Just a little closer to the Lord

I've been a fan [have two of his glossy coffee-table books fan] of Andy Goldsworthy since Stone [1994] Time [2000]. His schtick is to assemble or modify natural materials so they better stand out in the landscape. A good part of the oeuvre reflects on impermanence - even gurt big lumps of sandstone are being imperceptibly changed by wind and tide. It can be a salutary lesson in humility: we're on the planet for a few years and when we're gone Nothing beside remains . . . yes, even The Blob will be poofed away by The Algorithm and forgotten.

In the 00s, a Donegal forester called Liam Emery was tasked to cover another Irish hillside [The S face of the Hill of Bogay] with a monoculture of Sitka spruce Picea sitchensis because Coillte the state forestry service likes to cast things in its own image: dull, monolithic, short-termist, tone-deaf. [maps loca] 

But Liam elected to stick one to The Man and interplant 3,000 Japanese larch Larix kaempferi among the spruce. Not randomly but intentionally so that as the trees grew to maturity the golden-turning larch needles would (at certain times of the year [FALL], under certain [rare-in-Donegal, sunny] weather conditions) light up the hillside with the image of a Celtic cross. I am not sure if the project was driven by particularly religious ad maiorem dei gratiam etc.  sentiments. But it surely tuned into a particularly peculiarly Irish heritage [R image clipped YT by Stephen Reid ultimately from Will Reilly].  So park your wonder-fatigue and check out the YT story. 

tl;dw: in ~2002, Liam and his pal Bernard went off piste; they surveyed then planted 3,000 alien-to-the-project larch whips in a 200m x 100m pattern. In 2010 Liam suffered a fatal kayaking accident and it wasn't until a tourist overflight in 2016 brought the arbor-image to the internet. Slightly longer version.

Obvs, being so photogenic and with Liam's tragic death and all, there is a movement to stay Coillte's hand w.r.t. to felling out the forest when its commercial time is done . . . in ca. 2045. But forests must be thinned every ~15 years lest the trees suffocate each other from being too close-packed. Dogoodnik tree-huggers can't just Stop The Chainsaws and think that will solve the problem. Kiwi Sean came and thinned our forest in 2022, bringing in selective light and air and converting crinkle-crankle trees into firewood to warm a couple of Olds in the twilight of their years. So I guess we can expect the picture of the cross get increasingly pixellated with each thinning cycle.

Also earlier Triquetra (Celtic knot) in P. sitchensis and L. kaempferi above the Lake of Glencar Co Sligo 

Hat-tip off also to thelife.of_reilly on Insta for a) the Bogay drone footage and b) flagging that another artificial heritage construct, the Grianán of Aileach lies about 3km NNE from the Emery Celtic Cross. The GoA is a 19thC re-construction of an iron-age hill-fort atop the peak in the distant background of the picture [R]. 

¿Post Title? Bloboprev. 

Bone Dry Ungood

Cripes is Ireland damp for about 5 months every year. When we came home to Ireland after spending the 1980s+ in foreign, we canvassed opinion about what was essential to know / do / acquire to live our best lives At Home. MaryC was strong in her advocacy: "get a tumble drier; vented to outside". Later we acquired a polytunnel which (regardless of tomatoes, wood-storage and my second-best sofa) served primarily as a laundry aid. Even if we give clothes an additional blast with the tumbler before folding them away in the press. So we are not, like Dau.I and Dau.II, in their teeny Dublin flat, forced to dry laundry on a rack in our living room. 

The drier sort of deals with our laundry-damp [other damps are available] but not the fact that we live, breathe, bathe, and braise in a house built in 1941with 500mm thick rubble-in-courses masonry with no [rising] damp-proof course. The kitchen windows weep visible condensation. The walls are also sopping: it's just harder to see the dribbles . . .and the black mould against the grey granite. A month ago, Dau.II cried enough with the musty cotton goods and bought a MeacoDry Arete® One 12L Dehumidifier for their tiny 2-bed TigerBuilt flat in D7. And last week we followed CanDo Yoof and bought another. Come in, roll up, it's R2D2's kid-sister [R] sucking water from the air and saying Farewell to Fungus. We left the machine [its refrigerant actually] to settle for 2 days and then switched t'bugger on. It registered 95% RH [relative humidity] which was unsurprising: 24hrs after a yellow rain warning that had gone on and on for 18 hours.

