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

Maroon

Tramore Trá Mhór = the big strand  is really not wheelchair accessible. It has been a resort and holiday destination since the 19thC but the houses are mostly perched on ledges up the bluff which marks the West end of the long sandy beach. Half the streets require a steep trudge uphill, unimaginable to negotiate if pushing a wheelchair. There has also been a silent war as new houses struggle for a coveted sea view: which inevitably occludes someone else's. On a couple of occasions, we've 'taken' a recently refurbished upside-down house where the entrance and living room are under the roof and the bedrooms on two floors further down the cliff-face. One result of this design is an enormous picture window overlooking a)a steep ginnel of 19thC fisher-cottages b) the dodgems and other amusements c) the full length of The Prom d) the full sweep of the beach e) Brownstown Head beyond:

On the last morning of October, I woke before dawn and fossicked about making a pot of tea. The quiet was shattered by a distant explosion, followed a minutes later by another. My assessment was "maroon" the rocket that goes up to summon enough people to man the life-boat for a 'shout'. This was informed by my experience living in a garden flat [whc prev] opposite the East Pier in Dun Laoghaire in 1975. In those days, a maroon was still the standard way of calling a crew - as it had been in 1875. In some senses 1975 is recognisably the same as now: television, washing-machines, Manchester United, 747 Jumbo jets, baked beans. But comms have changed utterly: in the 1970s you could wait 5 years to have a telephone line installed . . . five months if you were a doctor or the apparatchik of a political party. Our Dun Laoghaire flat had a shared payphone in the hall but most ordinary homes didn't -- hence the broadcast-by-rocket call to oars for the RNLI.

Nowadays crews are mustered by txt or WhatsApp; so my explanation of the pre-dawn explosion in Tramore is a hopeless anachronism. All was revealed over the next 4 minutes when I clocked a series of star-burst rockets going up from the far end of the Prom followed 1.second later by the >!BANG!<. It is illegal to import, hold, sell or use any other fireworks without a licence: specified in Section 80 of the Explosives Act 1875, as amended by the Section 68 of the Criminal Justice Act 2006. I guess the perps had calculated how long of a pyrotechnic interval they had before the Gardai could send a cruiser from the barracks just uphill from our AirBnB.  The same evening the Dublin Fire Services handled +500 emergency medical call-outs. But bonfire collateral damage was less than usual for Halloween because material got a good hosing from torrential rain the previous night

Flotsam and jetsam

The family were gathered down the Déise for the last week in October: staying in an AirBnB with a panoramic view of Tramore Bay.  

Seven of us [3 shown L] took advantage of a fine blustery sunny afternoon on 29Oct to tromp along the shingle as far as The Rabbit-burrows. The Blob has been there before. It's about 3km there and 3km back, but, in contrast to me reg'lar uphill constitutional, it is on the flat. The footing is a bit more shifting. I had me eye open for "useful" items along the tideline. I explained my distraction to Gdau.I who was walking alongside: "On any beach, I'm always looking for flotsam and jetsam". She replied with "So, what's the difference?".  Fair enough: in casual speech, trials are always hanging out with tribulations. But, with my very expensive education, I was able to blag & bluster an explanation.  Neither of us were particularly satisfied, and as soon as our devices picked up a good signal, the medieval law-of-the-sea answer was revealed.

• Flotsam: matèriel, the work of human hands, which is washed into the sea from a ship and continues to float.
• may be claimed by the finder unless the owners can establish their rights in court 
• Jetsam: floating matèriel, which is deliberately thrown overboard to lighten the load of a troubled vessel.
• normally finders keepers: the original owners having thrown it away 
• Ligan: heavy stuff which sinks, or is sunk, but is attached to a floating buoy or marker.
• may still be claimed by the owners
• Seawrack, sticks, shells, seal carcasses are not Flotsam in the correct / legal sense. 

There we go, glad that's been sorted. About 5 hours after that flotsam jetsam discussion, I was walking a different tideline at Sunset with Gdau.I's father aka The Boy. He'd missed the morning walk, for reasons, and every good boy deserves beach.

