We cannot do perfection

"Natural timeless motion." Tamara Adler

Every now and then I change my computer's desktop wallpaper, choosing a photograph from my own collection. This is the one I chose yesterday. It must have been taken in autumn because there are berries on the hawthorn tree outside my window. The bird sits behind my computer, behind the window and its flyscreen - hence the hatched pattern across the picture. The bird is an Eastern rosella - a small but a stunningly beautiful bird that is pretty common in this part of the country. Everyday - well not quite but almost, we see one or maybe two or more.. But such a perfect shot - so perfect as I viewed it this morning that I thought I just had to try and use it as a launchpad for a post.

Perfection for once in the actual photograph - although it has of course been cropped and probably straightened and enhanced. But the background for once is suitably fuzzy - almost like an impressionist painting, and the shape and colours of the rosella itself absolutely clear. It's a miracle of nature is it not, the subtle gradation of the colours and the beauty of the curving shape of the furled wings, the tail and the upper body. The subtlest of hints of red at the very tip of the tail. Reposeful action as it chomps into the berries.

We humans in greater or lesser ways strive for perfection, and yet we don't achieve it. Possibly our only moment of perfection is the moment of birth - and even then and so very sadly not for some. But yes we should certainly strive for the best we can do - and admire the perfection of nature all around.

We returned a couple of nights ago from two nights in Inverloch, and on our full day drove to Wilson's Prom and visited Tidal River and Squeaky Beach - apparently recently voted the world's most beautiful beach. An accolade, I'm not quite convinced by, which is not to dismiss it's beauty, but I suspect there are many others around the world that are equally deserving. Nevertheless, on a less than perfect day - as you can say - there was perfection on view all around.

All of which, of course, has nothing to do with food other than cooking is just one of the many fields of human endeavour which covers everything from McDonald's hamburgers to the most highly artistically engineered production at one of the world's top restaurants, where "art out of the marginal" truly occurs. It even happens in our own kitchens every now and then.

I won't call it art, but I have just made my first batch of garden peaches into jam and, six assorted sizes of jars now sit on the kitchen bench sit, filled with amber sweetness, not to mention the satisfaction filling my own head.

“Perhaps this is why cooking feels so primitive and vital when one is in the act—not worrying about something else, but inhabiting the act of cooking. It’s when we, like ants, bees, mites, flies, birds, and squirrels, are in natural timeless motion.” Tamara Adler

POSTSCRIPT - I did indeed banish Kylie Kwong to our street library where I thought she might languish for a long time, as books left there often do. But no, she has found a better home and disappeared from the shelf. I hope her new owner gets more from it than I did.

YEARS GONE BY

February 22

2025 - A confusion of five dishes

2024 - Tumact me tulez (tumacë me tulë)

2023 - Do not poke the jelly bag

2022 - Uphill all the way

2021 - Missing

2020 - Is small beautiful?

2019 - Nothing

2018 - Activated huxta seeds, etc. - a postscript

2017 - Nothing