It's a tacky mess (way to remember introduction to food)

The strumming starts, get a couple of electric guitars in a house and any thoughts of social living go out the window, the rock and roll individual is born, Wednesday night everyone goes to bed at different times, and Friday morning I have breakfast alone as the crew get up over a 3 hour period. In the village the loud speaker system keeps everyone in sync, not just the individual houses but the whole village gets up and goes to bed as one. In a small village and in houses with paper walls this makes a lot of sense. In fact it makes a lot of sense for any society. The dysfunctional Romantic artist model that the west so aspires too, really makes no sense unless you want a dysfunctional fractured society filled with ‘individuals’ all actually doing the same ‘individual’ thing but at slightly different times. Or maybe I am just a dictatorial old bastard.

Another surprise today, we learn that the garden is an art project and that 25 volanteers from Toyko will arrive at the weekend to work with an artist to make a garden, looking at what’s already been done I assume it's a kind of ‘look at me an artist being interested in gardens’ the works to date is a disaster and the layout seems mental. The bits and bobs they have installed look almost intentionally rubbish I mean really ludicrous, maybe the project is more like ‘hey crazy city folk being rubbish at alien irrelevant medieval activity’. Again the instant thought for this kind of project is who is it for, without continual maintenance in this extreme climate (currently everything is growing inches a day) there will be nothing left in a year. The village is filled with highly productive gardens and some flower gardens, people are very busy maintaining what they already have. It seems like another pointless project, Art Front - who cant even answer an email - are sure as hell not going to maintain it.

We have several impromptu visits from the village, it is a bit of a pain in a way - delighted though I am that they are interested, but we have a lot to do and everyone is working hard. The visits stop everything dead while we all nod and ask questions show off our impoverished skills – Marcus imitates a cuckoo, Barnaby says ‘watashi ha Barnarby Desu’ repeatedly and makes comments under his breath about where the hell the chicks are at. Barnaby also shows of the ironic tea bowls I made. Ben has already mastered a rather impressive mastery of the language, it all goes down well. In the evening a number of the Toge artists invite themselves to dinner, which is fine only they don't tell us when they are coming and we all have stuff to do, it all works out fine and we eat at different times. The gardener artist turns up with a friend and is evasive, but I get the impression it's a serious garden endeavor – oh yes and everyone gets an arrogant self important vibe of him, we’ll see.