KW-34 Being useful is not the same as reaching a destination.

Always gonna be an up hill battle, sometimes I'm gonna have to lose

It ain't about how fast I get there, ain't about what's waiting on the other side

It's the climb

Miley Cyrus, The Climb

Today is the first day of the Collapse Laboratory. I went to bed last night, as I do on Sundays, thinking about what I am going to write today in this newsletter. I thought it might be interesting to more or less rehearse my opening words to the Lab attendees, and sitting here this morning, fingers ready to do their keyboard interracting thing, I don’t have a clue what I am going to say to either you, dear readers, or my IRL guests.

And welcome back. I’ve just been down a cup of tea infused internet rabbit hole of what part of the brain is responsible for creative writing. Apparently, it’s Broca’s Area (named after Pierre Paul Broca in 1861). The hippocampus decides what stories are going to be told, but this little smudged tangle of nerve cells, just down and to the left in the left hemisphere is the place where the magic happens.

talking to Stefan the sawmill man about woody needs. We’re cutting all the wood we are going to need for a whole load of projects, some of which might happen this year, some next. Barracks time. But when Stefan turns up, he needs to know from the beginning how much of what size wood you want, so you have to have a pretty good idea of all the requirements for all of the projects you are cutting for today.

and the finished result. Mostly for solar projects and the library.

The idea for the Collapse Laboratory happened when I realised that for a whole year, no journalist who came to interview asked me with that south-easterly facing grin but what if you are wrong. This has always been the wrong question to ask, it implies that what I am doing here is saving myself. Or being a weird hippy. Or living out some Good Life fantasy. Yeah ok, none of those are totally wrong, buttt… The Barracks exists because it seems to me to be essential. It needed to exist, and I was in a position to bring it to life. It is a political comment on, an avant garde statement about, a physical manifestation of the state of the world, the inevitability of collapse. It is a desire to be useful.

Simply being reactionary is not useful. Tee shirt sloganeering writ on the canvas of a human and three piggies.

a human and three piggies.

But, for the first few years, it was good enough. Until the slightly mocking, slightly amazed journalists started nodding their heads and saying perhaps. And so the Collapse Laboratory emerged. Usefulness.

Being useful does not have to result in an end product. The journey is the useful thing. So, in attempting to answer our two fundamental questions:

• Is there anything we can do to lessen the amount of time humans spend in collapse?

• Is there anything we can do to help with the rebuilding effort once society reclaims itself?

we do not expect answers. But trying, guided by love, we are going to give it a damn good journey.

Pirate Gardening Tip of the Week

Pirate gardening is mostly old man gardening. It was old man gardening when I started with my first vegetable plot 30 years ago. So really, it’s just the ancient ways of doing things.

Keep the ground covered

Everyone knows this these days, but in the absence of much gardening talk this week, coupled with the lack of a what am I doing this week section, I thought I’d combine them here.

This week, I am going to be mostly turning over the soil where the potatoes and the wheat were, and resowing with clover and lucerne (alfalfa / Medico sativa) as ground cover-slash-green manure.

Old man gardening has always done this. You should do it to :)

And now, I have to go and bake breakfast bread.

Be lovely to each other

Your Pirate Ben

xoxo