The artichoke heart is excellent with hummus. Wrap it in a warm tortilla, with scallion and coriander. Sit in a dim kitchen as the gloom outside prevails and eat, thinking that this is a subtle pleasure, captured and consumed in ordinary circumstances.

Another subtle pleasure: valerian glimpsed in rooftop gutters, waving over the river in cracked stone, bowing in the wind on the side of a scrubby hill by the cemetery, surviving wherever it may.

<<