Stabbed in the bathtub

9 y.o. me was entranced by a quip in Mad magazine "Caesar was stabbed in the forum . . . also the duodenum and the heart".  That was a satire on the glib pubquiz-level 'knowledge' most of us have about the classical tales of the Western Canon. We are legitimately confused because classical and modern authors have mangled the characters and their interactions to suit the plot. The relationships - who is related to whom - are more generally agreed; but the motivations and moral standings are up for grabs. Because Sophocles and Shagsper are wrestling with difficult ethical problems. One of the tragedies of our current age is that too many people are certain that they are right . . . and that Others are wrong. Not enough Metanoia, lads!  [changing your mind].

For Christmas I was given a signed-by-author copy of House of Names by Colm "Enniscorthy's own" Tóibín. It is another reworking of the Orestia a tangled tale of faith, bad-faith, betrayal, loyalty, incest, justice and murder. My last encounter with a modern version of a Classic tale was compelling my lab-mates to watch Seamus Heaney's version of Sophocles' Antigone in the Abbey Theatre 22 years ago. Like everyone else, Tóibín takes what he wants from the old story to give it his own twist. Hopefully, he and we-the-readers can make the result relevant to our lives today and come out the better for it. I bet you sixpence that he had a particular Wexford garden, with stone steps, in mind when he wrote the scene for the climactic matricide. 

Agamemnon, the Patriarch at the centre of the tale, is a) a mighty warrior b) the brother of Menelaus c) married to Clytemnestra. When Menelaus' wife Helen runs off to Troy with Paris, Agamemnon is obliged (with other Greek chieftains - 1,000 ships are launched) to voyage to Troy to get her back. Whoa problem!: none of the ships can leave Greek ports because of contrary winds. It is announced that [note passive tense] a favourable wind can be achieved IF Agamemnon sacrifices his elder daughter Iphigenia. The girl's mother Clytemnestra is pissed off at this [peculiar to modern eyes] bargain but, as a woman in a world of testosterone-driven blokes, she cannot avert the outcome: neither slaughter-daughter nor coincident wind.

Clytemnestra hesitates before killing the sleeping Agamemnon; Aegisthos pushes her on. Pierre-Narcisse Guérin (1774–1833) [see L]. While Agamemnon et al. have been battering at each other and the walls of Troy, Clytemnestra has shacked up with her husband's first cousin Aegisthos. Of Iphigenia's siblings, Elektra is hanging out, somewhat enigmatically, in the Palace; but Orestes, the son-and-heir, is somewhere off stage. Troy having been sacked and Helen parcelled up and returned to her husband, Agamemnon is ready for a triumphant return to his patrimony. Clytemnestra more or less immediately murders her husband in the bath and cements her relationship with Aegisthos. Orestes feels obliged to avenge his father's death by killing his mother. Just as his father felt obliged to kill his own daughter.

That's never going to end well. Reciprocal atrocity has not promoted universal well-being: not during The Troubles, not in WWII, not in Gaza. It's after the end of Tóibín' verrsion, but in ancient versions of the Orestes tale has him judged for his matricidal tendencies . . . rather than revenge-killed out of hand. This is said to indicate evolution in society towards a system governed by agreed rules of law rather than right-of-might and blood-debt. But sensitive moderns might also note that the outcome is much harsher when women kill men, than when men kill women. The part played by Elektra in the matricide is more ambiguous: different authors give her more or less destructive agency.

dramatis personnae and further scandalous behaviour below the fold:

Heart of Darkness

John McGahern has been aired on The Blob because banned for scandalizing the theocracy which was running Ireland at the time. He was not the most prolific of the pantheon of Irish writers but his short list of novels sold well [if not in the Republic]and won literary prizes. I've read a few; coming back for more even though they tend to black-dog rather than pink-fluffy. Djerzi, one of my oldest pals came to stay for a tuthree days and he insisted I read McGahern's 'Memoir' which was published 20 years ago. We're both a bit institutionalized so I can obey orders. Our local part-time mini-library had a copy, so I added Memoir to our pile of something for the weekend and sacked out for most of a rainy Sunday to read it.

