Cruella de Cork

I rarely browse in the library because I think that I want to read non-fiction, especially science; but the overwhelming majority of library books are novels. Most pubic libraries are especially thin on the Dewey Decimal 500s (Natural Science and Mathematics). However, we were in the library while awaiting a train, and I noticed the recent acquisitions shelf. I'll have that, I said, when I saw Missing Persons or, My Grandmother's Secrets [2024] by Clair Wills. I also snagged No More Tears [bloboview] to get ahead of the reservation queue.

Wills [R] is about my age. Her mother escaped from a 30 acre farm in West Cork in the 1950s and emigrated to England where she worked as a psychiatric nurse in South London. Some of her uncles joined McAlpine's Fusiliers to dig drains and pour concrete in post-WWII Britain.  Like me, every year through her English childhood, Wills and her family went 'home' to Ireland. One difference was that my family were 'shy breeders' so that cousins to hang out with were sparse: only a diminishing store of elderly female relatives who died one after the other as we grew up. In the 1960s a whole lot of history [from last week to last generation] was not in front of the children. And much of this material was known-but-not-spoken.

Not murder like in the Case of the Stradbally Postman [whc prev] but othering and exclusion of those who kicked over the traces and got with child. There is a hint of rite-of-passage here, when girls turn ~13 they are inducted into the secrets of those who know. Boys of any age get none of that. And if you're probably gay, like one of the uncles? Not much hope or happiness there. Wills' theory is that attitudes to unwed pregnancies [and the gays] changed for the worse as ALL aspects of social welfare were handed off to The Church in the late 19thC. Before then a) there was nowhere to escape b) communities were kinder and less judgmental. The stranglehold on public morality eased off in the 1970s, although hideous cruelty continued until the end of the 20thC to be habitually meted out on the weak by deeply unhappy spiteful wearers-of-the-cloth. Unmarried mother's allowance (1973) enabled single parents, with some difficulty,  to raise children at home rather than in A Home. “The mother of a friend of mine, now in her eighties, who worked for the local county council before she was married, found herself - more than once – filing the admission papers of girls she’d seen at dances a few weeks before”. I didn't have to be like that, and maybe in isolated rural Newfoundland it wasn't.

In a recent interview [60m YT] about the book Clair Wills was asked whether it was 'history' or 'memoir'. A distinction mainly important for those who are shelving or publicizing it. It is, clearly, both. And she is self-aware enough to acknowledge that, because we all mis-remember difficult things, there might be some fiction in the mix. Talking of fiction: further reading in similar issues in West Wexford with Claire Keegan's Small Things Like These [2021 bloboview]. Further reading on the life and early death of Clair Wills Uncles in I could read the sky [1997] by Timothy O'Grady (words) and Steve Pyke (pics) [bloboview]. Mebbe it's time to re-read  Saints, scholars, and schizophrenics : mental illness in rural Ireland [1979] by Nancy Scheper-Hughes. 

If, like so many Irish families [like mine], yours has mother-and-baby homes looming unspoken in the wings, this book may be too close to the bone. There are several Clair Wills readings, excepts, interviews, reviews on YT and the wider 'net to give you a taster without the full challenging meal.

40 stabs

One of the cognitive dissonances of moving to Ireland as a young adult with a vocabulary formed growing up in England was the existence of linguistic false friends. Prev: slim & dapper; or tête & tapfer & ewe.  In England a ditch was always something dug [concave], although it was obvs cognate with dyke = dijk the convex things which preserve Nederland from washing away with the tide. I'm a fan of The Sheep Game, a YT channel following Cammy "shepherd" Wilson in Ayrshire. A couple of weeks ago, they were fencing a rented field using sheep-wire supported by "stabs". Which from the context was the same as a stake or fence-post.  Which is a too-long intro to today's stakes today.

I am also a big fan of Jim Davis, who owns the sawmill on the Carlow-Laois border in Graiguecullen. He supplied the western reg cedar planks that face our amazing [2016] woodshed.  Those cedar planks keep on giving - to make the [2023] tree-house in the woodlot for example.  I was last in the Davis saw-yard almost exactly three years ago when I bought 40 of his best oak 50mm x 50mm x 1.5m fence posts. Actually, he only had 35 oak stakes ready-pointed, so I took 5 larch ditto. Oak lasts longer in the ground because of they are full of tannins (oak-bark was a source, in tanneries, for making leather last forever). But it can be hard to drive a fence staple [nail, screw] into an oak stake . . . and impossible to get it out.  Steel screws will shear off at the head rather than ease out from between oak fibres. I waggishly called my previous stab saga Ever Last Post . . . because of the longevity, like.

