Mental Elf

Someone in Coolock branch library decided to condemn as "Worn Out" Joanna Cannon's 2019 book Breaking & Mending: A junior doctor’s stories of compassion & burnout. A local contact snagged it from the discard box and sent it down country to us. Its publication was subsidized by The Wellcome Collection in London, which also hosts an excerpt of the book if you can't find a copy in the library, like.

Cannon left school at 15 but went back to school and then medical school in her 30s because she wanted to work wit people, especially people troubled in their heads. 

I've set out my stall on how the HSE/NHS treat Mental Health as a poor relation. It's easier to get €millions for Cerebral Palsy or €50,000 for a kidney transplant, than to get sorted for bipolar or OCD. Breaking & Mending is clean and compelling reading but it ain't a textbook and Cannon no longer practices medicine, so some assertions and suggestions are allowed. One is that good mental health depends upon being part of a listening, caring, community. Another is that we are all at different positions on multiple spectra. An effective [listening, caring] community makes allowances for outliers [in whatever direction they outlie]. I never thought I'd say this, but maybe the bullying and slaggin' and compulsory gym of school is better for mental health than slopping about in the shallow warm dopamine soup of TikTok in your exclusive bedroom.

The last 20 years, we have been sold a bill of goods by the gods of FAANG [whc polyprevs] - everyone gets their own customized glove-fit echo-chamber. We no longer go out to the cinema and roar together in a waft of shared pheromones. Netflix distributes movies now. Lockdown kept kids from classrooms - but sucked into their customized devices. As social apes, we [most of us, that is, it being a spectrum] are not designed for being alone-with-a-phone. Maybe that's why youngsters go off the rails|: further from the average on the Axis of anxiety, self-harm, OCD, suicideation, depression, paranoia. Back in the day, the unhinged were recognised and accommodated in the community even as they were teased and bullied.

As if one person's story at the coalface of mental health were not enough, I Borrowboxed Will you Read this Please as an earbook. It is editted by Joanna Cannon and chapters a dozen tales told to a dozen British writers. There was a recruitment process, soliciting "mental health service users" to come forward to tell their stories. The "finalists" [there is a reality TV vibe here] were chosen to illuminate the variety of lives which generally go under our collective radar. Normal (2.3 kids, reasonably happy, car in the drive, holidays planned) families go about their normal lives oblivious of the handwashing or gender dysphoria next door. If you have gambling or bipolar or self-harm in your family that is quite enough without embracing the troubles of Others. But we really should a) care b) allocate resources to the Cinderella of the health services.

For the earbook, a dozen different reading voices have been recruited to the project. One nice conceit is that the income / royalties [if any!] are split 50:50 between each troubled person and the tale bearer.

2 tonnes an hour

The biggest asset Chez Blob is our 17m x 9m polytunnel. It has a lot more utility that our most expensive asset - the 9m x 4m array of solar panels which we had installed in April just S & downhill of the tunnel. The tunnel is where we dry the laundered wearables; where we grow spinach & beans & tomatoes & squash & tarragon; where I can touch up a chain-saw and store kindling. The only draw-back is that it never rains in the tunnel and even that is only a problem w.r.t. to the veggies.

But it for sure rains on the plastic of the tunnel and from the beginning there have been gutters along each of the long sides which capture rain-water and deliver it to containers varying in size from 20 lt to 1,000 lt. If you add them all up we have the capacity to store nearly 3 tonnes of water [obsessive details and itemisation] which may then be eked out each evening to where the thirsty plants require it. I've said before that, in an ideal world, our average annual rainfall [~1,000mm] was delivered in increments of 10mm every third night through the year. In rose-tinted memory, it was like that in Olde Ireland but now we can expect to go for weeks without any rain at all and did so in 2018, 2023 and now again in 2025.

It was terrible dry for long stretches of the Spring this year and in July, I was reduced to using well-water to irrigate the veggies. I hate doing this because, since we changed the submersible pump in April 2024, prolonged running of taps drags silt up from the bottom of the well, and I have to clean the filter. On the w/e of 19/20 July we were served a dump of rain which topped everything up again. Then nothing for 5½ weeks and I was slopping an algal soup out every evening as the barrels steadily ran dry.

