Pond, ear-lobe

I first encountered Fitzcarraldo Editions in the summer of 2017, while browsing in the London Review Bookshop, near the British Museum. I came across a slim paperback volume with a plain cover in International Klein Blue. In white lettering was a single-word title, “Pond,” and the name of the author, Claire-Louise Bennett, along with the name of the publisher and its insignia (a bell inscribed in a circle).

A tuthree weeks ago, my Massachusetts correspondent P sent me a clipping from the NewYorker about this Art House publisher. Fitzcarraldo has a track record for discovering future Nobel Prize for Literature winners. As all these literateurs are being fulsome in their praise and support of an Irish writer, I went to the library catalogue to see what was in stock. Synchronicity revealed that Wexford Town library had a copy of Pond and I was due to attend Wexford Science Café exactly a week later. Instead of making an on-line reservation - and allowing the algorithm to send a copy from Sligo <whoop whoop carbon footprint alert> - I e-mailed The Librarian at Wexford and asked them to bring their copy down from the top floor and hold it for me. And in due course I took delivery of Pond just before attending a discussion about the history of forensic science in Ireland.

Pond was first published (2015) by Stinging Fly Press in Dublin before being spotted and boosted by Fitzcarraldo. And 'my' copy is such a 1st Edition. Let's say first off that's it's not as easy reading as Louis L'Amour. There is no Introduction so the reader must surmise that these are 20 short-to-microscopic pieces of literary fiction memoir, reflecting on what it is like being a slightly unhinged single woman living in the West of Ireland in the early 21stC. She has an uneasy relationship with the earth and what can be grown in it; and she details the uneasy relationships she has with her feller, her friends, a pair of thatchers and her landlady (and the landlady's baleful omnipresent sister). The details are, I guess, the point; or at least the reason why The Literary Scene has taken Bennett up so enthusiastically. 

That and the quirky, arresting, turns of phrase: "rice hissing out of the sack like rain" reminding me of my favorite lines in Seamus Heaney " But I ran my hand in the half-filled bags / Hooked to the slots. It was hard as shot, / Innumerable and cool"  . . . and the $10 words: antithetical, cantilevered, costive, ensorcelled, minacious, prelapsarian, scintillant, serrulated. In one essay she talks about the baggage the reader carries when real people share a name with a character in the tale . . . some little thing about Miriam in real life will infiltrate Miriam in the book so it doesn't matter how many times her ear lobes are referred to as dainty and girlish; in the reader's mind Miriam's ear lobes are forever florid and pendulous. This wasn't the only time I laughed out loud.

But, dammit, if you're going to be elliptical and allusive about a pond, why take 17 pages about it when 17 syllables will do?

古池や furu ike ya

蛙飛こむ kawazu tobikomu
水のおと mizu no oto

An ancient pond / a frog jumps in / ploosh! Basho [more / prev]

Found in Dublin

I've been baking the family bread for forty = 40 years now. Originally using dried yeast purchased in 500g tins - first in England and then from The Dublin Yeast Co. For many years now I've been using the sourdough starter I got from my pal Carole. As these things evolve, the ferment will not be the same as more yeast and LABs = Lactic Acid Bacteria local to our kitchen will have successfully elbowed their way into the party. As well as this jar of bubbles in the fridge, I buy 100g blocks of fresh yeast from one of the Polskie Sklepy. Dried yeast? so yesterday. Bread is made on the regular, either in a tin or as ~2oz balls rolled out thin and cooked on a dry skillet. These latter are called Knockroti K'roti or Chups [pic].  On Sunday 15/Jul here was a rather desperate call from Dublin:

MAYDAY MAYDAY The chups have run out,
the store is empty, the tears are flowing.

The problem with chups is that they have a shelf-life of about 36 hours, 48 if kept in a bag in the fridge. The solution is that they freeze nicely and revive from the ice quite well. Accordingly, when I bake I'll cook up a stack of K'roti, and freeze what's surplus to immediate requirements. When the call came, I found that I could muster a sackful of frozoti and had white-diary for the following Wednesday when Dau.II would be off work. 

I played my free travel card [use it or lose it: Irish Rail don't carry coffins] and had 5 hours in Dublin. Having delivered my bag of K'roti, and consumed a reviving cup of tea and a fressh-baked cinnamon bun, we set out to shop-till-we-dropped. We are both appalling consumers: we really do nothing for the economy, so in short order we were looking for lunch . . . in Yamamori. I was super distracted to be seated between two original art-works stuck to walls. The eyes have it - I thought - someone is ripping off Graham Knuttel whose work (singular!) we have been collecting since before he was famous. He died last year. These Yamamori paintings are signed by Jonathan Knuttel who is a nephew of the original successful Knuttle. You can buy J.Knuttel at various price-points; not all of the material is derivative of Uncle Graham. But beyond that I am unqualified to give an opinion.  The lunch was tasty, it all cost about 6x what I earned for a week's farrrm laboring when I was a teenager. Dau.II accounted it good value for Dublin.

After lunch we wandered down to Trinity College to consider the trees and encountered a nicely ironic bit of signage. For reasons opaque to me the TCD Management had seen fit to cover pretty much all the grass in New Square just North of The Berkeley Library with a very loud red metal building.

I've had occasion to slag off  the book of kells experience  with oR withOut caPitals. Separate the punter from any real contact with the actual medieval text and from about the same amount of money as we'd just dropped on a snack for lunch. I was chatting to a Trinity Perfessor last weekend and the "red box" (tech term) is only there temporary, like. After the Notre Dame de Paris fire it became apparent that The Long Room (where all the antient / valuable books are stored) has 18thC levels of fire protection. The red box is only there mulcting the tourists until the older building is fire-proofed to modern standards.

The irony? That's in a needlessly hectoring sign posted [L] at the entrance to  the experience . It's not okay for an unwitting tourist to step backwards onto the grass in order to get a better selfie but it is okay to land a huge tin can the size of the international space station and crush all the grass into anaerobic darkness‽ It is apparent that the only value my alma mater embraces nowadays is bullion value.

The Berkeley ? Berkeley, famous philosopher, and quondam Librarian at Trinity (whose bday The Blob celebrated in 2015), has been cancelled de-named because he was an unapologetic slave-holder. Don't lift the covers on what he thought about Catholics! That last link lays out all submitted arguments submitted to the Trinity's Legacies Review Working Group (TLRWG). Peter West PhD(Berkeley) TCD has rueful thoughts. Trinity is going to try another name, hopefully history-proof, although my Insider Channel favours vanilla-plain The Library.  [More on cancellation: RA Fisher defenestrated (eugenics); Edward Colston drownded (slave holder)].