Now, three years on, it's a bit more like Last Ever Posts. Indeed I was joshing Jim Davis to that effect when I back again in his yard: 

• Bob: "I hope this lot will see me out"
• Jim: "Why? how old are you?"
• Bob: "Just turned 71" 
• Jim: "Well, I'm 77 and, as you see, still sawing wood" 

Maybe he's right. You're not dead, till you're dead. Pat the Salt was still cutting his half-acre with a push-mower when he was 85. Although I think he stopped that mullarkey when he turned 86 and Dau.II and I took up the reins in 2012 - partly to get some daytime TV in, after the mowing, though. Whatevs, last week I went to Graiguecullen for to collect another 40 stabs. This time the proportion was reversed: almost all the stakes were larch with a handful of (significantly heavier) oak. Why 40? Because @€2.50 each I pay €100. They come rough-sawn so I spent a 'happy' couple of hours the following day shaving off the rip-splinters to make handling and creosote absorption easier. 

Then it was getting into my most threadbare LIDL work-pants and my sheep-dip tee-shirt (which lives permanently outside in a shed) to apply pseudo-sote - because old-fashioned, carcinogen-heavy, petrochemical by-product creosote can no longer be sold in Ireland. As before, I used a 90mm external ⌀ heavy-duty plastic tube, originally the centre of a roll of silage-wrap,  I found that the internal ⌀ of a tub of E45 paraffin cream is also 90mm and made a waterproof seal to the bottom of the silage-wrap tube. We haven't bought E45 since the last of our kids became continent, but the tubs have been convenient containers for screws, fence-staples etc. Dunking fence posts sure beats painting them, even if as here, I put each post through two immersions of creo-dunk.

Talc calc

 I don't think I killed my mother. But . . .

When I was 10, 11, 12, at the end of March each year we'd ask our mother what she wanted for her birthday. Her unwavering reply was "Oh, I don't know; Talc de Coty or covered coat-hangers". Both of which were A Thing for middle-aged, middle-class women in the 1960s. The first time small me went on a birthday mission on my ownio, I went to Boot's the Chemist determined to buy a tin as [R]. But noted that Boot's Own Generic Talcum Powder was half the price for 3x the quantity. What had my mother been thinking? She'd been allowing herself to be bilked for all those years! My mother, recognising a teaching moment, explained that sometimes less is more. Well I took that on board as an example of life's diverse ways of thinking. And found it difficult to reconcile with the fact that A Lot of  eye-wateringly expensive talcum powder finished up on the bathroom floor.

I've just romped through No More Tears: the dark secrets of Johnson & Johnson (2025) by Gardiner Harris. This is a long-form scatter-gun volume of investigative reporting listing the manifold times when J&J pursued profit in their marketing of cosmetics, drugs and medical devices . . . let the customers fall [dead] where they may. 

Because J&J is the world's biggest MegaPharma Corp, and they shifted A Lot  of product, the [dead] count laid at their door is, according to Harris (un)comfortably in excess of 100,000, or even 1,000,000 people. Their anti-psychotic offering Risperdal was doled out  to kids with ADHD and to troublesome old dears in nursing homes. To sell more units they suborned psychiatrists, GPs and matrons with 'consultancies', dinners, jaunts to Florida and biros . . . so many branded biros. They also buried any reports of adverse reactions. I've written [too much] about Eli Lilly's rival medication Zyprexa aka Olanzapine.

But perhaps the longest running J&J saga concerned their iconic baby powder the existence of which stoked much of the positive feelings Joe and Josie Public had towards J&J. Talc is a form of magnesium silicate Mg₃(Si₂O₅)₂(OH)₂. It is the softest mineral on the Mohs scale and is dug out of the ground from mines in Vermont and Italy and many other places. Asbestos is another form of magnesium silicate Mg₃(Si₂O₅)(OH)₄. It is an almost inevitable contaminant of talc, some mining locations being worse than others. Long after baby powder became sn essential part of This American Life evidence of the association between asbestos exposure cancer became overwhelming. Folk started testing for the stuff in likely and unlikely places and found it everywhere. J&J's made some effort to mitigate asbestos in their premier baby product but couldn't eliminate the last ppms . . . so STOUTLY asserted that baby powder had no significant asbestos and continued to manufacture talc-based baby powder even after rivals reformulated to cornstarch. the J&J C-suite doubled down on their denials. That change in corporate culture soon spread through every division of the conglomerate: nothing to see here . . . this biro is filled with $100 bills . . . that senator needs a corporate campaign donation . . . christmas bonus for everyone who exceeds their sales targets.

