Rehab through work

For a whole mid-20thC generation, a month's bed-rest was prescribed after the terrifying near-death experience of acute uncomplicated myocardial infarction AMI. There was no very good evidence for this form of rehabilitation and several studies found that patients did better (psychologically, physically and psychosomatically) if they got up and started back to their before times regime. 

A few months ago James Rebanks [L], the articulate Cumbrian shepherd - bloboprev - was interviewed on Full Disclosure [1hr YT also free download at podbean] by James O'Brien. Rebanks was plugging his latest book A Place of Tides [2024]. The conceit is that Rebanks volunteers to travel to the furthest NW edge of Europe and help two elderly Norwegian ladies with the eiderdown harvest.

April Fool's Day: while spaghetti is not harvested from Italian trees, the down from eider ducks Somateria mollissima is gathered from nests after the chicks have fledged, carefully cleaned and sold for high-end duvets and jackets. The eider boom has a peculiarly intimate relationship with seafaring people. In the 19thC, better boats and better prices led to an extension in the North Atlantic fishery. The by-catch and fish guts returned to the sea were scarfed up by the eider ducks as being easier, more digestible, pickings than mussels and crabs.  And now we have taken every fish from the sea and replaced them with plastrash, the numbers of ducks is tumbling.

In the Spring these ducks have to come ashore to breed and the women of the community started building eider hotels near the shoreline. The accommodation was/is in two parts 1) artificial nests made from dried seaweed 2) a shelter built from stones, sod and driftwood to mitigate the wind and shed some of the rain. It was/is easier to separate the down from neat seaweed nests than from the any-old-shite which the ducks would use in the wild. It's a compromise for the ducks: they accept tenancy from their enormous terrifying landlord because the presence (and the .22 rifle) of the latter deters the mink Neogale vison, otters Lutra lutra and ravens Corvus corax which eat nesting ducks and their eggs

The younger of the two women started to help during the eider season when she was a) increasingly hacked-off with the up-sell demands of management after several decades working in the local bank b) in remission from breast cancer. The Elder, came earlier but at a similar age after finding that catering in the hubbub of an old folks home was no longer floating her boat. And Rebanks, locked into his family sheep farm man-and-boy, is also troubled by an existential crisis. As with recovery from AMI, there's no good to be had from moping about as damaged goods. Better to be kneeling in slick goose-shit, suffering a biting wind with intermittent showers, fixing a new door on a duck-house. 

It turns out that 'young' James [b. 1974] is not a total useless mouth out on Fjærøy [Feather Island]. He's been deftly wielding a sprong since ever he could walk because hay must be pitched. Pitching rotten, or shaping newly dried, seaweed is essentially the same; and farmers can do A Lot with a saw, a hammer and a mouthful o' nails. 

I'm not surprised that my request to borrow A Place of Tides from the library took 3 months to reach the top of the list: it's easy to read and just a little bit inspirational.

Relief of Sheep

I went to school in England. I doubt if The Easter Rising was even mentioned but the various Acts of Parliament concerning the establishment of the Church of England in the 1500s - that was considered important. And some of the Protestant martyrs were considered romantic / stoic / StiffUpperLipped: Be of good cheer Mr Ridley and play the man not the ball etc. We were sufficiently even-handed to acknowledge that lots of Catholics also went up in flames. But in the superficial, sound-byte teaching of history, the impact of religious flip-flopping upon everyday farming folk was a closed book.

Not any more! It was suggested that I read The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village (2001) by Eamon Duffy. For skool-history regnal dates context "catholics" vs "protestants" . . .

• Henry VIII Fid.Def. 1509 - 1534 [25½ yrs] 
• ie before Act of Supremacy declaring KH8 to be head of the [local] church
• Henry VIII Ch.Eng 1534 - 1547 [12 yrs]
• Edward VI 1547 - 1553 [6½ yrs] 
• d. age 15
• Mary I 1553 - 1559 [6½ yrs]
• Elizabeth 1559 -  1603 [40+ yrs]

It's quite hard to do historical research in the County of Devon, because the Public Records in Exeter were blitzed to buggery in WWII. But, like the (7/123) surviving plays of Sophocles, by chance some documents from the 1500s survived. One of them was uniquely, garrulously,  comprehensive and exactly book-ended the whole period of religious reformation in England. The churchwarden's accounts for the village /hamlet of Morebath were scrupulous written up 1520 - 1574 in the spidery scrawl of the parish priest Christopher Trychay:

Local Government, and finance, was in the hands of several elected Wardens at the beginning of this period but the vicar was literate and so kept the minutes of annual reports of income and outgoings: "Ys for the gefth of Thomas at Tymwell the wyche was  vj^s & viij^d [6/8d = ⅓ of £1] hyt was be stowyd yn payntyng of the sylyng a bowt the hye crosse parte of hyt and the rest of hyt schall come in a banner dicit very shortly sperat". It sounds like English (with a scattering of Latin) but not as we now write it.

