Courthouse steps

It's a little more than 10 years since I was called for Jury Service. In 2016, I attended the County Courthouse, along with ~70 other citizens, three times over an elapsed week. On day two I came within an ace of making it onto a jury but was rejected by the defense counsel. I had some sour things to say back then about the cost and inefficiency of vindicating people's rights to trial by jury.

Well Tiocfaidh ár lá I was re-called to attend the Circuit Court in April and joined 75 fellow citz, crammed into a room with only 65 seats at the County Court House [view from the steps R] on Tuesday last at 14:00hrs. We were roll-called as if it was 1926, with no pretence at GDPR. Which enabled me to discover a) that my distinctively / uniquely named neighbour had failed to answer the summons b) the name of a distinctively-faced former colleague from The Institute whom I hadn't seen for 6 years. We watched by video the arraignment of someone in the main court room but he pled guilty. So no trial, no jury, and we were requested and required to return the following day at 10:30 for the reserve team match. 

It took the rest of the morning to reduce the mill of people to 12 who were a) unobjectionable to prosecution and defense b) not proffering a last minute excuse. Despite wearing my Tweed Jacket of Patriarchy TJP, I was accepted as one of that week's jurors. We were told that the case was estimated to take 2-3 days and that we should cancel other arrangements for Thursday and Friday with a outside chance of being required for the Tuesday. Then we went to lunch to be back at 14:10 sharp. Lunch was at the Hotel Generic with 3 choices: meat, fish, other meat. Enormous portions. Dessert = tea or coffee and a sliver of biscuit, whc fair enough: nobody needed more Kcals after the meat&carbs. The case continued until 16:00, most of which we spent in the tiny jury room as legal arguments surged back and forth in the court. Obvs I can't / won't give any details of the case. Or identify any of the jurors about whom I got to know rather TMI as we chatted idly in limbo or to, fro and at lunch.

I am the third member of our family who has recently been doing the state some service (jury division). Funnily enough all three cases hinged on evidence from cctv footage. In his summing up, our Judge referred to the admissibility of chinese cctv data. An unintentionally hilarious comment on the surveillance state we currently inhabit. He was, of course, referring not to the PRC but to the camera outside the Hop Kweng Schezwan Restaurant round the corner. One of the lawyers had a tendency to $10 dollar words (animus, disharmony) [betting they graduated from TCD]. At one point they asked if some key shrubbery was exuberant, to which the witness replied "wha'? it's about knee high".

It seems that, in our current state, anyone over the age of 65 can ask to be excused jury service. Which is further proof of the power of the grey vote. Every pensioner who refuses to serve the community (which is supporting us with free travel, fuel allowances and medical cards) is pushing an unwonted burden on someone younger who is currently struggling with a cost of living crisis, unattainable house prices, child-care and existential angst. Check your privs, Gramps! 

Anyway, I'm glad I finally got my chance to Do That Thing (many are called but few are chose etc.). But I have to say I left the courthouse on Friday evening feeling slightly soiled with what we had had to do. I ambled up the railway station where I was meeting The Beloved on her way down from Dublin.  A couple passed me on the platform and I heard her say " . . . that was not fair, the whole thing was based on a pack of lies". I'm about 60% certain (i.e. not beyond reasonable doubt but on the balance of probabilities) that they also had just come from the courthouse. It gave me pause.

One final comment: the courthouse has A Lot of steps: imposingly running up to the big front doors but also serving a warren of rooms and corridors inside. There is a single lift, so it is formally wheel-chair accessible but heck-and-jiminy I wouldn't want to try escaping from a fire.

Blackstairs Yomp 2026

Almost very year this century walk we have acknowledged the annual Blackstairs Challenge: an up and down yomp of 33km along and 1.5km up organised by the Wayfarers Hiking Club. We were here for them this time last year. Caisleán Bob is 300m up from the county road where the 13:00 cut-off check-point is located; so the tide of people, walking poles, ruck-sacks and gaiters drains away from us at ~12:45. We have always provided water:

The pixellated sign says "Trail Fairies / W A T E R". Over the last several years, for the craic, I've baked a few slabs of flapjacks for the troops and these all seem to disappear. 2.75kg flapjes / 180 hikers =  ½oz each. But not evenly distributed because some people take two and [so] some get none.

The weather in mid-May is usually pretty good: neither sno-blizzard nor sun-broilard but today was the drizzliest it's been for a few years. I felt I should add our agéd beat-up Aldi-speciaal parapluie to the support kit:

. . . not that any of these hardy hikers would cower under cover at the first splash of rain. 

Earlier in the week I was talking to an ex-Institute colleague, now also retired. He used to run the Institute Hill-walking Club whom we hosted 13 years ago. He said he'd never made it to The Challenge because the demand far out-strips supply. But he'd done the 33k route several times in a smaller group (saving €46 each on the registration and logistics fee). All good fun. I'm glad I was up early to set everything out, before it started to rain in earnest.

And the rain stopped shortly after the local cut-off time, which meant I could tidy up after 2026's challenge. Just about to close the gate when a delegation from Wayfarers Centraal came up the lane in a vehicle to deliver a bottle of whiskey: a much appreciated tribute which is getting to be a habit with them. Thanks! We took that dry moment also as a window for moving our sheep to a greener field. Then I strode up the hill to collect [another 2026 innovation] my water-warning sign [R] from the mountain gate. There behind the sign is the bottle of Jimmy. 

Not all great though. When I collected the sign, the mountain gate was open and my neighbour-above's cattle were out on the side of the hill munching through the heather. I called. The cows are meant to be there. But ne↑ghbour added the info that, when she went up to check the cows at noon, both gates were open. Which leaves the cattle with an unimpeded path all the way to the county road and Freedom. Wch is a mighty pain in the arse for their owner. Tsk! and, like, FFS.

Kangaroo Euclid

Most of us account [dyswidt?] math-anxiety an unfortunate outcome for any system of education. Some adults struggle making change from £5, or sawing a 8ft = 2400mm 4x2 into three equal parts. When I was in school, we were just moving out of rote-learning our times-tables and grinding through obviously artificial 'problems' that filled the pages of Pendlebury's New School Arithmetic [my edition is 1924]. Didn't make me no differ, I was 'good at maths' and institutionalized biddable, so the medium of teaching was largely irrelevant. I remember wetting myself when I cracked a code that was printed on the cover of the SMP text-book series that was the basis of math-ed at my school. But I gotta admit that teaching math there-and-then didn't light any fires. It wasn't FUN.