It is certainly likely that the industrial talcum powder which I gave my mother in 1965 had more asbestos than the fancy stuff. But a) she probably dumped it b) she lived to 99¾ c) she never had ovarian cancer. So I can probably damp my conscience on matricide-by-talc.

Footnote on the workings of libraries. Several years ago, all the public libraries of Ireland adopted a common catalogue and reservation system. 'tis brilliant: you can, from your sofa, browse away and wait for the call when the book you desire arrives at the nearest convenient branch. I ordered No More Tears a few months ago and watched my reservation number crawl up the list. It's published this year, involves scandal, there's plenty other folks who want to read it but haven't €20 available for a single read or shelf-space for another hardback. 

Image my surprise to when I was, for the first time this year, in Bagenalstown Library before meeting Dau.II off the train . . . and saw 'my' book on the recent accessions shelf opposite the counter. That's a bit unfair, I said to the librarian when I checked it out, but I could check it out and I did. Then again, each County Library system is still an autonomous unit with its own budget and priorities. Our county had decided to buy 1 copy of that book, so it seems right that local patrons should have first dibs on borrowing it. When it goes back tomorrow, it can get in the queue and get shipped to Sligo.

By the seaside

Been reading, me. Weighty tomes - one metaphorically heavy; the other 480pp 0.35kg = Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean (2011) by Philip Mansel [Guardian].

In reviewing Michael Crummey's Sweetland,  I touched up on a rather inclusive and open acceptance of the diversity of sex and its practice in rural 20thC Newfoundland . . . plenty of native nookie and the results of these liaisons are accepted even if marital non-paternity is known or suspected. I rather enjoyed his description of the end of days in a Newfoundland Outport and noted that another of his works was borrowboxable as e-book. The Innocents (2019) develops the story of a microscopic maritime community  in 19thC Newfoundland. Two subadult children are left alone after their newborn baby sister, their mother and then father are all carried off within a few weeks of each other. The kids have learned some aspects of living and making a living [salt cod, furs] in super-adverse conditions: the ice piles up in their remote cove each winter; they plant root vegetables and forage berries in the Fall; they eat fish in abundance.  

The perennial problem in such edge communities is spreading out the calories and vit-C so that they are available 12 months a year instead of 12 weeks. For the orphaned childer, this necessity is met by the twice yearly visit of the same trading schooner: bringing salt, shot, fish-hooks and flour in the Spring and taking cod-planks in the Fall. A couple of times, the sea delivers a Robinson Crusoe bonus to the kids by wrecking a ship out there and washing the debris [hats, coats, rum, cordage] ashore. Survival is the driving theme but nookie and the results of these liaisons also stitches together the teenage lives. The ending is happy: for some definitions of happy.

Diversity, inclusion and sex are also central to Philip Mansel's Levant his history of the Near East  in 19thC & 20th. He focuses on three jewels in the crown of Levantine cosmopolitanism: Smyrna, Alexandria and Beirut. I worked with a fellow in the 1980s who had, as a student, achieved the epitome of sophisticated cool in 1974: (snow powder) skiing on Mount Lebanon in the morning and water-skiing off a Beirut beach in the afternoon. On 13th April 1975 a random act of sectarian violence kicked off 15 years of Lebanese Civil War. 

In 1975, the population in Lebanon was ~2.5 million, over the next 15 years, +1 million fled and 150,000 were murdered by the neighbours. Same thing happened in Smyrna in 1922 [bloboprev]. Same thing (on a much smaller scale) occurred in 1882 Alexandria. In the background, and profiting from the disruption, were citizens and emporia of The Great Powers. Before the sht ht the fan, these three cities were kind of wonderful to inhabit - if you had a bit of money [a little hard currency could go a long way]; if you were a little bit gay [CP Cavafy R]; if you couldn't accept every word of your vicar, imam or patriarch. In Smyrna you could read a french newspaper, in an armenian café, eating greek pastries, while wearing a smart suit from your jewish tailor. Women could also sit in the same café sans hijab; a thing impossible even 10 km into the city's hinterland.

The Beloved's grandfather, some sort of Christian (Maronite?) left his crappy Lebanese valley orange grove with his brothers and migrated via Beirut and Alex to West Africa 100 years ago. His three daughters grew up in multicultural colonial West Africa in the 1940s. By 2000, they all finished up, for reasons, in Ireland. It was a wonder to watch them making houmous: bickering in English, French, Hausa about garlic and salt. Always too much food but so much kindness and welcome as well. Smyrna and Alexandria are now as boring, parochial and monoglot as the small town with the big cathedral where I went to school in the 1960s. Beirut is rebuilding itself from the rubble as the last bastion of The Levant - where cultures clash and get into bed with each other and synergies result.

