just because
the story's there
narrative pull like gravity wells
does not mean you must
spend your days spinning
(yarn to tell the tale)
in the distant orbit of a binary star
while comets unnoticed weep ice for your tragedy.

make your own wells
build your own frames
grow beans up them and plant pictures inside
there is poetry
even in folding laundry
even in sweeping floors
even in exhausted wrung-out washing up
especially in the curation of compost.

you are yourself alone
and all else is stardust

My mother - via her siblings - calls it "slug sinews", because of the very particular consistency and also the colour. I know you're supposed to end up with something delicate and white and refined and probably sieved, but in this as in so much else I hew fairly close to my maternal line: food waste is an abomination, there's no reason not to eat leek greens, and there's few things as nice as lumps of potato boiled in milk - so I never blend it as much as I might.

I season it with nutmeg and with bay leaf, of course, and with my parev chicken-flavoured stock, because what the other side of the family has given me - despite their nonobservance - is a great appreciation for the respects in which kashrut means I can get something close enough in flavour to the chicken-noodle-soup of my childhood without actually compromising on the vegetarianism.

Normally I eat it hot with crusty bread and aggressive chunks of cheddar. In this weather, I'm decanting it from the cauldron in the refrigerator into a watertight container, sticking it in the fridge at work, then drinking it direct from the bucket still cold. It turns out to be a really easy way to get me to eat a meal, and was inspired by my discovery in Paris that you can just buy litre glass bottles of gazpacho soup that you then pour into a bowl and eat.

Learning to make gazpacho is, as it happens, next on my list.