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.