Thistle-puller

That would be me.  In early July we had An Inspector Calls to assess the bio-diversity of our traditional hay meadow. He was looking for 'indicative species' for such habitats - pretty much any dicot which is not an alien invasive: hay rattle Rhinanthus minor, lady's bedstraw Galium verum, tormentil Potentila erecta, stichwort Stellaria spp., self-heal Prunella vulgaris, yarrow Achillea millefolium, spotted orchid Dactylorhiza maculata. If a threshold number of such species can be found, then the score is 10/10 and everyone is happy except the purveyors of perennial ryegrass Lolium perenne seed.

Actually its a bit more complicated than that. Take thistles: Cirsium dissectum meadow thistle is Good but creeping thistle Cirsium arvensis is a scourge and should be destroyed before it takes over the world. Inspector showed us that creeping thistle (like a lot of weed species) has a shallow root and can be easily pulled. The base of the stalk is spike-free, so you don't need gloves. If a given thistle does not pull up easily revealing a taproot, then it's probably not Cirsium arvensis and y'shoulda left it alone in the first place. It also looks like creeping thistle is on the gallop through the brash left by me processing storm-fallen trees:

You can't scythe them out but pulling works nicely - if you're respectful of the nettles.  In any case, I was able to pull a whole barrow full o' thistles [R] in about 30 minutes. Satisfying and maybe not wholly futile. We are mercifully free of ragwort = buachalán Senecio vulgaris another most undesirable weed species in pasture. Go pull some buachs was a dreaded instruction for idle farm-children back in the day . . . I wish Gdau.I and Gdau.II lived a bit closer to the farrrm . . . we have kid-gloves.

In the Spring, we got Sean and his MF135 mini-tractor to mow two passes round the headlands of the hay-meadow fields chopping back the encroaching brambles and bushes and bringing the 'meadow' that much nearer the field walls. On a 3 hectare field that is increasing 'productivity' by about 2%. When I went thistle pulling the day after inspection, it seemed like mowing might have cleared some thatch to give some thistle seeds their start in life. It's all very well pulling thistles from the base in grassland, but less so in the weedy edges where nettles share the condominium: a brush with Urtica dioecia in the face can be, shall we say, bracing.

Inspector admitted that pulling thistles is great for the abs but maybe a bit much for an ould chap. Imagine if I burst a blood vessel down the fields while straining at Cirsium and wasn't found for three days? The ravens would have started work. He offered another solution in ThistlEx. A highly toxic pyridine dicot-selective weed-killer. It's sold as a concentrated solution of Triclopyr (3,5,6-trichloro-2-pyridinyloxyacetic acid) and Clopyralid (3,6-dichloro-2-pyridinecarboxylic acid). Dilute as per instructions, fill a 1 litre spray bottle, and give a blast to each plant. These pyridines act as plant hormone analogs: they induce a huge wonky growth spurt and then the plant withers and dies. Harmless to grass and biodegrades in the sun after a few days - what could possibly go wrong? [hint: not a lot of sun in Ireland; plenty rain; Triclopyr is poisonous to fish, Clopyralid not so much; the ester bond is key]

Peas bearing

Last Summer 2024, Irish libraries were awash with little anonymous packets of FREE! seeds - green beans, peas, beans. Not quite anon: it was part of the Literacy & Food Education (LEAF) scheme - in association with GIY Grow-it-yourself. GIY is just the other side of the ArdKeen hospital roundabout at Farronshoneen X91 NX30. I wasn't greedy about the free seeds (we have enough languished beyond sell-by seed-packets for which we've paid ready money) - but I took one of each for planting Spring 2025.

That duly happened with beans and peas sown into micro pots [11Mar25 and 27Mar25] on a tray under the sofa as well as some saved black haricots. They were showing a week later and planted out in the polytunnel on 28Mar25 and 29Mar25. We can get frost up until the first week in May here, so it's a bit of a risk and I had a Lidl cold-frame ready to pop over the seedlings if MetEireann was giving frost.

The first peas of the season were presented to our USAian visitors on 27May25 - only two pods but much appreciated / soon scarfed down raw. Dau.II had a day off work on 23 Jun and came down-country to mow the grass and graze for food. She soon stripped half a peck [4-5 litres] of pea pods off the ~dozen surviving pea bushes. 10 days later, I went at them again, to harvest about the same amount. Americans are still wearing tricorn hats and britches so they'll know that there are 4 pecks in a bushel. Other folks will have to imagine a bushel-basket as a the contents medium size rucksack.

In May our community contact neighbour La Torbellina de Tenerife gave us a dozen tiny tomato plants of 10 different varieties - all new to us except on Ailsa Craig. I found room in the tunnel for five of these toms and planted the rest out in our biggest flower tubs filled with compost and getting maximum sun on the patio is front of the house. They are now ~1m tall and have a sparse smatter of small yellow flowers. Some of them have been visited by bees and are now carrying modest amounts of small green fruit.

There's one notably productive corner of the polytunnel where we have haricot beans, plum tomatoes and a rogue type=mystery squash plant fighting for space. Squash need more air-space than you can possibly imagine and are companion-planted at your peril. But this one is free-lance. I've pointed out two yellow squash flowers in the jungle-picture above. I think we are on a good pitch this year - in the past we've been eating late tomatoes and beans in Early October so I have 3 months of watering and grazing ahead of me.
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Abwehr buster

Years ago, we used to hop in the car at weekends and go for a spin. In due course, we paused at the German Military Cemetery in Glencree, Co Wicklow.  Most of the interees are unfortunate sailors and airmen who arrived in Ireland already dead. One exception is Dr. Major Hermann Görtz who arrived by parachute in May 1940 and led the security services a merry dance for 18 months. He liaised with a raggle-taggle collection of IRA operatives, old-fashioned Nationalists, wannabee Nazis moving from house to safe-house before finally being busted and imprisoned. It was a bit like [hidden in plain sight etc.] GUBU 1982 when an unhinged murderer was run to ground in the home of the Irish Attorney General. 

Görtz killed himself rather than be deported back to Germany in 1947 and was buried with full military honours including "Heil Hitler", a hakenkreuz flag and Luftwaffe greatcoat. His grave in Glencree is marked with a dagger sheathed in barbed wire. 

The Irish Security Services (Garda Special Branch and G2 military intelligence] arrested 10/12 of the known Nazi spies within 48 hours of their arrival. One of them was Joseph Lenihan, who was picking spuds in Jersey when the Germans invaded the Channel Islands in 1940. He was recruited by the Abwehr to wireless back weather reports to Germany. He was also the uncle of FF ministers Brian Lenihan Snr and Mary O'Rourke.  Far from being ashamed, the Lenihan family rather leaned into the story of their scapegrace Uncle Joe. A bit like our family acknowledge the red-headed cook who was the unwed mother of my Gt Grandfather. There's a rather handy executive summary of all the spies here: it's a blog written by Giselle Jakobs, grand-daughter of spy Josef Jakobs who was the last person executed in the Tower of London.

