Five years of Barracking around

People, progress, plants and pigs

Somewhere towards the end of 2023, I hit on the entirely original idea of doing one of those year in review posts. It would have been a record of quite an interesting, almost seminal year of Radical Authenticity, Happy Doomerism and a Collapse Laboratory. 2023 also saw the Barracks hosting our our first outside event - the weekend party thing, and Miley Cyrus released her popular hit single Flowers. So it was a pretty great year for music.

Flowers. Self seeded marigolds, protecting against root-knot nematodes, looking pretty, feeding pollinators and making calendula cream - great for all sorts of skin care, especially in the case of burns.

If I were to do a review of 2023, I would talk about the things we grew, the people who came to stay, and the new ground that we broke. The exciting adventures of being a Collapse Laboratorian, and the incredible, organic, food-miles-free meals that we ate. But if you are a subscriber to the newsletter (which you are), you would know all of that anyway.

So, something else. I am going to go through a load of old photos, from the end of April 2019 when I first moved in to the end of March 2024 which brings us bang up to date, and I am going to post them here, with hopefully more interesting, 5 year musings to go along with them.

One thing that I did say, when I said that I was going to do the 2023 post was that it would be for paid subs only. Therefore, this non-standard entry into the back catalogue of Barracks Newsletter posts is going to be, as advertised, for the paid subscribers only. I always said that the free and paid versions of the newsletter will be the same, but the survival of the barracks, and most especially the survival of the piggies, is down to all of you who do help out with a paid subscription, and I don’t feel at all bad about making this special post just for you, with thanks.