Ephemeral snow

in mid-April? It does happen but it's not expected. We have to prepare for frost as late as the first week in May although that doesn't happen every year. A sharp frost so late in Spring can shatter the blossom trees and shrivel the salad, so we don't plant lettuce outside [of the polytunnel] until St Pancras Day (12th May). Person or persons unknown set fire to the mountain on Sat12Apr - possible because of the super-dry Mar-Apr this year. EcoHorizon Solar finished up their groundworks on Mon14Apr - phew! in a nick of time to keep the mud under control. But on Wed16Apr, the drizzly rain turned to a slobby snow which a) covered the polytunnel an inch deep, then b) slid off and crushed the rhubarb - which had been doing so well up until then. MetÉireann made no mention of snow, so it must have been one of those rare local mountainy meteorfreaks.

That evening I was informed that my treasured Kiwi cousin had been returned home to die, so I promised that I would yomp up the hill to say goodbye in the morning. What a difference a night makes. I set off at 07:05hrs in bright oblique sunshine. You can do that if you don't have to go to work! The snow was largely gone from our yard but I knew it would hang around for longer on higher ground and I wasn't sure how far I could progress. Multi-tasking me took the branch loppers to cut back the gorse from the roadway, so I didn't arrive at the mountain gate looking back South until 07:30hrs:

Two things: a) that yellow gorse bush [R] is the last one unburned on the hill b) the fire-brigade failed to close the gate  - tsk! - when they finished fire-watching on Saturday and it was now stuck open in a snowdrift. I was very happy to see, looking up along the Narrow Road to the Deep North that our Stephen's Day sceagh hawthorn Crataegus monogyna was untouched by the fire:

"our" sceagh because for a few consecutive years in the 00s, we snuck up the hill at Christmas and festooned that tree with Cadbury Celebrations . . . knowing that at least one neighboring family with small children would walk up the hill on Stephen's Day if the weather was the least bit permissive. It's harder to walk in snow than upon dry ground but I plodded on until the road got to be dangerously icy. Then I turned diagonally up the hill heading for St Fursey's Altar. Despite the snow it was A lot warmer than it was in January upon St Fursey's Day. In fact, it was just plain delightful . . . to be up on the top of our world listening to the larks; and watching the crows pacing along with the wind.

The skylarks were doubtless pissed off that their nests had been swept over by heather burning at the end of the previous week, but I couldn't tell that from their song. My shortie boots didn't quite over-top in the snow banks - there's a lot to be said for dry socks in achieving a quiet contentment. When I headed downhill for breakfast, the snow banks were sparkling like a Disney princess and the water was just starting to thaw - burbling and lupping under the ice. Good to be alive.

Noo dles

I've been baking (almost all) the daily bread for 40 years now. I was happy to buy a decent wholemeal loaf until the relentless industrial rise and rise of Greggs ate all the early rising mom&pop bakers out of business. I could and did make cheap and cheerful - every loaf is different but every loaf is good - bread thereafter. But my bread was never stellar because I was too lazy to put in the time to knead and knead and prove. The Beloved's grandmother put my efforts to shame because she wasn't ever lazy. Cheap + tasty + interesting + nutritious + ethical bread is a myth: you have to sacrifice one or more of those desiderata.

Like a lot of people we have given house-room to a pasta-maker but in our hands it was an expensive and cupboard-cluttering toy. We compromise in pasta and buy from Aldi like normal people. I had an Italian pal who routinely made the family tortellini by hand every day: spending much more time working at the process that it took her kids to eat it. I am in awe of such a parent; but I am not that parent.

I was therefore primed when pulled noodles popped up on Metafilter. As with [ferment] bread, these noodles require physico-chemical energy to make the proteins in flour do the cook's bidding. Leavened bread works best if the dough is worked - by hand or dough-hook - in a series of repeated push-pulls to s t r e t c h the glutenin molecules out into long chains which can mesh together in microsheets to catch the CO₂ bubbles produced by the yeast. The other component of 'gluten' is several types of gliadin which are the trigger for the gut intolerance in celiac disease.

