Icing on the crumble

My mother was born in 1920. she stopped working when she got married in 1950. But as soon as her kids went to school, she started getting out and about. One of her wheezes was meals-on-wheels. Round about noon, she'd take delivery of a hot box of dinners [mostly meat-and-two-veg with gravy + crumble-and-custard] a deliver them round the county. The service was as much about the di♬g-do♬g on the doorbell and the bit of chat, as it was about calories and five-a-day.

My late-lamented FiL Pat the Salt had a brief encounter with Meals-on-Wheels in Waterford when he was still married, still ambulatory but getting a bit vague. In his case, he was induced to use his free bus-pass and go into Lady Lane House like Mohammed to the Mountain; get his dinner and the bit of chat; and then take the bus home.  He cd/shd have stayed there in the warm-and-dry playing cards with the other chaps and got tea and a biscuit before leaving. But he had no interest in cards and would only stay if there was a bit of music put on instead. 

After his wife died, Pat was untethered, of course, but the Alzheimer's Society of Ireland found space for him at their Pinegrove Resource Centre. He used to spend a [short] day a week there on the reg'lar and enjoyed the sing-songs; the nostalgia quizzes, not so much. Bob's Taxis picked him up several times. It was confusing the first time, because I hadn't done the delivery and nobody (not me, not Pat, for sure) knew which was his top coat. Next time we communicated with Team Deliver. Coronarama clobbered all that in person stuff with vulnerable elders. But Pinegrove also ran / runs an outreach service, where, for a nominal fee, a kindly person would appear at Pat's home and hang out with him.

Seamus, and after the lockdown, Gwen, came on different days with different toolkits. In the early days, when Pat was still able for it, he and Seamus would, weather permitting, tramp the golden pavements of Tramore chatting about the old times - Seamus was interested in WWII, especially the war at sea, in which Pat had <ploosh> been an active participant. Gwen knew all the old songs and was usually able to get Pat to si♬g alo♬g. Or failing that, wash away his anxious cares with a blast from the pipes of the Scots Guards. The bonus was that the family carer could have 2 hours carefree, even if that meant leaving the car in for service, shopping for dinner, or nipping up to the dry cleaners again.

And then, after his decade-long decline, Pat died and, as is the custom in Ireland, 30 days later a somewhat diminished family assembled again for his Month's Mind Mass.  The night before the MMM we achieved a form of closure by inviting all the carers to dinner in O'Neill's at the top of Main Street. At the end of the meal, one of the admin-side at Pinegrove leaned across the table to say thanks for the unexpected feed. I demurred: the thanks were entirely from the family to the carers. I suspect that many outsiders think that home visits are the icing on the cake of care. The preferred, subsidized, business model for elder care in Ireland is Care Homes with all their economies of scale. Run as a business, with minimal wages, and maximum clients, care in Care Homes tends to the perfunctory. There is no time to chat; it's far quick to feed someone than wait for them to feed themselves; and ambulatory elders are a trip-and-fall liability which the Home tries to avoid if at all possible (so many forms to fill in!). 

As I explained to Mr Adminside at the end of the carer's dins, Seamus and Gwen and their peers make the difference between A Life and mere existence.

Fakkn Darragh

There is a sense in some quarters that Met Eireann tends to throw out Orange and Red weather warnings with gay abandon. That leaves them in the position of having to say "no no we really mean it this time . . . don't make unnecessary Crossmolinas". Storm Darraaaaargh arrived at tea-time Friday 06Dec24 upgraded to Status Orange wind for the whole country, Red for Atlantic NW. Obsessively checking on the nullschool weather map , as I do, I could see the storm barrelling relentlessly across the N Atlantic and crumping into the Wild Atlantic Way.