Gdau.I is in secondary school in England and "good at school" like me, and quite competitive: unlike me. With encouragement from her teachers, she signed up for an extra-curricular math jam called Kangaroo Math run by The UK Maths Trust, "the leading charity that advances the education of young people in maths". The programme is derived from Kangourou sans Frontières which in turn owes a debt to a programme started in Australia by Peter O’Holloran and Peter Taylor in 1978: hence the Kangaroo label. Gdau.I's parent shared a link to Past Papers [2015-2026] from the UKMT scheme: grey kangaroo is for younger kids while pink kangaroo is aimed at "A" Level = last two years of secondary school. As I say above, I was great at the tricks to get good marks in tests [incl "A" Level] for The Calculus and other advanced math stuff.

Kangaroo is attempting, like so many school-math reforms, to go beyond instilling basic numeracy in the populace. They are hoping to bring more kids over the threshold into math can be diverting and intrinsically interesting and maybe even inspiring; rather than a merely functional, doubtfully useful, skill. As the least competitive person I know, I could wish this was achieved without pitting children against each other. Because if there are winners, there are losers and that gives people's self-esteem a biff.

But, out of solidarity with the young herself, I've been plugging away at some grey kanga past papers . . . as an alternative to sudoku, like. The set-up is for each paper to have 25 multiple choice questions: starting easy and getting harder. It's good fun (for the likes of me) and I can, with furrowed brows, motor through Q1-Q15.  Beyond that, I have to mobilise a pencil&paper. But, because it's recreational, I give up on the last tuthree [difficult for 15 y.o.s] Qs because my life doesn't depend on getting 100%.

2016 Q12 Two kangaroos Bo and Ing start to jump at the same time, from the same point, in the same direction. After that, they each make one jump per second. Each of Bo's jumps is 6 m in length. Ing's first jump is 1 m in length, his second is 2 m, his third is 3 m, and so on. After how many jumps does Ing catch Bo?

Possible answers: A [10] B [11] C [12] D [13] E [14]

2019 Q9 In the diagram, PQ = PR = QS and ∠QPR = 20◦. What is ∠RQS? 

Possible answers A [50°] B [60°] C [65°] D [70°] E [75°] 

Don't know about you, but these Qs seem a bit more fun than Pendlebury's equivalent 100 years ago:

99. A ship 600 miles from shore springs a leak which admits 6 tons of water in 20 minutes. 60 tons of water would suffice to sink her but pumps can throw out 70 tons in 4 hours. Find her average rate of sailing that she may reach shore just as she begins to sink 

 

Batman and Moggyn

Seems my memory [of whc fallibility prev] told a fibby-whopper about my reading matter 50 years ago. In 2022, I maintained that I had been reading an Elizabethan translation of Isidore of Seville's De Natura Rerum. I wrote it up in CGN Carnivore Genetics Newsletter for which I was crimper-in-chief for several years in the early 80s. About ten years later, I left a complete archive of this niche publication in care of the library of the Genetics Department of TCD, my alma mater, when I was back there as an adult. About 10 years after that a new generation of geneticists threw the whole thing in a dumpster when they were "streamlining" their inventory. Some scientists are so fixated on the Future that they see no value in the past.

In March, I was on a unexpectedly deep dive looking for something to read and checked the TCD Library catalogue for that book. While I was 'down in the archives' I thought I'd check my Isidore reference. There I discovered that what I had actually spent an afternoon with in 1977 was:

"Batman vppon Bartholome his booke De proprietatibus rerum, newly corrected, enlarged and amended: with such additions as are requisite, vnto euery seuerall booke: taken foorth of the most approued authors, the like heretofore not translated in English. Profitable for all estates, as well for the benefite of the mind as the bodie. 1582. Bartholomaeus, Anglicus, 13th cent" TCD Catalogue Reference.

And it is possible to track down [at the rather wonderful bestiary.ca site run by David Badke in BC Canada] the passage which so interested me back when I was obsessing about coat-colour in cats in the 20thC.  The whole booke is searchable at the Wellcome Collection.

The Cat is called Murilegus, & Musio, and also Cattus, & hath that name Murilegus, for he is enemie to mice & to rats, and is commonly called Cattus, & hath that name of ravening, for he ravisheth mice and rats. Or els he hath that name Cattus of Cata, that is to sée, for he séeth so sharply, that he overcommeth darknesse of the night by shining of the lyght of his eyen, and the name Cattus commeth of Gréek, and is to understand slye and wittie, as Isi[dore] saith li. 12. And is a beast of uncertaine haire & colour: for some Cat is white, some red, some black, some skewed and speckled in the féete, and in the face, and in the eares, and is most like to the Leopard, & hath a great mouth, and sawie teeth & sharp, and long tongue & pliant, thin & subtill, . . .

There; I'm glad we set the record straight. 

 

Moneta Roma Antiqua

A parapal on Metfilter recommended Moneta: A History of Ancient Rome in Twelve Coins (2024) by Gareth Harney. Obediently, I reserved a copy and it came to my local library quicker than average. The Blob's book-world has been in similar listicle-land before: 

• A History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor 
• also A History of Ireland in 100 Objects by Fintan O'Toole;   
• A history of Ireland in 100 words by Arbuthnot, Ní Mhaonaigh and Toner. 

Moneta is not 12/100ths the length of those other books, because the publishing world doesn't work like that. It is, therefore, more discursive and less exec summ; and definitely not the worse for that treatment. Indeed, I ripped through its 300&some pages in a tuthree days and popped out the other end feeling better informed and indeed smarter.  I'd be quite the pub bore about it for the next couple of weeks . . . if I ever went out.

Harney's journey was set when, as boy, his father gifted him a small silver coin that was "Older than both world wars, older than Shakespeare, had already existed for a millennium when Harold took an arrow in the eye at Hastings". It takes a certain romantic imagination to evoke just how long the tiny artifact had survived and through whose hands it might have travelled. Roman coins have turned up in Ireland, Iceland and Indonesia: places where the writ imperial never ran.  

The book, not stinting its brief, features a lot more than the 12 coins which head up the twelve chapters: Wolf -- Nemesis -- Dictator -- Ides -- Pax -- Kingmakers -- Arena -- Zenith -- Philosopher -- Split -- Cross -- Collapse. You might, like me, guess that Ides centres et tu Brute; Arena centres the Colosseum; and Philosopher centres Marcus Aurelius: whose likeness continues to grace the Italian 50c coin [L]. I knew a lot more Roman history, myths and legends when I was 12 than when I'm 72. I hadn't thought about Romulus and Remus being orphaned and suckled by a wolf for decades but Chapter One dredged the image up from my memory and gave it a brisk polish. Where does memory lurk unbidden for so long and still be available for recall?

