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)].