Tares

The Running Hare [reviewed prev] is all about a quixotic project to see if a farmer can grow wheat in 21stC England without killing everything that isn't Triticum aestivum. Everything dead includes all the worms which aerate the soil and all the microbes which release minerals and micro-nutrients from the subsoil. The standard practice is to spray 2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid aka 2,4-D when green starts to show after sowing - that will kill all the dicots and make the whole field monochrome - you can't eat poppy Papaver rhoeas, speedwell Veronica persica, cornflower Centaurea cyanus, mayweed Anthemis arvensis, corn marigold Glebionis segetum; Scarlet Pimpernel Anagallis arvensis, cleavers Galium aparine, or  colt's foot Tussilago farfara . . . so caedite eos kill them all.

Another [not-a-dicot] weed in among cereals is/was darnel Lolium temulentum, a close relative of Lolium perenne [prev] which is the current King of Pasture Grass. In olden days, darnel was a persistent pest because it was very difficult to clean its seed from the results of last year's harvest. Looks like wheat, quacks like wheat etc. especially before the seed-head appears but after it could be hoed out as an unwelcome interloper. When the seed corn was broadcast the next Spring, darnel was inevitably included in the mix and would compete for some part of the field's fertility. But it was not just a passive consumer of nutrients because Neotyphodium spp., endophytic fungi commensal with darnel produce lolines, a variety of hallucinogenic toxins. These natural chemicals are good for darnel because they incapacitate several insects which like to consume grasses. 

But lolines also incapacitate humans who ingest too much of the stuff as they loll about seeing things and behaving as if drunk [on ethanol]. Too much loline has been known to be fatal. But seeing visions and being in an altered state of mind has a long tradition of being embraced rather than avoided . . . at least for some people [priests, shamans] at some times [Saturday night, when you're coming up blank for tomorrow's homily]. Sid Thomas from Aberystwith U published an interesting tribute to Lolium temulentum and that plant's place in history. 

• Those tares, which featured in the bible? That's Lolium temulentum. 
• The Danes who were sprouting like cockle amongst the wheat before the early ethnic cleansing of the St Brice's Day Massacre? They were metaphorical Lolium temulentum. 

and now, in its turn, darnel has been condemned to the dustbin of history at least in the developed world.  The relentless, indefatigable drive for wheat monocultures has put darnel on the red list of endangered species because it only really knows how to thrive in wheat fields where every year provides a bare-field head-start. In other weedy communities - road-verges, for example - darnel just doesn't have to chops to compete. You'll have to look long and hard to find darnel in Ireland nowadays.

Sublime [ob]scene

 When we first ever moved into the Blackstairs, I was bumbling along in a neighbour's car and we came round a corner to be presented with a most spectacular view of that range of hills dizzying up from the checkerboard of fields and hedges and tapering away to the southern horizon.
"That's a most spectacular view", I said.
"Where?", he said.
"Well, everywhere!".
I don't think he understood what The Blethering Incomer  - TBI - was going on about. Nevertheless, it still is spectacular in its own understated not-the-Andes way.

Surely it's worth preserving a view so affecting? And doing so at all scales in the fractal landscape. Not only thinking hard about the costs as well at the utility of wind-turbines and electricity pylons but also paying attention to the details of what is perched in the hedgerows:
Dunnocks Prunella modularis [✓]
Sandwich wrappers Slobbo vulgaris [χ]

The weekend of 22nd Feb 2025 was designated the ~20th memorial An Taisce Trash Pick. We've been doing this every Spring, with some of the neighbours, since our kids were tall enough to not fit in a trash bag. We established a territory along the 1km stretch of the [60km/h!] local road between "The Monument" and "The Wall" - both sides. Because both sides, it's nicer and more efficient to walk the walk with some else. Saturday was gorgeous: sun-shiny, crisp, fresh. t.b.h the road margins were quite clean and the secluded car-park at The Monument surprisingly clean. Maybe Broken Windows Theory is working? 

I find it's easier to do the work without getting judgemental, let alone going mental, about it. When we finished, I sent an ironic comment to our local participants
"Best in show?? One flimsy brimful bag of used nappies".
Someone else responded with a suggestion about what punishment shd be meted out on the nappy perps [parents, I guess, not the incontinent infant]. But I demur: Once upon a time, the local authority collected everyone's trash as a public good. Then some bright spark decided that the process would be more efficient if put out to tender and Private Enterprises could compete to get the best value for the community. Competition worked well for making paperclips so cheap you could throw them away. The effect has been to have 3 competing trash collections running on the same streets in Tramore where one did the job before. And left all kinds of marginalised folk deciding that they couldn't afford both nappies and €600/yr to dispose of them.