The wealth of the parish was vested in the parish flock which were parcelled out, in ones and twos, to run with the flocks of parishioners. It was bad when one of these sheep pegged out, but not a total loss if the fleece could be recovered from the corpse. The parish bumbled along: raising funds by throwing "ales" = parties and then employing craftsmen to re-lead the church roof; make new vestments and altar-cloths; contribute to the repair of bridges.

But the finances were increasingly pinched [both senses] by the demands of central government to a) finance foreign wars b) cement (or undo) the trappings of a reformed church. The Protestants had a thing against altars and required their de-blinging and even dismantling; and the parish then had to provide a table from which to serve communion. Each parish was also required to buy an official Book of Common Prayer [whc prev], English language bible and the Paraphrases on the New Testament by Erasmus. You may be sure that someone made a fortune from the supply of these expensive articles but nobody from Morebath. When Catholicism was restored under Queen Mary, it was tables away, rebuild the stone altar, and refurnish it with chalice, pyx, paten and thurible . . . and Carry on Catholic.

Then there were the ornery taxes of secular life: like the 1549 Relief of Sheep [3^d per ewe in fields, 1^d for those on the moorland commons] followed by the Relief of Cloth [8^d per lb on finished woollen cloth]. The image this conjures is of a Highwayman holding up people at pistol-point "I shall relieve you of that purse of ducats, my good Sir, and cast thereto the lady's ear-rings". 

Those years in the mid-1500s thus midwifed, not only the Church of England, but also the modern centralized state - taking goods or money from citizens while giving them only indirect control of how the money was spent. All very modern, so.

Red feet by red hill

I am given to understand that one of the first steps on a new building site is for the apprentice carpenter to make a saw horse. Making the tea, frying eggs on a shovel over a brazier, wa/ondering from pillar to post in search of a glass hammer; all that comes later. A carpenter's saw-horse is a multi-tasker: just the right height for sawing a 4x2 to length; an extra two feet of height when slabbing up a ceiling; the only safe place to leave your tape-measure; a seat for the tea-breaks. 

The common-or-garden saw-horse is a different beast. No place for a cup of tea (neither for cup nor arse); no horizontal surfaces; precarious to stand on. But 'tis a great asset for sawing logs - either longer / fatter pieces with a chain-saw (saves the back) or final product with a bow-saw (saves the planet). I've made a number of these over the years: because they don't last forever being made from off-cuts and tend to get left out in the rain. In February, my elder saw-horse started to be real shaky . . . and I noticed a matching pair of short red cedar Thuja plicata planks left over from the 2016 wood-shed project; and the 2023 planter project. I usually have a fund of endless 50x50mm oak Quercus robur fence-posts: endless because the pointy bit has rotted out. Nothing going to waste, the elder saw-horse was reduced to sticks [R] for going up  the chimney.

The result of the 2021 saw-horse project is still giving great service despite the top bars being nicked and notched all along from over-active chain-saw. I learned a good bit on that job and was happy that this years offcuts are 10cm shorter that 2021s - a saw-horse needs to be long enough . . . any longer is just extra weight and awkwardness when the it's being moved around. I also used up some surplus red fence preservative leaving the bottom ends of the saw-fetlocks soaking in the gloop overnight. That might just slow down the inevitable foot-rot. Oh, how I wish that I could drill a 12mm hole straight through two 50x50mm timbers rather than at a crazy angle. But the 12mm threaded stock went through the wonky hole anyway. Chekkittout below - the dinky red feet cosa rua that may be viewed at Kncokroe Cnoc Rua the red hill. Also the well-used weathered older brother / template in the background

Now we are back to two saw-horses - one for each wood-shed. Win!

Tribute philatelic

 An Post was celebrating 2025 International Women's Day [8th March] a couple of days early by launching a couple of stamps featuring Irish Women in STEM. In 2023, they recognised Political women, in 2024 it was sportistas. This year scientists, and why not? But the question was - whom should the apparatchiks of the postal service choose, leaving so many worthy names on the cutting room floor? And how do they decide?? Pick two [2] out of two dozen is not going to be "fair".

Anyway; A couple of weeks ago, I was RSVP-invited to a An Post Event at The Point on the edge of Dublin's docklands. They had arranged for Jess Kelly, tech correspondent for Newstalk FM, to innerview Aoife McLysaght about her journey from school to getting her face on a National postage stamp! As did, in parallel, Jocelyn Bell Burnell [whom prev] The conversazione was similar in look&feel and take-home to one I attended last month in Wexford. Many scientists, men and women, give a hat-tip to the science teacher in their secondary school. But are not invited to drill down into the skills or attributes of that early sensei of science.

