What is more remarkable: our capacity to forget suffering and darkness, or our capacity to remember it?

 The good news first.

We are approaching Imbolc/St Brigid's Day but more on that on the weekend. Needless to say, it lifts my heart to hear the blackbirds singing before sunrise.

Things are looking rather messy in the vegetable garden. It's the time of the year when we've lost the will to harvest even more Brussel sprouts and turnips. Although the latter did taste great when I roasted a few of them yesterday. But my taste buds have begun to hanker for rhubarb, asparagus, freshly picked radish and so on. All in time. Anyway, apart from the green manure growing in the front right, all the rest is for the birds and the squirrels and will be dug up soon enough.

Meanwhile matters are coming along indoors . And this is only the beginning.

As for the covid patch, we've cleared all the self seeding wildflowers and various grasses/weeds to turn this into a patch for a variety of caterpillar food plants. It's all very well to enjoy butterflies in the summer as they feed on buddliah flowers, we need to think of them as caterpillars. I sat in a workshop some time last autumn and have now managed to find a seed bank sharing local seed for suitable plants, got the soil tested and found to be too rich in nutrients. So we are mixing in sand and stuff to reduce the nutrients, which is supposedly allowing the soil to be more welcoming for these plants. I am actually very excited about this, the seed packet includes over 50 species.

The dead wood hedge around it will grow in time and is currently home to wild bees and at least one hedgehog.

This morning we attended our city's memorial event for International Holocaust Remembrance Day. A large section of the program had been prepared by local high school students (year 10, 15 years old) who had studied the life stories of ten local persons who 80 years ago were liberated from concentration camps and prisons or who were able to leave their hiding places at the end of the war. The students had contacted consulates, schools, museums, archives, universities, churches and relatives worldwide and presented a very moving collection of images, memories and eye witness reports. In between, there was live music, and as expected, I had to cry during a Beethoven cello piece that I would normally probably never even listen to. I am sure I was not the only one in the dark auditorium. Not even hitler and his henchmen could survive on hate and terror.