I had almost finished an entire 100,000 word e-book on the story of Ireland's Abwehr spies before I came across Giselle's neat summary. Code Breaker: The untold story of Richard Hayes, the Dublin librarian who helped turn the tide of WWII [2018] by Marc McMenamin. Richard Hayes [R] was director of the National Library when he was recruited and seconded to G2 in 1940. He was fluent in Arabic, English, German, French, Irish and Italian and aced crosswords on a daily basis. Like the then Taoiseach Eamon de Valera he was a math-wonk. It's not quite like with like, but he was probably as successful at code-busting (in person hours per result) as Alan Turing across the water at Bletchley Park. He cracked Görtz's code by working out that the keyword must be Cathleen ni Houlihan. This enabled G2 to masquerade as the Abwehr and abstract extra information from that source. It's probably true that he was the first person to catch a microdot in the wild. 

The book has a good insight into the hypocrisy, double-standards and nudge-wink of Ireland's neutrality during The Emergency. We now believe that de Valera's government tilted the neutrality playing field in favour of the Allies . . . because Nazis are Bad. Maybe: no English spies were arrested and interned in Ireland during WWII. Hayes and his immediate boss seemed willingly to have shared their key code findings with their opposite numbers in the UK. Everyone knows that de Valera, as head of government, formally called the the German Legation after the death of his oppo Adolf Hitler. According to McMenamin, de Valera failed to extend the same courtesy to David Gray, United States minister to Ireland, after FDR died. The Victors write the history.

What it is to be Irish

I was expressing some skept about writing 225,000 words on what it is to be English in the guise of it being an analysis of [social] science and experimentation. Apart from some snarky comments about bluff USAians being baffled by British irony, almost all the data comes from observations of the English in England. It is hard therefore to determine if the conclusions are specifically about English humans or Humans in general. A lot of the findings d♪ng true for Ireland, for example.

El Blobbo has made some meandering comments about whether science has anything at all to say about the human condition acknowledging that the fiction of Jane Austen or Emily St.John Mandel or Claire Keegan has more pointers about how to live well than all the scientific papers I ever wrote.

As it happens, the night before I left for a week of sole-searching in France, I downloaded two e-books from Borrowbox. It would be a sin to take an earbook on pilgrimage: when there are ppl to greet and birbs to list. But maybe some reading matter is handy for trains and planes and before anyone else is up and about.  But a book would be weight in the pack. The MiamMiam DoDo camino-guides print not only the price €18.00 but also the weight 320g on the back cover!

• All in a Doctor's Day by Lucia Gannon about being [a bit more than] half of a GP practice [the surgery R] in Killenaule Co Tipp
• See also A Fortunate Woman about being a rural UK GP.
• The House on an Irish Hillside by Felicity Hayes McCoy about working from home in remotest Kerry as a Dublin-born but London-based media person

Both these women came, as adults, to particular but not too peculiar small rural communities and established themselves with a degree of intimacy and acceptance that enabled them to be among you taking notes. and distill something about What it is to be Irish [kind, generous, non-transactional, funny, ham sandwiches, booze] in a lot fewer words [75,000 for the Doctor book] than 225,000.

Gannon's book gives an insight into the pervasiveness of GAA in rural Ireland: so many county-colour shirts, so many flags. I guess it is A Good Thing if it gets kids out in the fresh air getting fit in all weathers. The shouty local rivalries, not so much?

There's a nice tale in the Hayes-McCoy memoir when they come home to find a huge heap of seaweed dumped on their lawn. Their neighbour above had been hauling algae off the beach as fertilizer for spuds and assumed that of course the in-blows could use a tractor-trailer load. That required English Wilf to help the neighbour to dig the seaweed into his lawn, and later plant potatoes, rather than setting his own adult agenda for the precious hours away from London. 

I guess these memoirs / autobiographies are not Dewey-decimalled as 'fiction', although 'some names have been changed to protect the innocent' doesn't make them fact either. What they definitely are not is Science. There is no attempt to objectively gather and record data, let alone test hypotheses. But they are narratives: picking out the notable bits from the swirling surge of daily, weekly, annual, experiences. They give us clues about how to deal with, react to, similar issues in our own lives. They capture something about what life is like in Ireland in the 21stC.

Spot the diff

25+ years ago, we were down the farm cutting bushes from one of the field boundary walls. Somewhere under the bushy debris along the East face of the wall there lies a pair of secateurs. We were younger then and, even without a formal inventory, could remember all the tools we had brought down for the task and had used over the previous couple of hours. It was lunchtime and none of us had the oomph to turn over 50m of spiny vegetation for an outside chance of recovering a tool which cost (then) €3.99 in Lidl. Javi was with us in those days, so there were three people to blame. We are always losing stuff . . . because we have so much stuff to lose. After the loss of the secateurs and a handy 90cm spike/crowbar, I painted most of the tools with red-and-yellow stripes [as L].

We were down in Enda's Corner tidying it up in advance of a film-crew and the spring of my current Lidl-secateurs went sproinnng into the vegetation. I didn't see it go, it just wasn't there, so finding it was to be a needle in a haystack affair. I didn't even start! I make the effort to retrieve nails and fence-staples in such circumstances because they can come back to bite you; but a wee bitty spring, not so much. And even if painted yellow and red, it would still be invisible to my rheumy olde eyes.

The machete / 'sward-sword' shown L is one of three which we inherited from The Beloved's Uncle Jim. He had commissioned them from the local smith in Kano, Nigeria and carried back to Ireland many years before 9/11 and the subsequent security theatre. We lent one of them to 'someone' years ago, never to be seen again, but I use the remaining pair on the reg'lar for brambles, bushes and briars. I periodically touch them up lethal sharp with an angle grinder. Indeed, two weeks ago I was trimming back the veg at the start of the lane beyond Harry's gate . It was a project, so I left the sword in place when distracted from the task by counting sheep, making tea and collecting the post. A week later, the goddam tool was not in its accustomed place, so I spent some time over about three days hunting and rehunting for it near Harry's gate and in all the usual places. It should have been here: can you spot the difference?

The old wooden chair has become a rack for small tools used in and about the polytunnel. So of course I checked there but only saw the handle of one of our pair of swords [as R above]. On the 19th time of looking, I knelt down to check behind the chair and under the table again. From that perspective, the blades of two swords were readily apparent . . . Bob the Autoconfused having covered the second handle with an inverted paper coffee cup.  Having a place for everything and everything in its place is a necessary but not sufficient solution to the lost tools problem.

StopPress:  that sproinged spring down in Enda's Corner? After my triumph with the once and future sword in the chair, I wondered how hard it could be to find that spring. Not that hard, it turned out: I got down on my knees to part the grass and saw it within 5 minutes. It was easier than expected because the spring was not the feeble / invisible helical wire I had in m'head, but a robust sausage as thick as a pencil. I have repatriated and threaded it back on the secateurs with anti-sproing spring string [as R].

Don't give up ♬ ♪ ♫ ♩
You know it's never been easy
Don't give up
'Cause I believe there's a place
There's a place where springs belong

Too long too easy

In the early 1970s, when I was getting to college, people were beginning to apply evolutionary theory to help understand the human condition. The basic idea was that, through comparative anthropology / primatology we could speculate about the social structures of early humans. It could then be suggested that some of the drivers of social relationships might be genetically hard-wired rather than learned anew each generation. This was controversial because biological determinism, if it was hard-wired, might make it impossible for the dispossessed to get a fair share of the cake. These ideas came to a head when EO Wilson [obit] published Sociobiology in 1975. An earlier exponent of the idea that 1 million years of evolution in anatomically modern humans might impinged on how soccer teams or boardrooms worked was Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox, The Imperial Animal (1971) [review]. You could hardly choose more eponysterical author names for a book about biological anthro.