We were promised the scut end of Hurricane Erin on Tuesday 26 August - without the wind but with the hope of some rain. I cleaned the gutters, checked the hoses, mustered the buckets in anticipation. Wednesday, I was woken in the dawning twilight by the drum of rain on the roof and went up to make sure The System was working. It was wonderful and not before time. For two pins I would have [frighten the horses alert!] stripped off and danced in the deluge.

It looks like we caught about 2 cu.m. = tonnes of rainwater between dawn and breakfast. Which is consonant with the fact that we had about 18mm of rain that morning and the gutters run full length and capture close to all the rain that hits the plastic - 17m x 9m x 0.018m =  ~2.75 cu.m. As mentioned we had another wet front slob through on the morning of 03Sep25, so we are now brimful at a time when we don't need it . . . but the soil microbiota in the polytunnel is having a fiesta.

Danny Boy

At 11 am 3rd September 1939, a Sunday, my mother and grandmother decamped briefly to shelter under the massive scullery table when they heard on the wireless that war had been declared. When nothing happened after 10 minutes, they somewhat sheepishly emerged and continued to prepare Sunday lunch for the men of the house. Meanwhile, somewhere in the Med, my father was making sure 'his' MTB, and its crew of 10, were ship-shape and Bristol fashion. He was a month short of his 22nd birthday. Just 10 weeks later, that Little Ship sank in a storm 20km W of the Northern tip of Sardinia [map]; as he was attempting to repatriate the Effectives to Blighty via French inland waterways. When I turned 22, I was studenting in Dublin and would no more have signed up to serve than I would have been training to be a ballet-dancer, surgeon or vicar - all of which had been stated career aspirations of younger-me. It was the 70s, long hair, loons and Bob Dylan for me; rather than drills, discipline and spit-and-polish.

A full [N=13] coven of my family gathered in Dorset in the middle of August, to scatter me mother's ashes in the sea near where she'd agreed to marry Sir the Old Man. As usual before travelling, I scoured Borrowbox for something, anything, to read on the road. I was ambivalent about an army memoir, but it was more up my street than James Acaster or Barbara Kingsolver. That's how I got to read Double Crossed: A Code of Honour, A Complete Betrayal by Brian Wood MC. 

Living in a parliamentary democracy, we get to vote every few years and hand over the command of the ship of state to a bunch of Effectives Operatives - people who can fund-raise and glad-hand and make deals without being necessarily competent to make difficult decisions. The data on which those decisions are made are gathered by professionals, paid for by the state. Whatever you think about the US-British invasion of Iraq, the uniformed employees of the state were obliged [and trained] to carry out the task on the ground. On 14 May 2004, Brian Wood was ordered out of his armored personnel carrier APC [as L] to engage the Iraqi militia who had just ambushed the Brits. Against 10:1 odds, 23 y.o. Wood and his squaddies won The Battle of Danny Boy and he was awarded the Military Cross. 7m YT exec summary.

But those events occurred 65 years after 1939 and the relationship between The Public and The Armed Services had changed significantly. Since Nuremberg, it was no longer possible to play that "only obeying orders" card: every soldier was expected to be squeaky clean ethically and morally when their mates had just been killed and maimed and incoming is still flying. Politicians, who had committed the British army to the sorry, shabby, ruinously expensive [£8,000,000,000 there or thereabouts] Iraq venture, chose to take the high moral ground by establishing a commission of inquiry into the ethical behaviour of the PBI (poor bloody infantry) hazarding their very lives on the ground at Danny Boy. Brian Wood was required to attend the Al-Sweady Public Inquiry and remember in detail who had done what to whom ten years earlier. The thing that most concerned him was that The Man would take away his medal. The Inquiry was also ruinously expensive [but only £25,000,000 not billions] almost all of it funnelled to lawyers, who had never handled an AK-47 let alone been shot at by one.

Fun facts; small world dept.  Jason Beer the principal lawyer for the Inquiry was the same as the Jason Beer [quips] who was i/c the legal team for the Horizon Post Office Inquiry 7 years later [whc bloboprev]. On the telly, beloved-by-Brits, actor Toby Jones played Phil Shiner - the venal lawyer for the innocent Iraqi farmers killed, captured and brutalized at Danny Boy . . . AND . . .  Mr Bates, the Sub-postmaster who wouldn't be bullied.

