82 days ago
My hero, Charles Ingalls, would have been proud of me as I defied almost non stop rain to start harvesting. I also brought in stacks of wood for the stove in the living room as it really is getting cold and the gas heating seems to be on the blink, yet again.
83 days ago
Set in the winter of 1880 to 1881, The Long Winter is a fairly grim book in the Little House on the Prairie series. It really did seem at one point as if the folks huddled in the North Dakotan town of De Smet might not make it. But they did, and sixty years later, Laura Ingalls wrote down what she remembered of a time when she was just fourteen. But the Indian…
93 days ago
In the middle section of my shed, the wood is stacked five foot high eight across and three rows deep. On the newly completed left hand side it is just four foot wide but there are now six rows. On the far right there is enough kindling to keep us going all winter. I am done. Reader R from Cornwall will be green with envy. I have channelled my inner Charles Ingalls and am done for the year.
112 days ago
My mother was a self sufficiency nut in the spirit of John Seymour with whom she corresponded, a believer in a sort of communitarian way of thinking. I spent a, not entirely happy, summer on a Welsh agricultural commune with her. Even then, aged six or seven I guess there must have been a latent capitalist and libertarian within me because I remember that I sensed unhappiness and impending implosion. There were loud arguments among the adults. Some folks worked hard in the fields while others listened to folk music and dreamed of the revolution. In the end those who worked walked and those who did not had to go and find someone else to sponge off.
329 days ago
The Met Office keeps on telling us all how jolly warm it is as a result of global warming. I have covered how its numbers are bodged and unreliable before but I can say without lying that, here in North East Wales, I feel bloody cold. It is, after all winter, so no climate change there. While the Mrs and my son Joshua are enjoying the Indian sunshine for another few days, the cats myself and little Jaya are really feeling it as the temperature, with wind chill, falls to zero
1142 days ago
It has been a bad day at the homestead, the Welsh Hovel, as I explain. I have also had a run in with Shipmans and other staff at “the envy of the fecking world” so am in a bad mood. I discuss Kefi (KEFI) and what is happening in Ethiopia. I know more than all the BB savants but there is only so much that I can say. Then I look at the David Beckham-linked swizzle at Guild ESports (GILD) and, by implication, Cellular Goods (CBX) both of which will end in tears and be posterboys for the bezzles at the fag end of a bull market.
1144 days ago
Joshua and I are now almost at the end of On the Shores of Silver Lake the fourth of the books by the great libertarian author Laura Ingalls Wilder. My old babysitter, DD, is also re-reading the series, just for her own pleasure, and is now a book ahead of us in The Long Winter. She says I must store up well at the Welsh Hovel as tough and cold times lie ahead. However, on that front, today saw a gut-wrenching setback.
