March 2026
The Magic Kingdom has its day. . . . .(month)
The last two week of March and the first two weeks of April are the ‘golden hours’ of our year. The flies have died, the snakes are sleepy, the weather is perfect and the days are still long enough. This is the time for Alpine walks so we did Lake Osborne and the Arve Falls walks in the Hartz Mountains. The Silver Banksia ( Banksia marginata ) was in flower and full of raucous birdlife getting their calories in before winter.
People die attempting alpine walks all the time so we took robust precautions such as taking a jumper, making Sahara Sandwiches for our picnic and wearing shoes. These walks are doable for active kids and if you feel they would amuse you there is more info here.
Interior March. The windows are finally in their slots. That was fussy. Even a couple of millimetres out and they don’t rest well on the eye. Lots of faffing about with the sander and plane but anyhoo, finally they’re in and the most of the trim is on the wall. We felt the windows might not be there for ever so installed them using lashings of silicon instead of traditional fixings. This worked better than our wildest dreams and allows for movement in a good way. You will note that these are interior windows and not load bearing.
rgbDesigner March. This month’s palette is informed by our trip to the Hartz Mountains with colours harvested from photos of the atmosphere. The featured generator is ‘stripes’, a simple but powerful tool with lots of options for customisation. The variations in these images are produced by altering the shade width only but as you can see from the screen grab you can also change orientation, mode, width and shade mode. Pretty much endless combos. We like stripes for designing large backdrops for window displays. Striking but neutral.
You can buy rgbDesigner on the Apple AppStore here. Designed for iPad
Writing March. Our resident writer Robert Gowty has had a busy month!
A thought provoking new series on the politics of convenience.
Living Without Running Water (The Politics of Convenience #1)
https://medium.com/civil-politics/living-without-running-water-a6d07e9fbe3b
Grizzly Man and the Call of the Wild (The Politics of Convenience #2)
https://medium.com/civil-politics/grizzly-man-and-the-call-of-the-wild-997a3a05866e
A short and weird on “Why a Staycation at the Gormanston Valley Caravan Park Might Be Your Last Vacation (Short & Weird: Rudimentary Structures #4)”
Some existential ( isn’t that the word of the month ) extrapolations
Complacently Adjacent (Existential Extrapolations #7)
https://medium.com/@robertgowty/complacently-adjacent-96c4cad69a98
and another fabulous spoken word.
Where Am I? (Spoken word in The Oral Tradition: Tribal Aperture)
All this without mentioning the war ; )
Our book of the month is Lady Glenconner’s Picnic Papers , a chatty tome that collects the writings of many of Lady Ann’s family and friends on the subject of picnics, and which manages to encapsulate both an elegiac homage to a pre war England, and an insiders view of the new world boom that followed. Some good recipes and some lessons for those who like to learn.
From the picnic reminiscences of Patrick Leigh Fermor…
“The picnic baskets may have contained all sorts of Moldowalkechian wonders - sarmali wrapped in vine leaves, fragrant mititei, chicken croquettes as light as feathers, a sterlet from the Pruth, perhaps, or even, and by the ladleful, wonderful Black Sea caviar from Vâlcov in the Danube delta, on the fringes of Bessarabia; turkey in aspic, almost certainly. Apart from fine indigenous cooking this country seemed to be the meeting point of all that was most delicious in old Russia, Poland, Hungary, Mitteleuropa, France, the Balkans and the Levant. The picnic would have been more likely to start with fierce Moldovian raki than with a milder southern tzuica of distilled plums; excellent white and red wines, stored in tortuous catacombs, would have accompanied it throughout.
The point of departure was an old and many-legended Cantacuzene country house with inhabitants of indescribable charm. It lay at the heart of a once large but now much reduced estate in High Moldovia, and the time was 1939.”
…
“It was a summer of unparalleled beauty and remoteness, but the months passed too fast; the crops were in and the storks were gathering before heading south; and suddenly, not unannounced, the evil omens had begun to multiply quickly, until all seemed black.”
We always take a picnic when we go to the forest. Somewhat less glamorous than Patrick’s but no less delicious.
May the road rise with you