Walling

very miscellaneous

• dry-stone bothy [building] and mountain-bike [riding]
• Das Bunker in Cumbria for sale 
• A wordy visit to Fair Isle with Alex Hibbert
  
• US boomer infra-structure now a hostage to fortune as it enters best-before warranty
• Rapidan dam abutment fails [R] - big scour up and down stream, bridge pier compromised 
• Upcycling pineapple waste.
• LifePack makes biodegradable plates with added cilantro seeds
• 𝄞 ♩ ♬ ♫ ♪
  
• Mümin Sarıkaya - via
• Oi Suomi, katso, Sinun päiväs koittaa [Finlandia]
• Lasse "Finland" Virén Munich 1972, falls, wins 10,000m : race-finish bloboprev 
• Sport: fierljeppen = canal vaulting
  
• Thames mudlark Graham duHeaume (fl 1970s) shares his finds. [mudoprev]
  

Trinity treeees

Let everyone bob to their own level. I was happy to be a second rate scientist because it gave me the chance to watch ticking first rate minds at work. I wasn't a fifth rate scientist; although I guess some of them are ignoring Mark Twain's advice about writing and writers and still drawing a salary in colleges round the world rather than sawing wood. Before I worked at The Institute and started The Blob, I was a computational immunologist in UCD and then TCD, the rival universities in Dublin. 

One of the first raters, for whom I worked, decided to formalize the process of allowing teenagers to intern in science. Having Professor Bigcheese bullying his colleagues to edutain his nephew for a few days got to be disruptive, haphazard and [therefore] not a good window into the wonders of science. If the Department could limit interns to a couple of weeks in the year then a) the kids would have some peers to hang out with while the centrifuge span down b) group activities / explanations / safety announcements would be efficient use of employee time c) the disruption to Real Work would be time-limited. And let's make a scientific scavenger hunt round college to get the teens out in the fresh air and explore campus. That would be Let's you Bob make a scientific scavenger hunt. Nothing loath, in 2008, off I went to research and write a booklet called Finding Out in Trinity. One of the tasks was to guesstimate the height of a particular tree near the college rugger pitch adjacent to the Engineering Building.

I was in Dublin recently and made a progress report on tree-growth between 2008 [L] and 2024 [R]. We can take it that the white building hasn't grown over the last 16 years (that is a new build behind it, extreme R). Even if you take the angle and camera differences with a pinch of salt, it looks like [data tabulated below] that tree has grown 2.05 ÷ 1.79 = 14% in that period.

Year	Building	Tree	Ratio
2008	28mm	50mm	1.78
2024	23mm	47mm	2.05
		growth =	14%

The Oregon maple Acer macrophyllum in which I was showing off in 1974 came crashing to earth in 2018. Partly because it was "a hazard", and partly because The Patriarchy prefers things symmetrical to show they are in charge, the matching maple on the other side of front square was felled out the following year. They were replaced with a pair of ginkos Ginko biloba which are native to Clare China. The trees are doing well, so far, although one could, and I do, fault the committee for failure to plant a species native to Ireland . . . and for still obsessing about symmetry as if we're André Le Nôtre in the Versailles of Louis XIV. They never learn. 

The other famous paired trees in front square are the Erman's birch Betula ermanii - also native to China. There used to be two more Oregon maples in the patches of manicured lawn here, adjacent to Front Gate. One of them blew down in a storm in 1945 and after much hand-wringing the College Symmetrists won the day and the remaining maple was felled out and replaced with the pair of birches. Nature, sunlight and soil had the last laugh on the Symmetriarchy: leaving one birch struggling and the other winner-takes-all - a fitting metaphor for late stage Capitalism:

Trouble with tree decisions like these is that they stand testament long after the responsible dusty old academics have passed on to the library in the sky.

Scones across the ocean

For years we lived anyhow with one another in the naked desert,
under the indifferent heaven. By day the hot sun fermented us;
and we were dizzied by the beating wind. At night we were stained
by dew, and shamed into pettiness by the innumerable silences of stars.

It wasn't quite as intense as it was for Lawrence of Arabia [The opening of his The Seven Pillars of Wisdom] and we didn't blow up any trains, but me and my pal Θ shared an office at The Institute for the 7 years before Coronarama. We covered for each other, commiserated when the exams for marking made a Manhattan of our desks, laughed about (but never at) our student's quirks and errors and shared our petty triumphs over an indifferent bureaucracy. Θ lives diametrically opposite The Institute from Caisleán Bob and twice the distance. But since I've retired, between the end of exams and the Summer recess, she's come out for tea&gossip each Summer. Same this June. I was going on (and on) about the wonders of our traditional hay meadow and its biodiversity and Θ said she'd bring her research group out to see this marvel - as a way of broadening her team's outlook and input.

Well that happened last Thursday after I'd received a text to say expect six for tea and scones, one each from Benin, Egypt, Greece, India, Kenya and Mexico. hoo-wee, I thought that was a rather wonderful metaphor what New Ireland means. TBH, I've no idea what their status is w.r.t. to The Man in his Indefinite Leave to Remain hat. They may be just passin' through, as I was when I spent 4 years in Massachusetts 45 years ago. But they're definitely contributing to Ireland Inc.! Working hard; pushing the frontiers; jollof rice! cilantro! bakalava! [not better than bacon & cabbage but different].

But it was a pretty good way for us all to spend an afternoon - apart from nearly an hour in a car to get here; and the weather. It wasn't exactly raining but humidity was 100%: like we were in the cloud. They weren't too distressed that they'd missed the biodiversity of the traditional hay meadow (which was knocked 2 weeks ago) and seemed interested in heritage tales about the House The Bomb Fell On and The Ringstone.

We passed through the polytunnel on our way back from a field tour and I was delighted to share mint and rosemary clippings with cooks who use those species in meal prep but just cannot find a source in their local shops. Now most people agree that home-baking can be a treat and I'd made a bowlful of dinky 5½ cm egg-glazed, touch-of-cornmeal, buttermilk scones. I explained that the best, traditional Devonshire, way of eating them was split in half so that each half acts as a vehicle for butter, then jam, then whipped cream. Unless you're lactose intolerant you can't have enough full-fat dairy products.