Noodles [R in the making] don't rise but they're better for having a similar push-pull work-over. Dough has two properties: stretchibility vs elasticity. Depending on the product - bread, croissant, pastry-crust, noodle - the cook needs to tilt the balance one way or the other.

• resting allows the dough to de-sproinnnng itself and allow more stretching. When you're rolling and folding the dough and butter laminations of croissants, you pop the block in the fridge every so often to let it unwind
• over-kneading you can totally deconstruct the molecular matrix of dough by grinding it in a stand-mixed for two hours but most stand-mixers can't stand that and the bearings burn out.
• Use penghui 蓬灰 as a chemical dough softener. Trad chinese cooks use "alkaline water" which is a decoction of the plant Halogeton arachnoideus which is rich in potassium carbonate,K₂CO₃ this alk-water makes the noodle dough softer and more stretchable. 
• the carbonate salt is released from the plant by burning and the ash dissolved in water
• H. arachnoideus is in the same family as spinach Spinacia oleracea, fat-hen Chenopodium album; orache, Atriplex spp.; quinoa Chenopodium quinoa 
• penghui is not available in Tesco!
  
• glutathione from 'nutritional' = killed yeast aka nooch this is a potent dough-relaxer

Watch Tim Chin make Lamian pulled noodles: super informative; not too sciencey; practical.

Going Solar

aMonda' I mentioned in passing The Works. Long ago, long enough for me to forget all about it, The Blob reports that I had a medium-deep dive into the economics and logistics of installing Solar panel in 2019. We could have gone for it, but the pay-back time seemed long and other distracting things were going on . . . not to mention Coronarama. I'm glad we didn't go solar solo in 2019 because we are now part of a Community Solar Electric Initiative. - hooked by a series of talks in the Village Hall in November 2023. By throwing our lot (and loot) in with the neighbours we get a) a bitty bulk discount b) a huge amount of expertise and support. What happened to Solar2024?? There are government grants for installing Solar and that incentive has driven a market demand for domestic installations [the tumbling price of solar panels helps too). Lots of entrepreneurs  have been asking "How hard can this be? If I sell systems and installations, I can subcontract all the digging, sawing, drilling, cable-laying, and connecting. and add 30% for myself". Entrepreneurs are, by definition, great for the sales pitch but are not all equivalent on communications, costings, timelines, reliability. The Result [a working system for sensible money] is important, but nobody wants to be chewing their beard or losing sleep over the Process . . . with unreturned phone-calls, missed deadlines inconsistent comms.

Eventually we finished up dealing with Eco Horizon from Mountrath who aren't just a glossy website. Solar panels are 1760mm x 1130mm and the DC to AC 'inverter' has a max capacity of 18 panels - or rather the Watts that will be generated by 18 panels in Ireland in Summer. It would be a false economy to skimp on a few panels because the main cost is the labour of installation. in ~2007 we acquired a polytunnel and decided to construct it in the flattest part of the haggard near the house. The alternative flat areas being too far away to be convenient for an asset used daily.  There was room on the same flat shelf to install the panels and their supporting frame.  But first I had to salvage some blocks.

The site was flat for some definitions of flat but was still pocked with hazards: an experimental frog-pond from 1998, some raised beds from 2008, a quince-tree from 2014; and a ragged-arsed dry stone wall from 1898 needed to be tidied up. I had already cut down the trees directly between the sun and the panels. This is the Before Kubota Minidigger BKM picture:

The grey edge to the L is the polytunnel with the strawberry bed in front. South is to the Right.

A few hours of Tonka-toy scooping and filling and pushing cleared off a rectangle of really level bare earth. Eco Horizon prefers to set the panels at 15° to the horizontal rather than 45°. This suits me because there is less windage in the flatter system. They also maintain that 4 x 250kg concrete blocks is enough ballast / foundation given that we aren't [yet!] in tornado country. Here's one foundation with its frame:

They invest in ½ tonne of 804 roadstone for each block because that will solidify with a splash of rain without sinking. 804 has a uniform consistency which allows one man with a minidigger and one man with a shovel to tip and tweak the blocks in 3-dimensions until they are all in line and the right distance apart. Then it is a matter of clipping on the panels and wiring those babies up [with Goran for scale]:

Minidiggers are heavy and are designed to work in muddy wet building sites, but they churn as they turn and you can see where they have been. But the mess is as nothing compared to what would have happened if we'd suffered a normal wet Irish Spring: so we count our blessings.

