The three ingredients for a happy life
When I first moved to London in 1997, I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. Long hours in the lab would spill into the evening streets and underground tunnels of a city so large that you could never experience it all. When I think back to those evenings this time of year, it’s all wet leaves slicked against grey pavements, streetlights bleeding colours, the smell of fireworks exploding in the chilly air.
My companions were fellow postdocs, and this whole period in my life is tangled up in how I thought about being a scientist, inexperienced and trying to work it all out. High highs and low lows, too young to have worked out the balance of things – the memories saturated with blue. Blue but beautiful, and the thought of not being in that place was incomprehensible, even when it hurt.
Of course, it was never going to feel that way forever. After Joshua was born, the compact two-bed flat in Canada Water was too small to contain us. And at that stage of life, a few decades on, it was possible to imagine a different kind of life. It almost broke my heart leaving the canals, docks and woodlands of the Rotherhithe area I’d grown to love, but the first time we’d stepped into the back garden of the Kentish house we now call home, our fate was sealed. It was vast, green, full of trees and potential – about as far away as you could get from the postage-stamp-sized council flat plot where we’d carved as many vegetables beds as was humanly possible out of the the rough grass – much to the bemusement of our indifferent neighbours.
I’d always dreamt about keeping chickens and bees, and a garden full as many of edibles as possible. Today, I fulfilled the long-standing ambition of making Torrone Sardo (an Italian nut-filled soft nougat) with only our own ingredients. Hazelnuts are an acceptable traditional substitute for almonds, and this year the cobnuts and filberts we’d planted ages ago were finally mature enough to give a decent crop.
Filberts and Kentish cobnuts from the back garden hedge
So today, we shucked two large bowls of nuts from their frilly casings, then experimented as a family with the best way to crush the shells in a high-throughput manner (the grape mangler was a bust, but a large brick against the paving stones worked wonders).
A failed experiment: crushing hazelnuts with the grape wrangler
I separated the whites from three pretty green eggs laid by Luna, our new Cheshire Blue, whipped them to peaks and folded them into a pound of melted honey from last summer’s harvest. It needed stirring continuously on a bain marie for 45 minutes, then 30 minutes more after adding the nuts I’d roasted for 15 minutes in a 180 degree oven. It was relaxing just to sit there on a stool by the stove, writing and stirring, and now the mixture is setting in a cool room between sheets of parchment.
Torrone Sardo, which I first tried on a trip to Sardinia at the turn of the century
There were other garden chores: Richard has been harvesting grapes for wine, collecting medlar fruit to “blet” into over-ripeness, and gathering the last of the apples and pears. It’s been a great year for fruit, thanks to the extended heat wave. But I’ve been happy to welcome the autumn, with its stormy rains, cold mornings and brilliant blue skies. Soon we’ll be picking the last of the tomatoes and cucumbers, and harvesting pumpkins and parsnips.
The right tool for the job
London is miraculous, and I still love working there. But country life is all I’d hoped, with space to breathe, grow and work the land. I can go for hours without thinking about science, or the anxieties that tinge my campus existence. I never stop remembering how lucky I am – not just for the quality of my life now, but for the colourful journey that brought me here.