As well as paying for the dump fees, An Taisce provides a stipend for tea and cookies in the village hall. I guess so we can all get together and congratulate ourselves for not being the kind of person who would fire a Lucozade bottle out of a car-window. After tea and chat, we went round the back of the hall to photo-op The Heap:

In case you're concerned, I c a r e f u l l y transferred 'my' nappies into a fit-for-purpose robust black bin bag, whc I have ◎ed. I turned my back on the trash, and there was the view which Michael Way thought made it worth the 50km trip from Wexford to teach drama to kids in the lee of Mt Leinster:

You cannot meaningfully have the spectacular view without cleaning up the foreground.

Not all men, science edition

International Day of Women and Girls in Science, is A Thing. This year it was marked [but not by Blob] on 11 February 2025. Wexford Science Café came to the party exactly a week too late . . . because we're on the 3rd Tuesday of the month, not the second. I posted about IDWGS on the correct day [Darwinday - 1] in 2018. WxScCa organized their event by having Amy Hassett a just-starting scientist (chatting with / interviewing) Mary Kelly a just-finishing one. They were about the same age as Dau.II and me, so there was a bit of one generation passing the chalice to the next. Gotta say it started off same-old, same-old with statistics about which areas of science had the most appallingly unequal sex-ratio in the 21stC - geology apparently. Of course we all agreed this was A Bad Thing and that things were getting better than 1925; but nobody in the room had a coherent strategy for how to chip away at the patriarchal monolith. It's pretty clear that having an inspiring female science teacher or auntie makes a difference . . . but quotas don't.

Older scientist has interviewed A Lot of people during her career. Her sense is that blokes present themselves as confident even if they are collywobbling inside; whereas women are more diffident and tend to qualify their abilities with a touch of realism. Interview committees [in my experience on both sides of the table] are cobbled together from available bodies and are kinda crap at sorting wheat from chaff: unwilling to puncture specious confidence or draw out shy competence. So Mr Know-it-Some gets ranked #1.

I've been gunning for a job in a formal interview only twice in my science career: for my first job and my last. The first time, I was shortlisted one of three for the post of sub-assistant lecturer in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1983. We three spent the whole day together being shown around, lunched, giving job seminars in turn. At the end of a long day we were sent to wait in one room while the committee made their deliberations across the hall. The other chap was getting antsy because, with luck and a following wind, he might just make a convenient train home; rather than kicking his heels for several hours after dark in a strange town. When the Head of Department burst open the door and beckoned to me to follow him, I demurred. Wouldn't they much rather take Other Chap first so he could get through and catch his train? Nope! They wanted me, and now . . . because my sketchy creds were deemed #1. Only if (on reflection and taking account of one day's lived experience on that campus) I refused the job offer would they move on to the next best candidate. I really was green when I was Dau.II's age. But here I be a few months later:

Almost exactly 30 years later, I was shorted listed for my final job at The Institute [which event spawned The Blob]. Again, I didn't play any cards because I didn't even know what cards to play. Someone asked why I wanted the job. Instead of outlining why I was the bee's knees and the cat's whiskers, I confessed that I didn't want it much but if they looked at my CV, they might decide that I could be a useful member of their team. If they didn't, I was happy-out that something else would turn up. After decades of nepotism and fixing, HR at The Institute was trying to codify the hiring process into a series of check-boxes and attribute scores that would objectively rise the cream to the top. I guess it didn't matter what I said, so long as I was clocking [5] on most of the several desirable qualities.

 Despite trying valiantly to shoot myself in the foot, I was offered, and took, both of those jobs . . . and that made all the difference. It wasn't that I lacked blokey confidence; it was just that my ambition genes were shot off in the war.

Meanwhile back at Wexford IDWGS 2025, Younger Scientist made an interesting point: whatever about hiring and promoting more women in Science, could we not just/also hire more different personality types. Earlier it had been suggested that some women had developed successful science careers by behaving like success men: ambitious, focused, selfish, single. Well, heck, we don't need anymore of those personality types - they make everyone else miserable! Caitlin Moran maintains that if you only hire/promote a limited range of people / types then your enterprise finishes up stupider, less agile, less creative, less profitable . . . and less fun!