Robin Fox has a daughter Kate Fox who works as an experimental sociologist in Oxford. She is married to author neurosurgeon Henry Marsh [whom prev], not that it makes any difference - she's a person in her own right, not a chattel of the men in her life. I got her chunky book Watching the English: the hidden rules of English behaviour. (2004, 2ndEd 2014), out of the library recently. It's 225,000 words [far too] long and not enough chips. There aren't many copies in the Irish library system and there was a reserve on the title, so I didn't read every word. There's a chapter on the relationship of English people to English television, for example. We last owned a telly 40 years ago (in England), so all that is a closed book to me and I skipped that chapter.

Other sections made my skin crawl with shivers of recognition, so I didn't dwell on them either. What I did read is readable and amusing in a breezy sort of way. It is based on experimental work, so is not a series of anecdotes and opinions. The experiments are science but not as hard scientists might recognise it. I'm not getting snitty/sniffy here: I had my name on a number of papers in biomedical immunology which had small samples, large error bars and quite woolly conclusions. Those conclusions are quite likely irreproducible, if anyone could be bothered to replicate our underpowered experiments.

Our results were based on molecular biological assays where the reagents cost a lorra money and patients and controls were limited. €500,000 doesn't go far in Eppendorfia. Fox's research is cheap: like bumping into people in railway stations and counting the number of times they say sorry; or sitting in the pub eavesdropping on blokes slagging each other off as a surrogate for showing affection . . . and counting the insults. But it doesn't seem to be based on thousands of interactions. Maybe it doesn't need to be. Fox's theme or thesis is that the English are funny. Irony rules! Self-deprecating humour is a key ingredient in social lubrication in England. I do that, it's how I was brought up (in England). The English also tend to be punny which is an acquired taste and I'm glad I don't have to endure the careful arched-eyebrow delivery of clever word-play any more. 

StopPress: Had a visit yest from a friend who lives in Newry and commutes daily to Dublin. In contrast to the English, they talk to each other on the train. Only among Team Carriage C, mind: wouldn't know anything about those Others from Carriage A. But Carriage C has a Christmas party and all the other elements of successful Third Spaces. Brits are missing something walled up behind their newspapers immersed in their devices not making eye-contact 

Eating for Gaza

Our friend and neighbour La Torbellina de Tenerife is up-and-at-'em again. She is the most active person I know when it comes to bringing relief to the dispossessed: be that refugees, travellers, single parents or the troubled.  On 21 May we got an invitation to come along to the village hall on the Solstice and eat middle-eastern food to raise funds of Gaza go Bragh - €15/plate.

I ignored it. I was in the middle of Preparation Yomp and was by no means certain I would be back from France by 21Jun25. The next easiest response is to pay the money with no intention of eating disturbing foreign food - most of us in Ireland realise that neither side in the current conflict will entertain bacon-and cabbage and spuds. A more adventurous response is to buy a ticket and give it a go. Over the last 30 years there has been a culinary revolution in Ireland: frozen pizza and pierogi are available in Aldi . . . for all. There is a Chinese take-away in Borris!

When I did get home on 18Jun25, I found that The Beloved had volunteered [no pressure!] for a) kitchen prep on Saturday morning b) being Provost of Serving in the evening. The emotional and logistical energy for such event is a significant drain on any available calories and it can be handy just to have someone, anyone, to assist with the decision making. That's how we came to be constructing 250 koftas for 3 hours on Saturday forenoon; along side two veg-choppers-chaps [Ukraine, Espain], a spud peeler, and a chef du salads.

We were allowed home for a late lunch and a brief siesta, but requested-and-required to rock up to The Hall for 18:00hrs for a gates-open at 19:30. There are seats for 200 in the hall, that's the limit set by the insurance and #punters were close to that.

Notes to self . .  and those who imagine a similar event.

• Don't employ absolute beginners to make kofta. Team Barbecue were delayed in their timetable because, 7-8 hours after being massaged onto the skewers the lamb-mince was ready to drop off. It helps a little if each layer of skewers is separated from the next by a sheet grease-proof paper. Bamboo skewers are better than steel.
• Shunt families with small children to the front of the line! 19:30 is bedtime for kids. This is what they do in Plum Village. As well as a Provost of Serving; appoint a Dragoon of Customer Management.
• Have everyone find a table [with their mates but also with strangers] and sit. Make sure some sort of snack and a drink is within reach. Have the Dragoon of C.M. bring each table up to the serving table in turn. That's the way it was done at the Christmas Do at The Institute. People sitting down and chatting are less likely to get hangry when the barbecue is delayed by kofta-inkompetents. 

It was all go for the next several hours. I did try the kofta, and the garlic & paprika roast potatoes and the falafel: anything I could manage to get down standing up without a plate. Quite apart from raising money for water-bowsers in Gaza, such events raise the spirit of community engagement. Seeing your neighbours eat tabouleh and not fainting is also positive grist for the mill of multicultural Ireland. 

Seeing a vat of houmous bi tahina made me certain that my beloved, half-Lebanese, MiL and her sister were looking down through their harp-strings disagreeing about the details: 
more salt ukhti . . . 
NO, less lemon ukhti . . . 
you can't take lemon out ukhti [insert Hausa proverb here]. 
But at least they agreed with La Torbellina that gargantuan over-catering was the way forward.

Sisnedop aiv - suite et fin

When the walking stops, the Camino continues. But only if the trudge has tilted the scale a bit?  In Just- spring when the world is mud-luscious early June, The Boy and Me, we walked 100 miles 160km the wrong way up the Via Podensis. Prev I - II - III - IV - V. wrong? only in the sense that most people are walking that section of the GR65 towards Compostella, or at least Roncesvalles, rather than towards Le Puy or Geneva. On the straight sections we saw them shimmering through the heat-haze stacked in diminishing size like planes coming into to land as night falls. Rarely did any pèlerins stop to talk - bonjour et bon chemin was enough acknowledgment. But from those who did pause we gleaned valuable information about our road ahead and its resources . . . and gave as good as we got. There was time enough talk at dinner each night. 

Apart from my trip-and-fall old chap's accident we scraped through uninjured. The Boy confessed to being shagged out at the end of Day 1, a clicking hip on Day 2, and a blister on his pinkie toe on Day 6. My feet had been pushed beyond integrity by a 40km route march towards Santiago in 2004. Too many blisters to ignore, so I went at them with a clean needle >!pop!< and surgical spirit. Truth to tell, my heels never really recovered from the insult. In my preparation for this year's trek, I did consider going to a podiatrist to trim down my keratin burden heel-and-toe . . . either a podiatrist or a farrier. But I put that plan on the long finger for so long, that it was too near to The Off to risk change down there.  Likewise, getting my EU passport in hand. Likewise updating my EHIC European Health Insurance Card. My 10 digit EHIC number from 2021 [enough to give a unique # to every person on the planet] has been replaced for 2029 with a 14 digit EHIC number [enough to give a unique number to every cell in my body].