How much water vapour can a room support aka is the R6X6 reservoir large enough to bring our kitchen down from 95% RH to 55? Turns out it depends on the temperature [see table under]. But the bottom line / rule-of-thumb is that our 4m x 5m x 3m = 60 m³ kitchen "only" holds about 1 litre of water. We set La Demoiselle Dehum going at 16:00hrs and 95 RH. When I went to bed 7 hours later, she had cranked the kitchen down to 65 but by 06:00 the following morning we had reservoir is full and RH had crept up to 76. Clearly this a work in progress.

°C	g/m3
-20	1
-15	1½
-10	2
-5	3
0	5
5	7
10	9
15	13
20	17
30	30
40	51
50	83
60	130

Being too dry indoors is also a problem: we are designed with wet mucous membranes which allow lungs to get oxygen and these membranes are also the first line of defense against microbes. Too dry and the macrophages cannot patrol and you'll get sick. 

Also wooden furniture. In 1967, my Dad retired from the Navy at 50 and bought a cottage + acre at the edge of the commuter belt for his new workplace East of London. It was before the end of cheap oil and, in winter, the family cranked up the central heating. Until he noticed cracks in some of his inherited dining chairs. Thereafter all the rads acquired a humidifier: a plastic reservoir with a 20x20cm square of porous sponge to wick up the water and disperse it to the circulating air. One of my teen-tasks was to fill these reservoirs with a dinky water-can. It was a neat cheap-as-chips appropriate technology solution.

For most domestic purposes the aim is for 40-60 RH. R6X6 trips off at 55. 

• Storing apples for the winter is best at ~1°C and 95% RH
• Storing flour 50 - 65
• Mixing dough 40 -50
• Proofing dough 70 - 75
• High RH was one of the reasons why N England became the centre for cotton spinning rather than doing this nearer the point of production 

Herding vets

I was at an interesting conference last week, which was grand but not quite grand altogether. The following day the organisers dropped me an e-mail requesting feed-back. But all the links there were to the dreaded Tripadvisor. I'm more comfortable giving back a narrative than a bunch of ★★★★☆s.

Logistics. I've run a few day-long meetings in my time and have some ideas about how to make such things run efficiently. And, like, name-badges! Even with a very small team of Effectives managing time, motion and people can be done with efficiency and dispatch. 

For example, at our village hall last Friday, from a standing start, all-willing D, The Beloved andI slopped out 30 cups of tea and 5 instant coffees in about 4 minutes. As well as stripping the clingfilm off the [Chocolate!] biscuits and getting the milk out of the fridge and into jugs. The Waterford Museum Team made three rookie errors in crowd management.

1. At the morning coffee break a backup of parched conferees trailed across the room, out the door and down the stairs. Because all the catering supplies were crammed on two 2m long trestle-tables arranged in series.
• The key thing is to put the milk and sugar and teaspoons on a different table from the hot-water bowsers. Preferably so that  conferees can get at the goods from all sides. Then put the petit-fours, micro-viennoiserie, sandwiches and biscuits at an even further remove. Folks dither. Nobody wants the *@!!& ditherers causing . That's what happened in Waterford .
2. The programme was as chock full of passion, interest and information as an egg is full of meat.  The very first speaker, an academic who should know better, made a big show of keeping to his allotted 45 minutes . . . and then ran over. It is about correct to say that if he hadn't peppered his talk with references to clocks and alarms, he would have kept to time. But his over-run set the tone and we were 15% over time by the coffee-break. And a full hour adrift by the end of proceedings! It matters because people have trains to catch and parking-meters running as well as their abiding interest in The Emergency.
• there was, because of over-stuffing the programme, no time for questions, comments or elaboration from the floor. That's a shame because the average age in the auditorium was 60+ and some of them would have info or stuff germane relevant to the discussion
3. The programme included 1.00pm Lunch in exactly the same font as 11.30am Coffee Break. But at no time were were told that lunch was forage for yourself. My Dunmore pal David must be from the inner circle (he was after all alive during The Emergency) because he had brought sandwiches. Obvs we're all adults; we can [and did] go across the square to have bowls of hot soup and soda-bread. And as the conference was 'free', adults can understand that the budget might not run to 1.00pm Lunch at any time. But slack time-keeping meant that there were no tables inside and we dined al fresco in November . . . because we're well 'ard. Better comms is easy: 1.00pm Lunch-break: find your own and be back at 2pm sharp.

