked for a bit when I stopped playing Elden Ring. Then I got bored of that so I started messing around with the synths again. I’ve even had a few story ideas kick themselves around my brain. I’ve also started writing here. All this is to say that sometimes the conditions just aren’t right. And then they are again. Things just need to compost a bit.