And soon enough (time flies when you're having fun) everyone had to pile into the cars and return to base - two mums had to lift childer from the creche before closing time. I can think of worse ways to spend a tuthree hours: sharing recipes, moaning about the patriarchy, and chatting about the various microbiomes both inside and out. A blob-back-catalog consult indicates that we'd been Failte Ireland for far-from-home students before in 2013.

Lost in Dublin

I guess I am a diasporan. In 1931 my father left Dunmore East at the age of 14 and more or less didn't come back: like Pat the Salt he ran away to sea; although The Da aka "Sir" didn't ship before the mast, but rather, in time, got to drive very big naval ships in quite exotic [and mundane] places. All his kids were born in England - Dover, because my mother was born there and went home to deliver the sprogs. But all my paternal rellies were in Ireland and, as kids, we returned every year to visit a diminishing store of agéd female relatives - Rosslare - Wexford - Tipperary - Wicklow - and home to wherever home was that year in England.

The year I turned 12 years old, we rang the changes on this round because my folks had business with the family lawyer in Dublin. It was also, coincidentally, the year we came with a 14ft touring caravan to save on hotels. The lawyer occupied fantastically dusty and decrepit chambers round the back of TCD - since demolished for the extension of the Mont Clare Hotel. Lest we die of boredom or from inhaling spores from long dead protestant dust, we three kids were deposited in the snug of Rice's Bar at the top of Grafton Street with minerals and bags of crisps. A peculiar choice? because Rice's, at least when I was a student a few years later, was The Dublin Gay Bar. But then again the whole othering anxiety balloon about The Gays (let alone The Zombies and The Kidnappers) hadn't gone up. So here we are in Rice's [◎pink blob] on the NW corner of Stephen's Green S; the parents are at the solicitor [▶blue arrow] on the NW corner of Merrion Square M. The car & caravan are parked extravagantly occupying several parking bays somewhere on Merrion Square.

As a Plan: so far, so good. But when I'd guzzled my mineral and the crisps were finished and I'd had enough being teased by my sibs, I announced that I was going to hang out in the caravan and stomped out of the pub. A while later, my parents returned to collect their family and head off towards the ferry port. Consternation! Contingency plan to leave one parent in Dublin to liaise with the Gardai and the Bureau of Missing Persons; while the other parent returned to England as scheduled with the rump of the family.

Meanwhile, I'd made two circuits of Stephen's green [we'd parked beside a large park with trees, here was a large park with trees] and found no caravan. I then started cutting through the Green to sneak up on the ephemeral caravan and catch it before it disappeared again. Eventually, I cut my losses and returned to Rice's to endure more [parched] abuse from my brother and sister. Let me tell you, the Prodigal son was in the ha'penny place compared to what I experienced in a torrent of relief-plus-annoyance. So it all ended happily ever after, as we all caught the ferry together that night. The mobile-phone generation cannot imagine the sketchiness of communication protocols in the 1960s.

We never toured in the caravan again and it was parked up on blocks in the field next to our house in Essex. I adopted it a tuthree years later as my atelier: banging out rubbish poetry on an old Olivetti portable typewriter.

A few years later, I was old enough to vote and old enough to leave home so I left Essex and turned up to try studenting in Trinity College Dublin. I was no longer answerable to my parents who were 400km and an Irish Sea away; so I could get lost in Dublin without causing an international incident.
I was still trying to locate people / things round the periphery of Stephen's Green though.

BIG

small

• gyratory cone crusher breaks rocks
  
• Scythes saving swedish meadow Slåttergubben R
• Saving peat in the Orkneys 
• Merch
  
• Anonymous Bronze-age axe;  Provenance is vital. Metal-detectors illegal in Ireland.
• Martin Hayes gets off the horse and plays The Sailor's Bonnet at walking pace cw: Tommy Tiernan
  
• You may recall this rendition from The Gloaming
  
• Game theory prisoners tit-for-tat
• Games: tight squeeze for pilots and ATC at JFK
• In 2018, I wrote about my  Nokia 3310 . Someone in the Guardian thinks the battery life is mighty. So do I.

Nobody else agrees but I think the US VP hopeful JD Vance bears a beard+eye-brow resemblance to US President Ulysses S Grant:

Noble or narsty?

Are you kind to kittens [L]? Do you bring cookies? Lend books? Rutger Bregman reckons that you, Jan Modal, behave like that, because he does and most everyone he knows does too. We've met Bregman before on The Blob, speaking the tax-truth to power in Davos, and de-demonizing the poor. I'm reading his latest book Humankind: A Hopeful History (2021) - originally De Meeste Mensen Deugen: Een Nieuwe Geschiedenis van de Mens (2019) which flips the statement [Most People Lie: A New History of Man]. Whatevs, the book is a philosophical look at what it means to be human and how we could / should live. Longish sample on Googlebooks.

DO you believe, with Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), that human life is 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short' and we need government to survive the assaults of nature and the rest of humanity.
OR, with Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), that once we were 'noble savages' and the ills of the world started when the first man claimed exclusive ownership of a defensible part of the Commons of Eden.
The side of this dichotomy you lean towards will probably determine your views on . . .  prisons, the queen, redemption, sin, taxation, UBI, volunteerism, welfare and youth mental health.

lean towards because it's surely not a black&white  answer. Although Bregman defo leans towards Rousseau not least because a Hobbesian world is so bleak and uncaring. The EuroEnglish language version of the book [R] allows a neat pun on the etymologically related [O.E gecynd] meanings of kind 1. friendly, deliberately doing good to others originally esp. relatives 2. those rellies = kin. But not kine (cattle) that's another root altogether.

Bregman develops the idea that The Enlightenment, including Adam "The Wealth of Nations" Smith embraced Hobbes in the belief that people were [bad] idle skivers who needed to be incentivized to do any work. Out the window went the idea that lord and tenants were in a mutually dependent relationship - see Levin in Anna Karenina haymaking scything with his peasants - where everyone would take pride in their work because it required deliberate practice and attention to detail. Assembly lines and the parsing of work to a series of mind-numbing repetitive strain injury tasks were more efficient for Capital and some portion [the least possible] of the enterprize was paid as wages.

