I’m keen on soup. Our weather generally suits soup. We’ve not had soup for ages. A lot of lettuce and no soup, been far too hot for soup. Lettuce is not good for soup. Cold soup? No, no, no, please don’t. Gazpacho? No. Sounds like a Spanish sneeze.

I like to make soup, but have not even been remotely tempted to try one of late.

It’s now gone a little cooler and soup might be on the horizon. I’ve been reading a small book by Dylan Thomas, looks to me like he just pulled out random words and then re-ordered them. I frankly did not understand one of the stories at all and asked my wife to read it an explain, she’s better read than me and more likely to know about this sort of thing. Her opinion though was as close as mine: random words, a sort of “word soup” from someone who might have been near a bottle. However his next story in the book, called “The Visitor” was just brilliant: a very fine soup indeed. I’ve read a biography too and it sounds to me like he spent money like water and would have benefited from some financial advice and the odd soup recipe.

I have some odd soup recipes. They generally appear on a Thursday and I used to call them “Thursday Fridge Soup”, they could be a bit hit and miss and if they were a hit, I’d tell the kids they could not have it again as I had no idea really what went into it, apart from it being at the back of an almost empty fridge. I bet Dylan had an empty fridge, in fact he probably had no fridge at all. So my “Thursday Soup” might be justifiably called “Dylan Soup”, random ingredients re-ordered.

I’m also reading Dylan’s letters and it strikes me that there is something else that is dying out: letters. He wrote loads of letters and they give an insight into his chaotic life. Some of them ask for money, one can’t blame him really as he seemed to have been ‘done over’ by various publishers. I think if he’d written to me, I might have sent him a couple of quid, and a recipe for soup. It must have been bone shatteringly cold in that old fisherman’s cottage on the Welsh coast. Hardly anyone writes letters these days, me included.

I was obliged when I went away to school to write to my parents every week. There was a particular time on a Sunday when we all had to sit down and write home. Yes, I was at a boarding school, not posh, but with aspirations to be so. ( Long story )

When my parents died I thought I might find a bundle of my own letters giving insight on what it might have been like to be a young boy away at school. There were none, which probably mean that I said the same thing every week. People familiar with this blog might find that resonates here.

Cooler weather has meant I’ve had a chance to get in some more gardening, and walking. Take a peek at my aubergines, eight fruits on one plant, none on the other.

Is there such a thing as aubergine soup? There might be on Thursday.