40 stabs

One of the cognitive dissonances of moving to Ireland as a young adult with a vocabulary formed growing up in England was the existence of linguistic false friends. Prev: slim & dapper; or tête & tapfer & ewe.  In England a ditch was always something dug [concave], although it was obvs cognate with dyke = dijk the convex things which preserve Nederland from washing away with the tide. I'm a fan of The Sheep Game, a YT channel following Cammy "shepherd" Wilson in Ayrshire. A couple of weeks ago, they were fencing a rented field using sheep-wire supported by "stabs". Which from the context was the same as a stake or fence-post.  Which is a too-long intro to today's stakes today.

I am also a big fan of Jim Davis, who owns the sawmill on the Carlow-Laois border in Graiguecullen. He supplied the western reg cedar planks that face our amazing [2016] woodshed.  Those cedar planks keep on giving - to make the [2023] tree-house in the woodlot for example.  I was last in the Davis saw-yard almost exactly three years ago when I bought 40 of his best oak 50mm x 50mm x 1.5m fence posts. Actually, he only had 35 oak stakes ready-pointed, so I took 5 larch ditto. Oak lasts longer in the ground because of they are full of tannins (oak-bark was a source, in tanneries, for making leather last forever). But it can be hard to drive a fence staple [nail, screw] into an oak stake . . . and impossible to get it out.  Steel screws will shear off at the head rather than ease out from between oak fibres. I waggishly called my previous stab saga Ever Last Post . . . because of the longevity, like.

Now, three years on, it's a bit more like Last Ever Posts. Indeed I was joshing Jim Davis to that effect when I back again in his yard: 

• Bob: "I hope this lot will see me out"
• Jim: "Why? how old are you?"
• Bob: "Just turned 71" 
• Jim: "Well, I'm 77 and, as you see, still sawing wood" 

Maybe he's right. You're not dead, till you're dead. Pat the Salt was still cutting his half-acre with a push-mower when he was 85. Although I think he stopped that mullarkey when he turned 86 and Dau.II and I took up the reins in 2012 - partly to get some daytime TV in, after the mowing, though. Whatevs, last week I went to Graiguecullen for to collect another 40 stabs. This time the proportion was reversed: almost all the stakes were larch with a handful of (significantly heavier) oak. Why 40? Because @€2.50 each I pay €100. They come rough-sawn so I spent a 'happy' couple of hours the following day shaving off the rip-splinters to make handling and creosote absorption easier. 

Then it was getting into my most threadbare LIDL work-pants and my sheep-dip tee-shirt (which lives permanently outside in a shed) to apply pseudo-sote - because old-fashioned, carcinogen-heavy, petrochemical by-product creosote can no longer be sold in Ireland. As before, I used a 90mm external ⌀ heavy-duty plastic tube, originally the centre of a roll of silage-wrap,  I found that the internal ⌀ of a tub of E45 paraffin cream is also 90mm and made a waterproof seal to the bottom of the silage-wrap tube. We haven't bought E45 since the last of our kids became continent, but the tubs have been convenient containers for screws, fence-staples etc. Dunking fence posts sure beats painting them, even if as here, I put each post through two immersions of creo-dunk.