The Book of the Barracks

Good morning, all. I was just about to type let’s start with the good news, but there really isn’t any bad news this week. At least, not at the Barracks scale. Just about everything else outside is going to pot, but that’s ok. Or at least, it’s not a surprise. The best news is that the nerve in my tooth finally died, and will never hurt me again! Huzzah! The froggers were being very vocal this week. But also very shy. This is the littlest pond on the Barracks.

We’ve been doing these newsletters together for so long now (me writing, you reading them), that I expect there is some semi-interesting data that could be pulled out of them. I wonder if there is anything that can be read into them about if and how the seasons have changed over the last seven years. when I say I am in the middle of the forest with no neighbours… I think the answer is probably not. I’m too disorganised with my planning, and my growing.

As reported last week, the Aged Parent1 made it to the far extremes of Germany and into the wild, wild woods where we find the Barracks. And she had a lovely time. Look! Here she is, down with the piggy residents, smiling and all that. We had a nice walk around the place, looked at the trees, and cooked some things and ate them, washed down with a suitable quantity of PG Tips. In the evening, we played Boggle and Stadt, Land Fluss, but in English because neither of us are any good at it in German.

Good morning, fellow adventurers on good ship Planet Earth! I was not expecting to type that, sometimes I think I might be a 1970s prog rocker after all. a allegory of something or other, I’m sure. Sorta beautiful, sorta run down and unloved. Steps to an uninviting locked door. Expansive treasures within.

Sad donkey Article voiceover 0:00 -5:09 Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. In the world of growing your own, specifically in the northern hemisphere, in a place with growing season of fewer than six months, you’d really like to have everything in the ground, sown, transplanted, potted out, by the end of May. Well, dear readers, supporters and co-conspirators, we are close, and where we are not quite on target, we’re behind in places where we can catch up.

I may have made a mistake ... Article voiceover 0:00 -7:37 Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. Although I number these newsletters sequentially, starting at 1 every new year, and finishing up somewhere reasonably close to 52 by the end of it; and although it does come out at more or less at the same time every week, as you might expect from such a numbering system, it is very seldom episodic.

It has been a very May week at the Barracks. Every morning has been quite chilly, but by the middle of the afternoon, we can be found somewhere on the grounds, loading up on vitamin sunshine. The hot water storage tanks are starting to warm up, and the solar batteries fill in a couple of days. Two days. Mostly, things in the garden are growing nicely. Peter on the roof, Vicente and Em bringing some glamour and woodworking to the barracks Not entirely without problems though.

This week has seen me mostly sitting at my desk, brain cramping up, re-writing the entirety of The Book, aka The Albatross. The short sojourns in the garden were mostly defined by a series of inanimate objects refusing to play nicely, and honestly, I did not have the time nor the mental capacity for their shit.1 Now all of that cheerful introduction might sound like I am in a bad mood. I get that.

Happy Beltane to all. Or Walpurgisnacht if you prefer it Germanic. The two festivals are approximately the same sort of thing in that they both happen on the 1st of May, and they are both about welcoming the start of Summer, and there are fires and much merriment until very late into the night. But one of them is a celebration of the fairy folk, and the other is about burning witches.

Good morning. It’s 6am and I have been staring at this screen for about 20 minutes now. I have no idea what sort of a mood I must have been in yesterday, but I wrote something kinda angry and kinda political. The title was “Bombing schools for peace” and although it was about the utterly horrible state of the world; politics, AI, climate, war, it was also just as much about language.