Bregman cites a number of cases [including the Haifa day-care fiasco] of perverse incentives [bloboprev] where paying (or fining) people leads to a series of unfortunate consequences. Anyone in the working world will know case of gaming the system. If/when The Man[agement] insists on auditing one aspect of work, then that aspect will become paramount on the shop-floor, the ward, the office, the lab, the classroom. Everything else gets sidelined. In my teaching at The Institute, new courses had to present a list of LOs [learning outcomes] for approval by the Teaching and Learning Committee. The LOs determined the curriculum and the contents of the exams. When something really exciting came along like the horsemeat hamburger scandal of 2013, there was no space on the curriculum to dig into that topical topic.

Charles Darwin married Emma "the Potter's Daughter" Wedgwood in 1839, and neither of them needed to work for a living. 1839 was getting close to peak industrial capitalism. Isn't in peculiar <not> that Darwin's whole world-view of individuals competing for scarce resources so exactly mapped his own lived experience . . . capitalism red in tooth and claw? I can't goog it up but Voltaire said something like "if donkeys were religious their gods would have long ears!". Mid-20thC evolutionary biologists had to tie themselves in "inclusive fitness" knots to explain the many examples of altruism in the natural world: where animals are kind to each other seemingly at some cost to themselves. 

Enough of me, back to Human.kind. Bregman is setting out his stall that if you trust people people and give them autonomy, then they are likely to achieve joy in work, being creative and contributing to the enterprise beyond their reluctant, extrinsically motivated, labour. These iconoclasts, it's easy to dismiss them because they are rocking the ship-of-state which may have been sailing majestically along under a totally skewed set of assumptions based on sketchy data and wishful thinking. Rutger Bregman puts it much more elegantly that I can, albeit at 400 pages of text. Get it out the library! I'm finished with it.

Covered in beees

First we'll get Eddie "covered in beees" Izzard out of the way. Our remarkable - recent - week of agri-progress coincided with another nice example of closure. It's at least 20 years ago since The Beloved started bee-keeping. When we acquired the ruined farmhouse in 1996, the disintegrating soffit and the six-slate hole in the roof were home to seven separate bee colonies. We networked ourselves up to a) an aged bee-keeper who had b) a much younger wannabee keeper in tow. These two came out with no notice one evening to "take those bees away". There followed a drunken, dangerous, hilarious adventure involving card-board boxes, teetering ladders, a pry-bar and only a few stings.

Until the bees vacated, renovation could not start and it was, in all, a full year before we actually moved into the house we'd bought at auction. Over the next tuthree years, The Beloved acquired a couple of bee-mentors, who were beyond kind, generous and knowledgeable. She also acquired lots of equipment: bee-hives, queen-excluders, frames, supers, roofs;  a smoker, a frame-pry, a veil & bee-keeper's jumpsuit, gloves, boots. We looked forward to the sweet life flowing with honey and lubricated with mead. But the new career was set back by an anaphylactic reaction to a bee-sting that added an epi-pen to the bee-phernalia. Apiculture didn't STOP because of epiculture but it definitely slowed its gallop.

It's been 2 years since La Torbalina de Tenerife aka The Biggest Heart in The Valley brought three Ukrainian refugees across for tea and scones. LaTdeT is currently teaching language, cooking and life-skills the other side of the mountain; and last Summer Dau.II went along as intern for a couple of weeks. Between the tea and chat, it fell out that one of the students was a Crimean Tatar who'd escaped the war with his wife and family of tots. So far, so normal, in these turbulent ethnic times. What was a little more niche was that Юсеф was a keen and accomplished bee-keeper back home! You may be able to see where this going. 

In the middle of agri-progress week, through a certain amount of trilingual chinese whispers, Юсеф [and his entire tribe] rocked up to "collect any surplus bee-kit" - that's what we thought anyway. But Юсеф was all "spacibo but where am the bees?". For all the years we've been in bee-land, there has been a hive in the top corner of the Home Field, fenced off against sheep-blunder, but gone completely feral. Most years there are some bees in residence but there have been at least three separate tenancies over the last 20 years. Юсеф's face went radiant when I showed him the roof of that hive surrounded by head-high nettles - there was clear evidence of bee-coming and bee-going.

Now here's the thing. If you want to move a hive of bees, you have to go less than 3m or more than 3,000m. Anything in between and the poor bees don't know whether to shit-or-go-blind, and half of them fail to return to the hive with their first load of pollen & nectar. Also, you want to scope out a strange hive when everyone is off at work in the fields BUT you want to move the hive when they are all tucked up in bed at home. Accordingly it wasn't until the following evening - Friday - that the hive was moved to a temporary home 6km up the valley. The plan being to move them back to La Quinta da Torbalina on the Tuesday following.

Because he's a very canny chiel and ever the optimist, Юсеp took the full bee-hive away and left another behind in the same location. This decoy hive was seeded with some fresh comb to say "Hello fellow bees, this is a grand place altogether, make yourselves at home". This cunning plan paid off handsomely: when I checked on Sunday evening I found a modest amount of activity on the landing stage of the decoy hive [see above L]. Who knows? They could be stop-outs who were away late foraging when their previous home was taken away. Or they could be a totally new colony which had swarmed in the neighbourhood and taken up residence in their new gaff. I am given to understand that, in the former case, the queenless rump of the colony can promote one of their number to the top job as egg-laying machine. Note added in press: hive two dang! kiting that second hive eventually failed, so Юсеp only has one working hive in its final destination.

Bonus for us: we have delivered a car-load of bee-equipment to where it can start generating honey and decluttered a corner of the polytunnel: WIN and, like, WIN.

How should we live?

I climbed a hill as light fell short,
And rooks came home in scramble sort,
And filled the trees and flapped and fought
And sang themselves to sleep;
. . . . .
I heard them both, and oh! I heard
The song of every singing bird
That sings beneath the sky,
And with the song of lark and wren
The song of mountains, moths and men
And seas and rainbows vie!
I heard the universal choir,
The Sons of Light exalt their Sire
With universal song . . . . . 

tum te tum? The long, relentless poem of which I've abstracted ~6% is Song of Honour by Ralph Hodgson (1871 - 1962). When I was a droopee, unhappee, wannabee poet aged 16, I transcribed the whole poem as an alternative to writing my own. I transcribed A Lot of other poetry at the time [imagine a world without ctrl-C, ctrl-V] & developed a neat and (thereby) efficient cursive hand. A couple of years later, I graduated to hammering away at an Olivetti manual typewriter which, even at two working fingers, was yet more speedy and legible. Ralph Hodgson is forgotten now, but he was at the centre of The Arts before WWII. Many of his contemporaries looked to The East for inspiration but Hodgson actually lived and worked in Japan for most of the 1930s.