We were in Roma briefly in 1978 passing through in a Citroën Dyane on the way to Sicily. I remember the Colosseum, largely because it was crawling with cats and I was going to the 1st Conference of Cat Population Genetics and Ecology. But I am now booting myself that we didn't pause to marvel at Trajan's Column, which features on a golden aureus at the head of Chapter VIII, Zenith. The column is a story-on-a-stick with 23 helical turns unrolling to 200m of graphics show-and-telling Trajan's trans-Danube adventures conquering the province of Dacia. The column had to be 100 Roman feet = 38m tall to match the height of Quirinal Hill which was carted away in baskets to level the area for the Column and ancillary Forum. The column is a stack of 20x 32 tonne marble drums. Nobody denies that the Romans were determined and effective engineers.

The conquest of Dacia resulted in the acquisition of 320 of gold and 450 tonnes of silver. Much of that was minted into 30 million aurei and 160 million denarii to dole out to the Praetorian Guard and pay for bread and circuses. Ice cores from Greenland document the quality of the atmosphere over the last 100,000 years. There is spike in the lead Pb content, as a by-product of silver smelting, that peaked in the 2ndC and died away to nothing for the next 16 centuries until industrial pollution really cranked up in the late 1700s.

I could go on, but it's all spoilers, and you'll want to get the book out of the library when I return it. 

Report from Spring

blob lady bird lane lump buds blue fire

We're past the Equinox & Bealtaine & Liberation Day NL, and no late frost, so Spring must be sprong. As evidence I found the first ladybird Coccinella septempunctata this year (&/or several years) on mint Mentha spicata. And across the lane, blossoms on the damson tree [sorry about focus fail]. Having missed a late frost I have high hopes of damson Prunus domestica (jam) later.

Just uphill from the damson is a beleaguered apple tree Malus; much festooned in brambles, but that too is chock full o' blossom. And opposite the gate the lilac Syringa vulgaris is running a little behind the apple sporting only buds not blossoms . . . as yet. 

So much for fecundity! There has also been damage. I was making a last sweep outdoors as darkness fell on 29 Apr 26 when I spotted blue flashing light in the valley at The Cross 500m SE. I wondered and wandered through the fields a-piece to see who had been side-swiped at the junction. 
Answer: nobody. 
It was just a fire-truck and a tender and a few fire-fighters sitting and pacing, as if waiting for an emergency. It never occurred to me to look over my shoulder, and went to bed. I was just settling when our neighbour-across txtd me "Is the fire close to your house?". Clearly not close enough to have me throwing passports into a go-bag. A week later I was doing my annual Spring-scythe down the lane, so that the Blackstairs Walkers (due next Sat) might believe we cared about their free-passage. I tugged an eye-level swooping fern and tumbled a rock off the top of ditch. Lesson: Never play football with something larger than a football!

Tuesday, three days after 'our' fire made the National news, I walked up the hill to see, from the scorch-marks, how close to your house the fire had been. And, as important, whether it had eaten into 'our' common, thereby docking us all of our EU-subsidy for maintaining a fire-free special upland habitat.

It looks like one of the fires (there were several last week, locally) swept up from Wexford to have nip at the NE corner of our common [boundaries of whc in green]. The Government satellite will scope the details but it's looking like less than 2% of the 200 hectares comprising the common. Blazing heather is a Bad Idea: bad for ground-nesting birds, bad for heather, bad for beetles, bad for the soil microbiome, bad for micro-nutrients, and hill walkers get soot all over their spats. We took it in the neck last year. and in 2022. Please STOP.

Phoenix morning

Last month, I went up to Dublin for an evening symposium on The Idea of a University. It was interesting and informative; but 'ard work trying to take notes like a student. I was relieved to get away because I had a date to spend the night with m'daughters who are bunking together in Dublin 7. Bonus was going for yomp in Phoenix Park with Dau.II in the morning. We caught a bus [free travel for self & companion!] to the distant Ashtown gate and walked back. She is getting to treat The Park as her back-garden / personal gym. Most visits, she will detour to wave at her neighbour Catherine Connolly's house Áras. Like me with Condé na Déise, she is surprised [and quietly delighted] at how empty-of-people such a bountifully interesting area can be. It is 700 hectares in extent, which is a lot bigger than the back-yard of Louis Agassiz but you could still take a life-time of walks there and still be surprised by joy at some peculiar bosky dell or obscure monument: like the tree [R] beside which, on 19Sep15, John McHugh had a myocardial infarction and died coming to the end of a half-marathon and his 24th year. Tough chips, mate, but at least you got to get out to run like the wind while your knees were still up for it. Clearly his friends and relations, and random runners, continue to bide-a-wee and leave a bouquet, or a medal, or a mumbled prayer.

Apart from the Áras, The Park is notable for its several herds of European fallow deer Dama dama, which were introduced 350ish years ago and help keep the grass down. They do an even better job keeping the trees down, so new plantings must be caged in browse-proof fencing tubes until they are big enough and barky enough to take a nibble and survive. Poor deer inevitably run up a bill with ticks Ixodes ricinus but the OPW stoutly maintains that their ticks are not vectors of Lyme Disease Borrelia burgdorferi. Nevertheless it looks like the deer are in a mutualistic relationship with crows Corvus spp.w.r.t. ticks and we saw a tuthree birds pecking about on some cudding deer:

The photo is crap because me . . . we kept, as requested, 50m distant from the poor beasts. Definitely don't want to precipitate a Fenton FENton FENTON event and live in shame forever. FYI, the deer all have year colour-coded ear-tags, so they can be identified when it comes to the annual cull. Yes, about 90 = 15% of the herd is killed and sold for venison each year.

Another less obvious asset in the park is a little but annually increasing grove of oak trees Quercus robur to commemorate the Tidy Towns scheme. A new tree is planted on the regular next to a rather ugly little grave stone recording which community had the best window-boxes, and the most frightening Gauleiter of Litter, that year. It's been running for more than 50 years and the grove is expanding Southwards away from the main road.

Just a perfick morning. Would repeat.

Fib, memory

„Das habe ich getan“ sagt mein Gedächtnis. 
„Das kann ich nicht getan haben“ — sagt mein Stolz und bleibt unerbittlich. 
Endlich — gibt das Gedächtnis nach. Nietzsche (↓)

Dau.I the Librarian, is retro-actively pursuing a B.Sc. in Psych & Soc, after her MLIS. She has been interested in the formal academics of Psychology since she was a teen, so deserves to get a scrap of paper from yet more study of the subject. We-the-family get to hack at her project reports and submissions - thereby learning something new while polishing our crap-detectors. The family that strives together, thrives together? She recently lent me a copy of  The Rag and Bone Shop: How We Make Memories and Memories Make Us (2021) by Veronica O'Keane, who is now Prof of Psychiatry at Trinity College Dublin. This is on message for me because I've been interested in Memory . . . since before the birth of the Blob. The post-title is a riff on Nabakov's autobiographical memoir Speak, Memory [Bloboprev].

Prof O'Keane has lived in exciting times since she was reading psychiatry as a student 40 years ago. Back then, with a straight face, experts would explain Freud's peculiar obsessions with penises and little girls  and how talking might help people get over their madness. Since then tech has delivered much better molecular and cellular mechanisms for when the mind-trolley leaves the tracks of what society allows as normal. And anti-psychotic anti-depressive meds can give a life-changing fix to the unhappy for far less investment than hours, days, years of psycho-therapy. Yes, MegaPharm share-holders win big-time;  yes, there can be egregious side-effects; yes, we are over medicalising normal variation . . . but for hundreds of people in Ireland today medication allows them to get up in the morning and go to work and have a bit of craic, at the water-cooler and the week-end. 

The kind of neurological detail which is now available is that individual neurons in the right hippocampus will fire as a rat-on-a-grid pass a particular location. But that the next neuron to fire (as the next external location is crossed) is identifiable but not adjacent to the first. This is in contrast to Penfield's homunculus where the [sensory or motor] toe neuron is connected to the foot neuron etc. albeit on the scale of slabs of neurons rather than individual neurons. That's the modern nanotech break-through: scientists can monitor the inside of a single living cell.

O'Keane quotes Henri Bergson as believing intuition is based on memory . . . as it must be. Intuitions are the result of  experience and learning even if we might not have consciously been aware of the lesson. it is no surprise therefore that Elders are better at guessing than their children and youngsters. Life experience clocks up facts, inventories successful outcomes and learns from mistakes. Younger people haven't been around long enough to build up their have-a-punt database. Age must be the basis of my success at table-quizzes.

The chapter on false memory and how it arises is particularly on topic for me, because I've been called to jury service in May. I shall be super-skeptical about eye-witness testimony, no matter how tall the stack of bibles upon which it is sworn. Elizabeth Loftus, the grand vizier of the field, is cited. Memory is dynamic: every time we recall something it's like taking a china soup-tureen out of the kitchen. By the time we've finished showing it to the vicar, the matching ladle has fallen to the ground and been replaced with fire-tongs; the soup has been swapped with tea; and it's been chipped by brisk contact with the marble counter-top.

This book is not without its quirks and peculiarities [too much bigging up TCD for some?] but is a brave attempt to lay out the science and mechanisms of memory in terms that won't baffle Joe and Josie Poblacht.

↪“That’s what I did,” says my memory. “I couldn’t have done that,” says my pride, and remains adamant. Finally, memory yields. Nietzsche Beyond Good and Evil.

I found me Da

The Census has been controversial since Mary and Joseph were required to register, in  person, at his Home Place in Bethlehem so that they could be enumerated by the Roman Imperium. 
Q. Why bother to do such head-counts?
A. Because numbers are essential for effective planning, and fair taxation.
Further controversy: on 30 June 1922 the early census records for Ireland went up in flames when the Four Courts, and the Public Records Office, were blown up during the Civil War [smoking ruin R]. But The Man had, for reasons of economy and archival ignorance, already dumped the original records for 1861-1891. So the earliest enumeration sheets for Ireland are for 1901 and 1911.  These records are searchable on-line, if you desire to find out who lived in your house or your home-place all those years ago. You can also get as nosy as you want about any other place which existed and was inhabited at that time. There was no census in 1921 b/c War of Independence. 

The Blob had a look at who was living in the Home Place in King's County in 1901 & 1911. In 1901, four sisters (aged Gwen 27, Lily 25, Alys 22, Myrtle 17) are living there with Lily's 1y.o. child. The three boys are all away from home having hi-jinks and adventures in the Boer War. By 1911, the oldest son has married, returned to his patrimony, and cuckoo-like ejected all his siblings . . . replacing them with - ahem -servants. There were a bunch of servants in the Big House in 1901 also. But it's pretty close exchange: 1 sister for 1 servant

My father was born in London in 1917 but returned to Ireland when his father was appointed Harbourmaster of Dunmore East in 1922.

The first census of the inhabitants of Saorstad Éireann, the barely solvent The Irish Free State, was rolled out on 18th April 1926 and, exactly 100 years later, these also became freely searchable. And there's The Da, aged 8½ asleep in his bed on the quayside in Dunmore. It's kinda sweet given that he was then younger than Gdau.II is now. There's also a 25 y.o. general domestic servant in that Tiny House - possibly sleeping upright in a kitchen press like a 21stC filipino maid in an Oligarch's flat in Central London.

Where's the rest of the family in 1926? 

• Gwen has married a solicitor called Alured and is living in Abbeleix. Confusingly, Alured is "two els" Allured  in 1911 and still living at home despite being qualified and 33 years old. 
• Lily has left the country with her daughter. She dumped the child's father at about that time and married Big Coal from NE England - or maybe didn't marry him? That was never clear when we got to know the couple in the 1960s.  The 'child' Periwinkle was 26 and making her mark as a golfer, dancer and avant-gardiste before she settled down after WWII in Glengarriff
• 
  Alys became Alice between 1901 and 1926 was married and widowed and is living on the shores of Lough Derg. My father's first cousin Posy was entered on that census form but scratched out by the enumerator [R]. I'm guessing that's because she was somewhere else on the night of 18-19 Apr 1926 - perhaps visiting her Aunt lily in England?
• Myrtle [married, war-widowed] was a Visitor in a Big House (many servants) in Co Meath.
• Hardress is still Patriarching in the Home Place; he married Big Sheep from Australia which allowed him to continue living in the servant-supported style to which he'd been accustomed. His Wife is Adoline in 1911 but [correctly] Adeline in 1926
• Evan has, hilariously and ironically, been transcribed as Ivan and married with two children 1F1M, 'only' two servants. His sister-in-law is visiting that Sunday in April. 

That sibship of seven, despite being "shy breeders" have many living descendants. 

