Violent wind, & raining slightly on & off.
Prepared a row for broad beans & another for cauliflowers, but impossible to get the surface soil fine yet.
16 eggs.
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Orwell Diaries 1938-1942 
I can certainly relate to his struggle with wet soil.
It’s Tuesday so, RAF bombers — 30 Whitleys and 20 Hampdens — attack the a German seaplane base at Hornum, at the southern end of the North Sea island of Sylt. The raid, publicly disclosed in the House of Commons by the prime minister as it was happening, is a reprisal for the German bombing of Scapa Flow three days ago in which six sailors and a civilian were killed.
Orwell’s obsessive/compulsive optimism, combined with his no-time-to-lose urgency, intrigues me. Viewed in a vacuum—that is, with surgical objectivity—he’s nuts. That he does not know what I know does not necessarily apply because, even if he did, I think he would still be out there with the suction of the semi-frozen mud holding him to the planet as the winds blow him sideways while he hacks the ground into precise (but not fine, yet) rows and his coughing echoes throughout Wallington.