Monday, a team of four came from Eco Horizon because the cables [electric + data] from the solar array to the fusebox in the house had to be dug in and buried. The route was a 3-D zig-zag: only a short part of which could be handled by the digger-bucket. And (sorry lads) the fine weather broke and they started to shovel in the not-quite drizzle known here as a grand soft day. We are still due another day's work where the company electrician makes connexions and the last bits of kit, controls and wires are installed.

the company electrician? Eco Horizon employ all their Effectives directly: minidiggerers; scaffolders; pick&shovellers; fitters; labourers; tree sugeons; tilers. As our on-site EcoHoz gaffer confided [paraphrase] "you're at nothing with local sub-contractors: they've never done a solar install before, they don't adhere to our standards, they think they know better, so we have to do it all again after we've paid them off".  With an in-house crew, the company can play everyone to their strengths and compensate for their foibles. And everyone gets a chance to [by necessity has to] wield the Kubota, angle-grinder, screwdriver, Kango hammer, impact drill and pick-axe so there is a good bit of learning by doing.

GoBag

We didn't have rain for about a month from midMarch to midApril. That meant that the ground has been super dry and load-bearing which was a blessing because we had Works going on at Caisleán Blob. From another viewpoint the lack of rain meant that the hills were 'tinder' dry with the gorse Ulex europaeus coming into flower over a bed of dead bracken which has been desiccating in the breeze since late last Summer.  I was up at 0500hrs on Saturday 12 Apr 25 and was surprised and undelighted to see an orange glow to the NW behind the house. The whole face of our hill was ablaze. I was cautiously hopeful because the wind was blowing the fire back on itself and might soon run out of fuel. By lunch time, when I yomped up the lane as far as the Mountain Gate, the wind had turned  and brought the fire to the very edge of the common; with smoke billowing  across the track between our heathland and the incipient forest planted 3 years ago.

By the morning of the following day the fire had burned through pretty much the entire 200 hectares of our Common; certainly everything we could see from the mountain gate was  A Study in Grey  [as L] a camo-parent not to be confused with Arrangement en gris et noir n°1  aka Whistler's Mother (1871). The 3 y.o. forest with its waist-high treelets in a wet valley bottom survived untoasted. They say that brush fires occur spontaneously; or from broken glass lensing the sunlight; or from lightning strike. But those causes are vanishingly unlikely in Ireland in April even if there has been very little rain. 

The county  fire brigade  had been mobilized to our valley all week. Nobody doubts the courage and community spirit of the fire brigade! But it's one thing to go blue-lights and sirens through suburban streets and unreel the hose in front of a burning semi-detached. Another level of fitness and commitment is required to struggle uphill, loaded with PPE and trade tools [Pulaski], through rocks and bushes towards a distant gorse fire. I gather they are on a watching brief - prepared to write off the dry heath, the lark's nests, the blueberries, the invertebrates - but ready for action if forestry or buildings are under threat.

 The Beloved had committed to spending the Saturday in another county, so I was alone with my ruminations. We've been woken in the middle of the night with fire crackling outside the the bedroom curtains. That was totally unexpected and we had only a few minutes to decide what to save if the wind changed direction and rained embers down on our home. This last weekend, I packed a Go-Bag in case we had to leave home in a hurry.  In 1993, I saved the computer, which was then a largely irrelevant and expensive toy. It was only later that I realised that the family photos were irreplaceable. In 2025, we have all moved our electronic world front and centre. All the recent family photos are stored as electrons rather than highly flammable paper. The Go-Bag received the backup hard-drives; the current laptops; the password list!; wills, birth certs and passports. That's all! ymmv, but I won't have time to re-read the wall of books which I look at as I type: so they can go . . . or stay as I go. The rest is just stuff and clutter.  To put that in context (and it reads a tad paranoid) I thought of the strip of forestry planted as carbon offset by the ESB in 2019. Those trees are now 2-3m tall poking through an understorey of bushes and briars. The 15 hectare lot snakes down from the mountain gate ↑ all the way to the County Road:

That forest comes to the very edge ↑ of the farm, about 40m from our bedroom window. Between the ESB plantation and our window there is a jungly copse of miscellaneous flammable trees and bushes. In my mind it was all a bit too close for comfort. Although looking at the actual map, I appreciate that it would be a very determined, goal-directed, Bob-hating fire to get from the blue arrow to the pink one and then jump at my throat while I lay sleeping.

Previous ruminations on The Heather Blazing: Sep 2024 - Apr 2022 - Apr 2020

Ne timere?

I was in the library a tad early last month for Wexford Science Café. Desperate for something to read I snagged Buried Lives - The Protestants of Southern Ireland review (2017) by Robin Bury [History Press of Ireland ISBN 9781845888800].  As we went into the meeting,  I waved it at the convenor and said "My people . . ." to which he replied "Yeah, mine too." As neither of us are Protestants of Northern Ireland the exchange didn't have much weight. Up North, when strangers meet there can be a bit of a dance around trying to establish each other's antecedents [never anything so obvs as asking "What school did you go to?" where's the fun in that?]- 

• mentioning a yorker or cover-point and gauging the amount of recognition of these cricketing terms 
• ditto the score at last weekend's local GAA / rugby derby 
• using mental calipers to measure the inter-orbital distance of your chatee
  

Bury's Buried Lives [a harmless pun? I don't think so: we know The English are mad for puns] is agreeably tendentious - because "My people . . ." - but that doesn't make it less shocking. We live in a multi-cultural society now with Paul McGrath + Lee Chin + Leo Varadkar not to mention pizza, pierogi and polenta:  all lovey and inclusive . . . until it's not. Obvs, travellers have been excluded from the inclusion. If you are Irish and think You are without prejudice, just check your pulse when a neighbour announces "Joe saw a white Hiace van going up Hungry Hill last night while the Widow Hungry was at Mass". Any sense of national smugness w.r.t inclusion is no longer tenable since the Coolock Riots last Summer.

Ger Murphy was a colleague and friend at The Institute where/when the Blob was born. He researched and wrote a book The Year of Disappearances, Political Killings in Cork 1921-1922 whose thesis was that Protestants were ethnic-cleansed along the Bandon Valley in Co Cork, during the civil war: under the fiction that they were informers or imperialists. You can get a flavour of the issues in Ger's review of a subsequent book on the subject: Massacre in West Cork: The Dunmanway and Ballygroman Killings, by Barry Keane. 

Not as terminal as being killed, but according to Robin Bury,  "My people . . ." were being given the C🔥🔥l🔥ck treatment - back then arson was carried out not on buildings intended for The Other as now, but buildings = homes actually occupied by people who didn't fit a narrow GAA, Catholic, post-colonial description of what it was to be Irish. People were rousted from the beds in the small hours by armed and trench-coated posses of their neighbours and told they had 15 minutes to vacate the premises which were scheduled to be torched. hmmm, for some definitions of "My people . . ." because both The Big House in King's County (where my Grandfather grew up) and The Big House in Wexford (whence his mother hailed) survived the 1920s Wars (Independence and Civil) unscathed.  The latter was then demolished by the Office of Public Works in the 1960s and 70s. Actually the structure was filleted, with great care, to remove everything that had been incorporated since the dissolution of the Cistercian Monastery in 1540. 

Gotta say though, that not all Catholics still say the crassest things to some Protestants - it just slips out like - one of my colleagues invited me to go back where I came from when I claimed to come from King's County.