The mountains labored and . . .

. . . brought forth 60g of poppy seed [parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus Quintus Horatius Flaccus aka Horace 65 BC - 8 BC]. Nit griping, really. No labour was expended in this. The poppies [of several different varieties] flourish in the corners of the polytunnel because the weeders [def'n'y not me!] have other things to do with their lives. Poppy Papaver rhoeas or Papaver sominiferum is an excellent example of a weed species - it is often the first in when ground is ploughed, bombed or otherwise disturbed. The seeds are light and prolific, so get widely dispersed. 

I sat down on the last evening in July with a soup bowl and a pair of scissors, topped the dry seed-heads and poured the black gold into a soup bowl [as R]. The biggest seed heads [think cherry] get processed first; because it's easier to justify giving up when the seed heads are the size of a raisin and yielding very little. There's sufficient wastage and clumsiness to ensure that some seed is broadcast locally to ensure that the poppy is ever with us. I've harvested poppyseed before: 2015 - 2024. 

Grow your own; make your own

Last year local libraries handed out packets of seed. I pre-planted the beans and peas in 4cm micropots to be germinated under the sofa. But I couldn't be dealing thus with spinach; so I cleared 1 sq.m. inside the polytunnel; lurried in a few buckets of compost; broadcast the spinach seed; and raked them in. In a couple of weeks, the weeds were back in numbers but the spinach came up as well; and I had to water c a r e f u l l y lest the wispy seedlings were carried away in the flood. Since then, for the whole of July and half of June that spinach has kept on giving [R below for one day's harvest]. [R above] is the too-small-to-pick abundance left for  another day. It's true, however, that I often hand-pick a sandwichful for lunch.

I never wash own-self-grown salad leaves because I know there is no coliform in that part of the garden; and who wants wet leaves in a sandwich?? In contrast there's been another national recall of contaminated produce: this time spinach (and rocket, mixed leaves). The only advantage of _buying_ fresh picked greens is that there's a chance they are packed in nitrogen which will (until opened) protect the product from spoilage much better than a bag in the salad drawer of my fridge.

I say another national recall of contaminated produce because we had one also involving Listeria just two weeks ago! That was at the value added end of the food chain in Ballymaguire Foods up in Lusk, Co Dublin/Fingal. If you've ever eaten a chilled 'ready meal' in Ireland [Aldi, Centra, Supervalu, Tesco] chances are it was made by Ballymaguire, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Hoey Family at Country Crest Ltd. The Hoeys used to grow and sell spuds but, like Keogh's Crisps, worked out they could do better by processing produce and now have 400 on the payroll. This recall list  gives some idea of the cross-contamination possibilities:

• Bolognese with Pancetta
• Chicken & Chorizo with Baby Potatoes
• Goose Fat Irish Potatoes
• Ham & Mushroom Tagliatelle
• Irish Angus Beef Meatballs with Pappardelle
• Mashed Turnip or potato [€6.50/kg "gluten free"]
• Potato Gratin
• Rainbow Root Vegetables
• Salmon Penne Pasta
• Three Cheese Cauliflower Bake
• Veggie Lasagne
• Wholemeal Pasta Bolognese

You can buy organic potatoes for less than €2/kg, so getting them mashed by strangers for your family is [€4.50!] costly . . . even without dicing with Listeria.

make your own? An earlier Me might have expressed amazement that adults in 21stC Ireland couldn't mash their own potatoes, let alone construct a basic chicken pie. Last year we went through a jag of buying and eating Aldi Deluxe Special fancy pot pies. They were tasty [food engineers know their onions] even if they had 30 different ingredients. Well obvs home-baked pies would likely max out at ~10 different ingredients, so convenience isn't about limiting the inventory in your pantry. My judgey gripe is imaging the cliché office worker unable to cook because they're exhausted from pounding the keyboard all day. Really? Not all office workers! but I reckon some of them would live longer and happier lives if they cared about food prep and did it well rather than shirking it as an invidious chore. 

I confessed this a tuthree days ago when I was having lunch with Cookie Dau.II. She invited me to check my privilege. There are far too many people living in B&B hotel rooms with no chopping board & only a microwave for cooking. And cohorts of elders living alone but not eligible for Meals-on-Wheels. And folk with the palsy or registered blind. I accept that, but I suspect there aren't enough such edge cases to justify a whole industry processing food for profit. The business model depends on healthy, fit, people who can afford the price of convenience and choose not to donate that discretionary income to people who cannot.