Because we were walking in a state of grace, we were both spared The Wolf aka Tinea cruris, scrot rot, dhobi itch, jock itch, intertrigo inguinal, Eczema marginatum. But my legs were brightened by a rather wonderful case of Disney Rash aka exercise-induced vasculitis, hiker's rash: an inflammation, commonest in elderly women, of the subcutaneous capillaries of the lower leg [as R on my own-self leg]. The combination of unwonted exercise, high temperature and susceptibility will do it for you. Not the same as sunburn which is a) epidermal b) uniform in colour c) painful. A case of the Disney's is a good example of the breakdown of a homeostatic system as we age. Although it looks alarming, it resolves itself quickly once the insult is mitigated. Children don't get hiker's rash because their peripheral temperature control is much better regulated and their capillaries are springy.

You can see [R] also that socks provide some protection - against sun and as support-hose. It also seems that we made our move in a timely manner. This last weekend the Béarn sections of the GR65 were suffering 40°C daytime temperatures. Phew wot a scorcher!

Lavendaria

The late Duke of Edinburgh had a quip "biggest waste of water in the world: pee half a pint and flush two gallons"; which I've cited before. I give similar side-eye to putting clothes, and household 'linens' through a washing-machine after a single use. This partly driven by the easy availability of the tech [cheap electricity; the complex of builders, surfactants, enzymes, and fresh-smell in detergents; cheap water] and partly by a fear of smelling of anything other than  fresh-smell and flowers. My students generalized this anti-pong aversion from their own and others' oxters to pretty much everything in the lab - especially anything wafting from a Petri-dish. Believe me, you wouldn't be so keen on the scrub-a-dub if you had to suds the clothes in the bath - which I did for a couple of years in a rented flat in the 1980s - let alone toting a basket down to the communal lavendaria down by the river. When I walked up the remote Atlantic coast of Portugal in 1989, communal clothes-washing by hand was still A Thing. In 2004, walking from Portugal to Santiago with The Boy, the village lavendaria were still there, but unused. I packed two shirts for seven weeks. Part of the ritual of landing for the night was to wash today's shirt and hang it out to dry while wearing tomorrow's for the evening.

For the second week in June this year, I was again marching with The Boy, and living out of backpacks. At the first gîte, a washing machine was available for a nominal €2 extra. One of the other pilgrims said we could throw our kit in with his, which worked out well for everyone. It was the south of France, the sun was still up, the clothes bone-dried before we went to bed. At the Gîte Communal in Navarrenx, two days later, Aurélien l'hôte had formalized this water-saving practice: Please don't wash your smalls in the hand-basin, throw them in that basket and I'll put on a wash before dinner. If they are not dry from hanging in in the morning, I run everything through the tumble-drier. I'd rather not, and I guarantee they'll be dry before you leave tomorrow.

Laundry on the Via Podensis is now institutionalized and hand-sudzing is a thing of the past. 

Apart from the laundry water that disappears down the plug-hole to add enormous volume to the water needing treatment, there is also the residual water in the damp clothes. M'daughers are sharing a tiny flat in Dublin and have to dry clothes on a rack in the living room. The water has nowhere to go so there is a perennial damp problem. Now that everyone has a washing-machine at home, the next white-goods must-have will be a de-humidifier.

There is no truth in the the etymology of laundry having anything to do with laying sheets out on a lawn to dry. Laundry is rather a corruption of old French lavandier one who washes, ultimately from Latin lavar to wash. And lavender Lavandula spica [as above L] has nothing to do with it either, despite the old fashioned custom of putting sprays of that plant in amongst the bed-sheets.  Lawn  n., a fine white linen/cotton 'Cambric' fabric, associated with the vestments of Anglican bishops derives from the town of Laon in NE France. Cambric aka otoh comes from Cambrai = Kamerijk a weaving town 100km further North in French Flanders.

Boo-hoo j'ai tombé

When I was young I used to run downhill. I was too broken-winded [asthma] to make <puf> much <puf> progress <puf> upwards.  I don't mean run on a downhill path; rather my joy was leppin' from tussock to rock planning my route 2 or 3 enormous steps in advance. Nothing bad ever happened - because I was immortal back then. Or more accurately: my tendons were resilient and springy and my eyes and feet talked to each other with me having to think at them. In the 70s, not so much? When she was about my now-age, my mother was visiting. She helpfully gathered some dishes after dinner tripped over a rucked rug in the kitchen and broke her fall with a broken wrist. It was bad timing because she was due to fly back to England the next day and A&E thought it was better to turn her care over to the NHS when she got there.

I spent my last 10 days as a 70 y.o. marching through France with The Boy. It turned out to be possible to walk 20+ km a day without [either of us - he do be pushing 50] crocking up entirely. It was hot, it was tiring, but twinges and pangs resolved themselves within a couple of hours and a decent night's sleep delivered us fresh for another day's graft.

Until, on Day 5, on loose gravel in the hamlet of Castillon-d'Arthez, my right ankle turned and I parachute rolled to my left to protect it. I was off the ground immediately and it wasn't until a few minutes later that I noticed blood trickling down my fore-arm from a few punctures in my left elbow. The Boy <"medic"> said it wasn't worth covering with a plaster until the bleeding stopped. So I trudged on trying to keep blood spattering the dest rather than my trousers. We paused 5m further along the GR65 at the épicerie at Pomps for bevvies and sandwich makings and I went back to the tap behind the Mairie to wash the blood off my arm [to not frighten the horses, like]. 

As well as weakness in the plumbing, my aged at no longer bounce-back resilient body seems to be defective in its Factor VIII response because my elbow was still leaking when we arrived at our gîte for the night. What was really concerning me, as we continued to pound le chemin, was the increasing stiffness in my turned ankle. The boy relented, after I washed my arm for the third time that day at one of the robinets d'église, and applied a sticking plaster just big enough to cover all the holes in my elbow. That night was the first and only time we were requested to stand behind our chairs before dinner while the host said grace. 

Whether it was the prayer, or the excellent dinner, or a tremendous midnight orage thunder-storm, or 8 hours with no weight on my ankle or a bonny breakfast; the next morning my feet were ready to go. I'd left no blood on the sheets, either; although the swelling on my elbow was the size of half a small hen's egg.  My unspoken anxieties of the night before about Uber, bus and stretcher contingencies to get us to Aire sur l'Adour on schedule evaporated as another sunny day in paradise rose up to meet us. We walked 31km that day and were rewarded with ice-cream.

The church as refuge

I promised more copy on the process of pilgrimage. Which seems a little pretentious because we were only a week on the chemin at the beginning of June; we were going the wrong way; I don't believe the credo. Nevertheless we chose to walk the GR65 because it was the direct continuation of my solo run from Santiago to France in 2004. the GR65 also happens to be the Via Podensis, one of the main pilgrim autostriders to Santiago de Compostella. 

