Sloppin' Bob

We have a polytunnel. At 17m x 9m its footprint is quite a bit bigger than the 2-floor area of our house. At one time we had a straggly grapevine trained up a trellis inside the tunnel. A friend, who knows a thing or two about wine came to view the tunnel when it was new and the plastic was clear and clean. I asked him: if were were to propagate our vine and have a 17m run of plants suitably pruned and fed and cared for, how much wine might we get in a good year? Oh, he replied,  a bottle a day with a following wind. We contrived to kill our little vine shortly thereafter. But for nearly 20 years, we've had on-again off-again success with green beans and tomatoes and courgettes. And a mighty triffid of a rosemary bush.

We do have a garden-tap in one corner which ultimately comes from our domestic 30m deep borehole but I'd rather use rainwater which falls on the plastic and gets guttered into various receptacles. Years ago, I bought 50m of perforated pipe with the intention of subterranean drip-feeding our ~10m long 'middle bed' where we most often grow the beans. But a different know-it-some pal assured me that such a project would be futile unless the pipe was perfectly level, Otherwise the water would just pool at the lowest point and everything else would be Sahara. So I'm still slopping out water into the bottomless buckets into which the various veg are planted. 

It rained on Saturday 27th June 2026 and I used that to top off all our water containers, down to the pair of 10lt plastic watering cans. Circled L is our Outside IBC, which is 2m higher than the plant roots it serves and the 2-wheeled stable barrow whc can double-job to hold ~250lt water. At this full capacity, we have a reservoir of close to 3 tonnes. That sounds like a lot, it is a lot. One tonne is about what I need for drinking in a year. But IF we have 3 dozen bucket-beds for veg ANDIF they get ~3 lt every time they're watered THEN 1 tonne will only last 10 days. 

But this year, it didn't rain again until a 25 minute Summer downpour at tea-time on Weds 29th July; and again more sustained on Mon 3rd August.  By 29th July we had more-or-less drained our reserves and I was tap-topping up the big-blue wheel barrow with cool clear well water. And leaving it to get to 'room-temperature' for 24 hours. That 29/07 shower delivered at least 120lt of water. The steady drizzle on the afternoon of 03/08 has put 500 litres into the Outside IBC and as much again has been captured in other containers.

But we've had most un-Irish multi-week rain-free spells in the Summers of 2018, 2023, 2025 and now 2026. The Beloved says I'm too old to be heaving buckets of water about. But I demur: I'm not about to pay ready money at a gym to get a similar workout.

I don't keep good records of when it rains, because it's Ireland. But I do notice when the weather goes all Ancient Mariner [With throats unslaked, with black lips baked / We could nor laugh nor wail/ Through utter drought all dumb we stood . . .] and the grass turns crisp and yellow. We are close enough that daily rainfall records from Alan O'Reilly at CarlowWeather are a pretty good aide memoire for past rainfall

Beard stokes food

Back in my YouTube days [ie before I went cold YTurkey  in Jan 2026], I went on a sub-jag watching, with fascinated horror, Adam "Beard Meats Food" Moran engaged in gluttonous food challenges usually against the clock. Restaurant will account it positive publicity to offer food for free IF the punter clears their enormous platter. 5kg of coleslaw, a 40oz steak with chips and trimmings, a gumboot full of fried clams. It is gross on many levels but Moran is affable and funny and the variety of challenge options keeps the channel going: 6+million subscribers & 2+billion views is apparently enough to give up the day job [wikipedia, I cannot obvs link to YT].

More paint is needed! The latest tradie to be living with us is slapping emulsion on the interior walls - one room at a time. It is hugely disruptive because although our home is modest at 1,000sq,ft = 90sq.m the amount of clutter is Mighty. books do furnish a room More books than I care to count is okay: IF they are stacked on shelves up against a wall THEN they are effective sound and thermal insulation. But boxing t'feckers up and moving them is a royal PITA. Note to self: do serious triage on the library [and the photo collection] before mobilizing the tradesmen. Yesterday we drove to Waterford for another 10 lt of fancy paint. 

It wasn't a total blow to the carbon foot print because a) we filled the car with The Recycling and b) two fruit-boxes of de-cluttering [one of books and one of nonsense] for Oxfam; c) & d) we fulfilled two health-adjacent appointments for The Beloved. I was required as chauffeur-paramedico after the treatments; and to heft the clutter. She promised to buy me lunch. I said I'd make a sandwich and bring me own. But between appts, there we were at noon getting seated in Hook & Ladder. Lunch menu didn't start until 12:30 so, despite preferring a ham'n'cheese toastie, I ordered a second breakfast. Begob & begut! It was like a Beard Meats Food eating challenge or reg'lar breakfast at The Pig & Whistle Diner in Brighton MA ca. 1982. But nothing that a Kobayashi shake won't settle, or running down a tuthree sheep. Also I was brought up to polish my plate, and so

Burp! From the Menu FARMER’S FAIR  2 Sausages, 2 bacon, 1 black & 1 white pudding, ½ tomato, mushrooms, rosemary potatoes, 1 fried egg, 4 x ½ toast 4 butter pats 1a,c,d,2,5,14 €13.95 (1a. wheat, 1c. barley, 1d. oats, 2. Crustaceans, 5. Eggs, 14. Sulphites). WTF crustaceans? Maybe Pill-bugs Armadillidium vulgare in the black pudding?

