KW-19 The full circle

Including peas, plovers and fuzzy ducks

There has been an explosion of April this week at the barracks. If you get soaked one half hour, the next one will dry you out with mid 20s sunshine.

My favourite food since childhood has been peas. I now like a bunch of other vegetables almost as much, but we will always give over more space than we probably should to the little green wonders.

For the first half of the week, this meant that the ground was mostly too wet to work, but also it seems that the insects have woken up. And with more insects come more small mammals, birds, amphibians and all the other creatures of the land, water and sky.

I’m sitting at my desk and I’ve spent the last 10 minutes watching a black woodpecker hopping up and down a silver birch outside my window. Passerines are everywhere, and seemingly unafraid of the humans. I wish I could recognise them by their songs. Yesterday, while I was off sowing in the vineyard, I had half an eye on the polyamorous family of ducks flapping around on the tiny pond on the fence it and a grey heron took flight from the long lake behind the pighouse. I took a bunch of photos of them, but they can be divided into too blurry to see and no ducks.

Blurry, but ducks

I have seen my first ever Egyptian goose, and all manner of terns and grebes. There was a group of five curlews chilling down in the swampy lake area yesterday.

I’m not too hot in bird of prey identification, but I know I have seen kites, buzzards and falcons. We have eagles just outside the barracks, swooping low over the fields on the way to the next village. I don’t have any point to make with any of this, other than this is a fabulous time of year.

I may have already started with sowing up the vineyard for pig food. I got in a couple of rows of sweetcorns last night. There is a long way to go

The weather has kept me out of the garden quite a bit. The rule is if the mud sticks to your shoes, then it’s too wet to work. There isn’t a rule telling you what to do when your boots split across the toecap and all mud spends as much time clinging to the inside of them as the outside, but I’m going to assume it’s much the same.

This week, it looks to be just about perfect sowing weather, so the plan for this week is mostly:

Hand weed, rake and sow the whole of the vineyard. Well, I say the whole of it. I’ll be happy enough if I get the sweetcorn (10 rows) and the fodder beet (more than 10 rows) in. A row is 35 meters long. After that comes the soya and pumpkins and whatever else I find to put up there, but that can definitely be well into May. It’s already the start. Eeks.

Preparing for the Reading Retreat. It looks like we won’t have bookshelves by then. The forester is going to let me know about the trees we talked about a few weeks ago. And then they need to be sawn up at the sawmill and turned into shelves at the barracks. With less than two weeks to go, this might not happen. But, there is plenty to be doing on the accommodation front and we are making a rather lovely reading room opposite the library. It’s nice having an infinity of rooms, Dr Hilbert.

We’re also starting to make plans for the Writing Retreat in September. Probably the first weekend. Early doors now, more details to come. But there are still a couple of tickets for the Reading Retreat. You should come to that first.

But for now, the kettle is boiling on the stove in the loft kitchen. I had better go and rescue myself from the whistling. Conveniently, with a nice cup of tea.

Until next week, be lovely

Your Pirate Ben

xoxo

---

Reading this week

I was introduced to Paul Auster by a very dear friend at the very start of the 2000s. We drifted apart for really weird geopolitical reasons, at around the time Erdoğan became top dog in Turkey. Paul Benjamin Auster died of lung cancer on May 2nd 2024.

Also this week, a former colleague from Berlin left us mortals behind.

Simon Shephard, † May 1st 2024

I didn’t really know Simon all that well, despite him being my boss for a short while. I only had a handful of conversations with him, but I know that there are a good bunch of people, friends, who read The Barracks Newsletter who did know him far better then I did. And when I say they are a good bunch of people, you know the sort. The sort that when they talk about Simon with such caveat-free positiveness, you recognise that we lost a good one.

There is never a good time to go, but at age 40, leaving behind a partner and two small children is grossly unfair. To those of you who knew, respected and loved Simon, you have my deepest sympathies. RIP