Actual practicing religious pilgrims are a minority, even amongst those who are collecting stamps in their credentials along the way towards obtaining their Compostelle certificate when they finally arrive at the City of God. The Boy was toting a [gîte and restaurant locating] device with access to GBs of data. On about Day 4, after asking for requests, he fired up Spotify to play a bewildering number of different versions of Ultreïa. He was in his on-line element. A while later, noting ear buds attached to a hiker, he stopped the feller and offered to swap Spotilists. The other chap wasn't interested: he was listening to prayers with an occasional break for Gregorian chant.

Compared to the Spanish section of the Camino Frances, the Via Podensis not too busy, it doesn't require crampons and is reasonably well served for dinner bed and breakfast . . . and water.

Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art Water I loved, and, next to water, shade:

The striking commonality of all the medieval churches along The Way is how chill they are; even if the sun is broiling your hat outside. Cool and quiet, a bit dusty, maybe; but there are seats and anyone can afford to take five minutes for reflection. If you can't spare five minutes in your race to the next hostelry; then your need to take 15 minutes!

Churches have graveyards, graves have flowers, so there is usually water somewhere in the churchyard. If it is roof-water caught in a rain-butt, you may not fancy drinking the stuff; but you can slop some over your face and neck. Several isolated churches announced the presence of eau potable from a reg'lar tap. Fill your water bottle chaps, it may be 10km to the next village. 

We had planned to stop in the village of Pimbo on our penultimate night but had been advised by a kind and energetic fellow earlier in the day to push on to a magical gîte in Miramont-Sensacq. But the church in Pimbo had a pretty garden and an invitingly cool interior: so we stepped inside. There to find that the parish recognised that some travellers might be penniless but nevertheless need shelter:

Yes, a rough blanket and a sleeping mat will be sufficient. It was now 13:20hrs, we were 2 hours from Miramont and day's end. We could power onwards in the hope of getting the best bunks . . . or . . . we could wait until 2pm when the gelataria in the square opened. "Black cherry for me" I announced and sacked out under a tree. When I came to, The Boy was coming out of the shop with two bowls of ice cream and two ice cold drinks. "Black cherry sorbet for me", he said "and I couldn't resist a boule de stracciatella on the side".  And that, folks, is how the village became known as Pimbo-les-trois-boules.

Honey I'm un homme

Two weeks ago, I checked in to checkout: planning to catch my first plane in 5 years and make my first trip to continental Europe since I don't know when. A two-handed Thelma&Louise with The Boy was more-or-less mission accomplished and we are now back on our respective, and respected, sofas. Turns out that my français d'ecole affreux is good enough to ask/give directions on le chemin or engage in dinner-table chat. Not enough to make 
1. a convincing political solution to the disaster that is Brexit 
2. discuss the differences between a buzzard and a blackbird 
3. hold a torch for Michel de Montaigne [whom prev], though.

Normal people walk the Via Podensis along the way-marked GR65, starting at Geneva [for hard-chaws and Swiss peeps] or Le Puy and walk West towards The City of God Santiago de Compostella. Very few of those on The Way are through-hikers: it is a privilege of the retired, the independently wealthy and the completely indigent to be able to take 100 days out of their lives to trek the 2,000km in one go. Most folks we met, were doing the pilgrimage / walk is sections: a week or a fortnight at a time over several years of Summer holidays. Wherever and whenever you start, there will be others walking in the same direction at more or less the same pace and they'll keep turning up in your life as you pause to pop blisters or drink beer. You'll talk more to these people, more intensely, than anybody outside your immediate family.

Bat-shit folks walk au contraire, against the tide of humanity, and meet a lot more people but for no more than one night and two meals. That's what me and The Boy opted to dothis year and the way I approached the Camino Frances in 2004: slouching from Santiago to St Jean Pied de Porte in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques départemente of Aquitaine. St Jean PdeP is where started on Saturday 8th June; having bought sandwiches, water, some postage stamps and an Opinel #6 clasp-knife. It will surprise no Irish person that, coming out of the boulangerie, we were hailed by another walker, who lives in the Wexford village about 3km from home. She was yomping the GR10 another waymarked route which stretches from the Med to the Atlantic on the French side of the Pyrenees. All the GRs are designed and marked with 🇵🇱s to go both ways but there is much more additional signage for Direction Compostelle.

We were only led astray through inattention [and super-discrete to absent signage]on three occasions out of hundreds of cross-roads or forks in the path. Last time The Boy and I walked in 2004, Google Maps was not yet born. 21 years later, if you have a phone with data, navigation is a cinch. 

We slept [more or less this route in reverse]

• Ostabat Sat
• Saint Palais WhitSun
• Navarrenx Mon
• Arthez-de-Béarn Tue
• Fichous-Riumayou Wed
• Miramot-Sensacq Thu
• Aire sur l'Adour Fri
• train to Bordeaux for Sat

That's the bare bones, I am still distilling the experience and will have more to say in the coming blobdays. Depending on sources, MiamMiam DoDo, GoogleMaps, many different commercial, municipal and non=profit URLs we done walk ~170km. Power User Hint: don't buy the Miam-Miam Dodo guide to the Vezelay Chemin de Compostelle  = GR654 if you're determined to walk the GR65 Via Podensis! The GR65, GR655 and GR654 all converge on the (one church, one boulangerie) village of Ostabat one stage North of St Jean PdeP causing accommodation to creak at the seams.

Lessons in Chemistry

It was surprisingly easy to find Lessons in Chemistry as an earbook on Borrowbox. It was named book of the year 2022 and adapted as a TV mini-series the next year: so I didn't expect it to be persistently available on Borrowbox. Eventually I downloaded and heard it through. Spoiler: it is not a chemistry textbook. In fact the overt chemistry in the book is kinda terrible - a mere dusting of needlessly obscure science-adjacent long words where any normal scientist would use plain English sodium chloride? salt! Trimethylxanthine? coffee!

But that's plenty okay because 'chemistry' does a lot of heavy lifting in the book at different levels of abstraction / metaphor. Cooking is Chemistry. Love is Chemistry. Rowing is Chemistry. Cynophilia is Chemistry. It's also okay because the author Bonnie Garmus was Arts Block at college and worked all her life in the media and doesn't apologize for not taking a degree in Chemistry in order to write a novel. Instead she bought a 1959 General Chemistry text on eBay and scraped that for $5 words. The novel also features a talking dog, so try to suspend belief in order to take on board the universals.

As reg'lar readers know I've written A Lot about women in science. The underlying theme in many of those short biogs is how so many of their careers are a daunting and depressing slog up Mount Impossible through the Vale of Misogyny. Perhaps the 1950/60s, when the novel is set, was the worst time to try launching a career in science as a woman. Before that, only the most ambitious, lucky, privileged and well-connected even tried. Afterwards, it got steadily easier as the dinosaurs died off and society became more willing to accept equality in the workplace. And believe me, I know we're not there yet 60 years later.

Lessons in Chemistry is heart-warming and funny and introduces a handful of not-all-men who support and encourage the Heroine Chemist in her quest for truth and recognition. Do not read the Spoiler synopsis in Wikipedia but rather snag the book on Borrowbox - I returned it a week ago. Okay this clip won't ruin everything.