This is not to cast a crate of asparagus at Team Waterford Museum. They had a limited budget, so they blew it on petit-fours; thinking "slopping out tea for 80+? how hard can that be?" and did that themselves. But catering is Hard Work - physical and logistical.

Maggot-pie

I was impressed / entranced by Chloe Dalton's Raising Hare: the winner of the 2025 Wainwright Prize for writing about nature, environment and conservation. I don't keep tabs on literary prizes [except wrt to Michael Crummey??] but maybe I should trawl through the Wainwright back-catalog because a dozen past winners / short-listees have been favourably viewed by The Blob. One of the gob-smacking episodes of Raising Hare, is when one of Dalton's adoptees elects to deliver a litter of kits behind a curtain inside the house.  It is a testament to the non-threatening empathy of their host. It is less crazy than you'd think because hares are fastidiously clean about their person and leave no trace - because to do so is to invite the attention of carnivorous predators.

Dau.I the Librarian filleted out a book for me from the book-stream she was processing. Featherhood (2020) by Charlie Gilmour is a memoir and reflection on the [abusive] relationship between fathers and sons over 2 generations more or less spanning the 20thC.  Charlie, the last son in the dynasty, was abandonned at birth by his famous and famously eccentric father Heathcote Williams. He spent the first 28 years of his life working to forge a relationship with this serial evader of parental responsibility.

A key theme of commonality is that both father and son chose to rear tame corvids - treating their homes as free-range aviaries. Heathcote adopted, and wrote poems about, a jackdaw Coloeus monedula called Jack Daw. While Charlie found a magpie Pica pica in a London gutter, named it Benzene and looked after it for nearly three years. Hence the book-title [har har] Featherhood. The difference between hares and crows [and birds in general] is that the latter are not house-trained in the way that small childer, cats, dogs, and hares can be. The most aggravating aspect of keeping a flock of free-range hens in the 00s was that they drifted in to hang about on our warm salubrious South-facing stoop and shat all over it. Don't get me started on the pair of skittery-shittery ducks we had for a while. At least the ducks were adept at hoovering up slugs in the kale. And it's sweet to have robins Erithacus rubecula in the polytunnel - but don't leave the laundry hanging there longer than necessary.

Corvids, like most birds, are just cloacally incontinent. If you choose to keep them indoors expect shit on the table-cloth - and every other surface. But corvids are carnivorous and are programmed to stash surplus food against a rainy day. If you feed the wee darlin's maggots, mince and scrambled [shells-and-all please] eggs, then expect to find giblets poked up your sleeve, meal-worms in your hair, and old meat book-marks. And the smell - whooph! These matters didn't effect Heathcote much because he lived feral, unwashed and surrounded by brimming chamber-pots. Charlie and his avant-garde artist partner Yana adapted to the maelstrom because they were on A Mission.

Benzene isn't a difficult individual to please. Her medieval tastes are simple enough. She likes music. She likes men. She likes to consume small animals when they're still alive. They assumed their magpie was male until, as a yearling, she started building a nest atop the fridge: a most unsuitably slippy surface to start weaving twigs and detritus into a nursery.

Before I lived in their basement, my New England foster-parents had hosted a sooty mangabey Cercocebus atys in the same space. This beast had been rescued from a Boston brothel where he'd endured a miserable existence wanking away in a cage in the lobby. Some of the whores used to torment him, but the clients were in general more kind and supportive. In the cellar, the mangabey would roar blue-murder at the sight of any woman but pause in his frantic business to hold out a hand to men, in the hope of a treat.

