In This Issue

The Rooms, Roads and Relationships That Keep Us Human

One of the pleasures of putting together The Pineapple is that we never quite know what the finished issue will become.

We start with a theme.

This month it was Balance.

Then the articles begin to arrive.

A table conversation here.

A member story there.

A walk through a forest.

A challenge.

A recipe.

A friendship.

A lost wallet.

A caravan.

A stubborn decision to keep going when stopping would be easier.

And slowly, usually sometime on Thursday evening or Friday morning, the issue reveals what it has really been about all along.

This week, the answer surprised me.

What emerged was not simply a collection of articles about balance.

It became a collection of stories about the rooms, roads and relationships that help people remain human.

Some of those rooms are workplaces.

Some are kitchens.

Some are forests.

Some are friendship groups.

Some are Brida tables.

Some are places on wheels parked on a camping site.

Along the way, we meet people finding balance through work, through movement, through family, through food, through challenge, through friendship, and sometimes through a stubborn refusal to quit.

This issue also introduces something new.

From Ralf’s Kitchen

For the first time, we open a regular member column built around something a member genuinely knows and loves.

Ralf is many things: traveller, walker, husband, barbecue enthusiast, future mobile-home explorer and occasional hedgehog landlord.

Now he also becomes The Pineapple’s first resident food columnist.

The idea behind the new section is simple.

Brida is not only a place where people talk.

It is a place where people bring something.

Knowledge.

Experience.

Skills.

Stories.

Recipes.

Passions.

A good community should make those visible.

Ralf’s spare ribs are merely the beginning.

Elsewhere in this issue, we discover that work is often about much more than work, that energy is not always comfort, that friendships sometimes arrive disguised as hot chocolate and panic, and that maintaining a middle-aged human being may be considerably more complicated than originally advertised.

As always, some articles may make you think.

Some may make you laugh.

A few may do both at the same time.

And somewhere between work, forests, cherries, cocktails, alarm clocks, caravans and barbecue smoke, you may find a story that feels surprisingly familiar.

Welcome to Pineapple 16.