KW-20 The calm before the calm

The universe rewards the spontaneous

It has been an emotional week at the barracks. My best mate died on Friday. Another one in his mid 40s. I was not expecting to have to give two death notices in two weeks. It kinda sucks.

I think I have spoken to everyone I still know who knew him - all four or five of you - the rest of you didn’t, so I am going to leave it there, except for a little bit in the P.S. at the bottom.

Other than being a distracted, miserable grump, self indulgently contemplating mortality and loss, there has been some onwards progress at the Barracks.

I’m really looking forward to the Reading Retreat at the weekend. It’ll be good to have a bit of a diverting buzz about the place, and getting everything ready for it is a necessary distraction.

I can’t remember the exact state of the vineyard when I spoke to you last week, but I do remember wanting to fully plant it up. Well, I got stuck on a patch of couch grass which brought back long supressed memories of sowing the vineyard two years ago. I had completely forgotten that there were great swathes of nothing but the tightly packed rocky debris, overlain with the matted roots of couch grass which last time, as this, kept me occupied for at several days longer than planned. But, we ploughed on - literally - and we installed and filled an IBC container to bring watering facilities to the most distant reaches, and the vineyard will be filled with pig food. And I mean filled. It has not had a greater than 50% occupancy rate before. Oh, the optimism! We will give up the we will feed the pigs optimism only in the shadow of a great many defeats! One more at least.

Tomatoes, beans, melons, cucumbers and popcorn maize all to be planted out this week.

And once I am done with the sowing of uncountable seeds the vineyard, I shall move to the roots bed and do the same there, but with many more different edible species of things which grow in the ground. I’m hoping that transitioning from 35m rows in their hundreds to the 8m rows in their dozens might make the horror of the roots break seem like light relief. Currently, is has been occupied by the dandelion liberation front. And I didn’t get to them before they seeded, so we will be seeing them next year again for sure. But in a just a few short weeks, it will be the roots bed that does more of the lifting to transform a vegetable bed into a potager. The look of the emerging plants serryring together in their reputably ordered and evenly spaced rows is absolutely worth the extra effort.

So then, this week:

• Sow the vineyard (sounds familiar!)

• Strip the tomato and bean beds. Plant tomato and bean poles

• Plant out the first dozen or so tomato plants

• Make liquid nettle fertiliser

• Do all the things which need doing in advance of the Reading Retreat

  • Install all the new furniture in the Reading Room

  • Make the beds, clean the everything

  • Plan meals (at least two from the forest)

  • Manifest an espresso machine from the universe

  • Move my personal library to the barracks library

  • Mow the croquet field and put out the croquet set

  • Test the hammocks again. With a cup of tea and a good book

• Have the Reading Retreat.

And by this time next week, I will have, hopefully, a load of photos of people having a wonderful, relaxing, bookish time. The barracks always looks and feels better with people in it.

Somehow, it has already gotten to nearly 8am. I had better wrap it up there, wish you call wonderful weeks in the garden, and say thank you all for being alive.

Be good to each other

Your loving Pirate Ben

xoxo

---

PS

I really don’t want to make this post anything like as mawkish or depressing as I easily could have done, but I do want to say: It is our destiny to be forgotten when we die. Accepting this, even celebrating this, is, in my opinion, an important step in living a good life, being the best human you can be. We should be happy to leave the world to the living. We live, we die, others carry on after us. That said, I’m not quite prepared for Rory, the recently dead friend from the beginning of this newsletter, to be forgotten just yet. I wrote a very brief thing on my blog about him. If you’ve read this far, perhaps you could go and read that as well? Keep him in memory just a little bit longer?

Thank you, it would mean a lot to me.

https://www.thebarracks.de/post/_rory

Oh, and it might ruin a perfectly good pop song as well. Which is always fun :)