Thing is, the way that door would bang if it was left open had irritated me for weeks, and I was constantly crossing the yard to close it, so the idea obviously wasn’t that obvious.

Protip: Darragh realised afterwards that he put the bolt too close to the edge of the door; now you can’t turn the bolt’s cross arm to the left or it stops the door from closing. Something to bear in mind if you’re doing this yourself. If you fix the bolt three inches or eight centimetres from the edge you can turn the cross arm either way.

Probably. This guy can move massive, 10-ton and 20-ton rocks using pepples, logs, levers, and pure ingenuity. He’s even moved a 1500 sq. ft. barn! It is a convincing demonstration of how Stonehenge might have been built and it’s pretty impressive.

Autumn fencing

This is a simple way to create a fence with few materials. Just wait until the Autumn and wedge your prunings between two stakes. Leave a gap for a gate and you could soon have an enclosure. The fence will rot over time, though you could add to it every year to keep it fresh. Once it rots down, however, the soil beneath will be amazing.

Bottle shoes

Necessity, invention and all that.

Saving buckets of cash on flowerpots

I found some pots of old paint so I converted biscuit tins and paint buckets into pots. There’s no need to paint them, but I had some and it amused me for an afternoon.

Here’s one I made earlier:

Whose a pretty pot then?

Inspired video for Arcade Fire’s My body is a cage. Footage comes from La fille sur la pont, a video clip of Stranger in Moscow, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and Matrix Revolution from the Wachowski brothers.

Do not break the chain

A would-be comedian once asked established comic Jerry Seinfeld for a tip. Seinfeld told the guy that you need to apply yourself, everyday, to whatever you want to achieve. To motivate himself, Seinfeld would place a large, yearly calender prominently on a highly visible wall in his home. Every day he wrote, he could put a big red cross through that day. After a few days, you have a chain of crosses. “Don’t break the chain,” Seinfeld said.

So this post has almost nothing to do about anything except I had a nice picture and I wanted to put the first link in my chain.

The picture was my view when I pulled up the Trampervan for a coffee break between Inchigeelagh and Ballingeary on the R584 after Macroom in West Cork.

Home is where the cheerful brolly is ...

We’re all of us in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars (Oscar Wilde, in case you were wondering). I took this picture in Berlin, where obviously even the homeless adhere to the stereotypical German work ethic.

But is there is a point, too: take advantage of the local environment to make the best use of the resources you have.

Reasons to be cheerful

Must know something we don’t ….

Art Work

If you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life, and if you turn every task into a game life becomes child’s play.

And if you read too many Chicken Soup for the Soul books you’ll sound like a pretentious git.