Well, that’s April for you (updated)

After the morning snow - and it got a lot worse after yesterday’s blog post - it was fine enough in the afternoon for me to sit outside for an hour potting up seedlings: roughly six dozen tagetes, grown from the seed we harvested last back end.  They didn’t look too happy about being out in the coolth and gentle breeze, but perked up overnight in the sitooterie.

Not much of a gardening day today, but I’ve hacked down the penstemons between our and the neighbours’ drives, so the fortnightly objective of filling the garden waste bin is well on its way to completion, helped also by a few handfuls of hairy bittercress: our most successful crop...  And Annie’s lavenders are getting some more light for a month or so.

Don’t know if I’d mentioned that I join in twice a month in a German conversation group, organised by the local u3a.  Someone suggests a text for each meeting to prime the pump, and I’d voiced a concern at the fact that it tended to degenerate into read-and-translate, reminding me all too uncomfortably of Hammy’s French classes at school, when we laboured through Le Grand Meaulnes, translating as we soporifically went.  One of the group had suggested quite a long piece about the popular uprising of 1953 in the DDR, and since it was so long, our organiser suggested that we all read it at home and then discuss it in free format when we met (on Zoom, of course).  The session fairly buzzed!  I had done a bit of further reading in preparation, discovering (excuse my higgerance) that Stalin had proposed re-unifying Germany way back in 1952, allowing freedoms of speech and press (yeah, right!), but stipulating neutrality, cf. post-occupation Austria.  The Brits, the French and the USA assumed it was a ploy to integrate Germany into the Soviet bloc, helpfully providing it with some warm water ocean ports.  A European Defence Treaty had just been signed, and German neutrality would scupper it.  (In fact, it was never brought into effect.)  Adenauer, a catholic Rheinlander, wasn’t buying it, since integration would give the  consequent Protestant Prussian majority too much sway.  So, though it didn’t happen, it’s worth wondering whether it would have spared the people of the DDR the dreadful hunger and oppression they suffered for another 38 years.