One result of eating a few dozen Aldi pot pies in 2024, is that I have a stack of those dinky aluminium foil dishes. For me it is the work of minutes to make a batch of short-crust pastry, enough for a week's worth of pies, say, Mo We Th. There is a good bit of Lebanese genes culture swilling about in the family: many of my rellies are unable to stop over-catering for The Unexpected Guest. There is always something to fill a pie in a left-overs tupperware tub in the fridge. The example [R] contained an interesting mix of brown lentils, green beans, red onion, beige garbanzos, with a smidge of diced chorizo.  It's probably more efficient to take a leaf out of Hoey Inc's playbook and assemble a batch of pies all at once - say a half dozen, not a half tonne. They'll keep a few days as >!Shazzam!< convenience in the fridge and much longer in our freezer rather than Aldi's. Pricewise, I'd guess the mark-up between my pie and Ballymaguire pie is about the same as for mashed potato. And any contamination from sloppy kitchen practice will just be asymptomatic family-own-self coliform. I wouldn't serve Uncle Dan from Canada one of my pies - his microbione is a different, susceptible, kettle of fish altogether.

I don't know any specific cases but it's Lombard Street to a china orange that some of 'my' Food and Ferm microbiology students from my working days in The Institute finished up doing QC for major food producers in Ireland. I reckon they're better at doing Gram--stains from production line samples now than when they were on my watch. 

Just a perfick day

♬ ♪ ♫ Lou Reed ♫ ♩ for background.

Back in the days when letters were sent & stamps were purchased, I visited A Lot of post-offices; from the GPO [Cúchullain! 1916!] on O'Connell Street to the sub-post office at the back of Greene's Bookshop round the corner from work in TCD. There was a marked difference in service culture among these several stamp-vendors. I developed a theory that sticking dingy sub-post offices at the back of a shop and a long way from natural light bred a service of sighs - surly tending to snappy and officious. Not all post offices!!

The 1915 vintage Post Office, with its classical facade just up from the river in Bagenalstown was worth the visit: a little cramped but with big windows and many nice architectural details. The Beloved claims she sometimes drove straight through Borris PO [crabby postmaster] to send a parcel from B'town. These premises were shuttered many years ago and the PO moved to the back of a petrol station at the very edge of town. The Old PO grew increasingly forlorn and shabby. Last year, it was reborn as The Old Post Office Café. "Welcome to The Old Post Office, a café with a stamp of history." (ark ark)

We knew nothing about this until Dau.II announced that she was incommming for a couple of days midweek. Driving between Aldi and the Library before the train arrived we noticed a new paint job and the menu-board on the pavement. There was a scheduled 0900-1300 power-cut back home and we intended to take Dau.II-the-Foodie off for lunch; why not check out the new place? And it was so. Turns out there is an enormous hall down some stairs behind the old PO counter. Apparently, this was also the telephone exchange for the whole of County Carlow. The Art Deco door is still in place and the new owners salvaged  the 1970s vintage [complete with Dymo labels] plywood post-sorting pigeon-holes [R]: Presentation Convent; M.Connolly & Son; Meat Packers; District Hospital; Corries Cross; Newtown . . .now used for misc condiments.

Unlike some members of the party, I had eaten breakfast before leaving home and at 11.30 it was a long way from lunch; so I ordered a scone and flat-white. The others went full-metal brunch. A hockey-puck is only 3in across: my scone was ⌀ 50% bigger . . . a leetle dry but comes-with two butter pats, whipped cream and strawberry jam. The brunches arrived in enormous soup bowls with close to a kilo of spuds, egg, tomato, black-pudding etc. over beds of wilted spinach. Had to deep-six thoughts of starvlings in Gaza. 

We got up burping and waddled back to the car. Next destination Altamont Gardens which we had intended for lunch. We went for a walk there [OPW free in! parking all-day €2] instead. All the way down to the R. Slaney through the formal arboretum, past the duck&lily pond and back again. It's lovely and there is a café and shrub-shop. 

We were heading for Altamont because it was adjacent to Malone Fruit Farm on the N80. Dau.II was determined to make a batch of strawberry jam. I checked their webpage to see if they had strawbs for sale and they did . . . at a very reasonable €6/kg frozen. When we rocked up, it transpired that their webpage was frozen in time (Copyright © 2013 Malone Fruit Farm): frozen fruit was actually €13/kg!!  This makes it barely economic: 5 pots of jam for €15 ingredients [fruit, sugar, lemon] not including labour. But Dau.II's position is that, in contrast to all other varieties, shop-made strawberry jam and home-made are noticeably different in quality.

Anyway, when we eventually got home, power had been restored and we were ready for a nice cup of tea.