McGahern grew up in Co Leitrim, the oldest of a family of seven created by a school teacher and her Garda Sergeant husband. She contributed sparkle, ideas, cookies and unconditional love; he contributed the starting teaspoonful and a pervasive bullying sense of his own importance. The family would have been larger if the poor woman hadn't sickened and died, from breast cancer, when she was 42 and John/Sean was 10.  Even before the mother died, the household supported a succession of young girls to help with the children and housework. Boys were never taught how to sew on a button, let alone how to get ingredients together and cook a nutritious meal. After the mother's death, the Help was required to step into her place with assistance from any girl-childer as they became competent (before their time in a foreshortened childhood?). The rest of their childhoods were endured in the Garda Barracks in Cootehall [R].

I'm a generation younger than McGahern and grew up in a different country. When I was 6/7, my sister and I attended a primary school in Portsmouth. Towards the end of the one academic year we spent there, I boasted that I had never been beaten. Aha hubris, in that final fortnight, for trifling transgressions I was hit with a stick, by an adult, on five (5!) separate occasions. Over the next 12 years until I was old enough to vote [in 1972] that form of punishment was completely scrumpled up and thrown away . . . in England. The McGahern siblings witnessed the normal [cripes! for some definitions of normal] round of beatings in school. Some teachers more depraved than others. But at home they were subjected to savage beatings with slaps, fists, sticks . . . a shovel - by their father. They protected each other as best they could and got to read the room and act together to minimize the unpredictable unstable assaults.

McGahern the writer spend the rest of his life trying to understand, and excuse, and come to terms with the psychic destruction lashed out by the damaged savage who engendered him.

Many years later, he goes to visit with the longest-serving of the Helps. "Katie's husband was over six feet, slow and sure of movement, remarkably handsome and strong; he belonged to that generation of men who had no consciousness of their good looks other than as a form of strength". Which says much more about McGahern than the man he's just met for the first time. It's a [clunk clunk] feature of the book that the narrator wants us to know if such-an-one is symmetrical or not. I don't look in a mirror from one year's end to the other, but I know men who do: maybe assessing people's value as function of how attractive they are is part of your normality. But for me, at this point in my development as a human, it's [clunk clunk] with frankly racist / sexist /otherist overtones.

Another quote "She was walking with us past Brady's pool and Brady's house, and the house where the Mahon brother's lived, past the deep dark quarry, and over the railway bridge and up the hill past Mahon's shop to the school".  One of McGahern's (more attractive) stylistic devices is to use this sentence repeatedly through the book. As if in old age he is playing and re-playing a silent home-movie clip of the together times before Loss flushed the happiness from his young life.

The John McGahern Barracks is a community voluntary project - tours, archives, hot-desk hub and seminar rooms. Barracks, like for soldiers? Last week.

My first Aurora

We've had several Northern Lights events over Ireland since the Birth of the Blob. At least once, I remember ragin' at my network for neglecting to tell me to get my sorry arse off the sofa and look up at the sky. I can also blame myself because the last time I missed-the Lights-by-inattention was on 10 October 2024, when I drove from Tramore to Dunmore and back for a talk about the RNLI while the Northern Lights were blazin' above oblivious me.

At ~21:30 this last Monday night, from my cosy sofa, I heard a low rumble as if a cow had blundered into our heavy-duty wrough-iron gates. Ever alert for protecting Caisleán uí Blob from external assaults I sprang into m'boots, flicked on the outside lights and went to investigate. As I blundered about in the dark another lesser rumble drew my attention away from the gates towards the SE granite-in-courses shed. I went back inside for a torch and noted that the SE corner of the SE shed had slumped exhausted and waterlogged to the ground. The rest of that gable-wall is stitched together with Ivy Hedera helix but granite is dense and gravity ever-present so we can expect fewer vertical "farmer's-ashlars" and a bigger heap at wall-foot.  Many years ago, that wall was 60% taller, and looming over the road which takes heavy machinery [mighty tractors, trailers, balers, back-hoes] into the fields. I rigged up a temporary scaffolding out of 2x6s and, like McAndrew on a similar project, reduced the height by 2.5 m. With the roof-tree gone the pointy part of gable end was almost flapping about in the wind. Stone by stone from the top, I pegged each part of the jigsaw to the ground. Next time we had John-the-Digger on site, he tidied away the resultant heap. This new heap requires his attention next time he's passing . . . and the ground is dry.