Ralph Hodgson doesn't warrant even a sentence in The Light of Asia A History of Western Fascination with the East (2024) by Christopher Harding. I've just finished reading this weighty tome. There are nods to Alexander the Great, Marco Polo, Matteo Ricci [prev] and even Lafcadio "Tramore's Own" Hearn but the book really focuses on three 20thC adepts: 

• Alan Watts (L 1915-1963), 
• Bede Griffiths (1906-1993) and 
• Erna Hoch (1919-2003).

Alan Watts, looking suitably Mephistophelean [L] has been threading through my life since I was a twenty-something. He went to the same English school as me [not at the same time, I'm not that old] and was often on the wireless with wry, chuckly, profound lectures when we tuned into the BBC or later NPR in Boston. He departed this incarnation early having serially shagged himself to death often in a haze of alcohol. I liked the chuckles [last para]: they made Zen and a contemplative life more accessible to spotty-poet me. Harding's book reminds me that Alan Watts was right at the hub of the Beats [Ginsberg, Kerouac, Snyder] in 1950s California. Sausalito hot-tubs & Howl.

I knew much less about Alan "Bede" Griffiths; an Anglo-Catholic Benedictine who went to India to spread the gospel but found himself consuming the local culture and writing inter alia River of Compassion: A Christian Commentary on the Bhagavad Gita (1983). Westerners bought his many books which found commonality among Western and Eastern religions. We would now probably cancel the poor man for cultural appropriation.

And I knew nothing at all about Erna Hoch, a Swiss physician and psychiatrist who went to India and finished up running The Madhouse at Lotus Lake and transforming it into an effective psychiatric hospital. There they employed Western and Eastern practice to do the best they could to alleviate distress - mental and physical. There is no entry for Erna Hoch in Wikipedia - neither the en. de. nor fr. editions - someone should rectify that.

The Light of Asia focuses on a) What is reality? and b) How should we live? - the meat and potatoes of philosophy since Confucius was a chap. The author Harding is a cultural historian not a philosopher, so you're not going to get the answers here; you're going to watch other, long dead, people wrestle with these eternal conundrums. A bit like getting seats in Centre Court Wimbledon, Athens.

MeFi 25 Today

In addition to this week's reg'lar Sunday Notcellany, I'm putting up a trib to mark (to the minute!) the 25th anniversary of the first post on MetaFilter. Matt Haughey = mathowie having written the software for a best-of-internet aggregator posted about "I have no idea how these people got their cats wedged into their scanners, or why."

I lurked (technical term) for years on MetaFilter until May 2020 when I coughed up my $5 one-time life-time membership fee so that I could say "Gorgeous!" about some fruit-with-fungi. Up until then, I mined MetaFilter for Blob-copy - usually with acknowledgment / attribution / citation. Through the 00s [peak blog] I followed a number of blogs and other aggregators - Memepool is long gone. Kev of "Nothing To Do With Arbroath" died. BoingBoing turned into an inter-necine shit-show with Ads. Neatorama is still trundling along although I rarely visit. I still check in with "Flippism is The Key" and Tywkiwdbi but not daily. Me, I try to generate my copy from elsewhere than the blogosphere because that medium is so prone to rechurning (technical term) the same old same old content in a sort of tedious reductive plagiarism. I guess I chose a sector of the blogosphere that was interesting to me and so had a certain amount of incest common interest = similar sources.

Anyway, I've learned a lot from MetaFilter, not least about how folks are different but not thereby wrong. And MeFi continues to serve its 1999 purpose of letting The Collective find the cool stuff. Come on in - the water's lovely.

Bricks and other matter

Lorra hard surfaces

• Building Marino Garden Suburb 100 years ago
  
• Yellow bricks of London  - lingo: soldier courses, headers, stretchers
• Grangemouth (swirly Lego) bricks
• Neolithic stone carving: spirals vs cup&ring [as R]
• Deciphering (and making) rock art
• Oatly vs Big Farma
• Six years ago Mr and Mrs Lipton were denied [€250] compo for a delayed flight. This week, 5 prime ministers later, the UKSC found in their favour.
• Freshers' Week 1978 - all a long time ago, but still 5 years after my time [I R olde]
• Guerrilla freeway signpainter LA edition
• Books in briefs
  
• The Secret Lives of Booksellers and Librarians ostensibly by James "famous author" Patterson but actually 60x 5-10 min pieces-to-camera about the power of sharing and distributing books. Call me sentimental but I was choking up about ever 15 minutes. Also anger-inducing tales of librarians and their books being cancelled by the Republican Right in Texas
  
• Gastrophysics: The New Science of Eating by Prof Charles "psychologist" Spence & Heston "cookie" Blumenthal describes experiments which help explain how all our senses address and filter the food we eat. Should be my jam, but I was worn out by the self-congratulatory tone before I'd finished listening. Up-market restaurants can charge big bucks by compelling clients to wear headphones while eating - so clever, so what?
  

Small but perfickly formed

Earlier I was writing about how well we'd done this year w.r.t. processing the traditional hay-meadow into, like, hay. But the title to that piece Haircuts All Round, was a very partial account. 

In parallel this year we found, hidden in plain sight in the next village a traditional hay-mower. Years ago, when we first blew in, there was a agéd farmer who could still wrastle a pair of horses into harness and have them draw a plough to turn sod. We came this ⇐⇒ far from getting him up to work for us, but it never happened and then he died. Séan The Mow is about my age and owns an MF135 tractor which is older than any of our children. It's super-dinky and he's super careful. Young chaps with big tractors tend to race around like it was a cross-country rally both on road and off- [Séan's opinion]. 

For small buckety field with doubtful margins, tearing around is a recipe for >!kerChang!< broken kit when, say, a mowing bar meets a lump of granite which has tumbled off the field boundary into the long grass. We have two fields on the far side of the world lane which we really need for grazing between {15 Apr and 01 Jul} when the main paddocks are going All Trad.  Being under-stocked, these fields tend to grow bracken Pteridium aquilinum and rushes Juncus ?effusus. In 2022, it took me 2½ hours to scythe the most bracken-jungly small corner of one field. I was only 68 then - a fit young stripling; but as an annual solution it's barely sustainable. Séan did the whole field in the same time: bracken thistles rushes gorse and miscellaneous thatch all together. See [L] that could, the little MF135 taking it handy. Being so small means that the tractor can e a s e  its way through any small gate no matter how tight the turn, and also up a real narrow uneven slope between two trees to reach the top step of the field.

