It was one of the most controversial parts of the Good Friday Agreement to pardon people on both sides of the fence, but deemed a sort of necessary evil to obtain peace. A lot of ex-paramilitaries ended up as taxi drivers doing tours of Belfast and a lot of our older politicians in Northern Ireland are well known to have killed people. It sucks but it’s the price of peace. Derry Girls’ final episode dealt with it really well. I’m from the post-GFA generation so it was hard to get my head around it growing up but the alternative is far worse.

Can’t sabotage what’s already broken. The rare time I’ve been asked to use it for a piece of work, the output is so shit and full of errors that it would be easier to have done it by hand as a human.

It was fun growing up in the countryside and things like banshees and fairies being taken as a fact of life. I had a childhood friend that would come in to school saying she heard the banshees howling during the night and then woke up to find out a relative had died.

There was a news report that resurfaced a few years back, accessible here, about the Housing Executive in Newry trying to get a fairy tree chopped down to build houses, and even after trying to bribe the workers with £200 no one would touch it and they had to build around it instead. And another where some builders halted work in the Mournes once they realised they were inside a fairy ring, 3 of them went on to suffer accidents that they attributed to revenge by the fairies, the foreman apologised to the fairies, and even the reporter was too worried to step inside the ring. We were told the legends too, like Tír na nÓg or Finn McCool, but I think it’s amazing how much of the superstition and old mythology has persisted through the years, even after the country becoming Christian and even now as it becomes more secular.

Unfortunately it’s very real. The author Naomi Klein has a great book about Naomi Wolf called Doppelganger, based on the fact that people keep getting the two of them confused. Her descent into the right-wing conspiracy world is quite a thing.

Quite funny to see someone call Belfast calm and peaceful though. I’m in it quite regularly and usually just want to get out as soon as I can.

Same in Europe in the late 00s/early 10s anyway - the ads here boasted about it being a good source of slow-release energy to keep you going til lunch

I think it’s just sold on privately here unfortunately, the council collects food and garden waste but doesn’t allow residents to collect the end product. I’m in Ireland but I believe the same advice applies here, it’s just we moved so late in the winter that autumn sowing wasn’t a possibility. But yes I’m trying to be patient and remember this isn’t a temporary rental, I’m here for the long haul and it doesn’t need to look perfect right away.

Nice! I’ve had no luck germinating my native seeds yet but it is only early Spring and the last frost here isn’t for another few weeks, but there is at least some campanula and primrose out the front that early bumblebees have been feeding on. We bought this house off an ex-landlord so the garden hasn’t been looked after at all - it’s taken me ages finding and digging up all the plastic plants, and there’s glitter in the soil from cheap garden decor that should never have been sold in the first place. Next big project is to build this greenhouse since my home office is so filled up with seed starters I can no longer work in there, then by the summer I should have some usable compost to replenish the plastic contaminated border.

At the minute, composting. It’s my first Spring having a house with a garden so I can finally do all the eco-friendly gardening projects I could never do while living in a landlord’s mouldy house. So watching garden and food waste slowly decay is surely the most mundane, but exciting for me, although it’s nice to have a few projects on the go like growing a wildflower patch, having a bed of pollinator-friendly herbs, and planting clover among the grass so it isn’t a monocultural suburban hell