Two hours later, just after midnight, we lost power [with a couple of flickers then plunging darkness] despite being a long old way from any coasts or any Red counties. We are misfortunate living in a sparsely populated rural back water because [and proper order] when the ESB does triage on where to restore power first, sparsely populated rural back waters come after schools, towns, google server farms, hospitals. If you're a dairy farmer you need a generator, because ain't nobody going milk 160 cows by hand . . . and how would you get it down to 4°C a.s.a.p.?

Those who built our farm-and-yard were great vernacular architects and faced everything South on a downhill slope with the out-buildings sheltering the yard from the predominant Westerlies and the chilling Siberian Easterly winds. 80 years ago, Old Jim he planted a shelter-belt of Scots Pine Pinus sylvestris round the acre that includes house, yard and haggard. All bets are off though in a global warming world where the warmer ocean fizzes up the wind. We are now in a managed retreat from living surrounded by trees and hugging them as we pass.

After storms, my first light task is to go out for a walk to assess the damage and count the sheep. If N_sheep = zero, a fence is down somewhere and the flock is whooping it up in the next county. Also I need to know if the lane from our gate to the county road is clear. Saturday morning I found a number of trees lying W→E at right angles to the ditches/walls that had anchored them for the last several decades. My next action was to send an ironic txt to my eponymous pal "Fakkn Darragh, throwing shapes agane. We are 3 trees down. How are y'all?" As I was out, I went to visit our nearest neighbour, at the bottom of the lane, and found his front garden full of horizontal trees. Part of his Cupressus x leylandii hedge, allowed to get far too big, had clattered against a lanky 30 y.o. Eucalyptus and brought that to the ground as well. I could hear his voice "I'm okay" and if I knelt down could see the lower part of his legs, but nothing of the [undamaged] house behind him.

My first task, though, was to deal with a rowan / mountain ash / caorthann = Sorbus aucuparia, which like my neighbour's trees had fallen out of one of the ditches and neatly filled the lane with a six-foot wall of ivy Hedera helix and horizontal rowan branches. Two hours later, I had reduced this impenetrable wall to a single trunk-supporting branch which any person or sheep could step over but prevented vehicular access to the uplands. I was just finishing up when the branch settled, pinned my saw and I borked the chain getting it out.  So I had to leave things thus:

you can see the lane up beyond the obstacle. And hey it's sunny after the storm: quite makes you believe in god or at least Gen9:13. That lane filled to the brim with drifted snow in late Feb 2018 which is another sort of impassable.

Sunday afternoon, I had time for him-next-door (an even more recent blow-in than ourselves) and joined a meitheal of miscellaneously skilled and equipped neighbours clearing a path through the Eucalyptus. For every person who was in the garden cutting pulling and stacking logs and brash, at least one car stopped to gawp or get out of their car and offer unasked-for advice to say how the clearance should be done. For the second time [first] in four weeks I can harrumph about the hurlers on the ditch. I dunno why it's so much easier to find fault than pick up a shovel and help. These clear-up operations are so often a Javi Problem: if you set to (with help is better) you can make substantive progress in a couple of hours. And by tea-time yesterday, we were confident that our neighbour could get his motorbike on the county road liberated from his brushwood prison.

We got power back at 16:00, forty (40) hours after it went out. Some of our neighbours were for throwing food out of their freezers. Me, I was for eating a hella gurt quantity of ice-cream in case it was spoiled.

Postscript for posterity: gusts of 120km/h were recorded at Shannon; homes and businesses 400,000 were without power: some are looking a week w/o power + 35,000 broadband fails; the Holyhead ferry terminal was whacked out of commission.