Part of the contract was to mow a sadly neglected heritage apple orchard at the bottom of the field over the lane. [Above] you can see Séan making a start on that task. His fully extend rig is less than half the width of the Big Boys Tonka Toys which were roaring around the bigger fields. Volume is the cube of linear dimensions, so those tractors are 2 x 2 x 2, call it 10x the size of the humble MF135:

• MF135 45 horsepower = 31kW; 1.4 tonnes in her socks
• Claas Arion 630 = 121kW; 6.6 tonnes

Apart from anything else, the bigger tractor is nearly 4x more powerful but 5x heavier and will compact the soil that much worse. Leaving the footprint which will absorb less rain and send the water down hill to cause flash floods downstream as well as ripping out the pearl mussels Margaritifera margaritifera and riparian trees. This MF135 is held together, literally, with baler-twine and, metaphorically, with prayer. The inset shows the lucozade bottle half full of bar oil which miraculously sits on a I-beam above the PTO - convenient to its task. No matter how lumpy the field or pot-holey the road to the job, this bottle never bounces out of its trough to be lost.

Haircuts all round

Last week was a Festival of Cutting. Starting with getting the sheep shore at very short notice but before there was a risk of fly-strike and the other perils to which unshorn sheep are Summer hostages.

A good few years ago, we designated our four largest fields [total area 11 acres =  4½ ha.] "traditional hay meadows". Apart from making a statement in a determined voice, all that is required is keeping grazers and mowers off the meadow between 15th April and 1st July each year. The reasoning is that, because so many dicot / ungrass wild flowers blossom and set seed in that part of the early Summer, not-mowing will give a boost to biodiversity. Not only the directly affected flowering plants but any species-specific invertebrates and whatever eats / parasitises them in turn. It is quite wonderful at Solstice time to get down among the seed-heads and find orchids and forget-me-nots and clovers under the bright yellow top-storey.

Last year I trimmed the field margins of brambles and in-bleeding ferns with my scythe to encourage the mowers to get closer to the field edge. But quel désastre! the fields weren't mowed as soon as the bracken had dried off and blown away . . . they weren't mowed until October! A sorry sequence of equipment break-down, parts-unavailability, crappy weather, a dose of illness, more crappy weather, a bereavement and more rain put the hay well beyond its best-before. Indeed, a combination of spite and ignorance saw the-field-over-the-river being left unmowed at all at all. As tractorless blow-ins we are dependent on our neighbours and contractors to cut and ted and bale . . . and plough and harrow and till, come to that. 

After last year's debacle, on 1st July prompt, TB The Farrrmer  went to ask whether our most recent cutting-and-baling neighbour was up for it again. He, poor fellow, is going through the wars healthwise and is in any case downsizing as he approaches retirement. So that was a No. But within a couple of hours, possibly on account of arriving bearing cake, a new neighbourly contractor was lined up. And two days later, well after the end of any 9to5 working day [farmers, remember] a medium-to-mighty sized green tractor drove through the yard and started to fell the grass [see above L]. He finished before midnight but after we'd all gone to bed. The following evening, subcontractors with mighty-to-huge rigs came through the yard to ted [turn and gather] and bale and wrap the barely wilted grass+wildflowers:

With the tedding sprongs out-spread, the gatherer-of-windrows is almost as wide as our polytunnel but the arms fold up so that the rig can fit through a standard 12ft = 3⅔m farm gateway. If that gateway has overhanging branches, all bets are off. I was advised to trim back a rather lovely birch Betula pubescens which I had [foolishly?] planted near the gate into the Home Field. These giant machines went through that gate with a handspan to spare on each side. But, because enormous, they went about the task lickety-spit . . . not great in the corners but super-efficient on a straight run. The baler loads up two spools of wrapping plastic which are 1500 m (!) long but still heftable by one person: it's 25μm thick.

We have learned the hard soft squidgy way to insist on getting bales off the field asap after cutting. The one year we left them in a corner until they were sold / required, the getting turned that corner into a set for Passchendaele 1917 from which it never recovered. Accordingly the bales went off  that night before twilight turned to full darkness. Big sighs of relief and a glass of plonk to celebrate a timely resolution to 2024's hay problem.

De gritting

1978 is a long time ago, but I was there. Where? Working in Diergaard Blijdorp in Rotterdam. I was hired as an extra hand while we /they set up the World's Greatest Aquarium Exhibition. One of the consequences is that I know loadsa Dutch words related to aquariums, fish, water [dekruit, verversen, koraalduivel, schoonmaken, zeemen] for which I draw a blank entirely in English. Dekruit is the pane of glass laid on top of an aquarium to stop the fish jumping out and crap falling in. 

One of my regular tasks was water-verversen which required siphoning out a third of the water in a tank and replacing it with fresh water. At the same time I had to look to the water filters replacing the filterwatten = polyester batting at each end of the filter; and like the water, changing a portion of the activated charcoal with fresh. It would be a, possibly fatal, shock to the system to replace all the water or all the charcoal all at once. Activated charcoal is as much a rich microbial ecosystem as my sourdough starter.

The submersible pump at the bottom of our bore-hole finally died this Spring after 28 years of reliable service. We were a week using old-fashioned rain-water in buckets but then got a new pump + pressure-cylinder + pipes + cables + switches + filter. 

The [miserable, incompetent, acursed] original plumber (we are now on our fifth!) installed a grit-filter . . . on the line which went from the pressure cylinder to one of the sheds. Any sand in the system went straight into the house where it a) wore out the tap washers and b) covered the bottom of the header-tank with nearly an inch = 2½cm of fine white sand. It was plumber #3 who figured this out and moved the filter further up the system . . . so it actually worked where needed. It was Younger Bob who bent double in the attic one afternoon and siphoned the sand out of the header tank. There's some suction in a 6 m fall! Younger Bob also developed the habit of cleaning the filter but then stopped because a) there was no more grit in the bore hole (??) b) he was a-feared of ripping the whole filter away from the steadily greening copper pipe to which it was attached.

Seems that the grit-filter, in a recently disrupted bore-hole, needs to be cleaned about once a month. We know something is amiss when the kitchen faucet starts to wimp out to a dribble rather than a manly gush-forth. 1st of July, I was Home Alone, and went for the filter with a couple of buckets of clear clean water and a bottle-brush. The Before and After picture above shows what can be achieved with 10 minutes of gentle scrub-a-dub-dub. And yes we are back to full-pressure.