Because they love each other very much, he asked exactly the same flotsam & jetsam question as his daughter. Because of our earlier research, I could give a much more confident answer. But who really cares to open a dictionary when you're on a beach empty of people . . . and unexpectedly light on flotsam. 
And for heaven's sake, carpe diem! and get out while you can. The following day, HallowE'enE'en was all blustery rain and yellow wind warnings for the South Coast.

Allied again

Almost by accident, at the start of the academic year in 2018, I got me a rainbow silicon rubber wrist band sporting the slogan "⚧ The Institute ⚧". I wore that accessory rain shine and shower 24/365. Whatever about signalling to students and Others that I was on their side, it reminded me every day to check my privilege (and mind my gob). That ⚧ symbol did A lot of work at The Institute - reducing the number of wheel-chair accessible bathrooms so that Management could preen themselves on having gender neutral bathrooms on campus. Habit is strong within me and, after I retired two years later, I continued to wear my wristband although I encountered minority students once a year rather than every day.

Then, in the middle of October, struggling into an inherited sweater, my wristband broke. At seven years, it had lasted me longer than the sweater, but I was still a bit bereft. I sent a picture of linear silicon and a message "Boohoo, Ally No More" to my right-on offspring.

A week later, we had a multi-generational friends&family knees-up and two younger people, friends-of-family, whom I'd never met before, presented This Old Ally with replacement merch. a) a new wristier made of pastel rainbow plaited wool [new for old shown above] 

b) a brace of Ally-pins which I wore in the lapel of my charcoal-grey 100% woolmarked interview / funeral / wedding / knees-up suit. I won't take this clobber into the shower, not least because the suit is "dry-clean only" but will sport it when I'm out and about. There are plenty of opportunities for an Ould Buffer to be passive-aggressive; to be passive-inclusive, not so much. A few days later, I went for a yomp up the hill with Gdau.I now approaching 14. She said that, if I said something dopey about chromosomes in a discussion about gender and sexuality, her generation would likely forgive me. Making some allowance for the Old, in the same way as my generation used to get up off bus-seats for them. Unless it was clear that my comments were uttered as cruelty or a wind-up. Then again, it seems that 14 y.o's can be quite neanderthal in using casual racist slurs. 

Decadance

In our family the birthdays are all crammed into the last third of the year - except for me as Son of Somer Solstice. We mark these days with cards and a meal together for the adults rather than presents and cake whc are still traditional among the not-yet-voters. And the meal together is optional because half the family live in a different country. But lookit: The Beloved was born in 1955; The Boy in 1975; Dau.II in 1995; and Gdau.II in 2015 and this is 2025. Sometime over the Summer we all woke up to this alignment of the quinquennium and reckoned it was worth a knees-up sometime between mid-Sept and mid-Dec.

And so it was that a 70-50-30-10-decade Tea-dance with a glass of fizzz was organized for the afternoon of the Hallowe'en Bank Holiday Monday. We rented a room in stately Mount Congreve which is a about 15mins from the centre of Waterford or Tramore. We've been to their caff a few times, but it was only this Summer that we stumped for entry Tix to wander through the desmesne. Ambrose, last of the Congreves, was mad about the gardening. Living to the age of 104 and i/c the estate for more than half of that time, he was able to see his arborial plantings reach maturity. And the complex of walled and kitchen gardens is extensive, varied and rather wonderful. Bring a book and sit on one of the benches listening to the beezzzz fumbling the flowers.

The catering was a separate ticket but the whole event was much cheaper than a wedding. They say that you should arrange wedding receptions without mentioning the word 'wedding' lest the bill doubles. 

We saved a mort o'money on one item four items on the ticket because Dau.II has been baking and decorating cakes since she was tall enough to get her nose above the kitchen table. It is definitely not about the money because Dau.II has Standards which are far above those of most people in the business who have spent 3 or 4 years in catering school. The initial plan was to make cakes of different sizes to reflect the different ages of The Principals but that was soon ditched because it is obvious that 10 y.o. eyes are bigger for cake than those of someone with a bus-pass. Whatevs: these cakes, separately or together,  give the lie to never eat anything bigger than your head. Just wield a cake-slice and take your time. 

• Hazelnut, pear and cardomon
• Lemon meringue with 'guests'
• Chocomalt and Maltesers
• Red velvet wi' cream-cheese frosting & capybara  

In real-life, of course, you'll share your cake with the couple of handfuls of true friends who have had your back for decades. Some of these pals were unavoidably tied up promoting World Peace, but most of those invited made the trek from all over the Western European Archipelago WEA. It was a like a wedding (or a funeral) insofar as we all got to meet people whom we haven't seen for twenty "my, haven't you grown!" years. And many [partners, offspring] of whom we'd never met before.

Funerals? The principal MIA was Pat the Salt, the ancestor of all the decadancers, born 1925, who died last year in the same week as this year's festivities. Errrm, I guess that makes me The Patriarch[y]. As I type, I am wearing one of Pat's sweaters - maybe that will serve as patriarchal robing?

When good men do nothing

I have a younger friend who is, like me, a passionate believer in the EUropean Dream. As a youngster he was happy to articulate his side of any argument about the politics, economics & social benefits of hugging Magyars and Spaniards. In college he widened (or narrowed?) his political horizons to consider the inequities and inefficiencies of Ireland and asked which of the available political parties had the organizational infra-structure to get things done. His analysis decided that Fianna Fail was far-and-away the most Effective machine and so he joined the party. In May 2002, two weeks before the 2002 General Election, our entire lab was on a train to Cork for a scientific meeting. Our Kevin bailed out in Portlaoise and returned to Dublin because the Fianna Fáil website had collapsed and he was the only person in the country who knew how to fix it. We used to tease him about being the next Taoiseach but three.

I've just finished earbooking Running From Office by former TD and Minister Eoghan Murphy. Murphy was a middle class kid who could have leveraged his network and straight white privilege into a comfortable life with two cars in the drive and enough money for beer and skittles. In his 20s he working abroad as an effective UN apparatchik when the 2008 financial crash, the bailout, the Troika set fire to Celtic Tiger. He could not look on from the sidelines and watch his country get flushed down the t'ilet. His family had no party political affiliation, so he was free to choose what colour shirt to wear. Unlike Our Kevin, he cast his lot in with Fine Gael FG, the other right-of-centre party who have carved up the political turkey with Fianna Fáil FF since the foundation of the State 100 years ago.

The subtitle of Murphy's book is Confessions Of Ambition And Failure In Politics. And confessional it is. The quality of political discourse in these Post-Twitter days is so debased, that people all over the Internet are damning the book as a self-serving, self-pitying, pathetic excuse for the fact that there are still homeless people [Murphy was Minister of Housing (. . . Planning, Flood defense, Pandemics, Local Government and Elections) for several years]. We don't have a TV, and indeed I've recently stopped listening to the wireless especially The News. But I remember at the time clocking Minister Murphy as someone who was not merely marking time and blaming others but was having new ideas about how to house the nation . . . and all her dusky dispossessed dependents. 

Politics is the Art of the Possible [Politik ist die Kunst des Möglichen, Otto von B.] and there is so much inertia built into any parliamentary democracy that it is difficult for any one person, as Minister of Whatever, to achieve anything at all let alone deal with a major systemic embedded long-standing political issue like Health or Homelessness. It is otoh very easy for shouty hurlers on the ditch to prevent progress towards a more just and equable society. Lord NIMBY stalks the land holding up the Children's Hospital, Water Infrastructure, Refugee processing. Meanwhile Lord NIMBY's lieutenants are being spiteful and ad hominem on-line about politicians. That's poisonous enough, but now NIMBY's minions think it's brave to spit on the children of politicians or go by night and shit on their family doorstep.

Eoghan Murphy fought his corner on behalf of us all for 10 years but then cried Enough! before he had a total breakdown. He went on to other things which will benefit from his drive and realpolitikal chops. My opinion is that, as with Othello and Charlie Haughey, he did the state some service.  It is no harm to the health of the nation that Murphy chose to create photo-ops of him surfin', wild-water swimming and trekking [he covered 2 weeks of The Camino back in the day]. Better than being performatively seen bulging out of a funeral-and-events suit at Teh Ploughing. So Murphy is gone for now: who among Ireland's young-and-fit will next take up thankless cudgels on behalf of us old-and-not-so-fit and the dispossessed? Also on the reading list But What Can I Do? Why Politics Has Gone So Wrong, and How You Can Help Fix It by Alastair Campbell.

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" Not an Edmund Burke quote. And while we're on the pol quotes page “Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made”  Not Bismarck but John Godfrey Saxe (1869) so I don't need to rustle up the original German statement.

The Far Side

Eeee, when I were a nipper maybe ~11 y.o., I was introduced to the conventions of Ordnance Survey mapping. 

• contours close together said "hill"
• blob ⬤ surmounted by + is church with spire
• otoh filled square ■ surmounted by + is church with tower
• coniferous forests were kiki🌲while deciduous / broadleaf forests were bouba🌳
• T was telephone box [remember them?] - PH is pub - PO is Post Office 

With these tools in my carton, the next step was to create fantasy islands with footbridges, gravel pits, houses, power-lines, railways and their stations. It was a Bobby-no-Pals occupation, true; but engaging and harmless. I blame my pal Gibbo for giving map-play a darker more destructive dimension. That's by way of back-story to explain my interest in islands . . . of which there is an index [N = 70!] hereabouts.

I am not alone in paddling my sofa around distant alluring islands. A similar obsessive is Judith Schalansky who was born 45 years ago in Greifswald DDR, so an Ossi as a young child who couldn't travel beyond The Wall until it came down abruptly in 1989.  Schalansky has written a whimsical book about her interest in The Far-off and Sea-girt:  Atlas der abgelegenen Inseln. Fünfzig Inseln, auf denen ich nie war und niemals sein werde (2009). Here auf Deutsch is the N=50 list with links

So when Dau.I the Librarian had the English translation float into the Returns box, she reserved it for 'er dear old Dad and sent it to our branch library down-country. Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands - fifty islands I have not visited and never will. Translated into English by Christine Lo (2010). Here's the island list-of-links in English. I guess a) someone had to create some extra Wikipedia pages for the less well-kenned ocean-pimples b) some islands never made the cut because Schalansky couldn't rustle up even 300 coherent words about them.

For each of  the final fifty, four pages have been allocated 

1. data! Latitude and Longitude; the several and sundry names; the area; the human population, if any;  distances to a selection of other places; a telegraphic and quirky time line of its discovery and subsequent events
2. a lovely map on a 1km:5mm scale. Part of the absurdity is to represent, say,  Tromelin [80 hectare] the size of mung bean in a wash of blue  && Easter Island 160 sq.km bleeding into the gutter margin
3. & 4. A 300-400  essay about some peculiarity of the island's geography or history  . . . because it would be an impertinence to attempt a comprehensive narrative of who did what to whom over 500 years.

One of the peculiarities of this our blue planet is that all the land is crammed on one side map [as R] source and the CC licence. So only a few Europeans can claim that someone else is living exactly on the other side of the world. The Antipodes Islands in the far South Pacific barely graze the coast of Normandy, for example. Most of a flipped New Zealand would be in the Western Med, although Christchurch [43°32′S 172°38′E ] maps close-but-no-cigar to Nice [43°42′N 7°16′E]. Irish people must be content with Campbell Is, NZ [52°32′N 10°51′W] an uninhabited 112 sq.km which is antipodean to a patch of Atlantic Ocean ~60km West of Loop Head, Co Clare [52°34′N 9°56′W].

My fantasy island [above R] takes its perimeter from one of Schalansky's Fifty Favorite Islands. Hazard a guess, which? Answer below the fold.