But as my eyes grew accustomed to the dark, I twigged that it wasn't January-dark as it should have been 5 hours after Sunset. There was a dark crimson glow off to the West 

. . . with pale almost green blobiness above me and sweeping away to the East. If it hadn't been hosing rain all the previous day, I might have attributed the red glow to another effing eejit setting fire to the hill.  All in all, it wasn't Hammerfest quality, but I realised that I was seeing the Aurora Borealis for the time. I sent an alert to my pal Russ and he replied: "Lucky you...save you a fortune on a Norwegian Arctic cruise :)". He, of course (because he spent his early years out fishing at all times of the day and night and oblivious to the weather) had seen the Northern Lights before.

Meanwhile across the water, The Boy was dragged outside by his resident owl = Gdau.I and he caught the show on camera:

Which goes to show that the Aurora don't piffle about with the lumens. It is clearly visible despite the blast of street lighting from the city of Bath beneath. There was a late night post from RTE, with more quality Aurora-pics from across the country and an explanation of why they happen. Lest there be confusion, Pat's first Aurora, in Buenos Aires ca.1943, was an [in the] altogether different experience!

Civil engineering, farmer division

Good fences make good neighbours.

Robert Frost 

Tuesday 13th was sunny and a little warmer than 'crisp', so after lunch, I filled up the chainsaw and went for a ditch-peeling session. It's really jungly on the far side. I was sweeping through some brash to get at the big stuff and hopped the chain off its bar [dang!]. It's annoying because with PPE ear-defenders it takes a while to register the whining change in note in which time the stationary chain has been grinding against the drive cog. To get the chain back in its groove, it is often necessary to file off some burrs; which means trudging back home to the shop for tools and tooling. On the way back home I heard [the son of] my neighbour-above tractor-tricking just behind our garden.

After some frustrating bricolage on the saw, I fired it aside and offered to stand in a gap for my neighbour. "stand in a gap" is the level of competence expected of a 4 y.o. child. What I actually said is "If you do the heavy lifting with the front-loader, I'll endeavour to stop the stone falling off the top of the build . . . I'll just fetch a bigger [iron] bar than yours, and my own shovel". Dry-stone wall building is nearer the top in my bag of competence than, say, sheep-shearing. Accordingly we spent the next tuthree hours, until bad light stopped play, piling up stones in an orderly way to a) keep the sheep in b) allow enormous tractors, trailers, trucks to sweep up the [tiny, rough, gravel] lane and into the field. The result is not to be ashamed of:

It's actually the second wall built on that corner. When we blew-in 30 years ago this Spring, a farmer from round the hill bought the distal 25 acres we couldn't afford. One of his first tasks was to back-fill the tiny narrow entrance to the fields behind our house and open a new tractor-friendly gateway. The tractors of 1996 weren't MF35 tiny, but they were smaller than the 200+ horse-power behemoths favored today. Back in the day, Neighbour would herd his sheep along the tarmac from his home place 5km West of here in order to turn them loose on the 12ac/5ha field that he created from a clatter of much smaller, rougher, paddocks that we couldn't afford. Back then he had help: childer, his bestie-next-door and even an elderly retainer called Dan. 

With the skills of a Roman legionary, Dan repaved the steepest part of the track up beside our back garden. All we supplied was a few loads of sandy 'yellow clay' which hereabouts lies under a skim of black peaty top-soil. We had a surplus of the stuff because John-the-digger was getting a Saturday's backhoe work out of us pretty much once a month. Digging the back of the house out of the slump of the hill for starters. When he finished the road surface - which has survived two floods which washed out the rest of the lane - he started work on the gateway. Dan wasn't the quickest, but he was careful, methodical, painstaking and skilled. About five years ago, Dan's handsome piece of vernacular engineering was shoved out of the way to facilitate a contractor's boastfully over-specified machinery.

