Yesterday, St Mark's Day, Dia do Revolução dos Cravos, 25 April, I was up betimes bustling from kitchen to sofa assembling the cast for First Pot of Tea when something Other caught the corner of my eye through the window. "Aurora" my scrabbling snap-mind delivered: we will try to make sense of the untoward. But I paused my bustle and went outside to ◎◎ it was a (murky) rainbow:
It was ideal cycling weather: grass frost at dawn then cloudy with sunny intervals. Cycling is miserable if either a) it rains a lot b) the sun raises the temperature so that you feel the sweat - and therefore need hydration and therefore need pee-stops. What is ideal cool and breezy for aerobic exercise can be uncomfortably chilly if you're just standing around. But I didn't need my jacket or my water-bottle in the event. I was happy out, with a couple of podcasts on my device to while away the intervals between bikes.
I've always tried to be the infra-structure guy: making it possible for others to do wonderful things. I left the house to walk to my station at 09:55 and got home at 13:10: just in time to make me a cheese-toastie for lunch before I got all hangry and out of sorts.
Oh, and I heard the first cuckoo Cuculus canorus in the valley this year. That was a pretty good day.
That was all a nothing-burger until Dr Google threw up "sycamore seedling poisonous to horses" on the off-chance that was what I was really after. Equine atypical myopathy, aka atypical myoglobinuria when myoglobin is detected in the urine because muscle tissue is disintegrating. But you'd only [call in the vet to] look if your previously happy horse is stiff, reluctant to move, collapsed. Regardless of treatment, it is typical that 75% of affected horses will be dead with 2-3 days. The proximate cause is a toxin called Hypoglycin A HGA.
It is a known thing that horses have a rough-and-ready digestive system: shovelling its outcome is what gives teenage stable-hands such prodigious upper-body strength. Sheep are ruminants and their dietary carbs get a double hammering mediated by a sophisticated gut-flora. Nobody is flagging HGA toxicity for ruminants, so I suppose that some guild of their microbiome is digesting Hypoglycin A HGA before it is absorbed through the gut wall to start to digest the muscle-mass. No quarter given in evolution. [note added in press: the sheep were moved from the traditional hay-meadow to the sycamore-rich field 3 days ago, and nobody's died yet]
Well mates, I wasn't not going to count them as I went but I did weigh the whole harvest on our kitchen scales = 25oz = 700g. And I did count off a random selection of single plants until they tipped ½oz = 15g that was N = 30. My math indicates that I have killed [25 x 2 x 30 =] 1,500 potential trees in a natural selection exercise. How potential? When Sean the Forester was thinning our little woodland in 2022, we discovered a substantial sycamore in the NE corner of the plot. That's about 75m due West [and thus downwind] of the two fecund sycamores mentioned above. In 2008 that corner of the plot was still pasture, so in 18 years one seedling similar to my Easter-holocaust now has a girth of 85cm or ⌀ = 27cm at chest height. The height of the tree can be estimated by measuring a) a distance from the foot and b) the angle from there to the top of the tree and looking up a table of Tan= opposite/adjacent. In this case ~12m tall. That a much better place for a sycamore tree than shedding seed into pasture.
In the wrong place? I did eventually agree to go off-site for a tuthree days with the family when they touched base briefly after Connemara. But on the morning of departure, our RCD [residual current detector] tripped OFF twice! again. There was no way I was going away for two days if the 'lectric was going to fail the deep-freeze: & for me to return to a puddle of rotting food. They went off, and I did some diagnostics, and the RCD behaved itself for 24 hours. [I think it's the extension that runs to the polytunnel - but it requires some positive testing of this hypothesis when there is only me at home]. Anyway, I did agree to go South-for-beaches the following day. But while way, I twigged >!Shazzam!< that an unintended consequence of having the Fronius app to monitor the solar array, is that I can remotely check to see if our router/modem at home is still powered up. And if so, assume that freezers and dehumidifiers are also working. Here's a re-assuring snap-shot of an overcast day at home from 80km away.
. . . went down to the beach(to play one day) [ee]
[premature posting error on Friday! here released on schedule with added value].
may couldn't lift a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.
