better a mile wide than an inch deep

1 tablespoon sunflower oil
4 large leeks
4 large potatoes
4 stalks asparagus
2 litres (8 cups) vegetable stock
a good grinding of black pepper and a pinch of salt
1 carton plain soy yoghurt or a cup of soymilk (optional)

Trim the root ends and any dead leaves from the leeks, and cut the woody ends off the asparagus. Peel the potatoes.

Rinse all the vegetables, and then either slice them thickly or run them through the large grating plate of the food processor.

Warm the oil in a soup pot and add the vegetables, sauteeing them over a medium heat for a few minutes, stirring often, until the leeks soften.

Pour in the stock and turn up the heat.

As soon as the soup boils, turn down the heat and leave it to simmer for ten or fifteen minutes until the potatoes are tender.

Ladle the soup into a blender and puree the soup until very smooth, being very careful with the steam, and then pour the soup back into the pot. Or puree the soup with an immersion blender, but I think a regular blender works better.

Add the pepper, salt, and yoghurt or milk, if using. Add extra water if the soup's too thick. Simmer a minute or two more, and serve.

Notes:
- Slicing or grating the potatoes too finely will make them stick to the pot.
- Don't use white asparagus. White asparagus needs peeling which is a drag and it doesn't taste quite as good.
- It is possible to make this soup without oil; simply put the prepared vegetables in a pot with the water and proceed as per recipe. The finished soup isn't quite as richly flavoured but it is still terrific.

This soup makes six to eight bowls and came out so well that everyone, even the people who dislike vegetables, had second helpings. I named it in honour of the enormous bucket of frogspawn that Liam and I rehomed from the garden pond to the forest pool today.

Well, that was mental.

I had forgotten how crazy live gigs can be. I was right in the middle, ten foot from the stage, and it was moshpit central, although security kept trying to break it up. But good luck to them even trying to get in there in the crush. I'd have thought that being in a heaving mass of sweaty strangers would be unpleasant, but I just threw myself in and elbowed anyone who was aggressive, and actually it was fun!

My Chemical Romance are fantastic live. They played it like they meant it. Frank Iero is incredibly rock and roll, even in a dodgy green cardigan; Ray Toro is amazing and note-perfect; Gerard was excellent; and Mikey was cool. They came out in Irish football shirts for the last song, which was well-meaning but kinda bizarre. The new drummer guy, whoever the hell he is, was fine; even the two support acts (LostAlone and The Blackout) didn't suck.

The music was such a rush. I danced and sang and screamed my guts out for four hours, and now my face hurts from smiling and I ache all over.

Brilliant.

I was cleaning up my hard drive and came across a text file of Seven Sunday Mother-Daughter Mornings by Hradzka (Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles). I just read it again. I can see why I saved it. It's a short and not exactly cheerful story, but well worth reading, in my opinion.

Here's a poem Carol Ann Duffy wrote when the last British veterans of the Great War died in 2009.

Last Post


In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If poetry could tell it backwards, true, begin
that moment shrapnel scythed you to the stinking mud...
but you get up, amazed, watch bled bad blood
run upwards from the slime into its wounds;
see lines and lines of British boys rewind
back to their trenches, kiss the photographs from home-
mothers, sweethearts, sisters, younger brothers
not entering the story now
to die and die and die.
Dulce- No- Decorum- No- Pro patria mori.
You walk away.

You walk away; drop your gun (fixed bayonet)
like all your mates do too-
Harry, Tommy, Wilfred, Edward, Bert-
and light a cigarette.
There's coffee in the square,
warm French bread
and all those thousands dead
are shaking dried mud from their hair
and queuing up for home. Freshly alive,
a lad plays Tipperary to the crowd, released
from History; the glistening, healthy horses fit for heroes, kings.

You lean against a wall,
your several million lives still possible
and crammed with love, work, children, talent, English beer, good food.
You see the poet tuck away his pocket-book and smile.
If poetry could truly tell it backwards,
then it would.

I had to get my car fixed today, which took two hours. Conveniently, the cinema is beside the garage, so I got to see Made in Dagenham, in a cinema which I had all to myself. It's a well made, life-affirming, inspiring film about women's fight for equal pay for equal work in England in 1968. I heartily recommend it to you. I laughed, I cried, I cheered... I took no crap off the mechanics while I was picking up my car afterwards. :D

I was saddened to learn today that Mary Daly has died. If you're not familiar with her work, she was a radical feminist academic, theologian, philosopher, lexicographer, and author. In my opinion, she was easily the most significant philosopher in the last hundred years. She passed away on the 3rd of January at the age of 81.

I loved her writing. My sister introduced me to her work back when I was in college studying theology by throwing the massive tome Gyn/Ecology at my head and bellowing, "Get into it!" You will maybe appreciate how incredibly important Mary's work was to my own life when I tell you I look back at this moment with gratitude.

I was raised as a feminist in the simple 'men and women are equal' sense, with the viewpoint that sees patriarchy as a inexplicable misfortune and aberration. And that's true, as far as it goes. Mary's wide-ranging and incisive writing went much further. It literally broadened my mind and opened my eyes. Once I read her work, I could understand the world differently. I could see how the world is run in systems of interconnected domination, and how overcoming patriarchy is more than simply getting women the vote, important as that is. It's about challenging the acts of a diseased culture that uses the oppression of women in religion as a template and tool as it seeks to dominate, enslave, and ultimately destroy every living thing. If that sounds scary, it's because it's terrifying! I never understood it on this level, never knew this before I read her writing. But now I know.

Mary was born into a Catholic family but grew to view all organized religion as patriarchal and herself as post-Christian. However, she was a very spiritual person in the deepest sense. I was lucky enough to meet her once, after attending one of her lectures where she described in the tones of disgust how scientists were planning to create headless creatures, "chicken-things" based on hens, who would be grown on racks to lay eggs continuously and then be eaten. Her spirituality was holistic and went beyond the 'Jehovah in drag' of some religious traditions. "Especially important was a startling communication from a clover blossom one summer day when I was about 14," she wrote. "It said, with utmost simplicity, 'I am.'" She saw feminism as the seed of the way to overthrow the sterile systems of patriarchy and restore the spinning spiral balance of nature, of culture, and of life itself.

Mary taught for many years at Boston College. Due to her uncompromising views, she was fired by them not once but twice. Her writing was pyrotechnically inventive, pure undiluted biophilia, to use one of many phrases that she coined herself, as she reshaped the very language and wrote the Intergalactic Wickedary, her own dictionary, to better express her original thinking. She dismissed college officials as "bore-ocrats" who suffered from "academentia" and "predictably reacted with 'misterical' behavior." Funny as she was, and I've just been re-reading some of her work and laughing while I cried, she was very serious about language and the way we shape it and it shapes us, for good or ill.

"Mary was a great trained philosopher, theologian, and poet, and she used all of those tools to demolish patriarchy - or any idea that domination is natural - in its most defended place, which is religion," said Gloria Steinem. Mary herself once wrote, "There are and will be those who think I have gone overboard. Let them rest assured that this assessment is correct, probably beyond their wildest imagination, and that I will continue to do so."

Mary was fearless and creative and wild. Unforgettable. And she lived up to her name. In Hebrew, "Mary" means "rebellion."