• F1 = all dead now mostly in the fullness of their years: health prognosis good for me.
• F2 = 7 including me
• F3 = 18 incl. The Boy, Dau.I and Dau.II
• F4 = 6 incl Gdau.I and Gdau.II

But the family is finally 'daughtering out' as girls but not boys get born. Unless my brother's 30-something son pulls a chap out of the bag next time - a daughter was born to that line before Christmas 2025 - it's all up with the family surname.  No Lloss. 

Agora U

The Provost, Fellows, Foundation Scholars and the other members of Board of The College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity of Queen Elizabeth near Dublin aka TCD, like other Institutions across the world, is should be having an existential crisis in response to "AI". But Institutions have the inertia of a super-tanker: they keep going in the same direction because change is just . so . hard for the [old embedded complacent] people who hold {power | purse | policy }in their hands. In my section of social media [<coff> Metafilter] you have to be super-tippitoes if you want to advocate positively for AI. At least partly, this is because "AI" is not one thing, but a range of tools created by a range of actors, only some of which are The Axis of Evil. But what do I know? AI has tsunamied over me (and you) so quickly, so recently, that I am reduced to slogans with as much discrimination [both senses] as "Four legs good, two legs bad".

In 2018, the Fellows of TCD elected immunologist Cliona O'Farrelly [my old boss] as first female Chair of Fellows. In 2021, they voted for Linda Doyle, an engineer, as the first female Provost in 400+ years. On 22Apr26, as part of her exit strategy, the outgoing Chair of Fellows organised a symposium of Two households Six pundits, both all alike in dignity, In fair Verona Dublin, where we lay our scene on "AI and the Idea of a University". I booked in because it seemed like a good opportunity for Me to find out how to spell AI and learn what my Alma Mater was going to do about it: not least because the first speaker, after the Chair, was The Provost.  

Prizes:

• Most obscure cited reference John Kelleher for Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (1979) by  Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar. 
• Also for best $10-word: semiotics - see Umberto Eco 
• Best timekeeper (by far) Camilla Persello, Secr of Scholars, also by far the youngest panelist 
• The Whitehead Prize for talking waaaay over the allotted time?  redacted .
• Fewest on-message bullet-points (3) The Provost:
• Are we good enough? - the antidote to smugness
• Dreadnought AI - it's here & not going away: engage challenge resist
• Truth is grey not black&white
• Most embedded in certainties (and not in a good way, although my bloboprev guts are with him generally) Fintan O'Toole
• Also for mentioning Tim "The are no Short-cuts" Robinson whom RIP
• Most empathic speaker Jennifer Edmond - wish I'd been a student of hers.
• Shortest on-message comment from the Floor Ken Mealy
• Most valiant effort (largely successful) to rein in his tendency to ramble: Ian Robertson [whom bloboprev]. 

Exec Summ [filtered through my jaundiced eye]: 
[I was far better at taking notes in 1976: in 2026 I found that an idea I was in the process of capturing on paper was slipping beyond my ken because the next idea was demanding my attention. Sorry if I've missed something important in the discourse. Doubtless within a few days I will be inventing whole paragraphs]  
In my day [1973-77], teaching at Trinity was very heavy on the Medieval model: The Professor / expert stands by a chalk-board and imparts his [almost always His] accumulated experience; know-nothing students write down the content with a pen, in a book. Weeks or months later, Prof sets and exam to see how well students have retained his imparted knowledge. Students with the most legible notes and most retentive memory are rewarded with high grades. The highest graded students become professors in their turn. Nobody taught us Pittman's short-hand

At the AI-fest, Camilla Persillo pointed out that group learning, where students bat ideas around together without faculty in the room, can be the most exciting and productive learning experiences during college days: it's the synergy innit. Several of the other contributors, incl Ken Mealy, made the point that Content is So Yesterday; nobody now needs to take notes to recall Scads of Stuff when they can look it up in two tics on their device. The trick is a) to remember how to question the source b) have a well-polished crap-detector to critically evaluate the 'answer'. If the curriculum and the exams require memorizing Avogadro's, Bernouilli's, Charles', Dalton's, Euler's, Faraday's . . . Laws then there is no time left to teach ascertainment bias, availability error, anchoring bias, authority deference and other cognitive fails.

But whoa! Only some 21stC students have the time for group study with peers. It's fine if you are a Foundation Scholar with free food and rooms in College, or if you live at home a short jog from the city centre because your family's generational wealth is a lovely red-brick in Rathmines. Not so much if your commute is 90+ minutes to Outer Boondocks and/or you have to slave in the local Spar convenience store several evenings a week to make rent and/or care for your beloved but demented Grandpa. Inequality [of resources and opportunity] is a systemic failing of our FF/FG society regardless of AI. But AI provides an option for the dispossessed to help them knock-off assignments which they have no time to address in a medieval collegiate manner. 

Another much worked point was the desirability of being uncomfortable with your data or ideas. The phrase used is meaningful friction . . . and b'god it involves Effort. Prof Robertson asserted that the cognitive work of [trad] learning increased myelination and connectivity of nerves in the same way as weight-training or running increased the # mitochondria in muscle cells. [Protestant?] work makes you fitter and cleverer. Using AI for cognitive-offloading, let alone cognitive-surrender is a disaster for your education: over-use of AI might make you stupider after college than before. Prof Edmond's experience is that the smarter students work effectively with AI to produce even better deliverables . . . but the weaker [tired, poor, huddled] kids turn in shoddy because they don't have the spoons to discriminate own-self-okay from superficially convincing AI-slop.

All agreed [everyone present being invested in The Idea of the University!] that Agora University was first-and-foremost the collective intellectual interactions of the people [provost, fellows, junior faculty, scholars, students, that janitor who nailed calculus problems] present on Campus. It was also recognised that (in addition to reviews, recordings, re-thinkings; patents, papers, plays; dissertations, discoveries and degrees) the deliverable is Citizens. The more engaged, ethical, thoughtful, kind, inclusive, resilient, the Better. 

[[Personal sidebar: I was entirely off-with-fairies during my last two years studenting at TCD. The most exciting thing that happened to Evolutionary Biology in the 1970s was Sociobiology and the genetic basis of altruism. I spent several days out in the library of The Other University because they had the academic journals in which this material was published. I read, and wrote a long-form review of, EO Wilson's 1975 book Sociobiology. I've written about my off-piste investigation of inbreeding and fertility in the Habsburgs. I was stoked! But I was also failed! when it came to the exams. With different teaching methods and more me-adjacent learning opportunities I coulda been a contender for the next professorial vacancy.]]

Potlatch

Last week, I confessed to failing to finish a couple of books. Since giving up YouTube in January, I have a lot more time for reading books. But sometimes just sitting is better than sitting and reading something unfulfilling. As the days get longer, I will read less and get out more - although with earbbooks multitasking me asks ¿Por qué no los dos? When the family came home this Easter, Dau.II was uncharacteristically nose deep in a book The Heart-Shaped Tin: Love, Loss and Kitchen Objects (2025),by Bee Wilson a foodie confessional ramble which nods at Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia (2006) by Elizabeth Gilbert. Dau.II was reading it because foodie. I finished reading it because stuff.

So much stuff!  in Bee's kitchen, her friends' kitchens, our kitchen. We've come a long way since Cooking in a Bedsitter when our entire batterie de cuisine fit easily in a single orange crate. Now there is so much rarely used kit that, when company comes, pots need a good un-dust & up-scrub before use. Which is kinda shameful when far too many people subsist on a batterie de cuisine not much more than the possessions of a hunter-gatherer in the Kalahari. 

But the accumulation of stuff is not entirely my fault: people will give us things & only occasionally for pure generosity of heart. When The Management at The Institute decided to mark my retirement with gifts, they made sure to engrave my name and The Institute's to indicate the continuity of my indenture. Six months later they doubled-down with another gift and I doubled-doown on my rant. You don't need to read that again here. In other cultures - Japan and the Pacific NorthWest - gifting has to be reciprocal. If the return gift is more valuable, the exchanges can result in damaging loss as a runaway spiral ensues.

Valuable? Stuff, gifts and sentiment offer a neat alternative dimension of value. One of my two favorite everyday mugs is 20+ years in my cupboard or, as rarely washed, on the table. It [L] was given me by a caminante when we got together to compare notes on the process of pilgrimage. My other favorite mug was a £1.99 gift to me by me from Tenby near Pembroke Ferryport signalling that my family originally came from Wales. I don't think we are housing stuff because it was gifted to us and passing it on (to Oxfam) seems wrong or disrespectful. But we have enough clutter material household goods that it is sometimes hard to find a rarely used but then useful bit of kit - the Spong mincer for marmalade for example,

But enough of me! You can't borrow me from the library, but you can put a reserve on Bee Wilson's ruminations and insights into the baggage that adheres to kitchen kit. Who knew that her sister is Emily "Iliad" Wilson [whom bloboprev] and their father is A.N.Wilson, the British public intellectual and their mother Katherine "Shagsper sonnets" Duncan-Jones? Small wonder that both girls ended up as [Arts Block] researchers and writers.

Sheepset

Yesterday, St Mark's Day, Dia do Revolução dos Cravos, 25 April, I was up betimes bustling from kitchen to sofa assembling the cast for First Pot of Tea when something Other caught the corner of my eye through the window. "Aurora" my scrabbling snap-mind delivered: we will try to make sense of the untoward. But I paused my bustle and went outside to ◎◎ it was a (murky) rainbow:

Oh-ho, I said, there is a pot of gold Up Sturra, we must look more carefully next time . . . and IF that rainbow is centred SE THEN the sun must be NW. And, out the kitchen window, it was:

That was 06:00hrs. 14½ hours later, 20:30 I was fossicking around giving a wrap to the day: battening hatches, counting sheep, watering the beans (very sad altogether so far this year) when I snapped this

Don't angst if you can't count 16 sheep, I did and N = 16 [✓] but I cropped the picture of some Ginnie-no-pals ewes off camera to right. Like the junior army officers in Lisbon 52 years ago, y'have to Carpe Diem.  We'll be a long time dead. Once more with jigsaw.

Gawping the peleton

In 2019, I [was] volunteered to marshal a local cycle rally.  I stood a road-junction a mile from home and separated the hard-chaws [110km and 140km] from the realistic recreational cyclists [50km and 80km]. I made my own sign, so that the choice was clear if I fainted dead away at the shock of seeing so many knotted calves and far too much lycra.  It started as a community solidarity initiative to raise a bit of money in memory of two young brothers who died in tragic circumstances in 2013.  The next 3 years' events were scrubbed because of CoViD and I was unavoidably elsewhere when thinks cranked up again in 2023.  But in 2024 and again in 2025, I was Colonel of the Cross where the L3001 leaves the R702 'main' road; and the shorter races turn for home.

It was ideal cycling weather: grass frost at dawn then cloudy with sunny intervals. Cycling is miserable if either a) it rains a lot b) the sun raises the temperature so that you feel the sweat - and therefore need hydration and therefore need pee-stops. What is ideal cool and breezy for aerobic exercise can be uncomfortably chilly if you're just standing around. But I didn't need my jacket or my water-bottle in the event. I was happy out, with a couple of podcasts on my device to while away the intervals between bikes. 

I've always tried to be the infra-structure guy: making it possible for others to do wonderful things. I left the house to walk to my station at 09:55 and got home at 13:10: just in time to make me a cheese-toastie for lunch before I got all hangry and out of sorts.

Oh, and I heard the first cuckoo Cuculus canorus in the valley this year.  That was a pretty good day.

In the wrong place

The family were downhome over Easter and Dau.II took a proprietorial walk through the fields. She reported that the top corner of one of those fields was carpetted with a particular sort of dicot sprout with 2 elongated seed-leaves and a robust reddish stalk. WTF? she enquired. I investigated and admitted that I'd never noted such a phenomenon before. But I formed a hypothesis that the pair of sycamores Acer pseudoplatanus in the ditch just to the South must have had a mighty year for seed set, as had several sweet chestnuts Castanea sativa down in the adjacent woodland. And sho'nuff Dr Google confirmed that sycamore seedlings looked just like that.

That was all a nothing-burger until Dr Google threw up "sycamore seedling poisonous to horses" on the off-chance that was what I was really after. Equine atypical myopathy, aka atypical myoglobinuria when myoglobin is detected in the urine because muscle tissue is disintegrating. But you'd only [call in the vet to] look if your previously happy horse is stiff, reluctant to move, collapsed. Regardless of treatment, it is typical that 75% of affected horses will be dead with 2-3 days. The proximate cause is a toxin called Hypoglycin A HGA.