Garden update

If someone said it was Ireland's driest Spring since records began, I wouldn't immediately call Rubbish! Lack of rain hits our food-growing capacity harder than some, because almost all the productivity is inside a 9m x 17m polytunnel. At the end of May, we had a delegation of Hickeys come by from the US for lunch. As best as we can tell, their family owned our farm up until ~1873. Many years ago, the whole family returned home to their Patrimony and I rendered them some trifling service. I was happy to do that because you couldn't meet a taller, sunnier, kinder bunch of people. I was adopted by the recently widowed matriarch and included in her Xmas round-robin Annual Report. Over the subsequent years various septs of the clan came by for tea and scones, most recently on St James's Day 2021. When my foster-mother died over Christmas 2014, I had a Mass said for her in our Parish church and was able to double the audience at early mass on my way to work in The Institute.

Mais revenons nous à 2025! #1 Son and #5 Son and their spouses came for lunch. Na mBan Hickey had a tour of the garden afterwards and were delighted to be presented with the first two fat pea-pods for dessert. As well as peas [free from the Library last fall], we've also planted some saved haricot beans [which are taller than me already, but have few blossoms]. Also tomatoes of several different (named but unknown to me) varieties: so that will be a pot-luck bonanza. Actually half these tomatoes are growing up against the sunny front of the house, in the biggest pots we own: where they will get free watering [rain and kitchen rinse water] and a thermal boost from the in🌞ated wall behind them. No pressure to produce, Toms!

I have described the 1 tonne IBCs which act as rainwater reservoirs in and around the polytunnel. I wrung every drop out of these back-up reserves during the Spring 2025 Drought and had to keep things going with water pumped from 35m below grade through our domestic plumbing system. I'm really reluctant to do this because our bore-hole water is really acidic . . . and also because it's really cold. Whatevs, I rinsed out the external IBC and moved it away from the ash-dieback dead ash Fraxinus excelsior to a new, shadier position as ◎ L. It is also 0.5 m higher than before, which should make irrigation run faster. I was ready when we had a drought-breaking storm which delivered steady rain for about 6 hours. It took that much time to ¾ fill the IBC by pumping from the water-butt which takes all the water from the gutter running along the S edge of the polytunnel. 10 days later, it was brimful from drizzle and showers. 

In contrast to [solar] electricity, you can store water against an [un] rainy day! 

blindsight

El Blobbo has mentioned VS Ramachandran several times already. Borrowbox, Irish Libraries portal to ear-books and e-books is not limited to media which has at some point been issued on paper. One example is The Reith Lectures - 10 of the Best [2022, BBC]. The Beeb went to some trouble to pick 10 different Reith Lecturers [from a stable of ~75] and then fillet out One of the lectures from that pundit's series. It's going to be random and eclectic; but I guess they will have left the right doozies on the cutting room floor. "The BBC found that some of the audio archive of the Reith Lectures was missing from its library and appealed to the public for copies of the missing lectures"!!

They chose to include  Ramachandran talking about blindsight - the curious phenomenon where people who are stone blind because of damage to the striate cortex can nevertheless reliably point to an apple that is presented in front of their face. This may be through activation of, and processing by, the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) - a part of the brain which normally activates to assess speed and direction of moving objects. I guess the evidence for blindsight pans out . . . but the jury is still out on the mechanism?  Just when the audience [me] is putting on their skeptic hat and thinking up alternative explanations, Ramachandran pauses to say "But we all have blindsight when we drive".

I worked for 8 years at The Institute. During that time I clocked up about 100,000 km going back and forth on my 40km commute. I drove through the familiar landscape without hitting the curb (mostly not) or sheep (never) while listening to whatever audio I had on the go. Or giving orders to myself about marking lab-books or delivering lectures.

Distraction while driving a lethal instrument is much increased if someone else is in the car and we are nattering. Early one morning, I clocked up a fine and 3 penalty points in Enniscorthy when I was taking my sister to the ferry from Rosslare. It was a fair cop but I was completely oblivious to 30 cu.m. of camera-van outside the Community College until I got the penalty point notice in the post 5 days later. My retina got the image and sent it up the chain of command but there was nobody home in the visual cortex.

There's A Lot of data cluttering up other parts of my brain, though. The Beloved bumped into an acquaintance in Waterford City the other day whose first name, luckily, she knew. She knew the husband's name as well. But neither of us could remember their surname. That sort of thing annoys me so I tend to work at a solution. Several times that evening I could feel their name coming to the surface. But each time I gave the wisp full attention and tried to fish it out, it squidged out of my grasp and was gone. The following morning that name came to me as I was on my second cup of tea. 

• Where was it hiding?
• Why would we have a storage system that was so hard of access?
• What is the longest river in Spain?
• When is the next pub quiz?

PS. Another I R Old failure (of hearing this time) the other day. We're getting contractors in who need payment. I'm doing this on-line because I'm not that Old. One payment was in "processing" for a long time so I called the Bank's support line. That put me through to a gatekeeper, to whom I explained my problem. After a while she said brightly "I'll just put you on to rapine and steam" I repeated this back in my best incredulous tone and she repeated at dealing with imbecile pace "I'll just put you on to Our . Payment . System"

yellow brick road

A New England. ♩ was 21 years when The Boy was bor♬ . . . ♪'m 70 now but I won't be for lo♫ g. In 2004, I'd just turned 50 and retired [retire early and retire often has been my lifetime strategy] and announced that I was ready for a long walk in Spain. The Boy did me a solid by saying he'd komm mit. We pulled into Santiago on The Day:

Looking [too] closely, it is apparent that the older man is still portering 10kg of lard. That had all gone by the time I arrived, 800km later, at St Jean Pied de Porte in September. 

This evening we're meeting in Bayonne 64 with the intention of walking North a piece out of St Jean along the GR65. That is one of the many sentier de Grande Randonnée which criss-cross Western Europe in a largely car-free network of walking routes. GR65 is the French section Chemin de Saint-Jacques aka Via Podiensis and starts / finishes in Geneva / Santiago. In 2019, I was getting ready to retire [retire early and retire often has been my lifetime strategy] in the Summer of 2020. I fantasized about walking from St Jean to Cherbourg as the third and final stage of my 25 year walk from the furthest tip of Portugal to Home. Coronarama put the kibosh on that but my plan was taken aboard by The Boy who said he intended to komm mit agane. 

Ho Ho, he is now the age I was in the photo above and much fitter so def'n'y able for a 150km yomp along a waymarked sentier. Me, maybe not so much: I've been moaning that it's 5 years too late for me. But, as I mentioned a tuthree weeks ago, I've been in training for a month, and can now "sprint" 2km up a 10% slope in less than 25 mins. That's only vaguely related to being able to keep going at that pace for 30km. We have dinner booked on Saturday that far away from St Jean - so my knees had better be good enough.  Ultreïa!? ♬ ♪ ♫ ♩

Blob posts will be patchy to absent! 

De-ivy de Ash

Cripes, we're on our (...counts...) eighth ninth tenth forester. I feel sure there's another one or two in the 30 year back-story but can recall neither name nor face. Only one of these men [all men despite our best efforts to find another type] was an Ass: a bullying tree-hating power-tripper. There have been an equal number of tree-workers employed by the contractors we have paid. I guess therefore that we're paid-up supporters of a niche sector of the Irish economy. 