Charlie was eventually adopted, and loved and supported by David "Pink Floyd" Gilmour when his mother dated and then married the guitarist. It didn't keep the chap from going off the rails with drink and drugs and mental breakdown as a teenager. But his new Dad was infinitely kind, tolerant and open-handed. Not all men, indeed. For one of his offensive off-'is-'ead escapades Charlie was banged up in chokey for 16 months, but new Dad embraced him at the prison gates when he was released.

So Feathered is less bucolic and meadow-sweet frothy than your average contender for a Wainwright Prize.

Going for Solar

It was dreich ould time last week. If it wasn't raining, it was either just finished raining, or was looking to start raining. The brightest thing on our lane was a dozen canary & green pumpkins which I hooked on the gate for Hallowe'en.

At Friday teatime we were scheduled for a Knowledge Transfer Group KTG meeting down at the mill in the valley . . . to learn about Solar Power. KTG is an excellent scheme to encourage adult education among farmers. Farmers work hard all day, every day, and won't be stopped by a drop of rain: but they are conservative and won't leave the routine, needed, work for fripperies. Being a member of a KTG and turning up to meetings comes with a small inc€ntive to cover time and petrol.  Knowledge is quite the broad church for KTG. Last Friday Solar Energy, last June we hosted KTG to have a couple of dozen farmers be skeptical about our Traditional Hay Meadow. The best thing for many of them that day in 2024 was the brack and flapjacks and the tureen of tea I made.

But often education is a seed sown rather than a stick to beat you. Seeing those strangers up the lane managing their fields in 1940s style, coupled with the ruinous increase in the cost of nitrates, might have made a couple of our neighbours ponder whether there might be a better / different way of doing things in their own patrimony.

I have been a Great Solar Bore GSB since our solar panels went live on 30 Apr 2025. Obsessively running upstairs to switch on the immersion heater when the sun breaks through and the panels start to snag kWs; or setting a batch of sourdough going before breakfast when the forecast is giving ☀️ or even 🌤️ after lunch. It was of course ironic that it was all grey drizzle on KTG Solar day - "Hydropower, so it is" as one wag put it. Here we all are [L] looking at a Fronius dc/ac inverter buzzing away in a shed - much drier than us. Fronius inverters are guaranteed fireproof and weather proof. After looking at the inverter and the array of solar panels it serviced on the roof above, we repaired up the hill for tea and biscuits [some chocolate: thanx D!] at the village hall.  Tea and chat [and biscuits] is an important part of these meetings. The organizers hope that folk are talking about alternatives to perennial ryegrass or how many kW does a slurry-stirrer draw. But any ould chat will do to cement community and make people comfortable. If KTG reminds anyone of, like, school as it was practiced in the 20thC it will likely freeze every mind in the room with stress. 

After tea, there was a short, on message, informative, presentation. The take-homes:

• most people, even those who can change a plug, don't really know how much it costs to boil that vs that kettle or do 2 slices in that toaster from Harvey-Norman
• a 10 year guarantee won't do much for you if the company that issued it has folded
• if you are making your own power, try to use it all in-house
• selling surplus to the grid is only possible while it is politically expedient
• the steady state established norm is that you don't get paid for surplus
• there are cheap solar panels and panels which are fire, hail and storm-proof 
• community buy-in may get you bulk discounts 
• informed independent advice from someone who is not selling product may save you heart-ache and money 

The PTSD war distilled

To commemorate the 80th anniversaries of VE [May'45 & Margraten] and VJ [Aug'45 & St Laurens] days, Donnchadh Ó Ceallacháin, Keeper of the Medieval Museum in Waterford organized 1) a trawl through the collective memory 2) a conference about the Déise in The Emergency. The best time to tap into oral history is always 10 years ago; but Now is better than Not. The event was opened by the Mayor of Waterford [seen R guarded by a young chap who has a gig doing cos-play in period kit as a squaddie in the Irish Army of the 1940s].