Lick it off a stone, didn't

I was at this gaahden  paahty in England with a mission. Actually, of course, I went for free booze and sausage rolls but I found myself getting all Ancient Mariner "long grey beard and glittering eye, now wherefore stopp'st thou me" etc. on the poor wedding (anniversary) guests. I had to explain to anybody who couldn't escape [wheelchair, dodgy hip, emphysema, whatever] just how brilliant my pal the hostess was. My formative experience of this multitalentedness was in the world of molecular biology, which has a technical language quite opaque to outsiders, so it was Work to make sense. Two glasses of fizz didn't help.

Anyway, I button-holed a misfortunate 30-something niece, and gave it socks on the auntie-propaganda front. Not least because Mark ch.6 v.4. When I slowed down a bit, we fell to talking about how it was, as a Greek woman, living and working in middle England. It was okay, so long as you didn't let the niggling casual racism get under your skin. "And how is it in Ireland?", she asked. I wasn't going to trot out some tired old platitudes about Ireland of the welcomes; nor did I feel qualified to quantify how prevalent was the setting fire to direct provision centres.

Accordingly I replied brightly that my 30-something daughters and all their friends were a) colour-blind b) embracing the entire range of the LGBTQ+ spectrum c) giving me some optimism about the future of Ireland as a multi-cultural h[e]aven. Their collective watchword seems to be "you do you, knock yourself out, none of my business". The Niece raised a quizzical eyebrow and said that my children didn't develop their inclusive sensibilities without any input from their parent[s]. "No No", I replied, "it's not just my daughters; it's their entire cohort, their entire generation, they are all kind, tolerant and forgiving, I delight in their company".

"Yer, yer", said the Niece, "but you can't escape all responsibility, I blame the parents". We had agreed earlier that her Aunt had a finely tuned crap-detector. So her clincher was "You must be a good person, you wouldn't be my Aunt's friend else." And that was the Last Word on the matter.  

Folding money

The great Euro currency project is 25 years old and Der Mann has decided we need a new design on the banknotes. Which is kinda quixotic given how much change kaChing! has happened in the world of currency transactions. On the shuttle bus to Bristol Airport last week, for example, I sat behind two Australian backpackers who were settling up their debts [in UK£ AU$ and €€€] with a few swipes on their smart phones. The olde tea shoppe in Bath refused to accept cash. I can use "quixotic" because Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra features on half of the proposed designs of the new €50 note.

The design brief was either famous European cultural icons: €5 Maria Callas €10 Ludwig von Beethoven €20 Marie Curie €50 Miguel de Cervantes €100 Leonardo da Vinci €200 Bertha von Suttner. Gaah! Marie Curie is such a usual suspects choice to represent European Women in Science: I have blobbed a couple of dozen more interesting names. And Baroness Bertha Sophie Felicitas von Suttner née Countess Kinsky von Wchinitz und Tettau ?? - never 'eard of 'er, although she clocked the 1905 Nobel Peace Prize.

The other option involves specified birds with a compulsory river feature  and Eurobatimentson the reverse

• €5 wallcreeper Tichodroma muraria || European Parliament 
• €10 kingfisher Alcedo atthis || European Commission, 
• €20 bee-eater Meropidae || European Central Bank, 
• I think they mean Merops apiaster the only bee-eater endemic to (Southern) Europe
• €50 white stork Ciconia ciconia || Court of Justice of the EU 
• €100 avocet Recurvirostra avosetta || European Council & Council of the EU
• €200 northern gannet Morus bassanus  || European Court of Auditors 

These banknotes are so freighted with 'meaning', stipulations, baggage & metaphor ["embodying cohesion through diversity" etc. etc.] that they are camel (a horse designed by a committee). That's probably okay because new banknotes, in contrast to new flags [NZ and AU], are meant to be hard-to-draw but it is a handicap preventing designers reaching for the sky. I liked series B because they cut us some slack by including some small print info including Linnaean binomers for the birbs and IDs for the EuroGebäude on the reverse. But I think my final pref is for Series I by Isabelle Daëron from which the €10 kingfisher is clipped above: a) having portrait banknotes is cool / different b) there are Easter-eggs like the radio-telescope and the dragonfly [sooo River] c) all the birds are haloed by the 'sun'. You / we are all invited to vote and give crowd feedback on all the designs. From me: please, no people on currency, they always turn out to have feet of clay.