Which is just as well because it [L]was an interstellar messenger from the Planet Zorg cooling off in a rock-pool at Benvoy along Costa na Déise. I mentioned that my family left me alone with my weighty blanket after Easter and headed W to The Coral Strand = Trá an Dóilín in the Connemara Gaeltacht. I can just about handle having six extra [beloved] bodies in my own house . . . disappearing my charging cables tidying things up. But wrenching myself off a familiar sofa and, in a foreign environment, fighting over the breakfast cereal with m'fam? That was a too much for my agéd frame. Not to mention making a boarding-house queue with my fellow guests for access to the bathroom. At home, rain-or-shine, day-or-night, there is always the compost heap. So they went off and I stayed home and everyone was happy.
But they came back to the Sunny South East less than a week later and continued their live-like-there-is-no-tomo fun along the Waterford Coast. There is free-will, but in a sense they rolled their Ould Fella up in a bit of carpet, strapped him to the roof of the car and took him to Tramore.
The timing was ungood because, a week before Waterford has been named the top destination in Ireland by Condé Nast Traveller, in a list of the must-see places to visit in Ireland. In particular they cite Trá na mBo so it will be even less of a Secret Beach than it has been since they added steps down the cliff and signage to get more footfall. I couldn't go: I was all tied up [nnggg nnnGG] with building works: being required to hold one end of a piece of timber and pass nails and screws to The Boy. But Dau.I took her niblings to Trá na mBo [you may call it cow-strand, if you live in England]. Together they made the rite of passage [woooooo] up the rocks and through the hole in the cliff to The Secret Secret Beach beyond. Which is important because Gdau.II is ten years old now - almost too old for Secrets.
One of the new additions at the car-park nearest to Trá na mBo is a box made of pallets and painted pink&blue with a scrap of fishing net atop to slow down the gulls. It says [in a rather spare, enigmatic ee cummings way - appropriate to a beach where one may encounter poets who are fluent in Spanish - and if you don't meet a poet you'll have to spout forth something yourself - do not mumble, the seals defo don't like mumblers.]
Tidy Towns
Beach Box
Swap & Share
Lost & Found
Old Ray, the batchelor farmer who lived all his adult life in our home before we blew into the valley, got a little weak on maintenance in his latter years. The gutters got carried away in a storm and not replaced. When the house was built in 1941, the 'parlour' was constructed with a suspended ventilated timber floor. But in one corner water had penetrated the wall and rotted out a section of the floor-boards. We could see the join between original 1941 boards and the replacement. And some of the replacement floor-boards had themselves been assaulted by water and rotted in their turn. Sod that we decided and a) ordered new gutters chutes and down-spouts b) ripped out the timber floor brought the sub-floor to grade with rubble c) installed under-floor heating pipes throughout the ground floor and d) covered that with s sand-and-cement screed.
But the parlour floor undulated like drumlin country which was obvs unsuitable for our desired final finish in cork tiles for toddler comfort. I decided to fix this myself and bought a bag of levelling compound. How difficult could it be to follow directions on the packet and move things forw over the weekend while the contractor's team was home resting? A: quite difficult for an absolute beginner. The following week, the contractor's plasterer came with another bag of levelling compound, ignored the printed directions and made a much runnier solution which more or less spread itself. Hats off to experts!
But one corner of the floor was still a few mm out of true which only mattered when we wanted our handy light-weight Ikea 600x600 'coffee' table in that corner. Unless the legs were turned and positioned just-so, you could be guaranteed to spill your tea. For several years we solved this problem with a mop. Then Dau.II left home to live in Cork. One time we were visiting and Dau.II asked me to make a wedge for the bathroom door whose default position was closed. This was clearly not for the best, because the bathroom was entirely internal [no windows] and needed air-circulation against the damp. By providence, there was a builder's dumpster on the quay opposite their appt; & I'd given her a householder's tool-kit when she left home. I seized the feeble little saw from the tool-kit and sawed a suitable wedge off a bit of scrap timber in the dumpster. A few weeks later, Dau.II called to say "More wedges are needed!". Her pals from the HomEd house-share had been to visit and seen the utility of wedges to hold doors open.