1) When my pal Russ (historian, researcher, broadcaster, author) contacted me this Summer about what my father and grandfather did in The War, I had a sense of imposter syndrome. My Grandfather, as harbormaster at Dunmore East, definitely had a role to play in The Emergency of 1939 - 1945 because his tenure in office (1922 - 1947) bracketed the entire period. Dunmore would have been the Front Line if Das Dritte Reich had made moves to occupy the country and make quislings of the IRA. But wrack my brains with hammer and tongs but I couldn't come up with a single anecdote about his (second) War and only smidgeons about his adventures in WWI.

About my father I had slightly more information, not least because I had captured a few events and anecdotes in The Blob over the years since Jan 2013. Sinking off Sardinia. - - - Up Dover Beach. My qualms were brushed aside, and Russ'n'Bob filled a generous hour of memory-by-proxy in September. There are plans to digitize and hopefully make searchable transcripts of this material . . . for posterity. It was slim heritage pickings at our kitchen table because my Dad basically did not talk about his War. In an essay typed up [a good bit easier than speaking up!] in the 1990s, my father referred to Bryan Scurfield, a much admired and effective older officer under whom he served in HMS Hunter. Scurfield's later command HMS Bedouin was out-gunned and sunk in the Mediterranean in June 1942. Scurfield survived as a POW only to be killed by friendly fire in the very last month before VE-day. The pity of war, the ptsd war distilled.

And nor did my Mother: she served at least six years in uniform, dated a number of aircrew who never came back, saw one of her friends blown to fritters at a V2 launch site, shared a jeep with French commandos with knives bloody from killing German sentries. But my father died aged 83, while my Mum lived into her 100th year. In her 90s, her PTSD drained away a little and she opened up with some scarcely believable tales of lice, horses, scavenging professors, code-breaking, fur-coats and Hitler-rich photo-albums. Ignore all that, my mother never set foot in the Déise until she married in 1950: three years after her much-love FiL had retired to Co Wexford.

2) Silence among veterans of foreign wars was a running theme at the Waterford Conference. One delegate referred to it as omerta -- neither asked nor spoken about in the family nor the local community. So it seems that the best time to tap into oral history is not 60 years ago; because then the memories are so raw they may bleed if poked.

Another running theme was the fact that The State was less than 20 years old when hostilities broke out [in Poland] in September 1939. Not so fast! Up until the very end of 1937, the polity in the 26 counties was Saorstát Éireann. The Republic was not two years old when it was announced that a state of war existed between Britain and Germany. de Valera [felt he] had to teeter totter so as not to offend either of the belligerent sides and try to bring in enough tea to sustain the people.

Hindsight gives a different complexion on actions and inactions during The Emergency. Would Ireland really have been neutral-but-leaning-Allies if Churchill had fought them on the beaches . . . and lost. I mention this because Nuremberg told us that The Other Side was the sole perp when it came to war-crimes in WWII. There was no killing of prisoners [ooops Katyn] or civilians [er Hello Dresden], let alone weapons [Hiroshima] of mass [Nagasaki] destruction [to use an anachronistic term] by the Allies. Many Waterford folk were definitely leaning-Allies: Serving in the merchant marine in Allied convoys like my FiL Pat the Salt; or Dermote Bolger's Dad on MV Kerlough. Or going full in and sailing with the "Grey Funnel Line" a euphemism for the British navy.

The last talk flagged a monument in Bavaria where the crew of a British Lancaster has been adopted by the village of Bolstern. The speaker was the gt.nephew of the Navigator, F/S Terry McEneaney from Waterford City. The bomber crashed outside the village and the whole crew was killed. It is possible that one of the last actions of the pilot was a swerve to avoid hitting the village. The family took the trouble to find out what happened to ObLt Gunther Koberich, the pilot credited with downing the Lancaster . . . he died 5 days later on yet another mission. The pity of war; the pity war distilled.  That personnel research is of personal interest because we live in the house the bomb fell on that Felix built in 1941. Because it has been on my mind, for the last 25+ years, to mine Luftwaffe records to see which squadrons were out on the night of 1st/2nd Jan 1941and which crew reported a) getting lost b) jettisoning their load at 0600 hrs. Like the folks from Bolstern, it would be nice to go Full Atatürk on these boys who were doing a job of work in severely adverse and dangerous conditions:

"You, the mothers who sent their sons from faraway 
countries, wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying 
in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives
 on this land they have become our sons as well."   

Shucking chestnuts

🌰You know and I know that there are two sorts of chestnuts in these islands. Horse chestnuts = conkers Aesculus hippocastanum vs sweet chestnuts Castanea sativa. Don't be eating horse chestnut: it is loaded with aesculin a coumarin related toxin, not to mention getting all frothed up inside by the soapy saponins which are also present at high titre. They are both called chestnuts because a) nuts b) 'similar' palmate multilobed leaves. But the two species are about as far as they could be phylogenetically. A horse chestnut freshly blurfed from its shell is a gorgeous thing. 

🌰I've always been disappointed by fresh-fallen sweet chestnuts, though. The covering is much more offensively spiny - you have to be a bit previous in your attack to get ahead of squirrels - and the insides are, for me, always wizened husks or too small to bother with. Which is a bummer because I love marrons glacés or chestnuts roasting on an open fire or in any other form.

🌰In 2007 we planted a few hundred 10 y.o. oak and other trees courtesy of our pal Rene. In among that micro-forest were about a dozen Castanea sativa. Some of which were thinned by Sean the Forester in 2022. In Sept 2025, I was stravaiging through our wood when I found a tuthree sweet chestnuts on the ground. Inside was the usual disappointment. A month later under a different tree the leave litter was dense with fallen chestnuts in various states of undress. I shucked a bunch right there and then went back for a bucket to do my shucking in the warm and dry [R with old boot for scale]. I went back a couple of times and stopped when I had ~10lb = 4.5kg. Leaving some for wild loafers. I was amazed and delirah, especially after I cut a couple of small ones in half and chugged down the contents.

🌰According the Dau.II & the Internets, chestnuts will keep for a year if frozen or a month in the fridge. But this is not great advice. Chestnuts sweat through their shells and a bagful gets soggy in the fridge. And turn quickly furry if left out of the fridge. I triaged my horde and put 2x 500g of the biggest shiniest nuts in the freezer against Christmas stuffing. I also passed a 1° quality bag to La Torbellina my cookie neighbour. She scored the shells with a cross and boiled them with aniseed and lemon in the eSpanish way. Scoring and roasting is only sensible to process small amounts (for immediate consumption) because as the nuts cool, the inner membrane re-glues itself to the nut. 

🌰The last two bags, of 2° grade and smaller nuts, having lurked in the fridge for a week, were triaged, cut in half and boiled for 5 minutes. Six nuts had decided to make an attempt at sprouting-for-posterity, so I potted them out in sieved compost [before boiling!]. About 10% of the remainder were squidgy or discoloured within. Compost! Processing the hot nuts gives you the same sort of wet burns as Seville oranges when making marmalade. I found that the best shucking tool was two opposing thumbs: in ideal cases that popped the half nut out of shell and membrane. In other cases it was more of a struggle. I hope my thumb nails don't get infected from compacted matter; they were quite sore when I'd finished. The work-to-reward ratio is not as positive as for marmalade, but 8oz = 225g has been frozen against Christmas [see L], as well as the larger unshucked qnty already there.

🌰The smaller chestnuts looked suspiciously like filberts / hazel Corylus avellana, but these two species are in different families (as below). Castanea is sibling to beech Fagus sylvatica and oak Quercus robur in Family Fagaceae although their fruit look quite different. Which is a lesson in taxonomy: don't over-emphasize Obvs features, like palmate leaves, to determine evolutionary relationships.

English	Genus	Family
Alder	Alnus	Betulaceae
Birch	Betula	Betulaceae
Hornbeam	Carpinus	Betulaceae
Hazel	Corylus	Betulaceae
Chestnut	Castanea	Fagaceae
Beech	Fagus	Fagaceae
Oak	Quercus	Fagaceae
Hickory	Carya	Juglandaceae
Pecan	Carya	Juglandaceae
Walnut	Juglans	Juglandaceae