72 words for hare

Richard Feynman made a big ToDo about the names of birbs being irrelevant: the birbs don't giveadamn: they care more about the right song, the right food, the right number of eggs-per-clutch. But Feynman is not quite right because the labels we apply to the things in the world help us get on the same page of understanding how things tick. I've riffed on what do you call a dandelion? by abstracting a list from Geoffrey Grigson's wonderful compendium An Englishman's Flora. When gifts must be given, it's safe in our home to present naturist natural history books. That's how The Running Hare:The Secret Life of Farmland by John Lewis-Stempel appeared in the house sometime last year. JLS is a farmer-writer from the Welsh Marches in Herefordshire, and he's not above shooting and eating grey squirrels Sciurus carolinensis. [as R] Mais revenons-nous à nos lièvres Lepus timidus! Early on in the book there is a mention of the medieval poem called The Names of the Hare, which include

þe hare, þe scotart,
þe bigge, þe bouchart,
þe scotewine, be skikart,
þe turpin, þe tirart,
þe wei-betere, þe ballart,
þe gobidich, þe soillart,
þe wimount, þe babbart,
þe stele-awai, þe momelart,
þe cuele-I-met, þe babbart,
þe scot, þe deubert,
þe gras-bitere, þe goibert,
þe late-at-hom, þe swikebert,
and so on and on

Abstracted from þis manuscript which is more than half footnotes¹. For updated here's Ben Whishaw reading Seamus Heaney's version of the litany. Or for a guitar-driven gallop. The take-home seems to be that it's okay not to like hares very much . . . except after they have been slow-braised with onions carrots bay-leaves and whatever you're having yourself. And on inventory, it's always nice to have an excuse to read Henry Reed's 1942 anti-war poem Naming of Parts "The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers: They call it easing the Spring."

 JLS, for his part, loves hares and wants to give them a bit of a sanctuary, if only for a two year tenancy on a peculiar property, part of which he gives over to nature as a spray-free traditional wheat field with all the weeds wildflowers that entails. Its a quixotic endeavour but also a proof of concept showing that wheat can be grown, harvested, threshed and fed to animals - and peeps - without involving Bayer or Monsanto. As well as the wildflowers, the wheatfield becomes a haven for birds, badgers, foxes, toads and . . . hares. All of which the author observes from his Landrover or from the lee of a hedge. Towards the end of the book he asserts:

I have seen hares by moonglow,
and I've gazed into the heavens.
I've felt the true peace of the World.

And good for him!

¹Proceedings of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, Literary and Historical Section 3.6 (1935).

Flying trampoline

I casually mentioned our storm destroyed trampoline in a piece about wind-throw and firewood. But I didn't go into detail. Like everyone and their dog, we bought a trampoline in the 00s when Dau.I and Dau.II were tweens. It seemed like fun and it came with more safety features than some which were sold in an unregulated market. The upright poles were sheathed in foam tubes and supported a child-proof safety net. The tubular-steel circular frame and the steel springs were covered by foam-filled water-proof mats. We also implemented a strict [boo-hoo no fun] policy of one bouncing body at a time. At the same time, on a different trampoline,  one of the neffies lost half a front tooth . . . embedded in the skull of a pal who was bouncing up as neffie was coming down.  A year earlier a niece had bounced off a trampoline and sustained a compound fracture in her arm. And my then boss's neighbour's boy had broken his neck and died having launched at his trampoline from the roof of the garden shed. Anyway, here it is, in its heyday with three tweens for scale:

What could possibly go wrong??  Well nothing even close to those harrowing accidents. One morning I got up and glanced into the haggard then stopped a rubbed my eyes because the trampoline wasn't there as usual at the bottom of the haggard. It's not like you could miss it!  I rounded the corner of the shed and saw it, all bend out of shape, at the Top of the haggard. During the night, which had been windy but not Storm Force, the trampoline took off like a flying squirrel and sailed 40m up a 1:10 slope until it whacked a pine tree. 10m further West, it would have taken the lid off our 16ft touring caravan = spare bedroom. 

I was a Navy brat, I knew about windage [The force of the wind on a stationary object]. I had therefore weighted down the tubular steel base of the apparatus with eight [8] 4in = 100mm solid concrete blocks. Which everbode kno is 8 x 22.5 = 180kg. But that's pffft nothing when the surface of the trampoline [not including the contribution of the safety netting] is 20 sq.m. and the wind is, say, 60km/h. We had that trampoline for several years, and the winds had been much stronger than The Last Night of the Trampoline. The key factors must have been a) the direction of the wind funnelling through the screen of trees to the South b) something something resonance: where the precise speed of wind bounced the whole disc off its blocks and set it off uphill.  

Don't do this at home kids! Forget trampoline tether kits. Only go trampolining somewhere you can sue the owner's ass if something goes wrong. But even then the compo really won't cover the damage.

