... and now, for something completely different

I've been spending far too much time and energy on lost causes and pointless crusades and I have vowed to stop it and dedicate more time to you, my wonderful readers. It is amazing to me that even now, at my advanced time in life, certain injustices and random acts of unpleasantness can rile me so. I have always spoken out against that which I abhor and it has cost me. Over the years I have spent a lot of my time righting and trying to right wrongs. It has cost me emotionally and it continues so to do. Do not misunderstand I am not talking about curbing that behaviour. It's the pointless quests that I'm dropping. Or at least the ones that I can see today as pointless. Too often this flavour of mission becomes a downward spiral much like a maelstrom that sucks me in: time and energy devoted to fighting an inexorable current. I emerge exhausted and without having made a single iota of difference save for having my voice heard and although that is important it profiteth me not. And so I'm saving my efforts from now on for genuinely worthy causes. I'll need to be more selective and perhaps more circumspect.

After the mess that was last week we are concentrating on the farm this week with no deadlines to meet, and nowhere we have to go, and nobody we have to see, and no thing we have to do. A week for the land and the crops. And ultimately a week for us.

The plants all seem to believe that it is spring and are putting spurts of growth on that defy sense. Clover and oxalis are calf high already. Roses are putting on new wood and freshening their blooms. The mimosas are spreading their branches wide while all around them the fruit trees are preparing to shed their leaves and show their winter skeletons. Olives distinguish themselves at last from the leaves and show out: some green; others dark grey and slowly blackening. This month I think, this month. The first stalks of koukia beans are showing among the long grasses between the lavender patches. The bamboo is 5 and 6 metres long in places, waving its fronds far above lav1.

We humans are not fooled by nature's untimely seasonality, we porepare for winter for winter is surely next. Gill excavates drainage trenches around the lavender patches and runs the Husqvarna around and between the circles. The Farmboys burn 9 cubic metres of biomass remaindered from the autumn clean up in a phenomenal bonfire too late for Guy Fawkes but timely enough - before olive and lavender prunings swell the farm litter heaps to Gargantuan proportions as they always do this time of year. I am working on a bamboo sculpture that we discussed with Lindz in the summer and struggle with wire and pliers while eyeing its perspex prototype on the bench and the rough panel drawings above them - I may have to order more bamboo to be cut - I'm sure I shall. The girls make the most of every little ray of sunshine, and heaven knows there has been precious little of it lately, by laying on their very own winter decking and luxuriating in the unexpected warmth that percolates down through their thickening winter coats.

If I am a blogger for writing this does that make you bloggees for reading it? Whatever your title I am grateful for your ears and eyes and apologise for neglecting you of late.