Gan Smal

misc mish mash  Today: the Feast of the Immaculate Conception: shop till you drop

• History of playing cards [via MeFi]
  
• Oktopus Orkestars - Tentáculos
  
• Twenty-one Pilots I bin thinking too much . . . help me.
• Live
• What's Pete doing after Tally Ho
• St Adjudor [prev], Dublin canal edition
• Medal for Model School
  

Clueless in Cloughjordan

Bruce Darrell set up in Cloughjordan when it was rebranded as an/the EcoVillage. His enterprise was the RED (Research, Education and Development) Gardens Project which is a lot more useful and kinder to the planet than TED and all its TechBros. Here he is calling a halt to one of his long-running community actions.  RED Gardens grows food organically and offers surplus next to an honesty box. 12 years ago, looking for more nutrient input, he put out the word that [local] folk could add their compostable waste to his compost bins . . . and he'd turn it - sieve it - sort it - barrow it - dig it . . . [one year later] . . . harvest it.

I've never met Bruce, but a lot of our home-ed & rice-cakes, Birkenstocks & FloatySkirts pals have passed through the Eco Village, so I daresay I've washed the dishes [at the annual HEN gatherings] for the self same people, or their carefree childer, who can't be humped to keep plastic out of their compost bin. Bruce started believing that he was getting an asset for free, so of course he should add the labour needed to transform the gift into something garden-useful.

Poor bugger is now worn out with fetching uncompostable shite [mostly plastic] out of compost as he turns and sieves it. He's spent years cutting his co-composters some slack. Our small veg-peeling knife turned [lit.] up in the compost the year after Javi left: it must have gotten submerged in the potato peel. But the compost of others is no longer worth the candle. And so, earlier this year he stopped managing this community resource . . . but let everyone know that Compost Manager was available in sits.vac. Of course, nobody else stepped up the the plate, just as nobody else had offered to put in an afternoon compost turning in his garden.

Read the comments attached to the YT: they are an instructive collective confessional of other people's experience with compost, lost sink-plugs and community action. Bruce baulked at putting a DO NOT sign beside the bin because 

• a) he worked as a design-wonk in a previous life and believes signage is only needed because the system is poorly designed 
• b) the people who leave plastic cookie packets in their compost ain't a gonna read no sign 
• c) it seems officious

But I did like his idea [see below] of creating a 'lost&found' board next to the compost intake bin on which were pinned a weird and wonderful selection of what The Community had mistakenly concluded was compostable. See my earlier rant about tea-bags and the difference between bio-degradable [years] and compostable [months].

"Having said that, I was thinking of setting up a big board beside the compost where I could hang all the stupid things that I found in the compost, almost like an art instillation. And label it 'Lost and Found' or 'Is this Yours?' or something like that, to make a joke about it, and so that people can see what does end up in there. I think that would be more interesting, effective and educational, than an instructional sign."

Tortfeasor frolic

Jason Beer KC, is the lead counsel for the Wyn Williams enquiry into the iniquities of Post Office and their hounding and harrying of sub-postmasters [prev]. He's just, justifiably, been called Barrister of the Year . . . and been given an awkward doodad and a glass of bubbly. He works from / for / at 5 Essex Chambers; I idly looked at the back catalogue of their youtube channel. In 2020, in lockdown and all WFH, they put out 'The Sofa Series': some 40min pieces-to-camera about aspects of law. What's not to love about a Sofa Series? I live on / for / at my sofa. I started with 'Vicarious Liability' and watched the whole thing through. Not quite on the edge of my seat, like, but engaged.

My father was a career naval officer, sometime CEO of a mobile, dangerous, battleship-grey enterprise with 600 men under his command. He was very much of the mindset that the buck stopped with him, even if he was asleep or ashore when any untoward event happened. He was quite judgmental [last para] about the Master of the Herald of Free Enterprise when that ship sank at Zeebrugge in 1987. If there was any vicarious liability on HMS Fearless, my dad would suck it up.

Two of the key UKSC rulings on vicarious liability concern the British supermarket chain Wm Morrison. Together they help lower courts set boundaries upon the extent to which corporations and institutions are liable at law for the iniquities of their employees.