Treemageddon

In early December were endured Storm Darragh which brought down 1 rowan Sorbus aucuparia; 2 sceagh Crataegus monogyna and and large ½ ash Fraxinus excelsior. Oddly, the night before the storm, another rowan, which had been leaning uphill forever, quietly sank to the ground as if exhausted. When Éowyn blasted through 7 weeks later it was a much bigger event nationally but we only lost one (1) more rowan. Inconveniently that was 320m from the woodshed: as far as you can get and still be on the farrrm. More importantly, it was 25m downhill; which makes an uphill struggle with a loaded wheelbarrow.  Rowan is about the least useful tree we have. It is beloved by ivy Hedera helix; it tend to branch copiously from near the base; it tends to have standing dead branches; the bark of these branches stays on and stays wet which tends to rot out the timber. Even if you can get the timber out of the wet (by shucking off the skin and covering it against the rain) it may still be punky before it's ready as firewood.

The key thing for drying wood is to a) increase the water-shedding surface area by cutting to lengths and splitting b) persuading the breeze to whisk past sucking out the moisture c) keeping the rain off. In that order, i.m.o. The design of the wall of the woodshed was hit-and-miss vertical cedar planks with staggered gaps which (in theory) allow breeze and discourage rain. In processing the fallen rowan trees, I started filling one bay of the woodshed [4ft wide] with logs and billets ~35cm long. When I had stacked two ranks of these logs 1200mm W by 2000mm H [that's about half a cord for Nordamericanos] I figured that the wind-whistling was getting diminishing returns. Resolved therefore to give what I had stacked a few months of unimpeded drying and start another pile elsewhere.

What you see [L], is cannibalized parts of our storm destroyed trampoline, formed into 2 squares of tubes braced 30cm apart and oriented N-S -- at right angles to the prevailing wind. The N side of the square [to the R] is tied up against an old apple tree. It's not a permanent solution, and I'm hoping it won't collapse before I decide it's time to move the semi dried logs into the woodshed. And let me say that, since picture was taken, I have at least doubled the quantity of logs on the rack.

I thought I was working through the wind-throw of Darragh in quite good time, I R not 30 anymore, so I am not getting all macho about Outdoor Work. One tank of gas in the chain saw will see me through a happy hour of chop-chop with a bit of pully-hauly to see what I'm doing. Then it's 🛑 stop.

But walking through the fields to the most distant fallen rowan, I clocked that 3 more downed rowan trees [all with too much ivy and so too much windage]. It's a bit disheartening because rowan is kinda useless [as explained above] but I can't let them lie where they are: collapsed over fences and occluding the grass from sheep. I think we've have more trees down in the last ten weeks than in the previous ten years. And we can't blame ash-dieback.

 

Boys at sea

From my beachcombing days, I've written extensively about buoys on shore. This is something completely different. When the family came home for Christmas, it was decided [plebiscite] that we'd sit in a row on the sofa and watch Master & Commander again. Part of this was to induct a 3rd generation into what-the-family-knows . . . about bowsprits and halyards. Most of us know Withnail & I by heart of course he's the fucking farmer etc. not to mention Kenneth Branagh doing Crispin Crispian. If you haven't watched, M&C is the 2 hour distillation of a multi-year friendship between the Jack Aubrey, Captain of a Napoleonic era British man-o'-war, and his supernumerary surgeon-naturalist Stephen Maturin. Distillation because Patrick O'Brien developed the relationship over 20 volumes and 7,000 pages of text.

Their friendship is based on complementary virtues, epitomized by Aubrey playing the fiddle to Maturin's the cello. They tick a few boxes on the multiple intelligence score sheet: Maturin more cerebral; Aubrey better with people. But the bottom line is that the Captain always makes the final call "subject to the exigencies of the service" etc. etc. There is a fundamental imbalance in power between the two parties. That's partly because, as my Ship's Captain father always maintained, with great power aboard goes great responsibility; especially in adverse conditions. 

Last week, on a whim, I started re-reading, after a gap of 50 years, The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monsarrat. It's another love story: between Captain Ericson and Lieutenant "Number One" Lockhart [more or less Monsarrat] set in another brutal [mid 20thC] war at sea. Because they are British their respect and mutual admiration is super-undemonstrative. Here again, the buck stops with the Captain and that drives a power inequity into the relationship. The film, starring Jack Hawkins and Donald Sinden, like M&C compresses and elides a long book into 2 hours. Which makes it altogether too exciting. The book by being so long better captures the idea that War is long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of terror.  

The Cruel Sea, the book, is about 25% too long. After their first ship is sunk, halfway through the war, the structure of the book changes from a begin-middle-end narrative into a hotch-potch of vignettes and scraps which takes the book up to May 1945 and VE day.