It is a known thing that horses have a rough-and-ready digestive system: shovelling its outcome is what gives teenage stable-hands such prodigious upper-body strength. Sheep are ruminants and their dietary carbs get a double hammering mediated by a sophisticated gut-flora. Nobody is flagging HGA toxicity for ruminants, so I suppose that some guild of their microbiome is digesting Hypoglycin A HGA before it is absorbed through the gut wall to start to digest the muscle-mass. No quarter given in evolution. [note added in press: the sheep were moved from the traditional hay-meadow to the sycamore-rich field 3 days ago, and nobody's died yet]

But, as I say, I've never seen so many sycamore sprouts and who knows of what digestive heroics our mixed bag of sheep are capable. The family had buggered off to the Gaeltacht within hours of alerting me to the sycamore nursery; I R retire; I finished my book; I chopped wood and hauled water; . . . dum de dum . . .; I went across the lane to pluck sycamore as prophylaxis against an unlikely but devastating event. At 71¾, I am no longer limber as a 7 y.o., so I can't pluck at a sustainable rate for a working day. The weather  was Irish-changeable sunny with showers and my shop-steward won't allow me to get rained on while bent double. After a few sessions over three days, I had a bucketful of sycamores untimely ripped from mother earth. How many?

Well mates, I wasn't not going to count them as I went but I did weigh the whole harvest on our kitchen scales = 25oz = 700g. And I did count off a random selection of single plants until they tipped ½oz = 15g that was N = 30. My math indicates that I have killed [25 x 2 x 30 =] 1,500 potential trees in a natural selection exercise. How potential? When Sean the Forester was thinning our little woodland in 2022, we discovered a substantial sycamore in the NE corner of the plot. That's about 75m due West [and thus downwind] of the two fecund sycamores mentioned above. In 2008 that corner of the plot was still pasture, so in 18 years one seedling similar to my Easter-holocaust now has a girth of 85cm or ⌀ = 27cm at chest height. The height of the tree can be estimated by measuring a) a distance from the foot and b) the angle from there to the top of the tree and looking up a table of Tan= opposite/adjacent. In this case ~12m tall. That a much better place for a sycamore tree than shedding seed into pasture.

In the wrong place? I did eventually agree to go off-site for a tuthree days with  the family when they touched base briefly after Connemara. But on the morning of departure, our RCD [residual current detector] tripped OFF  twice! again. There was no way I was going away for two days if the 'lectric was going to fail the deep-freeze: & for me to return to a puddle of rotting food.  They went off, and I did some diagnostics, and the RCD behaved itself for 24 hours. [I think it's the extension that runs to the polytunnel - but it requires some positive testing of this hypothesis when there is only me at home]. Anyway, I did agree to go South-for-beaches the following day. But while way, I twigged >!Shazzam!< that an unintended consequence of having the Fronius app to monitor the solar array, is that I can remotely check to see if our router/modem at home is still powered up. And if so, assume that freezers and dehumidifiers are also working.  Here's a re-assuring snap-shot of an overcast day at home from 80km away.

 

maggie and milly and molly and may

 . . . went down to the beach(to play one day) [ee] 
[premature posting error on Friday! here released on schedule with added value].

may couldn't lift a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone. 
Which is just as well because it [L]was an interstellar messenger from the Planet Zorg cooling off in a rock-pool at Benvoy along Costa na Déise. I mentioned that my family left me alone with my weighty blanket after Easter and headed W to The Coral Strand = Trá an Dóilín in the Connemara Gaeltacht. I can just about handle having six extra [beloved] bodies in my own house . . . disappearing my charging cables tidying things up. But wrenching myself off a familiar sofa and, in a foreign environment, fighting over the breakfast cereal with m'fam? That was a too much for my agéd frame. Not to mention making a boarding-house queue with my fellow guests for access to the bathroom. At home, rain-or-shine, day-or-night, there is always the compost heap. So they went off and I stayed home and everyone was happy.

But they came back to the Sunny South East less than a week later and continued their live-like-there-is-no-tomo fun along the Waterford Coast. There is free-will, but in a sense they rolled their Ould Fella up in a bit of carpet, strapped him to the roof of the car and took him to Tramore. 

The timing was ungood because, a week before Waterford has been named the top destination in Ireland by Condé Nast Traveller, in a list of the must-see places to visit in Ireland. In particular they cite Trá na mBo so it will be even less of a Secret Beach than it has been since they added steps down the cliff and signage to get more footfall. I couldn't go: I was all tied up [nnggg nnnGG] with building works: being required to hold one end of a piece of timber and pass nails and screws to The Boy. But Dau.I took her niblings to Trá na mBo [you may call it cow-strand, if you live in England]. Together they made the rite of passage [woooooo] up the rocks and through the hole in the cliff to The Secret Secret Beach beyond. Which is important because Gdau.II is ten years old now - almost too old for Secrets.

I'm glad they didn't ask me for an opinion; because several years ago, I stopped making that micro-journey when it was clear that several tons of roof had collapsed since I last went to visit. But nobody died [Phew!] last week and they disturbed a seal, Phoca vitulina probably, who had hauled out at high tide. Seal probably thought "Fakkin' Condé Nast, I've been sunning myself here, minding my own business, for years - and now it's ruined by human yahoos".

One of the new additions at the car-park nearest to Trá na mBo is a box made of pallets and painted pink&blue with a scrap of fishing net atop to slow down the gulls. It says [in a rather spare, enigmatic ee cummings way - appropriate to a beach where one may encounter poets who are fluent in Spanish - and if you don't meet a poet you'll have to spout forth something yourself - do not mumble, the seals defo don't like mumblers.]

Tidy Towns
Beach Box
Swap & Share
Lost & Found 

Wedgies

Old Ray, the batchelor farmer who lived all his adult life in our home before we blew into the valley, got a little weak on maintenance in his latter years. The gutters got carried away in a storm and not replaced. When the house was built in 1941, the 'parlour' was constructed with a suspended ventilated timber floor. But in one corner water had penetrated the wall and rotted out a section of the floor-boards. We could see the join between original 1941 boards and the replacement. And some of the replacement floor-boards had themselves been assaulted by water and rotted in their turn. Sod that we decided and a) ordered new gutters chutes and down-spouts b) ripped out the timber floor brought the sub-floor to grade with rubble c) installed under-floor heating pipes throughout the ground floor and d) covered that with s sand-and-cement screed.

But the parlour floor undulated like drumlin country which was obvs unsuitable for our desired final finish in cork tiles for toddler comfort. I decided to fix this myself and bought a bag of levelling compound. How difficult could it be to follow directions on the packet and move things forw over the weekend while the contractor's team was home resting? A: quite difficult for an absolute beginner. The following week, the contractor's plasterer came with another bag of levelling compound, ignored the printed directions and made a much runnier solution which more or less spread itself. Hats off to experts!