Mohamud v W M Morrison Supermarkets [2016] UKSC 11

In 2008, Ahmed Mohamud [R] stopped into a Morrison petrol station and kiosk. On his way to a protest meeting in London, he asked if there was anywhere he could get some images printed from this here USB stick. The fellow behind the counter, Amjid Khan, refused to engage, and told Mohamud to leave with a spatter of racist epithets. Not content with that, Khan followed the uncustomer out to his car continuing to abuse him; opened the passenger door and landed a punch on Mohamud's head; went round the driver side of the car and duffed Mohamud up good and proper.

Nobody doubted that Khan was a Tortfeasor ['e done 'im wrong same legalese root as malfeasance] to / of / at Mohamud: the issue at law is whether he was on "frolic of his own" OR "furthering, however misguidedly, the interests of their employer" if the latter, then Morrisons is vicariously liable. The various lower courts had shillied and shallied citing different precedents in Case Law. The UKSC is at pains to make their judgments clear not only to lawyers in future lower courts but also to The Press and The Public. Their 2 page press summary explains that they key to (Mohamud v Morrison) is "close connection". Khan was employed by Morrison for customer service and there was an unbroken sequence of events from refusing to look at the USB-stick to putting the boot in outside.

a) I don't know whether the continued use of 'frolic' or 'tortfeasor' as technical terms is more out of touch with today's sensibilities b) justice delayed is justice denied hmmm? It took Ahmed Mohamud eight [8] years to get his vindication and he died in the interim: "Mr A M Mohamud (in substitution for Mr A Mohamud (deceased)) (Appellant) v WM Morrison Supermarkets plc (Respondent) [2016] UKSC 11". Four years later Morrison was in the UKSC dock again.

W M Morrison Supermarkets v Various Claimants [2020] UKSC 12

In this case, the rogue employee was found to be on a "frolic of his own" not least because it is very difficult to see how he could have been "furthering, however misguidedly, the interests of their employer". The Press Summary tells how Andrew Skelton, an internal auditor at Morrison, felt aggrieved at his internal treatment [nobody racially or otherwise abused him, let alone beat him up]. Later, tasked to deliver 'the books' to the company's external auditor, Skelton took a copy of the data and uploaded to the internet all the salaries, PPS #s, bank details and home addresses of all employees. He also kited the data to three separate newspapers, who declined to publish. 

The Various Claimants in the case, employees all, felt that a) the Data Protection Act 1998 had been breached [clearly it had] b) as well as Skelton, Morrison was vicariously liable for the failings of its internal auditor. The UKSC disagreed and let Morrison off the hook. Skelton was banged up for eight [8!] years. A bit of google suggests that in Brum, you get eight years for: a) assault with a meat cleaver, b) dealing class-A drugs, c) shotgun attack on business premises.  I cannot discover what happened to Amjid Khan beyond being sacked by Morrison.

It's a bit of a cheap shot to smirk about the failings of Morrison HR in hiring two tortfeasors perps who brought the company into disrepute (and cost the company £2million to fix Skelton's data-breach). Morrison have 100,000 people on payroll, guessing that 2 / 100,000 is a no higher rate of bad-apple than in the general population. I don't think that Morrison should be held to a higher standard than say public representatives in the Irish Dáil - rate 1/ 160.

Sconser

I can see how this might seem from outside. Late in life, a bloke starts new job teaching at an Irish Institute of Technology: decides to document the process of transition and record some funny thing happened in the lab tales to edutain others in the same business. Blog degenerates into rants about politics; poorly informed speculations about exo-planets; and hard-to-follow streams of conscious more appropriate to the psychiatrist's couch. This post tends to the latter; read on . . .

At the beginning of the month, a slightly younger and much more successful pal said that they'd shared my contax with a mutual acquaintance who was trying [very] to reach me. That contact turned out to be a silly, quite snobby, enquiry about The King's County Ancestry [L] which I was able to put to bed quickly and move on.