Today we have naming of Storms

Today 2 days ago . . . Met Éireann, UK Met Office and KNMI Koninklijk Nederlands Meteorologisch Instituut have been in bed together as a storm naming co-op. Since 2017, France, Spain or Portugal are in another consortium, upon whc Belgium and Luxembourg are coat-tailing. This allows for warnings about floods and gales in Tarragona or Toulouse when things are comparatively benign in Tullamore. The last named storm which affected Ireland in the 2024-2025 season was Floris on 5th August and he was a lot less windy than tree-felling Darragh or Éowyn ( a record 184km/h at Mace Head Co Galway on 24Jan25). 

Hurricane Erin was a) nothing to do with the NL/IE/UK list b) a bit of a damp squib when she passed NW of Donegal later in August.

On 1st September, the tabula is raza and we get a new set of names to crank through: Amy, Bram, Chandra, Dave, Eddie, Fionnuala, Gerard, Hannah, Isla, Janna, Kasia, Lilith, Marty, Nico, Oscar, Patrick, Ruby, Stevie, Tadhg, Violet, Wubbo. Met Éireann is responsible for choosing those in green. Take it from me, there won't be any Storm Steve or Storm Wubbo this cycle! There just aren't enough name-worthy storms in any year.

More weather newses: after a long droughty Spring and Summer we have had two rainy fronts come in from The Atlantic - one passing through even at the moment of launch - which has refilled all our containers. Full report on 08Sep25.

Naming of parts (easing the spring) 

Car Ha Ha Ha Hire

This Summer, on so many axes, I've been hatching from the cocoon of corona-mediated sofa comfort.  Went flying and speaking French after a gap of five years in June. Rented a car in foreign two weeks ago. I've had rather a lot to say about car hire in the past. The general practice at the rental desk is to require A Lot of explanation about the extent of the customer's liability for damage to the paint-work and alloy wheels and very little about the added features on modern cars. It kind of ruins the holiday worrying that the car will get scrorched by a 20 year-old [in a] Ford Fiesta while you're having dinner at a restaurant.

We rented a car in Ireland for a few days last September to facilitate the transition from the dying Citroën Picasso aka The Grape to a new-to-us Toyota Yaris. The hire-car was a head-ache: the previous renter had set up but not cancelled a relationship with a Road Toll company that land us with charges; concerning 'failure' lights appeared on the dashboard just as The Beloved was embarked on a trip to Dublin. That trip was therefore cancelled. otoh Enterprise Car Hire bent over backwards to comp us for our troubles and sort out the problems.

That's not a very good reason to choose to rent from Enterprise in England two weeks ago but that's what I did. We were two hours delayed by Aer Lingus hassles at DUB airport but not in a tearing hurry when we landed at BRS Bristol. So we suffered through their weird obsession with dunts and scratches and £1,700 liability for such damage [and £1,700 for damage on the other side of the car!]. rather than getting cross. I didn't get really cross when the under-employed Enterprise Chap at the next desk started in about how cool our Ford Puma was. But I did invite him to "SHUT UP", so I could concentrate on the CDW excess.

Despite having an extra hand larking about, nobody from Enterprise troubled to explain how to open the petrol cap on that particular car. I've been caught on that before as well as not finding how to select reverse gear. Youngsters in the car trade know all about the latest bells and whistles and so assume [Curse of Knowledge] that An Old like me will too. Lucky I had two 30-somethings in my party to handle the SatNav, the Bluetooth and the AirCon, eh? 

You have to wonder at the adolescent mind of car designers. 

• Did I say we rented a Puma? I did [and see R]. When the car is activated by the unlock button on the fob, a light from each wing-mirror projects a pouncing puma onto the pavement beside the car. 
• More useful in theory is a bing-bong alert and a light which appeared telling us that The Driver is Sleepy, rest soon. Followed 10 minutes later by The Driver is really Sleepy, rest Now. 
• Ditto for the disconcerting periodic wobble in the steering. That is not the wheels are out of alignment and about to fall off but the lane assist feature which eases the car away from grassy verges. This can be disabled IF you know it's called the Lane Assist feature and have time to read the online onboard manual.

Enterprise customer service called me on the phone the day after we got home to re-assure me that my tab had been closed and the £200 credit card lien had been refunded. That's pretty good service. Less so the barrage of txts and emails the system sends out including "Hi Bob, please confirm your existing details or modify them to add new information for your upcoming rental return." Go away with that!