I've always thought that they were underpaid: asking dozens rather than thousands of €€€s a day. Plumbers get wet; chippies bugger their knees; but tree-surgeons (even the most careful and competent) die. I was, therefore, kinda glad when two of my favorite tree-monkeys refused to help with my tree-anxieties after Storm Darragh and Storm Éowyn this last Winter. Both chaps had hung up their harness, lapsed their insurance, and got work on the ground. There are two ways to get to "there are no old tree-climbing foresters": one option being distinctly preferable.

I've been losing sleep over a Scot's pine Pinus sylvestris , right opposite our front gate, which looked like it had had its foundations shook by Storm Darragh and might fall on the adjacent shed at the first gust of the next Westerly storm. Forester#10, let's call him Conor, finally called back last Wednesday evening, saying he'd come by to have a look on his way home in . . . an hour. He came on time, drove a big Toyota pickup and had the widest Husqvarna-branded suspenders I ever did see. A wide smile and a crushing hand-shake boosted my confidence. 

Conor was not particularly concerned about the looming Scots. His take was that oak Quercus robur, Scots Pinus sylvestris and ash Fraxinus excelsior had deep tap roots and were most unlikely to be ripped from the ground by any storm. They could shed top-hamper for sure, especially if there was ivy Hedera helix to provide extra windage. As we've experienced Monterey cypress = Mackie Cupressus macrocarpa; sceagh = hawthorn Crataegus monogyna; and rowan = mountain ash Sorbus aucuparia are classic for being untimely ripped from the earth-mother's womb by any stiff breeze. My anx alleviated, we've agreed to give that Scots another year: monitoring to check the progress of needle browning.

otoh, there are four (4) stonking gurt ash trees on the ditch between our micro-forest and the access road. They have been differently affected  by ash die-back Hymenoscyphus fraxineus and the last one is perilous close to angry neighbour's sheds. I've been dithering about cutting a ring around the ivy until I got an opinion on whether climbing arborists thought it made the trunk easier or harder to climb. At least living ivy is firmly attached to the tree. Conor advised ivy-cutting at 6:30 pm. At 6:30 am next morning I was on that task and by 08:00 it was mission accomplished - handtools [loppers, saw, hatchet] only!

We've also identified a drop-zone in the nearest corner of the forest where they can rain down lumps of tree when the time comes.

The list of sleep disturbing tree issues is now a little shorter. It's not like we haven't been living in the midst of trees for 30 years.  Which have been unsteadily falling over or shedding branches all that time. We've never had to buy firewood. But we lost more trees in the last Winter, than we've lost over the previous 25. When chaps are young, they know they're going to live forever so they don't worry about mortality [including doing bat-shit crazy things in/with cars, trampolines, quad-bikes, power-tools]. On some level, don't worry is extended to meteorological assaults resulting in property damage. I guess my tree-anx is increasing as the tide of old-man hormones turns. And hints of feistier weather as a result of climate change might be a factor also.

You can't herd one sheep

We have a farm[let], so we're farrrrmers? That's true, I s'pose, for some definitions of farmer.  The current regime at Caisleán Fáinne-chloch is that we have a minimum number [N=15] of sheep to a) stop ecological succession turning our trad hay meadows into old growth oak forest b) attract a modest subsidy from Bruxelles. Although, we are growing a micro oak+ forest next door. The Dept.Ag. requires that we vacate the 4½ ha. of meadow of sheep (and scythe) from mid-Apr to end-Jun; which is peak growth, flowering and seed-set season. The sheep have ~1 ha. of reg'lar fields on which to vacation during the vacate.

I was tidying up the boundary of that field at the end of March: cutting back the bushes makes it easier to count the sheep - no place to hide. Years ago, before our time, when that boundary separated two active farmsteads, that ditch was cleaned up and topped off with iron stakes, a run of sheep-wire and a single strand of robust barbed wire. There followed ~50 years of neglect: brambles, bushes, and full-on trees have filled out the defenses. Several years ago, a small sceagh Crataegus monogyna gave up under the local weight of wire and sagged over to our side of the boundary. The fence, at a 45° angle, was leaning out over a bit of a drop and the combo seemed to be sheep-proof.

But last Tuesday, I heard an unusual hullabaloo loud enough to penetrate by sofa-sacked 'mind'. Such noises often presage sheep-head-in-wire or similar events: 'tis almost as if it's a cry for help. I put on my boots, seized my shepherd's pliers, and strode purposefully across the lane. Most of the noise came from a lamb on the neighbour's side of the ditch; but the beast gambolled away at my approach and all the adult sheep were grazing unsnagged in the middle of the field. From force of habit I counted them and found 15 . . . +1. We had an extra black-faced ewe who had cleared the fence to see if the grass really was greener on the other side but her lamb at foot had baulked at the jump. I called up m'neighbour to say I had one of his. But we agreed that as the lamb was big enough to eat a bit of grass between milky bars, there was no urgency about repatriating the ewe.

I heaved a big put-upon sigh <harrrrumph> and went back home to assemble the rest of my fence-repair kit: 3 stakes, a handful of staples, chainsaw,  hatchet, iron bar, sledge-hammer. I'd cleared the site and was ready to re-erect the fence when I paused to reflect. It would be the divil-and-all to separate one ewe from her new pals and drive her out the gate, down the lane, along the county road and up the neighbour's drive to home. It might be easier for the two of us (and a good dog, hopefully) to catch the sheep and bundle her all willing over the saggy fence. 

A few hours later, evening-time, I went to look the field the final time and counted 15! Herself had gotten bored with the company and fecked off home under her own steam. At first light, I went back alone to fix the fence:

. . . for some definitions of fixed. That fence had been leaning to our side for many years and disappeared into an unkempt jungle in parts so it required some effort to get the sheep-wire more-or-less upright and supported by the new stakes. The rusty barbed wire wasn't coming vertical to match. But <thinks> if I stand on neighbour's side of the ditch I .might. be able to .lever. the wire over the top of the middle post to tighten the whole MacGyver up. I was an inch from achieving this goal when the wire broke and I pitched back off the ditch onto my arse in the neighbour's field. No amount of PPE can protect from that sort of seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time accident. No, I'm fine, thanks for asking.

Caisleán na Cailleach

Who shall be saved? That's today's question. It is a truism to say that slaps can be delivered to the head of any one of us - Henry V took an arrow in the face; Terry Pratchett's cortex emptied out; Phineas Gage's was briefly filled with an iron bar - but you'll respond better to life's tonks if you have money or connexions. How the dispossessed are treated is a measure of how civilized a society is. 

It's not enough to aspire to cherishing all the children; elected governments have to allocate resources to ensure that the difficult cases get dealt with. From 2000 Kathy Sinnott took the Dept Education to courtS to vindicate the Constitutional right of her disabled son Jamie to have "free appropriate primary education based on need". Jamie got to vote before he got his rights!  It's pretty clear that, in the 1916 proclamation, Padraig Pearse was cherishing all the children metaphorically not just the subadults. No grown-up nation should allow its citizens to sleep in cars, or in tents, or in at whim B&B accommodation. But that's where we're at. This last Winter there were 15,000 people homeless in Ireland a third of which were children. Not good enough.