One important element of that relationship is telling the younger person that they are smart and capable and could for sure leap tall buildings. And those encouraging, validating, statements are too often rarely heard when growing up. I knew Aoife before she was famous. And it seems that I was one of the people who distinguished between ignorance and stupidity. When you're young, you may know nothing, but nevertheless have an aptitude for finding stuff out. Teaching at its best is about framing questions that spark curiosity rather than transmitting the ideas of others. At some stage in a scientific career you stop taking notes about Hooke's Law and start formulating your own rules about how the world ticks. A good mentor says: you can do this.

At the An Post Event, on Mardi Gras, they secured some time from busy Minister James Lawless T.D., Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science and Linda Doyle, the Provost of TCD. It can get quite tiresome how parochial these leaders of the ship of state can be. Minister Lawless wanted to own Kathleen Lonsdale [bloboprev] because she was born in his constituency. Lonsdale died 5 years before the future Minister was born, so there's a dollop of hubris in claiming her for his bailiwick. And The Provost seems to imply that the two Stampees would have been at nothing without the imprimatur of her college. “Aoife, who holds the Chair of Evolutionary Genetics in Trinity, and Jocelyn, who is an Honorary Fellow in Trinity, have already stamped their mark in their research areas. It is fitting that they are now honoured in this way." It is just so much nonsense: Aoife and Jocelyn have made their own luck and would have done just fine regardless of what college they were associated with. It's not all about the environment, it's [also] about the intrinsic quality: resilience, smarts, openness, creativity. If Aoife hadn't worked for me in the Summer of 1996, she might not have spent the next 30 year staring at genome sequences - but rather making sense of some other aspect of the natural world.

Lawless and Doyle are, in a sense, both Prof McLysaght's bosses; because she is currently double jobbing as a) Professor of Evolutionary Genetics in Trinity College b) Government Science Advisor. Me, I'm only here for the merch [eight (8) stamps, a first day cover and two post-cards]:

 

Washout

We've been living 300m from the county road up a rough 1in10 bohereen for nearly 30 years. The year we moved in 1997, a large part of the surface was washed down to the bottom of the hill by a Summer rainstorm. It didn't help that the clatter of small fields above us had been converted into a single sloped 3½ hectare meadow pointing directly at the lane. In Feb 2010, exactly the same thing happened because a lot of snow thawed in a rush at night. It was only through the power of prayer that we didn't suffer a third washout in 2018.

In 2022, if was fixed that 100 tonnes of top-dress roadstone was delivered by the County Council  and spread u the lane by a meitheal of local farmers so that a procession of strangers could walk to the top of our hill. Imagine the shame if someone tripped over a loose stone. It looked pretty spiffing tbh but uncompacted was a bit of trudge for walkers. As we worked away spreading the gravel, I said to anyone who would listen [that would be N = 0] that it was pointless to put this down without sorting out the drainage first. That's three years ago, and we've had plenty rain since then, not to mention a succession of named Storms and the gravel was shaking down nicely as tractors and 4x4s went up and down.

In the wee hours of the morning Friday 21st Feb 2025 we had a yellow rain and wind warning. I didn't pay much attention after Darragh and Éowyn romped through in their big girl pants. But at first light the drain was still roaring full of water and I shucked myself into my rain-drain gear including chest-high Aldi waders [as R] to clear any log jams below us. The reason why we washed out in 2010 was because a couple of twigs got caught at the top end of a 30cm culvert and other material built up until the water had to spill up and out into the lane.  That's where I was caught by Pete the Post. He had a fine line in dry irony: "where are the neighbours, so . . . is it my back is out or my shovel is broke??". I replied that I was really the only one with skin in the game: the lane would have to get real bucketty before it stopped a tractor or a flock of sheep.

Having reassured myself about the downside, I trudged uphill to see where the water was (still) coming from and make a start on stemming the flow. Above us the water damage [example L] was much worse . . . because I've gone to some trouble to engineer dams and sumps to divert water from the road surface to the parallel drain. The worst part of the roadway would be a challenge to any car - and it's the worst part which is the gatekeeper. After many hours of nighttime rainfall it was bolt-stable-door-after-horse-fled futile, but nevertheless I cut some sods from the margin and dumped them upside down across a low patch in one of the ridges across the road where a positive river was spilling from the mountain. That worked to turn the flow to one side and so served as a diagnostic for where to do something more effective later.

The drain had sorted the gravel out in patches where it was a little deeper than average. And I spent a good part of Friday afternoon, in the drain excavating these tailings for a more useful purpose than going further downhill to block things or eventually finish up in Waterford Harbour. That was mildly satisfying as a whole-torso workout. And I filled a few crates with gravel that I could not sensibly spread immediately. Dry gravel has a density a little over 1.5x water. Guesstimating the volume suggests I've captured 150kg of this material for future use rather than immediate waste.

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.