Another anecdatum about whether Protestants were excluded from the nascent state after independence is that the same Big House grandfather applied for and got the job of Harbormaster at Dunmore East in Co Waterford and held that billet for 25 years until he retired in 1947. In retirement he lived across the estuary in a cottage owned by his cousin near his own mother's home-place. He died in the fullness of his years in the Summer of 1957. By coincidence, a very short hop down the road, that Summer the Fethard Boycott blew up over the rights and wrongs of the 1907 Ne Temere decree from Catholic Centraal under Pope Pius X. Ne Temere declared that Catholics could marry Others if, and only if, both parties to the contract agreed to raise the kids as Catholics. Sheila Cloney signed the papers when she got married but balked at sending her eldest to Catholic National school when the child was old enough to go. At least partly that decision was triggered by the bullying assumptions of Father Stafford the local curate. A film [poster L] was made about the events 40 years later. And at about the same time the then current Bishop of Ferns Brendan Comiskey issued a formal apology. Four years later Comiskey resigned because of his complicity in the wide-spread sexual abuse of children by members of his team. 

Robin Bury devotes a whole chapter to Fethard. If you live in Ireland, or grew up here, you probably have 'views' on some of the actions of some of the members of The Religious. According to Rev Adrian Fisher, the CoI rector at Fethard in the 1950s, Father Stafford found time to carry out a vehicular homicide on one of his parishioners . . . "One day he killed an elderly man. Ran into him and the body landed on the bonnet of his car. I walked to the village after this happened and saw two elderly country women, simple souls, and I mean this is no disparaging way. I said it was a tragedy that poor old man who lived down the road. The immediate reaction of these two women was to put their hands in the air and say 'Glory be to God, killed by a priest.' Extraordinary. I walked on. The Gardai did nothing about it. In  England there would be an enquiry straight away." [Buried Lives Ch.5 p.131]. Nobody talks about the boycott in 1957 SE Wexford nowadays. No more than the plain people of Granard speak about Ann Lovett - those who live(d) there all know the story and those who didn't don't need to know; but will certainly judge.

What's with Ne timere in the Title? Just a hint that "My people . . ." fear nothing. I do think that Buried Lives is worth reading by those who aren't members of our MOPE community but rather live alongside us. Or read something like Liam Kennedy's Unhappy the Land; the most oppressed people ever, the Irish? [whc Bloboprev]

Category error

One of the last events in which I participated before CoViD and my retirement from The Institute was a workshop on gender and sexuality. It was really useful for de-fuzzifying my language and understanding in that arena.  It is a category error to confuse sexuality [who does what to whom] from gender [how those involved self-identify]. 

As a society there's a whole bunch of things we don't do well. In Ireland I think we have a good line in Death - especially The Afters. Wakes are good, open coffins are good, expediting the transition from bed to grave is good; shouldering the coffin is good; the month's mind mass is good. In England, none of these are normal practice which delays closure and derails the process of grieving. Your Ukrainian Mileage May Vary. 

Sex maybe not so much? Because a) we don't usually talk about those things [so] b) people are confused and can persist in just being wrong about stuff. And also quite unkind. It is not a good look when "gay" is a term of casual abuse among schoolboys. Although I will say that acceptance of actual gays and gender-queer is pretty good among the friends of my ~30ish y.o. daughters. There are more trans-people in their rather tight friend-group than I encountered at all at all in my whole generation. - and that includes the travel writer James→Jan Morris [whom prev]. It's kinda pathetic when JK Rowling and others in the TERF-bund make such a song and dance about whether trans-women can use 'their' bathrooms. And if someone wants to be known as Jan or 'they' why not go along with that?

That's a bit of preamble to note that I had a couple of hours listening to Alice Dreger recently. Interviewed by Sean Carroll on his Mindscapes podcast and then giving a TED talk.  Dreger is famous for taking evidence-based positions on the diversity of human sexuality and gender. She made herself very unpopular for refusing to accept that the norms of her society should be accepted by all its members even when those norms and just wrong for a minority.

It would be fine and dandy if men were men and women were women and there were no edge cases. But biology is not binary, it's complicated in (inter many alia) androgen insensitivity syndrome AIS and Congenital adrenal hyperplasia CAH. 

