KW-43 Toast Envy

and announcing the Journal of Pirate Investigations

This week, at the barracks, we stumbled across a possibly previously unknown parapsychology in human consciousness. We have decided to call it “toast envy”. It is defined as the sure knowledge that someone somewhere is eating toast, and you want some of it.

There are still many nuances which need to be more thoroughly investigated - is the toast chef transmitting the information telepathically, or is a form of extrasensory perception in the desirer? Is it envy or jealousy¹. Is covetousness just for god stuff, or can it apply to bread-based cooked goods? How much twice-cooked wheaty dough needs to be consumed before a person stops desiring the toast of another person? More research will be carried out, and a full write up will be published in the Journal of Pirate Investigations some time soon.

Autumnal colours. I have said it before, I will say it again. It is simply glorious living here.

Moving along.

In less important news, I fixed the curtains in the loft. I think I made the curtains in the first year here, and according to standard Barracks operating procedure, it has been necessary to improve them pretty much continually. That’s what happens when you don’t know what you are doing. So, the word fixed in this context should not imply any final state, there will be further improvements required, no doubt. But this one involved, as always, taking the damn things down, performing minor surgery, and rehanging them. They are ungodly heavy, unhandlich, and when they are not hanging properly, they make the whole loft look like a slum.

But then, you fix them, rehang them, and spend a few minutes delighting in their almost silent swooshing, the overall effect is stunning. They simultaneously emphasise the vastness of the space, and reduce it to a comfortable, warm and cosy winter hideaway. I think that making the curtains nice and pushing Henry around is probably of equal winter-readiness importance as having a good stock of potatoes in the cellar.

The Week Ahead.

• Continuing with the guardhouse. Last week, the walls and the ceilings all got beautifully plastered. This week, painting and Flooring Mk 1 / 1.5. There will be discussions now that we have made it all nicely watertight. We might just put down a thick insulating layer of cardboard, with a carpet and rugs, or we might put in a new cement floor. The negative of the new cement floor is that if we want to put in underfloor heating, that would be a bit of a waste at this point. Let’s see what happens in the actual execution.

• The maples at the bottom of the potager are ready to drop every single one of their 800,000 leaves. There has been a primary raking already this year when the winds got up. There is going to be a much bigger one this week, I can feel it.

• I’ve still not emptied the compost. But that’s ok, there were carrots where I was planning on putting it. So this bullet point has sub bullet points. Ahhh, the long distant memories of working with so many people for so long who have jobs which are literally measured in bullet points…. _sigh_

  • eat carrots

  • clear the compost

• Continue with the evolution of the tomato house. The current state of construction is "making firewood”. So, the wood store is going to become the tomato fabrication house. I think this is a long standing arrangement. So, I need to clear some of the wood, not a huge amount, maybe two days of dedicated chopping, in order to build a shelf on which to store the handtools that I first have to restore before I have the equipment and space to start actual wood working. It’s complicated.

In other news, and also in preparation for winter, I am going to start to try to have a more organised and repetitive day. There was, many months ago, a germinating plan to spend a considerable chunk of the winter elsewhere, not at the barracks, in order to write the book. I am feeling a strong pull towards writing the book.

I’m still not very sure which one of the two books I want to write it will be, or if the two will end up mashing together, but I am confident that it will reveal itself once I get started. Well, the plan to go and sit in the old town of Tangier, Morocco on a roof terrace high up the cliff overlooking the Straits of Gibraltar, being warm and alone with my thoughts, learning street Berber and Bruce Chatwinning with a sheaf of Moleskines will not be happening, but the desire to write most definitely is there. So, I have decided to attempt a thing called discipline.

I’m not confident at all that I have it in me, but I do know that a regular programme of feed pigs, eat, write, repeat twice daily is probably helpful. Or something like that. I’ll work out the details later.

For now though, it’s already quite late enough (my computer did this really weird thing all morning when opening a new window or tab, but no matter, resolved now), so I shall gently click on the “send to all” button and wish you all a lovely week full of pleasant surprises and fulfilled expectations.

Much piratey love

Your Pirate Ben

xoxo

1. Homer knows.

Do you remember Rory? My best friend for two decades who went and got all unalived earlier this year? The most remarkable thing about our friendship was the creativity that emerged in the middle of us. The glorious stupidity that delighted in unique thoughts, the ability to idiot around and discover originality. Well, I have been spending some time with a human lately in whose presence, my brain does the same dumb stuff. Like toast envy. It’s lovely. Maybe I’ll tell you more later.