I'm soooo non-attachment nowadays that I wasn't particularly riled up. Not even about the fact that this was the [checks gmail] third time in 5 years, that I had email contact in similar circumstances with said snobacquaint which needed a third party to mediate the interaction. In my teens I dated a well connected gal whose titled grandfather refused to acknowledge he knew anyone in Surrey [home of riff-raff and -gasp- stockbrokers], so would address letters George Good-Seat esq., Goodseat Castle, Guildford . . . Suffolk.

I did peel off a rant to our go-between: I can't imagine why he wants to contact me. He's spent the entirety of our relationship (and that's 50 years) looking over my shoulder to see if someone more interesting is passing by. Most recently at the 2022 Christmas Do: he turned his back on me when I was in mid-sentence as the Emeritus Dean of Importance hove into view . . . I take this [advice the perp had given another mutual pal] with a big pinch of salty tears. As Protestant in Chief, he has for half a century been sent a steady stream of middle class youngsters for career advice. Invariably he told them "you'll always have climbing / opera / cello / gouache / carpentry /poems as a hobby - make sure you get your [science] degree first". He's possibly done more to scuttle creative Ireland than any man alive. Then again, in fairness, he caused a student to duck under my wing one Summer in the last century: a brief encounter which could be said to have launched that student's meteorically successful career. But that's just bollix, that was-a-student would have been Top Gun in any field they went for. Could now be an EU commissioner . . . editing the Irish Times . . . a patent lawyer in Strasbourg . . . director of policy at McGill U.

It is a categorical error to look back at a life [yours, mine, theirs] from some teleological peak or trough and think that it all turned out fine because of a series of random encounters and lucky breaks. My mother made her own luck when she landed a peach job in post-WWII London. I don't doubt that she would have been happy enough if she hadn't met my father as he blew through town in 1950 and married the local doctor instead (they had been an on again / off again item).

More or less exactly after that to-fro, I found myself listening to Ellen Langer on Sean Carroll's Mindscapes podcast. The sound quality is comically bad: feed-back echo; dogs barking; phones ringing and there is A Lot of push-back in the comments. But a few interesting ideas are aired over the 72 mins. One relevant to the current post, is Langer's suggestion that people start in life with an infinity of possibilities but only live one life: ". . . people make decisions to take action. Once you take that action, there's no opportunity to evaluate the other alternatives that you might have chosen. You can never know". There's no future in beating yourself up about 'mistakes' made in the past. If life isn't a Panglossian "best of everything in the best of all possible worlds" it can be pretty good if, having made your bed, you lie in it . . . rather that complain about the crackers someone ate in the bed since you last washed the sheets.

If you want a modern Pangloss you might listen to Hanif Kureishi who suffered a freak accident a couple of years ago and broke his neck. He's still writing, still mouthing off, still thinking, still being funny from his wheelchair. Try James O'Brien Full Disclosure or wherever your get your podcasts. Which makes me think of Simone Giertz and her tumour. 

Sconser (n.) A person who looks around them when talking to you, to see if there's anyone more interesting about. A defn from The Meaning of Liff (1983) by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd.

One Dec Sun Bit

First December 2024

• Honoring Dixie
• Remembering Charles de Foucauld [d 01Dec1916] friend of the Touareg
• Making pecorino
  
• Maeshowe
• Stonehenge altar stone is Orcadian  
• Weirdly compelling: Dr Tom Crawford does 2023 LeavingCert Maths Paper 1 [Q2  spoiler R]
• Two guys cleaning up storm tree-damage
• IMPORTANT: The 2nd edition of the Agricultural and Rural Inspiration Awards (ARIA) is searching for the greenest, smartest, most socially inclusive, innovative and resilient Common Agriculture Policy (CAP) projects implemented at the local level. Chekkitout and Vote. open until Sunday, 1 December at 18.00 (CET)
• For Irish General Election anoraks: dynamic updating, maps, bar-charts. 
• tl;dr 07:00 Sun 01Dec24: 41/174 seats assigned - Left fragmented, Greens stuffed - as 2020 three way FF/FG/SF - too many independents, of which too many fasch