Storm Darragh felled out a mountain-ash Sorbus aucuparia from our ditch so it blocked the lane. The first thing I did the next morning was start to clear the right-of-way. It took me a while, but by Christmas I had cut it back the the stump and propped the stump up against the ditch so it could fall out any further. It was, I thought, out of everybody's way. But Neighbour-above threw a tantrum one day and tore the stump from the retaining wall bringing down half the ditch along with it. We had words, but didn't get too angry . . . because, like the sped arrow, you cannot recall [shouty] spoken words. In August, Sean O'MF35 [whom prev] came by with a cutie-pie Kubota mini-digger and we rebuilt the wall so it was again chest-height and more-or-less vertical [with a slight batter on it to settle back into the bank rather than totter forward into the roadway]. Not starting from a clean foundation, but starting off doing some dental work to get back to solid wall at bottom and both sides, it took us about 5 hours. The result is not too shabby functional [it's still on me to tidy up the fence!]:

The two walls are right opposite each other [classically educated folks may call them Scylla and Charabdis but for me they are W.all and E.all]. Almost all the many hill-walkers yomp past them without a glance: failing to appreciate what mighty works allow them unlimited access to the uplands.

PS In contrast to an iron-bar and a shovel, a chainsaw is a reet ould prima-donna. Delicate and attention-seeking. Last time I borked the chain, in the aftermath of Storm Darragh, it was cutting through a fallen tree-trunk as fat as the chain-bar was long. This time, it was twerking it against some twigs. I should maybe pay attention to myself and clear brash&briar by hand, keeping the noise-maker for the big stuff.

Fado fado 25 years ago

I've written abit about my father, from growing up on the quayside at Dunmore East to his exciting war in small ships. 25 years after the picture captured in the first link, he was caught [cropped R], all pensive and/or embarrassed, at another seaside location with my mother [off stage R]. He was an only child, doted on by a handful of Victorian vintage maiden aunts and some of their buttoned-up primness descended upon his shoulders. We're not sure where or when he started to hoover up, and retain, facts obtained from books. He read a lot, and widely, and in another life and time he might have been an Oxbridge don. Indeed, he used to articulate a fantasy that, if the family hadn't sent him to join the UK navy aged 14, he might have gone to college to read History. Whence he would have been called up in 1940 and, shortly thereafter, been killed in the Western Desert. 

As we all know, he survived WWII, and continued to read [so many books] all through the rest of the 20thC. Indeed, aged 80, he enrolled in a speed-reading course because the books on his bedside table (and on other surfaces through the house) were accumulating faster than he could get through them.  It was, in hindsight, kinda weird: what did he hope to Do with all the data which he had warehoused in his mind. If his kids tried to tap into it [What's the capital of El Salvador, Daddy? How do you spell lighthouse? What treaty ended the War of Spanish Succession? What happened to Voltaire's library after he died? ], his standard response was to tetchily invite us to "look it up!". He died in the wee hours of 15th Jan 2001, 25 years ago this week, having fallen down the stairs encumbered by more reading material. 

A few hours later, Jimmy Wales uploaded the first words ["Hello World" apparently] into what grew into Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not without its detractors: critics of both its policies [deadnaming etc.] and product [invisible women etc.]. Oh and more MeFi Wikipedia knockers. But I've been coffing up supportive donations on the regular for ten years and <new policy> I use Wikipedia as my primary search engine [works really well for Central American capital cities]. I like the idea that, during the great transition, my father downloaded 80 years of accumulated knowledge and it was captured by the Great Wikipedia Ouija Board. 

And [bonus] a Wikipedia Quiz. I clicked on Random Article until I got ten people, each from a different country and 'notable' for a different thing. Then sorted each category alphabetically. Women are not invisible but the sex-ratio i'nt great. Your task, should you choose to accept it, is the match up the data. And No scientists! Personal name shd be a hypertext link to the answer.

Who	Whence	What
Andrew Napier	Canadian	actor
Boris Gusman	English	composer
Bruce Carlson	Filipino	cricketer
Isabel Toua	German	FilmProducer
Jim Dale	Netherlands	linguist
Julia Dahmen	PapuaNG	musician
Lope Santos	Poland	NotAPerson
Štefan Maixner	Russian	politician
Tofik Dibi	Slovak	singer
Żeromin Drugi	USA	SoccerPlayer

 For all its faults we're better off for Wikipedia 

I have his Wellington

Today is the Feast of St Fursey. I have a comparatively spartan calendar w.r.t. religious practice: StFursey's 16Jan, Darwinday 12Feb, StPs 17Mar, St John's Eve [w/o bonfires - sooo yesterday!] 23Jun, Santiago 25July, Άγιος Ανδρέας 30Nov. As a believer, I should really make the effort appropriate for the genuflect on The Day. I made a dry run preview yest because the sky was clear. Although that is no guarantee about cloud-cover to the East over the Irish Sea:

There was still a skim of ice on some of the puddles when I left the track and headed up the boggy incline to The Altar [whc lower L above]. "dry run preview" because wet ewwww socks. At least my genu's still flex. My ears were accompanied by Sebastian Barry's Old God's Time on borrowbox: the title at least is appropriate for the legwork.

What a difference a day makes! Today, the actual Feast of St Fursey, I startled awake at 0730. Gulped down 2 mugs of tea and a couple of cuts of yesterday's soda-bread, booted up my tired bod, and left the house at 07:57. I couldn't be doing Old God's Time again, so chose a cartographic episode of BBC's Start the Week to keep pace with my present exploration of the landscape between heaven and earth. The sun was rising but invisibly to this earthly domain. The cloud / mist was trying to lift, though:

It had been raining intermittently over-night and the grass was slicker than yesterday. But my feet didn't go-o-o-o from under me until I was almost there-and-back-again at the roadway. St Fursey held my arse out of the mire, however, so I didn't have to squelch home with a soggy bottom like I had a accident. The interceding saint also held the rain off until I was a few steps from our gate. I just made time to nip across the lane to count the sheep [N = 16, phew!] before shedding boots and socks and making a fresh pot of scalding tea. So here we are and there you are, and I wish you

Lá Fhéile Fursa

My Fursey calculus happened too late for The Day in 2021 but I've made the pilgrimage each year since 2022 -- 2023 -- 2024 -- 2025 with variable success on the ☀️ front, and indeed the frost front.

barracks

 I've written about proximity to my roomies when we worked at The Institute. Back then I was told that the minimum area for offices was 4 sq.m. for each drone. On Tuesdays when both the part-timer staff were at their desks we were possibly the most crowded [within allowable Heath&Safety limits] office in the EU. The HSE has something to say [not our Health Service Executive but the UK Health and Safety Executive]: unless employers allow 11 cu.m. for each person, they are in breach. Assuming a ceiling height of 2.4m, this requires a floor area of 4.6 sq.m. including desk and chair. I thought at the time that this was cramped for professionals working in third-level education and was much less than any office I had in universities. I didn't feel oppressed though because I went to boarding school to acquire a very expensive education . . . and a lot of tics and psychological baggage.

What brought that on? Reading another pop.hist. book by Richard Holmes : Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket (2001) [Guardian review]. I read his The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (2008) when it came out: it describes what happens when Science mugs The Arts Block;  as when Keats references William "Uranus" Herschel [whom prev - and his sister Caroline!] ". . . deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne / Yet did I never breathe its pure serene / Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: / Then felt I like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken . . ."

Anyhow, back to 19thC soldiers. In 1842, a General Order of the British army decreed that, in barracks on home station, each soldier should have 450-500 cu.ft [13-14 cu.m.] of space: to sleep, eat, chat and maintain his kit. But this ideal fell short in at least Brighton [412 cu.ft = 11½ cu.m. each] and Kensington [363 cu.ft = 10cu.m.] barracks. In 1857 a Royal Commission into the Sanitary Condition of the Army optimistically recommended 600 cu.ft. but it was another 20 years before a barrack-building programme, as part of the Cardwell Reforms, came close to achieving this aspiration. 

This all brings to mind Samuel Johnson's quote about going for a sailor: "No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned... a man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company." Apart from the drowning the same calculus applied to soldiering. And in barracks close packing and lack of washing facilities, let alone hot water and flush toilets was surely bad investment as trained soldiers got sick and died before they could be deployed. And on active service, microbes killed more than "the enemy": Peninsula War 25,000 from disease to 9,000 KIA. Crimea: 17,000 from disease to 4,000 KIA + died of wounds. Although obvs before Koch's Postulates and Pasteur, septic issues were involved in died of wounds,. Hat-tip to Florence the Statistician of the Lamp.

Redcoats is a good read if you like that sort of thing. Plenty of sources and footnotes, although Holmes claims he is not an academic historian. But lots of evocative tales and anecdotes which give a sense of what it might have been like after taking the King's shilling 200 years ago. 

Maybe the last word should go to Thomas Hood's Ben "was a soldier bold" Battle:

'O Nelly Gray! O Nelly Gray!
For all your jeering speeches,
At duty's call I left my legs
In Badajos's breaches.'