• AIS is when the developing embryo, possessing a Y chromosome, starts belting out testosterone but [ooops] there are insufficient androgen receptors in the cells of the primordial genital ridge. These proto-genital cells divide and divide as if the testosterone level was low and a clitoris develops instead of a penis; and maybe [it's a spectrum] labia majora rather than scrotum.
• Contrariwise CAH can lead to so much circulating testosterone that, despite all the cells being XX, the external genitalia develop looking like a boy's. A quite glance at the neonatal groin will have the staff go M [✓] and the parents will order up blue babygros despite two X chromosomes and two ovaries. Things can go pear-shaped come puberty.

When presented with such edge case, us normals often freak out. Patriarchal pediatric surgeons go snip, nip and tuck to make the down there bits a better fit for a binary gender universe. The implication / assumption is "you'll thank me when you grow up". errr no! what happened to informed consent?

Who we become is a complex process of hormones, growth factors, receptors for both classes of chemical; feedback loops; psychology; family dynamics, societal norms, religious practice, culturalization. Dreger knows all this - because she made it her business (as a historian!) to find out. She has said that, in some cases, coming out as trans is driven by confusion about sexuality rather than gender and that raised a shit-storm of 'social' media invective and cancelling.

You'll have to listen to Mindscapes to fill in the details. Here's another thread in my recent reading in which it is discussed whether Oscar Wilde was gay or bi. Couldn't care less? Me neither. But it seems that True Gays and Real Lesbians regard bisexuals as not part of The Movement and must be cancelled, erased and/or have their epaulets ripped off prior to expulsion from homosexual Eden. The fact that St Oscar fathered two kids on his wife Constance doesn't necessarily tarnish the author's true gay credentials.

No hiding place

Robert Frost (or rather his neighbour) was all about ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’  Nearly 30 years ago, we bought an old farmhouse with out-buildings and 16 acres and were delighted with ourselves. The buildings were in various stages of collapse and there were A Lot of trees-and-bushes sprouting from the field boundaries. One catty neighbour explained that the previous incumbent had been too feckless to cut the trees for firewood but we were happy-out with the aesthetic and ecological diversity we inherited from the old chap's laissez-faire stewardship. Up until the ash-die back necessitated some judicious felling at the end of 2021, we never had to cut a tree for fire-wood . . . but we never short of the stuff because bits fell off or trees fell down with every storm.

16 acres with a bohereen running through the middle generates ~1.6km of perimeter! Over the years, we have by project and piecemeal repaired or re-instated fences and hedges and ditches good enough to make good neighbours. Most recently denying The Beach to our sheep and before that to keep the East-Neighbour's jumpy sheep from leaping the wall beside the same river. But in general, the policy is if it ain't broke don't fix it . . . for some definitions of ain't broke. Because sometimes the fix will reveal a huge hitherto invisible cavity in the boundary infrastructure which require time and treasure to make good.

Then again, sometimes the grit that niggles is a) never going to birth a pearl and so b) moves from niggle to let's fix that sucker. Case in niggle-point was a 9m section of the West boundary wall where a clatter of gorse furze whin onn Ulex europaeus and bramble dris Rubus spp. had sprung out from the top of the wall - there maybe 1.5m high - and drooped down to the ground as far at 3m from the wall-base. That's not much lost grazing but, behind the green and brown parts of the shrubbery, there was a black whin-tunnel which had room for up to 4 invisible sheep. Invisible sheep canna be counted. Instead of standing on the rise and surveying the flock [15 head + 60 leg = all good], I'd have to go roust out the missing from their shady tunnel. Which is a better outcome than finding one with her stiffening legs in the air; but still a niggle.

The last Thursday in March I touched up my chain-saw, clobbered up in the PPE, and strode off down the field to fix:

Less than 20 minutes later the tunnel was all gone, the wall revealed, the brash tidied back against it and any branches big enough to make firewood stacked in a separate pile for Christmas 2026. Sorry sheep; but there are plenty of other places left in that field where you may shelter from the driving rain and unforgiving sun . . . but in plain sight.