Grifting the croft

Whaaa's happenin'?

• Justice delayed = justice denied? That flower-thief of Carrigaline has finally been fined . . . €200 with six months to pay; she has form.
• We look out for swallows Hirundo rustica each year. They arrived here on 23 May this year: a full week after their latest arrival since [our] records began. They didn't stick around and I gloomed on about the end of days and loss of biodiversity and where have all the butterflies gone? Yesterday two couple of swallows were coursing about the yard before [our] breakfast - they must be trying for a second brood, and good luck to them.
• Election UK. The Left is optimistic.
  
• Heart-warming story of stranger who hand-carried a postal vote from Paris to London 
• Cork to MidletonCycleway Project progress report 2024 with drones
  
• I wrote a few years ago about a curator razoring out ancient illustrations for sale. Seems RTE made an audio doc about the case in 2011.
• There are no odd perfect numbers - who knew?
• On the balance of probability billionaire has been responsible for drugging horses without informed consent. Race-horses under his care He Knows No Fear, Old Tom Higgins, Boxing Hero, Grand D'espagne, Aircraft Carrier, Powerful Don, Wee Jim, Great Moon, Our Man Flint, Questionare, Green Force and Blyton all failed tests for an anabolic steroid. 
• His son is careless about the disposal of horses which have died under his care. 
• ♩ ♬ ♫ ♪ They shoot horses don't they?
• What am dat 'scampi'? It am dat Nephrops norvegicus a handy-sized decapod crustacean.
• Coleridge was famously interrupted [by a gent from Porlock] while getting "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree . . ." down on paper. Ash Farm is where the story unfolded . . . or didn't.
• Roman bronze dodecahedrons.  MetaPrev from 2010.
  

Proxy Vote

The country next door, still masquerading, in medieval cos play, as An Kingdom just had a general election. I was born there, grew up there, and left there more or less as soon as I was old enough to vote. After college in Dublin, and Grad School in Boston, I returned there at the age of 29, for the first of all the short term contracts along which my "career" has teetered. We lived in Geordieland for the next 7 years and I must have voted in the General Election of 1987 but I have no memory of doing so. With no help at all from me, or any of our friends-and-relations, Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative Party won a third term at the helm of government.

By the time the next election came round, we'd moved back to Ireland, and were a-voting in a pluralist democracy and a republic. But I've paid attention to UK elections partly because I have family [ancestral, collateral and descendant] over there; and partly because economic and political decisions over there do have impact over here - Brexit for starters. At the moment I have voting-age family in four, maybe five, different English constituencies. I sent them an exhortation early on Thursday morning to "Vote Early and Vote Often" and suggested [quip clipped from Metafilter] an appropriate beverage after polling might be a bottle of Sangre de Tory. I think "we" have helped to see off the Conservatives. It's hard to take the thing seriously when the results are announced [here knocking the stuffing out of Tory Leader hopeful Penny Mordaunt] by a chap in a great frilly bib like it was all a Restoration comedy ca. 1670.

At least in Stroud and Didcot, Conservatives have also lost their seats. Thanks Fam!

• STROUD: 2024 LAB 46% CON 26% - 2019 CON 48% LAB 42%
• DIDCOT: 2024 LIB 40% CON 28% - 2019 CON 51% LIB 32%
• BATH: 2024 LIB 41% LAB 18% - 2019 LIB 55% CON 31%
• HACKNEY 2024 LAB 60% GRN 23% - 2019 LAB 70% CON 12%

If you care, there is plenty of data to crunch and opinion to ignore out there. Starting with Wikipedia, whence I have culled the numbers in the list above. Here in Ireland we elect our pluralist democracy using STV proportional representation, it is not without its problems - not least round after round of counting. In the UK, they blast through, starting immediately after polling stations close at 22:00hrs, pulling an all-nighter and getting a very good idea of who has won before breakfast and everything ironed out by lunchtime. Counting efficiency aside, I'll just draw your attention to the egregious disenfranchising consequences of continuing to operate on a Winner Take All protocol in single seat constituencies. 

There is a clear trend in the data here: more votes == more seats in parliament but in the detail it is crazy unfair. Democracy requires that if more people vote for such-an-outcome, even if that outcome is contrary to my druthers, then the majority gets the win. Even if that outcome is sexist, racist, ageist, fascist or murderist. In the Election on 4th July 2024, the inequity and iniquity of the British electoral system is high-lighted by the bum's-rush meted out on the (dreadful populist racist) Reform UK bund of Nigel Farage. They secured 14% of the countrywide votes and only got 4 MPs elected . . . the same as the Greens with less than half their tally of votes. Contrariwise, the Liberal Democrats, with many fewer [85% of] votes than Reform, nevertheless got 71 seats (18x more than Reform). And the Conservatives have seen the biggest loss of seats since records began despite getting 2/3 as many votes as Labour. [note added in press, Reform secured a 5th seat late in the day; but my analysis of unfairness stands]

British rellies: you do you, of course; but surely it's time to move along from a) a Monarchy b) a manifestly undemocratic democracy c) frilly bibs and tricorn hats except in costume dramas.

counting sheep

I do this every day, several times a day.  But I certainly do not do it yan tan tethera methera pimp . . . because no spik Brythonic. Then again, there is never a circumstance in which I wag my finger going one two thr for fiv six sev ate nin ten . . . 

There was a shock of recognition when I found myself watching The Real (Weird) Way We See Numbers 16m on YT. Dunno how I've missed this Be Smart channel of Dr Joe Hanson because the fellow has 5 million subscribers and it should be my jam. That is almost exact 1 million times more than there are subscribers to The Blob. Hanson lays out the idea that we absorb a gestalt insta-clock for 1, 2, 3 probably 4, possibly 5 items but beyond that we are reduced to counting. We know, for example, that the plate with three buns is more fattening than the plate with one bun. Indeed, herrings and magpies can many manage that life skill as well as we can.

When it comes to larger numbers, you need a much bigger difference to be confident about which plate is the plate-of-power. 4 petit-fours vs 6 ditto? no problem. But 40 M&Ms vs 60 M&Ms? that is a punt that at least some of us will fluff.