Did I mention see a kingfisher? I did. Which gives me the opening to cite Halcyon or The Kingfisher of Gortrush Wood a poem [vimeo] embedded in an essay about loss, trust, family by Mark Roper. A few years ago, Jack, my more famous brother, was on the bill at an Arts festival in our post-town. Because family, I was invited to Sunday lunch at the home where he was billeted. There was one other couple at table and everyone were chatting away about, like, The Arts. I didn't have much to say! Until I suddenly twigged that the 'Mark' sitting opposite was Mark Roper the poet. I became a blushingly effusive fanboi stammering how much I'd been affected by Halcyon.

Trinity House

When I was a teenager, I spent a tiny bit of time at sea on a working ship. The gig was finagled for me by an old boyfriend of my mother. Note the passive tense: I did essentially nothing to make this happen. Nowadays, there is a whole industry mapping out Gap Years for privileged youth so they can get into the socially preferred colleges and universities. One week as a supernumerary 'working' for Trinity House was plenty enough to convince me that actually working at sea would be a long old way outside my comfort zone. Trinity House* are / were responsible for maintaining and operating lighthouses, lightships and buoys round the coast of Great Britain. The Commissioners of Irish Lights = CIL = Coimisinéirí Soilse na hÉireann does the equivalent work for the island of Ireland.

While in England recently, I idly picked up a copy of Granta 61: The Sea - Voyages, Mysteries, Discoveries, Disasters 1998, like all Grantas there were a number of interesting pieces inside. Including one about the North Carr lightship by the son of one of her last skippers. In December 1959, that vessel broke away from its moorings in a gale and drifted engineless out to sea. The Broughty Ferry lifeboat was launched but came to grief on the rocks and the entire crew of eight was drowned. By luck, determination, situational awareness and bower anchors the lightship was just able to ride out the gale on a lee shore and everyone aboard, and indeed the ship itself, survived. Let us bow our heads for the RNLI.

It was natural in that context to reference an earlier lightship tragedy, when the South Goodwin Sands lightship's anchor chain parted in a gale on the night of 26/27th November 1954. The only survivor was a 22 y.o. government scientist Ronald Murton who dived through the galley hatch as the ship rolled onto its side on the notorious sandbank. He clung to a topside stanchion [pointed out with broad arrow L] for eight hours in the dark until he was winched off by a USAAF rescue chopper from RAF Manston. That aerodrome is more recently used as a lorry park to mitigate the logistical disaster known as Brexit. RIP the crew who perished that stormy night: Horace Skipp (Master) George Cox, Ken Lanham, Sid Philpott, Walter Viney, Henry Lynn, Tom Porter. [Wreck picture credits Lighthouse Digest September 2009].

After his ordeal Murton continued his life's work on the migration and ecology of woodpigeons Columba palumbus. He was employed by the Dept Ag and Fish for this project because pigeons were a scourge for cereal farmers. In the 1950s farmers could indent in triplicate for a supply of free shot-gun cartridges and blast away at these profit-depleting avian pests. Murton's [obituary] appraisal of the Evidence concluded that pigeon numbers would never be reduced by any economically justifiable quantity of lead. That conclusion changed government policy on control methods. He wrote the book on his bird The Woodpigeon (1965).

That storm on 26th November was wreaking havoc in other parts of these islands, as noted by my pal Russ in his blog in 2019.  

(*) Formally, by royal charter of 1514 "The Master, Wardens, and Assistants of the Guild, Fraternity, or Brotherhood of the most glorious and undivided Trinity, and of St Clement in the Parish of Deptford Strond in the County of Kent". A mouthful! like “The Provost, Fellows, Foundation Scholars and the other members of Board, of the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity of Queen Elizabeth near Dublin” my other Trinity.

Only the righteous

Third weekend in July, I was over in England for a Significant Anniversary. International travel can be a schlep, and I wasn't inclined to lease an executive chopper and land on my friend's lawn in time for cake and then zoom off to my next appointment. And that's how I came to spend 4 nights with The Boy and his family in and around Bath = Aquae Sulis. My father was very restless, and so not for me restful. He tended to tack something extra onto a Perfick Day, putting children beyond their sell-by and often in tears. He didn't know when to stop. I think that was one reason why he joined the British Navy as a chap in 1931 - and indeed he did get to see the World. The habit of rushing through places, rather than being IN them, skipped my generation. But the Let's Go spirit seems to have re-ignited in The Boy, so I had a full diary.

On Sunday morning before Matins we walked down to the River Avon, borrowed a Canadian canoe, and paddled up river for half an hour. Eeee, it were lovely: we {didn't have to | couldn't} look at each other so we were encouraged to look out and about. The seating / setting also had some element of the confessional and I 'shared' some of my failings by way of explaining why [unlike some] I never reached the top of my profession and, rather than retiring early, was only able to retire when I became eligible for a free travel pass. It seems that part of the River Avon is now home to beavers, which gives visitors the chance for some 'bigger than a breadbox' observational biology on top of the birds.

I also recalled a traumatic episode of rowing with others from my childhood. In ~1935 my father graduated from 'Dartmouth" aka Britannia Royal Navy College shortly after 'the greengage mutiny' when the cadets protested about the hideous quality of the food. In 1965 a pal of his from those days became officer i/c the College. Me and my sibs had gotten quite chummy with the Duffy boys when we lived close to each other in Plymouth. So it was somewhat natural that I'd go a spend a week with them one Summer holiday. Being there, it was entirely unsurprising that the four of us would borrow a couple of skiffs from the College and row upstream one evening like Swallows and Amazons. All good fun . . . until the tide turned, a stiff breeze blew up and we were a mile from the wharf as darkness fell. I wasn't the youngest, but I was possibly the weediest and, as we will see, lacked the bottle which had won WWII in 1945. In adverse circumstances, I was quite unable to match the pull of my ship-mate and so we were more or less rowing in circles. After a good bit of justifiable ribbing from the rest of the expedition I mutinied: stood up in the boat [cardinal sin!]; gave the sole-boards a mighty tonk with the handle of my oar; roared out "I . just . can't . do . this" and burst into tears. That shut 'em up!

You may be sure that The Boy was careful about criticizing my paddling after that confession. A short time later he called "kingfisher!" and we both turned to follow the halcyon Alcedo atthis pacing upstream. They say that only the righteous get to see the kingfisher, I am so glad we saw that one together.

On the last night with my ex-pat family, three generations of us walked up to the flat-top of Solsbury Hill [whc prev] behind their house. We strode out and and made it to the top just as the sun sank below the hills to West. By way of libation to Sol Sols Sulis, The Boy had packed a small picnic: chai latte and cherries. Perfick!

 

Bearing witness

About 40 years ago, I was invited to upskill myself in the white-coat, real-science lab across the corridor from my office. I had been hired to teach population genetics because that _had_ been an important and edge-cutting area of genetics. Pop.Gen. was quite the doldrums in the early 80s, but someone had to teach it, and I was that person. The technology to look quite directly at variation in DNA was coming on-stream and they were about to inject steroids into Pop.Gen. So it was a smart move to learn which end of an Eppendorf to open [hint; not the sharp end]. I spent half a year getting to stage where a) I could generate useful, repeatable results b) I knew it would always be hard work. I recognised b) because I was working back-to-back with someone who really understood what she was doing.

I had a long weekend in England recently because my molecular mentor MolMent was having a knees-up to celebrate her 50th wedding anniversary. My parents celebrated their 50th in 2000AD and my father dropped dead [of "medical misadventure"] 6 months later. It seemed better to bear witness at the anniversary, than at a funeral, so I booked a bed-in-a-shed with The Boy in Bath, which is a 2 hour train-ride from Weymouth [as L Donald McGill, kiss-me-quick, candyfloss & sandy sandwiches] where my friends had retired early about 10 years ago. 

They were able to do that because MolMent left real science shortly after teaching me everything I know about it and put herself through Law School. She parlayed that qual to London working as a Patent Lawyer specializing in molecular biology for MegaPharm. Developing and marketing new biologics generates billion$ for shareholders, with million$ crumbs available for the Effectives. Obvs she was an asset - knowing both the law and real science to exacting standards gave her powerful negotiating power round board-room tables.

At these things (weddings, funerals, celebrations) I've learned late in life to follow my mother's lead and wade in despite being the emotional basket-case that I am. At one point I strolled to the end of the garden where a 50ft cliff fell away to the tide-line. Standing at the top (and not falling away under the influence of fizz) there was a fine view out over the bay to Portland Bill and Chesil Beach. The view point was already occupied by a husband and wife - who were not made of the same wade-in social steel as I was affecting. I told them the story [not for the first time, not for the first time that afternoon] of me and MolMent and how I'd never met anyone with such a deep "feeling for the organism" understanding of sub-microscopic molecules and processes. "Molecules schmolecules" replied the bloke, "that woman really understood Intellectual Property"; and proceeded to tell me a £15million board-room war-story.

Errrm, quite so. Some people, by genetics or upbringing or both, are destined to be lucky make their own luck by hard work, long hours, good memory and finely tuned crap-detector. It doesn't matter which college, or no-college, such folk go to, they do well anywhere anytime anyhow. That's another reason not to agonize about which college or course to choose.

Their was-delapidated, now painstakingly refurbed by Himself, Edwardian mansion with sea views is about 300m from the flat where my newly-wed parents lived in 1950 . . . and scavenged coal from the train-tracks to Portland.