I’m not sure what possessed me, other than that it was my turn to cook that evening, and it was clear that our glut of courgettes were the very architecture and hard landscaping of the available ingredients.
Whatever it was, ‘courgette’ has now joined a long list of things that you really shouldn’t ever google that include, ‘mouth larva’, ‘Fournier’, anything criminal, your current medical symptoms, smokers’ lungs, personal finance advice, coupon codes and the word ‘beaver’.
But there remains an essential problem with growing courgettes, one that humanity is being very slow to recognise. Maybe the problem is existential. Perhaps that is what Sartre meant when he wrote: ‘Time is too large; it can’t be filled up. Everything you plunge into it is stretched and disintegrates’. Perhaps he meant courgettes.
It goes like this.
January: Buy courgette seeds from catalogue, as muscle memory assures you that this is ‘what we do’. Feel that all-too-common tristesse that you get when the dopamine hit has passed, and you can’t think what on earth had got into you.
March: Reluctantly sow seeds in little tray. When germinated, plant out in various places, keep watered, and then watch. Feel muted enthusiasm, as for someone you don’t particularly like who is recovering from a long illness.
June: Note with some guilty satisfaction that courgettes are rotting after long rainfall.
July: Become slightly alarmed when said courgette plants recover spectacularly, and then head off in three dimensions, strangling on their way all the nice things that you planted, and really wanted to eat.
August: Stare in blank amazement at the juxtaposition of failure, on one hand, of all the things like beans, peas, sweet corn and salad potatoes that you really like, and the arrogant success of every one of your courgette plants, on the other.
Once harvested, there is then a menu of things that you can do, which starts innocently enough in frying some off as a fresh addition to a bowl of pasta, or mulching a whole lot into a soup that everyone subsequently ignores, and finishes in leaving a box full of them outside the drive with that old public spirited exhortation to ‘Help yourself to these organic courgettes’.
No one ever does, so you put them on the compost heap after a few days, and put some fresh ones in the box.
No one does again, so you have one final go at making them into something- a quiche perhaps, or something that Ottolenghi came up with on an off-day.
September: Pull up remainder of courgette plants, and place on compost heap. Write ‘no courgettes this year’ on the Outlook Diary for February 2021, and determine to live a marrow family-free life from now on.
But that’s not how it works, because you ordered them in January, and will order them again next January, as sure as eggs are eggs. Because, like everyone else, you are fated to grow them forever, trapped, as you are, in a vegetable time warp.
Fundamentally, the courgette owns you, and always will.
But that should not stop you deleting your search history from time to time.
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