Mais revenons à nos moutons . . .  if I'm lucky, the to-be-counted sheep are gathered in a shady corner burping up their cud for another go round. They like to hang out together with particular pals / rellies closer than their frenemies. Depending on the scatter, I do something like

• 4 + 4 + 4 + 3 = 15
• (4 + 2) + (4 + 4) + 1 = 15
• (3 + 4) + (4 + 4) = 15
• (2 + 4) + (3 + 4) + 1 . . . where is she? I bet she's gone all betty-no-pals AGAIN behind the gorse clump . . . + 1 = 15

(2 + 3) + 5 + (3 + 2) [✓] And, yes, I do count twice - especially if I get 15 the first time

Hochschule für Gestaltung

Some tags sound better auf Deutsch, oder?  We turn to German for solid - dependable - engineering - think Audi's Vorsprung durch Technik . . . although that slogan was brought to life by an English advertising exec called John "BBH" Hegarty. I learned German for a year in school and built up an impressive vocabulary by obsessive rote-learning - grammar, not so much. I clocked gestalt as one of those words like saudades and hiraeth which fails to translate well into another language; for me it means look-and-feel. Later I learned about Gestalt Psychology which values a holistic rather than reductionist [boo, science] view of the world and our place in it. Gestaltung means Design in its broadest sense.

In Hillary Cottam's iconoclastic book Radical Help, I caught a rec for Hello World: where design meets life by Alice Rawsthorn. This book is a polemic for adopting a holistic view of design. It's not enough to look sleek; things we use have to be handy, and fit-for-purpose; price is important but cheap shouldn't be in the driver's seat. Especially not if cheap requires exploitation of workers and the environment. It may be a deliberate ironic meta-comment but the book is hideous to behold! The gutter margin is a mean 18mm and the page-numbers and running titles are stuck down in there in micro-font. The outside margins are a miserly 7mm. Winnie-the-"bear of little brain"-Pooh would be at a loss, let alone Fermat with his Hanc marginis exiguitas non caperet. At least it is typeset in Helvetica.

Thonet N.14 is an iconic bentwood bistro chair produced by Gebrüder Thonet since the 1860s. It is an engineering / design marvel able to support the most capacious bottoms for long enough to down a coffee and croissant, and yet be light enough for a child to carry. But design threads through the whole life of this product. It was flat-pack 100 years before Ikea: 36 de-constructed chairs could be shipped in a 1 m³ box with room to spare for the 10 screws and 2 washers required for each assembly.

The Braun electric toothbrush, not so much? Braun coming to Carlow in 1974 was one of the early coups of the IDA. At peak, 1,400 people were employed in the town making hair-dryers. One of the reasons for locating there, then, was the establishment of the Regional Technical College RTC in the town in 1970. Braun was famous for the design of its products (shavers, audio-kit, toasters) which owed a lot to the standards and aesthetics of Dieter Rams.

But Rawsthorn faults Braun for an electric toothbrush which wrought a miracle for the maintenance of her teeth BUT shipped in an enormous box embedded in polystyrene and had no sensible end-of-life disposal protocol. Also it took 16 hours to charge the machine so that it could operate for 2 x 2 minutes each day. That's crap design because it's off-laying so many of the costs of production, distribution and disposal on the planet. It is poor design to have all your iAccessories made in the PRC and your shirts cut and assembled in Bangladesh because wages are less.

Shown left is Alvar Aalto's iconic 1933 Artek No 60 Stool. 90 years old and still supporting bottoms - with a little more austerity than Thonet No.14. That's what most of us would consider good design: "form ever follows function" as Louis Sullivan put in 1896. We just need to adopt a broader view of "good" in design generally: cost? exploitation? sustainability? disposal?.

Hello World? Stick with it. I learned a lot about stuff to which I normally wouldn't pay much attention. That's because I affect to be above fashion, trends and stuff. But if we embrace the Rawsthorn hypothesis that design is everything, then how things look becomes integral to how things work and we should accept nothing but the best.

Shorn the Sheep

Farmers are immersed in uncertainty but, like surgeons, have to live by their decisions. Actually for surgery, it's the patients who live (or die) by that decisiveness.  In farming, you may go out of business if you knock the hay just before a month of rain but nobody is going to die. Sometimes the prices at the mart seem derisory but you have to sell anyway. And sometimes in farming, good judgment and good fortune and good weather pay off and you make so much money your accountants have to dig up some losses allowable expenses, lest The Revenue takes all the fun out of your Win.

As tractorless, barely competent, micro-farmers (7 ha. 15 sheep), we are prone to a whole other layer of powerlessness. Last year, the grass (and other excitingly diverse species) in our 4x traditional hay meadows didn't get knocked till October! Irish weather runs to rain, or at least drizzle, so when a window of several consecutive dry days is forecast then everyone wants the mower, tedder, baler and wrapper in that order and Now. Mowers-for-hire would rather do big flat fields with good road access . . . so small places like ours get queued last. Then, last year, our preferred mower's tractor blew a cylinder-head gasket and was out of commission for weeks. Eventually, he had to sub-contract the job to someone else, who was fully busy elsewhere etc. etc. Consequencely late mowing, over-grazed other fields, unexpected payments. But at least nobody, and no sheep, died.

With shearing, it's a welfare issue. The price of wool is rock-bottom for the 3rd or 4th year in a row (and perhaps from here on out) at ~20c / kg - less than a tenth what it has been during our tenure on the farrrm. It's barely worth the petrol to haul the bale of fleece into the co-op for sale. But the sheep must be shorn anyway lest they pass out from heat stroke or get fly-struck or roll over get backed and unable to rise the ground. As with getting grass knocked, everyone wants the shearer at the same time and it's the same work to set up the shearing platform and oil up the shears for 15 sheep as it is for 150. 

Last night at tea-time Paddy-the-Clip, our heroic and dependable shearer from just the other side of the hill, called to say he could come, like, Now.  With the sheep-welfare issue and small-return for appearance issue, the Shearer takes precedence over tea, Dowager Duchesses, family zoom-calls, Full Colonels, favorite TV shows, Minor Eastern Potentates and The Match. Accordingly we dropped everything and mustered a) the shepherd's marker-and-meds bucket b) the longest extension lead c) my blue-marker-stained combats and . . . d) the sheep. 90 minutes after the call, the sheep were all lighter by a fleece and we were lighter by a wodge of folding money. Somebody cracked open a bottle of fine red wine to mark the occasion of getting the fleeces off before the dreaded bot-fly got on. Win!