We had a family full-house over Easter but when they left for 5 days in the Gaeltacht, I could not find the wedge. Two days later, I found it . . . in the kindling. But not before I addressed a supply-chain bottle-neck and made three more. I like the Dennis the Wedgace livery and am thinking, why not make a wedge-a-day set? as a wedge-hedge against uncertain memory - if it's Dennis it must be Tuesday etc. And hands up who knew that the Irish for TheWedge is AnDing?
I plugged away at Independent People all 225,000 words of it, but not because there was anything attractive about the central patriarch. Perhaps it was insights about the transition from poverty and backwardness to prosperity during a boom. Or a sense of gratitude that, compared to Iceland, our our climate in Ireland is so much more benign for sheep. But I doubt I'll switch to reading fiction for edutainment anytime soon.
Evidence for this is that I have quietly put aside two novels recently with the thought that sitting on the sofa gazing at the ceiling might be a better use of my remaining days than reading something that fails to nourish.
I'm in general more of a fan for things Portuguese than things Icelandic, so when I was informed that António Lobo Antunes had died, I opened the library catalogue to see if any of his books were available in Ireland. There were! An English translation of his Explicação dos Pássaros (1981) was on the shelf in Carraroe, Co Galway. I got 30 pages in before "The distinction between fact and fiction, between past, present and future, blur in Antunes brilliant narration" [Publishers Weekly] left me only confused, rather than inspired or interested. Pity because the book is set in the era of Portugal's Carnation Revolution in which I have an abiding interest. Rather cool was that the family-except-me had 5 days Carraroe just after Easter and were able to return the book to its home library much quicker than it shuffling about the country in a plastic box. Of course Dau.I the Librarian made it a busman's holiday and dropped in to talk Dewey Decimal cataloging and backed-up toilets with the Galway librarians.
It's okay to throw some back in the water. There are thousands of new [non-fiction] books published each year. Not to mention enough back-catalogue on library shelves to last a life time; or at east waht's left of mine.
Don't Label! Everyone is on their own journey, getting surprised by joy and finding out what matters. After me, the least sporty person in the family is was Dau.II. Then she moved to Dublin and took up walking; getting to see the city step by step at 4km/hr. Last Spring, when I was in training for our GR65 walk into the French interior, she came home for the weekend and came up the hill to keep me company . . . and then insisted we carry on another 1000m Along and 150m ↑↑↑Up to Stoolyen, the S facing shoulder of Mt Leinster. Later that Summer, when all 3 generations of the family were back together, Dau.II set her sights on Sturra: a 3km hike requiring 500m of elevation. It would be churlish to let her go alone, so The Boy and The Patriarch went with. So glad I went!
MetÉireann has gotten really good about predicting the weather. Just, maybe, a slight tendency to big up incomming storms with yellow and orange warnings, which turn out to be mere asthmatic wheezes. Therefore, when The Clan gathered home on Good Friday 2026, we had a choice of Sa Su Mo to launch up a hill together. Easter Sunday dawned sunny-but-windy in the aftermath of "Storm Dave" breezed through the day before. Pilot Dau.II decided that we would walk to "The Black Church", a turf-cutters lodge at the Moats of Craan, along an Easterly spur of MtLeinster. It's near the beginning of the annual Blackstairs Challenge.
Accordingly, after brunch a 3 generation party aged 10 to 70, departed for a 5 hour, 9 mile, 1700ft elevation circular
yomp up the hill behind the house. It's all too easy to slip into a choco-coma
on Easter Sunday afternoon, but Dau.II will walk and will dragoon accept company. Gdau.II, with the shortest legs, was given a bailout option when we briefly touched
the [Wexford] county road but stoutly turned it down and pegged along after her older rellies. We encountered a farming couple taking the tea-time air along that road and they asked "Where did you leave your car?" to which we chorused "We have no car, we walked from Home" and explained where Home was. I think they were impressed [maybe only by 10y.o. Dau.II?] because farmers tend to go by quad-bike nowadays. When we got back we sat down to an Easter dinner that couldn't be beat centering on paschal lamb and
[most important] roast potatoes. Vegetarian options available.
Eeee it were great, a perfick day! The weather gave us the merest shake of sleety snow and only for a few minutes, otherwise sunny, breezy with scudding clouds. X marks the destination as seen from near the summit of Mt Leinster:
