I carry no phone An aspiring Luddite In a wired world.	Jeff Berry is an early adopter of the Internet and the Web, a late adopter of Twitter, and declines to adopt Facebook. With the death of Google+, he's experimenting with federated platforms . He admins a medievalist Mastodon instance, and can found on the PlusPora diaspora pod. He hates cell-phones.

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More Settling In It's been almost exactly two years since we moved into our house, and we're still getting some things settled. The weather cooperated a few weekends ago, so we had a good, hard look at the back garden to determine the state of play. We had some professionals in late last year to take down and out some of the larger and more troublesome parts of the garden. About three quarters of an out-of-control laurel (on the left in the pictures) was demolished. The top of the silver birch (obscured in the first photo, visible on the left in the second) was removed. A poorly pine (on the right) was reduced to about six feet - a good pell height. The pampas grass has been chopped and killed, even if we haven't completely removed it all yet. We had a turn round the estate, deciding what needing doing next. One answer was sheds - removal and installation thereof. Also more work on the borders and beds. A while back I talked about how pleased I was with my little raised bed. Well, the herbs have settled in nicely and we've put some pots around it to pretty it up a bit. I spent a reasonable chunk of change on new tools. (Makita LTX series, if you're interested. I mentioned this to a friend who said, "Buy nice, don't buy twice!" and offered a high-five.) With those in hand, I turned most of the rest of the first demolished shed into a planter box to go out front. I need to make another, so it's just as well there's another shed to be demolished. I spent some time fixing up the fence, which had been neglected. That led us to consider the space at the bottom of the garden where we think the old coal store was. Our understanding is that the original house was used by someone who provided coal to the railway and there was coal storage at the back. That space (we think) is still visible in the brick outline of the walls. (We could be wrong, of course, and the bricks could be outlining something else entirely.) In any case, the space has a masonry or tile floor about four inches down from the level of the lawn. We briefly considered excavating that and using it as a foundation for a new shed, but realized that what we would be doing would be creating not so much a 'shed' as a 'submerged garden tool store' when the first heavy rain hit. However, the area is still flat, and relatively free from weeds and such, so the current plan is to simply put a shed base down on top of the earth, and put the shed on top of that. Not all the work has been outside, though. We also found enough picture frames to start to get our various SCA scrolls framed. (The SCA is our reenactment group. I write it about it over here.) These scrolls are one-of-a-kind pieces of artwork, and deserve to be seen. A few of them went up in my office, near a homely clutter of books. These books are mostly medieval resources: books which I used for my MA and MPhil, and still use for my various historical endeavours. The fiction and most of the other hardbound books are in the lounge/library. The room is in the oldest part of the house, dating to around 1900. (The wallpaper visible in the background is considerably newer.) It's a working office, I make no apologies for the clutter. Well, almost no apologies. More of the scrolls have gone up in other locations around the house, which is a major nesting milestone for us. So things are moving forward, but there is still much to be done! Luddite'sLog, 2 May 2019 © 2019 Jeff Berry

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