Relying on private citizens to make homes available for those who don't have one might have worked sorta in the past. So long as you weren't black, an unmarried couple or <oof> with child. In 1975, with a newborn at foot, as students, we were able to rent a seafront property in Dun Laoghaire. The rent was about 2.5x that of the 2m x 2.5m x 3m shithole bedsit The Beloved and I had shared with a family of mice the previous year. I'm sure, the demeanour of patriarchy (and the accent) got us that room with a view of the sea. Through the noughties, I found that private rentiers could raise rents arbitrarily and evict tenants with impunity. It is only by being born at peak boomer and being lucky in the breaks, that we bought the farm 30 years ago and had a home for which we owned the keys. My correspondent G after 10 years in the private rental sector with her extended family, finally got a Council House in 2022.

I am relieved . . . happy . . . delirah to add my correspondent M to the list of those who have washed up ashore after years at sea in Dublin's rental sector. Whom shall we thank? Maybe Ned Guinness (1847-1927) [R, in his patriarchal prime] whose family had made a fortune in booze. At one time he was the richest man in all of Ireland. Having more money than anyone was capable of spending on racehorses and champagne, he allocated part of his patrimony to The Iveagh Trust [if you're reading from Baluchistan, don't bother clicking that bloatware link but get the gist from Wikipedia]. Still tl;? it's a provider of affordable housing in Dublin. They run a 200 bed homeless men's hostel, built the Iveagh Public Baths and the Iveagh Covered Market, and . . . a home for The Old. M is six weeks older than me and little bit more crocked up. After 50 years buffeted by the winds of change in private rental sector, M obtained the key to a teeny tiny apartment owned by The Iveagh and moves in Today!

All bets would have been off, if she hadn't been old.

Jokaisenoikeudet

Two years ago, I was a bit bereft because a British court had decided that private property bested the common good w.r.t. the right to camp on Dartmoor. 

When I was young, I had  a six month gig delivering books to primary schools. I had to cover a certain number of schools each week but how, when and in what order was up to me. I found that 3½ days "work" covered the modest requirement. For the rest of the week, I had wheels and a per diem and could do whatever I wanted. One afternoon in February, the sky was without cloud and the sun was high so I parked the van at Two Bridges in the middle of Dartmoor and strode up over the moorland.  There was nobody about, so I stripped off most of my clothes heading for the appropriately named menhir, Beardown Man. On the way back I poked about a bit in Wistman's Wood. I was too young and ignorant to really pay attention let alone properly understand why the wood was special nor appreciate just how privileged I was to be busy doing nothing midweek. 12 years later, the rights and privileges of Joe and Josie Publick were codified in

Dartmoor Commons Act 1985 [full text pdf]

The ruling by the High Court that made me sad two years ago was reversed by the Court of Appeal. Last week the UK Supreme Court UKSC doubled down on the intermediate court to conclusively allow wild camping on common land owned by someone with a lorra money: Darwall and another (Appellants) v Dartmoor National Park Authority (Respondent). I've given tribs to the efforts of the UKSC to make their definitive findings readily available to ordinary people. The judgement is always on line in full. There is a two page Press Summary. There is a ~10 minute youtube video (with transcript) of one of the Justices explaining their thinking. In this case, as many others, the UKSC digs out the relevant Acts of Parliament, weasels out the key paragraph - sentence - words - and decides whether they mean This or That - delighting one party to the dispute and plopping the other into a slough of despond. Obvs! it is section 10(1):
B. Provisions concerning public access to commons 

10( 1) Subject to the provisions of this Act and compliance to commons. with all rules, regulations or byelaws relating to the commons and for the time being in force, the public shall have a right of access to the commons on foot and on horseback for the purpose of open-air recreation; and a person who enters on the commons for that purpose without breaking or damaging any wall, fence, hedge, gate or other thing, or who is on the commons for that purpose having so entered, shall not be treated as a trespasser on the commons or incur any other liability by reason only of so entering or being on the commons.

Just in case you get caught in a parallel case later "open-air recreation" includes camping, yes, but is not prescriptive about what folks do to get their jollies. The Judges hope, assume and expect that the Dartmoor National Park Authority will, using good judgment, regulate matters by bye-laws. Don't expect to be able with impunity to buzz folk with drones; set loose your ill-trained dog; or host a concert. But you don't have to ask Mr & Mrs Darwall's permission: they may own the land but they don't regulate the recreation on it.

Stop Press: the morning after I wrote all about theoretic wild camping in a different country, I went for my reg'lar daily yomp up the hill . When I approached the first flat part of the path after the mountain gate, I saw a flash of red stripe and assumed it was a discarded walking pole. Turned out to be the zipper of a tent which was otherwise camouflage against the dullish green background. When I realised that the camper was not sleeping, I called a cheerful 'morning' and powered on past. 30 minutes later I had to go past again and a head popped out to chat. Thomas is a french truck-driver who is having a gap-Summer to walk round Ireland [Dublin - Cork - Galway - Belfast] mostly by designated long-distance footpaths like the Wicklow Way [gregoprev] or The South Leinster Way [whc prev with wild camping].

Time was passing and he needed to get packed and gone, so I took my leave. As I left, I said I'd show him some neolithic petroglyphs [his word] if he was interested when he went past our gaff on his way South. A while later, he arrived. He left his pack [17kg!!!] in the yard and we caught the Ringstone at peak visibility as the sun shone obliquely across the face. Afterwards he accepted a cup of tea, a fill of his water-bottle and a single flapjack before going on his way. Such an open disposition in him; the kind which rains down blessings of hospitality and kindness. Bon v'yage!

 * Jokaisenoikeudet n. Everyman's Right to roam the wilds of Finland. Included is the right to forage for berries and fungi and whatever else you fancy eating. When I was visiting my pal Heikki in Helsinki, he gave me a pair of scissors and told me to come into his back garden and help him cut nettle-tops Urtica dioica for lunch.

20 shades of grape

Did I say that Dau.II was down home and up hill? I did. We went up beyond The Fork the same evening for to see the Sunset - which had been spectacular the night before when she came down from Dublin. The sunset was scheduled for 21:17. But that's when both observer and horizon are at sea-level: we were quite a bit higher than the Castlecomer plateau behind which the sun e v e n t u a l l y dipped until the last bright dot winked out. By which time it was well past 21:20. Had I a nautical chronometer and/or a sextant, I could have calculated the height difference from the time. But I didn't so I couldn't.

Between yomps, Dau.II rolled up her sleeves and leaned into the family freezer which has a tendency to take things in rather than spit them out. A couple of years back, when she was billeted with us, she;d gone with her mother to Malone Fruit Farms and purchased a variety of soft fruit. We also had two years of meagre damson harvest from a sad old leggy Prunus domestica which stands on one of our ditches. And some own self picked bramble blackberries Rubus spp. Four hours of stirring over a hot stove resulted in:

Inventory: 5x blackcurrant curd; 10x black&loganberry; 2x cranberry, clove and anise for Xmas; 8x damson. Well done us. At a cursory glance they all look essentially the same: variations of purple. But every batch is different and every batch is good. Man cannot live by marmalade alone!

Come teatime, I made a batch of scones to act as tasting vehicles: each of the jam options sandwiched between butter and whipped cream à la Devon Cream Tea. [discrete burp] Must do quality control, after all.