But one corner of the floor was still a few mm out of true which only mattered when we wanted our handy light-weight Ikea 600x600 'coffee' table in that corner. Unless the legs were turned and positioned just-so, you could be guaranteed to spill your tea. For several years we solved this problem with a mop. Then Dau.II left home to live in Cork. One time we were visiting and Dau.II asked me to make a wedge for the bathroom door whose default position was closed. This was clearly not for the best, because the bathroom was entirely internal [no windows] and needed air-circulation against the damp. By providence, there was a builder's dumpster on the quay opposite their appt; & I'd given her a householder's tool-kit when she left home. I seized the feeble little saw from the tool-kit and sawed a suitable wedge off a bit of scrap timber in the dumpster. A few weeks later, Dau.II called to say "More wedges are needed!". Her pals from the HomEd house-share had been to visit and seen the utility of wedges to hold doors open.

I don't know how long it took me to make the connexion, but eventually I mobilized a Generalized Theory of Wedges GTW and cut a half-sized wedge to stop the Ikea coffee-table from canting about like a ship at sea. One residual problem was that a small beige wooden wedge was often hidden in plain sight against a beige cork floor. My solution was to paint stripes on one side of the table-wedge and write WEDGE on the other [as L at top]. 

We had a family full-house over Easter but when they left for 5 days in the Gaeltacht, I could not find the wedge. Two days later, I found it . . . in the kindling. But not before I addressed a supply-chain bottle-neck and made three more. I like the Dennis the Wedgace livery and am thinking, why not make a wedge-a-day set? as a wedge-hedge against uncertain memory - if it's Dennis it must be Tuesday etc. And hands up who knew that the Irish for TheWedge is AnDing?

It's okay to stop

I plugged away at Independent People all 225,000 words of it, but not because there was anything attractive about the central patriarch. Perhaps it was insights about the transition from poverty and backwardness to prosperity during a boom. Or a sense of gratitude that, compared to Iceland, our our climate in Ireland is so much more benign for sheep. But I doubt I'll switch to reading fiction for edutainment anytime soon. 

Evidence for this is that I have quietly put aside two novels recently with the thought that sitting on the sofa gazing at the ceiling might be a better use of my remaining days than reading something that fails to nourish. 

 Having enjoyed Sean Bean as Sharpe adventures on YouTube, not least the Over the hills and far away  theme tune, I decided to give Bernard Cornwell's books a try. It seemed sensible to start at the chronological beginning rather than in publication order. That has two advantages 1) Cornwell had presumably found his beat by the 15th book he wrote b) there is no back-story to be revealed. So Sharpe's Tiger (1997) it was: set in and around the Siege of Seringapatam in 1799 India [Commem Medal L]. The series appears to be available as ear-books on Borrowbox. The storyline of the whole series is the growth and development of a young tearaway who takes the King's shilling and rises to greatness through a series of daring [and improbable] adventures. The message is that, despite a rigid class system 200+ years ago, smart and courageous people could win through. There is a pantomime villain and some dopey, venal, lazy officer-toffs who can be manipulated to do Sharpe down. But we know that Sharpe survives [because 25 books about his later life], so his recurrent jeopardy just gets to feel manipulative set-pieces to spin each tale out to 350 pages. I balked at the casual killing off of another "nice guy" by the villain about 40% through and returned the book to the library for someone else to enjoy.

I'm in general more of a fan for things Portuguese than things Icelandic, so when I was informed that António Lobo Antunes had died, I opened the library catalogue to see if any of his books were available in Ireland. There were! An English translation of his Explicação dos Pássaros (1981) was on the shelf in Carraroe, Co Galway. I got 30 pages in before "The distinction between fact and fiction, between past, present and future, blur in Antunes brilliant narration" [Publishers Weekly] left me only confused, rather than inspired or interested. Pity because the book is set in the era of Portugal's Carnation Revolution in which I have an abiding interest. Rather cool was that the family-except-me had 5 days Carraroe just after Easter and were able to return the book to its home library much quicker than it shuffling about the country in a plastic box. Of course Dau.I the Librarian made it a busman's holiday and dropped in to talk Dewey Decimal cataloging and backed-up toilets with the Galway librarians.

It's okay to throw some back in the water. There are thousands of new [non-fiction] books published each year. Not to mention enough back-catalogue on library shelves to last a life time; or at east waht's left of mine.

Family Yomp to Black Church

Don't Label! Everyone is on their own journey, getting surprised by joy and finding out what matters. After me, the least sporty person in the family is was Dau.II. Then she moved to Dublin and took up walking; getting to see the city step by step at 4km/hr. Last Spring, when I was in training for our GR65 walk into the French interior, she came home for the weekend and came up the hill to keep me company . . . and then insisted we carry on another 1000m Along and 150m ↑↑↑Up to Stoolyen, the S facing shoulder of Mt Leinster.  Later that Summer, when all 3 generations of the family were back together, Dau.II set her sights on Sturra: a 3km hike requiring 500m of elevation. It would be churlish to let her go alone, so The Boy and The Patriarch went with. So glad I went! 

MetÉireann has gotten really good about predicting the weather. Just, maybe, a slight tendency to big up incomming storms with yellow and orange warnings, which turn out to be mere asthmatic wheezes. Therefore, when The Clan gathered home on Good Friday 2026, we had a choice of Sa Su Mo to launch up a hill together. Easter Sunday dawned sunny-but-windy in the aftermath of "Storm Dave" breezed through the day before.  Pilot Dau.II decided that we would walk to "The Black Church", a turf-cutters lodge at the Moats of Craan, along an Easterly spur of MtLeinster. It's near the beginning of the annual Blackstairs Challenge. 

Accordingly, after brunch a 3 generation party aged 10 to 70, departed for a 5 hour, 9 mile, 1700ft elevation circular yomp up the hill behind the house. It's all too easy to slip into a choco-coma on Easter Sunday afternoon, but Dau.II will walk and will dragoon accept company.  Gdau.II, with the shortest legs, was given a bailout option when we briefly touched the [Wexford] county road but stoutly turned it down and pegged along after her older rellies. We encountered a farming couple taking the tea-time air along that road and they asked "Where did you leave your car?" to which we chorused "We have no car, we walked from Home" and explained where Home was. I think they were impressed [maybe only by 10y.o. Dau.II?] because farmers tend to go by quad-bike nowadays. When we got back we sat down to an Easter dinner that couldn't be beat centering on paschal lamb and [most important] roast potatoes. Vegetarian options available.

Eeee it were great, a perfick day! The weather gave us the merest shake of sleety snow and only for a few minutes, otherwise sunny, breezy with scudding clouds. X marks the destination as seen from near the summit of Mt Leinster: