Right from Wrong

 I started my first academic job in October 1983 = a long time ago. As with other work, I was usually at my desk some time before 0900hrs. This gave me time to chat to Eileen the woman who cleaned the rooms on my corridor. Over the next couple of years we got to be good friends although I also got to know rather too much about her circumstances and family. Her son Stephen was working as a lorry-driver and happy-out to set his own times and make good money. By Eileen's account, he had been precociously brilliant in primary school particularly with maths but he was also a handful: always jigging around in class and being mildly, sometimes charmingly, disruptive. Years later, Stephen and Eileen were watching a TV documentary about the epidemiological connexion between ADHD and tartrazine = E120 = Yellow 5b. "Blimey Mum, that was me!?!" If there'd been less Fanta in the fridge he might have gone to college like me and be driving a particle accelerator not a truck. The stars had to align for a working class kid to get a BSc; but those were the days when third level education was effectively free to users.

Jacob Dunne grew up on an estate in Nottingham with even fewer advantages than Stephen. We met him a month ago talking about Prison Reform, Masculinity, Restorative Justice . . . and killing a random chap with an unlucky punch. After that interview, I reserved his book Right From Wrong (2021) in the library and read all 200+ pages on Twelfth Night. The advantages of being retired include being able to spend a Monday on the sofa reading a book pausing only to get more logs for the fire and tea for concentration.

I dithered about starting the book for a couple of weeks because a) I had other library books to read b) I had the 1 hr exec summary of his life story already c) there's only so much gritty Northern working class grind a chap can handle. But once I started, it was hard to put it down. Despite many failings on the copy editor front: p.3 "Widford has a more gentile, village feel . . ." p.63 "that wasn't not the case". And some tired repetitive phrasing: rumours / news always spreads like wildfire and on the weekends everyone lets their hair down. 

As a child in primary school Jacob was bright and engaged when he chose to be. But, like Stephen, he was easily bored by school and tended to be distracted and drifty. Things plunged into the abyss academically in secondary school but got exciting, and not in a good way, out on the streets: drink, bare-knuckle fights, vandalism, theft, dealing. 

Remarkably, after jail, with help from the probation service and social services and some lucky breaks with the media, he restarted secondary schooling ten years late. He is smart and articulate, so aced exams and was sponsored to University by The Longford Trust; getting a 1st class honours degrees in . . . Criminology. Twelve years on from prison, he's elbowed a rung on the property ladder, and married with two kids. He's learned from his journey and is determined to give back to the community with raised (and failed) him. Talking a capella to schools, TEDx, prisoners, prison officers, the telly: initially pro bono, latterly for money like all the other experts / pundits / grifters [pick whatever suits your prejudice] on the circuit. 

One of his points is that education and training is largely irrelevant to the skills needed to thrive in life and in the workplace. A bit like me being ace at The Calculus in school and college but never using those tools at any time during 40 years as a professional scientist! You can get a permanent pensionable job as a prison officer after only eight weeks training. Only half a day of which explicitly addresses mental health! The square logo is an aide memoire for those in an asymmetric relationship: officer/prisoner;  teacher/student; parent/child. 

• to is when power tells the dispossessed how things will be.  
• My way or the highway thinking gets people's back up and is therefore counter-productive
• for is when power tries to be kind by helping people to the correct answer / behaviour / solution
• but cutting the apron-strings is an essential part of adulting  
• with is usually better: through example, empathy and tough love, the dispossessed are given the chance of sorting it out for themselves
• it can be work and requires a long game to break the cycle of learned helplessness 
• not is worse than everything: when power walks away with "I taught them but they didn't learn" and "they're too ugly, disrespectful, stupid, angry, other to learn anyway".

I had a rush of aha! with this characterization: in class at The Institute we all learned more and better when I, nominally the adult in the room, professed to know-not the answer. And every year on my watch, every kid in the room got to be autoclave liaison officer ALO at least once.

Victim-blaming is much easier and cheaper than fixing the systemic societal issues that generate victims. Breaking generational cycles (of anger, despair, violence and disrespect) is hard. 

Éirigh a Naomh Manchán!

Arise St Manchán! For reasons, which may become clear, I've been fossicking among the bones of Irish saints since my annual devoirs upon St Fursey's Day. There are A Lot of Irish Saints: incl 25 of them canonized in a single swooosh by Pope Leo in 1902. There are more RC saints than there are days of the year, so there is a mort o' doubling up for Feast-days. Perhaps the most notable being the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul celebrated with panache on 29 June each year. Peter Paul Rubens [R] was so named b/c born on the Eve of that day in 1577. If there was a Pope of Woo, they would have already elevated Manchán Magan, who died cruel young last October to their list of Alternative Saints.

There are [at least] two St Mancháns stalking the calendar of Irish saints, the more famous is Manchán of Mohill who doubles up with St Valentine on 14th February. But Saint Manchán mac Silláin (died 664) is venerated locally [Lemanaghan, between Ballycumber and Ferbane in King's County] on 24th of January. [sharing the day with many other saints and martyrs incl St Francis of Sales]

Last year, you may remember, Storm Éowyn blasted through Ireland for a shortcut on the morning of 24th Jan 2025 felling out a few trees for us [Darragh in December 2024 was more damaging] but generally felling more across the country and recording record wind-speeds. Some people were still without electric power two full weeks after the storm and insurable damage reached €300 million.

When the wind abated in the evening, as every year, Offaly woman Aoife Phelan took herself and the kids to the Holy Well at Lemanaghan. The childer were delirah because Éowyn had uprooted 4 substantial trees in the compound and they had a whoopin' and hollerin' climbing frame to play on instead of just a splash of holy water. As you do "We took some pictures of them climbing them and it was only looking back on the photographs later, that they saw that there could be something there," Ms Phelan said. Closer inspection revealed a skull and so Heritage were called and they've spent some time excavating the site previously unregistered as a graveyard.

Among other protocols, the archaeologists sent some of the human bones off to QUBelfast for radiocarbon C₁₄ dating. That test is known for giving quite large error bars - it's better at 000s of years than 00s. But the dating range for at least one skeleton just includes the best guess for the death of Naomh Manchán.  Phelan and other devotees are making much of the good saint lurching himself from the earth on his own feast day. Resurrection? 'tis the end of days, my friends, shrive yourselves as soon as convenient . . . and No More Sinning.

Stabbed in the bathtub

9 y.o. me was entranced by a quip in Mad magazine "Caesar was stabbed in the forum . . . also the duodenum and the heart".  That was a satire on the glib pubquiz-level 'knowledge' most of us have about the classical tales of the Western Canon. We are legitimately confused because classical and modern authors have mangled the characters and their interactions to suit the plot. The relationships - who is related to whom - are more generally agreed; but the motivations and moral standings are up for grabs. Because Sophocles and Shagsper are wrestling with difficult ethical problems. One of the tragedies of our current age is that too many people are certain that they are right . . . and that Others are wrong. Not enough Metanoia, lads!  [changing your mind].

For Christmas I was given a signed-by-author copy of House of Names by Colm "Enniscorthy's own" Tóibín. It is another reworking of the Orestia a tangled tale of faith, bad-faith, betrayal, loyalty, incest, justice and murder. My last encounter with a modern version of a Classic tale was compelling my lab-mates to watch Seamus Heaney's version of Sophocles' Antigone in the Abbey Theatre 22 years ago. Like everyone else, Tóibín takes what he wants from the old story to give it his own twist. Hopefully, he and we-the-readers can make the result relevant to our lives today and come out the better for it. I bet you sixpence that he had a particular Wexford garden, with stone steps, in mind when he wrote the scene for the climactic matricide. 

Agamemnon, the Patriarch at the centre of the tale, is a) a mighty warrior b) the brother of Menelaus c) married to Clytemnestra. When Menelaus' wife Helen runs off to Troy with Paris, Agamemnon is obliged (with other Greek chieftains - 1,000 ships are launched) to voyage to Troy to get her back. Whoa problem!: none of the ships can leave Greek ports because of contrary winds. It is announced that [note passive tense] a favourable wind can be achieved IF Agamemnon sacrifices his elder daughter Iphigenia. The girl's mother Clytemnestra is pissed off at this [peculiar to modern eyes] bargain but, as a woman in a world of testosterone-driven blokes, she cannot avert the outcome: neither slaughter-daughter nor coincident wind.

Clytemnestra hesitates before killing the sleeping Agamemnon; Aegisthos pushes her on. Pierre-Narcisse Guérin (1774–1833) [see L]. While Agamemnon et al. have been battering at each other and the walls of Troy, Clytemnestra has shacked up with her husband's first cousin Aegisthos. Of Iphigenia's siblings, Elektra is hanging out, somewhat enigmatically, in the Palace; but Orestes, the son-and-heir, is somewhere off stage. Troy having been sacked and Helen parcelled up and returned to her husband, Agamemnon is ready for a triumphant return to his patrimony. Clytemnestra more or less immediately murders her husband in the bath and cements her relationship with Aegisthos. Orestes feels obliged to avenge his father's death by killing his mother. Just as his father felt obliged to kill his own daughter.

That's never going to end well. Reciprocal atrocity has not promoted universal well-being: not during The Troubles, not in WWII, not in Gaza. It's after the end of Tóibín' verrsion, but in ancient versions of the Orestes tale has him judged for his matricidal tendencies . . . rather than revenge-killed out of hand. This is said to indicate evolution in society towards a system governed by agreed rules of law rather than right-of-might and blood-debt. But sensitive moderns might also note that the outcome is much harsher when women kill men, than when men kill women. The part played by Elektra in the matricide is more ambiguous: different authors give her more or less destructive agency.

dramatis personnae and further scandalous behaviour below the fold:

Heart of Darkness

John McGahern has been aired on The Blob because banned for scandalizing the theocracy which was running Ireland at the time. He was not the most prolific of the pantheon of Irish writers but his short list of novels sold well [if not in the Republic]and won literary prizes. I've read a few; coming back for more even though they tend to black-dog rather than pink-fluffy. Djerzi, one of my oldest pals came to stay for a tuthree days and he insisted I read McGahern's 'Memoir' which was published 20 years ago. We're both a bit institutionalized so I can obey orders. Our local part-time mini-library had a copy, so I added Memoir to our pile of something for the weekend and sacked out for most of a rainy Sunday to read it.

McGahern grew up in Co Leitrim, the oldest of a family of seven created by a school teacher and her Garda Sergeant husband. She contributed sparkle, ideas, cookies and unconditional love; he contributed the starting teaspoonful and a pervasive bullying sense of his own importance. The family would have been larger if the poor woman hadn't sickened and died, from breast cancer, when she was 42 and John/Sean was 10.  Even before the mother died, the household supported a succession of young girls to help with the children and housework. Boys were never taught how to sew on a button, let alone how to get ingredients together and cook a nutritious meal. After the mother's death, the Help was required to step into her place with assistance from any girl-childer as they became competent (before their time in a foreshortened childhood?). The rest of their childhoods were endured in the Garda Barracks in Cootehall [R].

I'm a generation younger than McGahern and grew up in a different country. When I was 6/7, my sister and I attended a primary school in Portsmouth. Towards the end of the one academic year we spent there, I boasted that I had never been beaten. Aha hubris, in that final fortnight, for trifling transgressions I was hit with a stick, by an adult, on five (5!) separate occasions. Over the next 12 years until I was old enough to vote [in 1972] that form of punishment was completely scrumpled up and thrown away . . . in England. The McGahern siblings witnessed the normal [cripes! for some definitions of normal] round of beatings in school. Some teachers more depraved than others. But at home they were subjected to savage beatings with slaps, fists, sticks . . . a shovel - by their father. They protected each other as best they could and got to read the room and act together to minimize the unpredictable unstable assaults.

McGahern the writer spend the rest of his life trying to understand, and excuse, and come to terms with the psychic destruction lashed out by the damaged savage who engendered him.

Many years later, he goes to visit with the longest-serving of the Helps. "Katie's husband was over six feet, slow and sure of movement, remarkably handsome and strong; he belonged to that generation of men who had no consciousness of their good looks other than as a form of strength". Which says much more about McGahern than the man he's just met for the first time. It's a [clunk clunk] feature of the book that the narrator wants us to know if such-an-one is symmetrical or not. I don't look in a mirror from one year's end to the other, but I know men who do: maybe assessing people's value as function of how attractive they are is part of your normality. But for me, at this point in my development as a human, it's [clunk clunk] with frankly racist / sexist /otherist overtones.

Another quote "She was walking with us past Brady's pool and Brady's house, and the house where the Mahon brother's lived, past the deep dark quarry, and over the railway bridge and up the hill past Mahon's shop to the school".  One of McGahern's (more attractive) stylistic devices is to use this sentence repeatedly through the book. As if in old age he is playing and re-playing a silent home-movie clip of the together times before Loss flushed the happiness from his young life.

The John McGahern Barracks is a community voluntary project - tours, archives, hot-desk hub and seminar rooms. Barracks, like for soldiers? Last week.

My first Aurora

We've had several Northern Lights events over Ireland since the Birth of the Blob. At least once, I remember ragin' at my network for neglecting to tell me to get my sorry arse off the sofa and look up at the sky. I can also blame myself because the last time I missed-the Lights-by-inattention was on 10 October 2024, when I drove from Tramore to Dunmore and back for a talk about the RNLI while the Northern Lights were blazin' above oblivious me.

At ~21:30 this last Monday night, from my cosy sofa, I heard a low rumble as if a cow had blundered into our heavy-duty wrough-iron gates. Ever alert for protecting Caisleán uí Blob from external assaults I sprang into m'boots, flicked on the outside lights and went to investigate. As I blundered about in the dark another lesser rumble drew my attention away from the gates towards the SE granite-in-courses shed. I went back inside for a torch and noted that the SE corner of the SE shed had slumped exhausted and waterlogged to the ground. The rest of that gable-wall is stitched together with Ivy Hedera helix but granite is dense and gravity ever-present so we can expect fewer vertical "farmer's-ashlars" and a bigger heap at wall-foot.  Many years ago, that wall was 60% taller, and looming over the road which takes heavy machinery [mighty tractors, trailers, balers, back-hoes] into the fields. I rigged up a temporary scaffolding out of 2x6s and, like McAndrew on a similar project, reduced the height by 2.5 m. With the roof-tree gone the pointy part of gable end was almost flapping about in the wind. Stone by stone from the top, I pegged each part of the jigsaw to the ground. Next time we had John-the-Digger on site, he tidied away the resultant heap. This new heap requires his attention next time he's passing . . . and the ground is dry.

But as my eyes grew accustomed to the dark, I twigged that it wasn't January-dark as it should have been 5 hours after Sunset. There was a dark crimson glow off to the West 

. . . with pale almost green blobiness above me and sweeping away to the East. If it hadn't been hosing rain all the previous day, I might have attributed the red glow to another effing eejit setting fire to the hill.  All in all, it wasn't Hammerfest quality, but I realised that I was seeing the Aurora Borealis for the time. I sent an alert to my pal Russ and he replied: "Lucky you...save you a fortune on a Norwegian Arctic cruise :)". He, of course (because he spent his early years out fishing at all times of the day and night and oblivious to the weather) had seen the Northern Lights before.

Meanwhile across the water, The Boy was dragged outside by his resident owl = Gdau.I and he caught the show on camera:

Which goes to show that the Aurora don't piffle about with the lumens. It is clearly visible despite the blast of street lighting from the city of Bath beneath. There was a late night post from RTE, with more quality Aurora-pics from across the country and an explanation of why they happen. Lest there be confusion, Pat's first Aurora, in Buenos Aires ca.1943, was an [in the] altogether different experience!

Civil engineering, farmer division

Good fences make good neighbours.

Robert Frost 

Tuesday 13th was sunny and a little warmer than 'crisp', so after lunch, I filled up the chainsaw and went for a ditch-peeling session. It's really jungly on the far side. I was sweeping through some brash to get at the big stuff and hopped the chain off its bar [dang!]. It's annoying because with PPE ear-defenders it takes a while to register the whining change in note in which time the stationary chain has been grinding against the drive cog. To get the chain back in its groove, it is often necessary to file off some burrs; which means trudging back home to the shop for tools and tooling. On the way back home I heard [the son of] my neighbour-above tractor-tricking just behind our garden.

After some frustrating bricolage on the saw, I fired it aside and offered to stand in a gap for my neighbour. "stand in a gap" is the level of competence expected of a 4 y.o. child. What I actually said is "If you do the heavy lifting with the front-loader, I'll endeavour to stop the stone falling off the top of the build . . . I'll just fetch a bigger [iron] bar than yours, and my own shovel". Dry-stone wall building is nearer the top in my bag of competence than, say, sheep-shearing. Accordingly we spent the next tuthree hours, until bad light stopped play, piling up stones in an orderly way to a) keep the sheep in b) allow enormous tractors, trailers, trucks to sweep up the [tiny, rough, gravel] lane and into the field. The result is not to be ashamed of:

It's actually the second wall built on that corner. When we blew-in 30 years ago this Spring, a farmer from round the hill bought the distal 25 acres we couldn't afford. One of his first tasks was to back-fill the tiny narrow entrance to the fields behind our house and open a new tractor-friendly gateway. The tractors of 1996 weren't MF35 tiny, but they were smaller than the 200+ horse-power behemoths favored today. Back in the day, Neighbour would herd his sheep along the tarmac from his home place 5km West of here in order to turn them loose on the 12ac/5ha field that he created from a clatter of much smaller, rougher, paddocks that we couldn't afford. Back then he had help: childer, his bestie-next-door and even an elderly retainer called Dan. 

With the skills of a Roman legionary, Dan repaved the steepest part of the track up beside our back garden. All we supplied was a few loads of sandy 'yellow clay' which hereabouts lies under a skim of black peaty top-soil. We had a surplus of the stuff because John-the-digger was getting a Saturday's backhoe work out of us pretty much once a month. Digging the back of the house out of the slump of the hill for starters. When he finished the road surface - which has survived two floods which washed out the rest of the lane - he started work on the gateway. Dan wasn't the quickest, but he was careful, methodical, painstaking and skilled. About five years ago, Dan's handsome piece of vernacular engineering was shoved out of the way to facilitate a contractor's boastfully over-specified machinery.

Storm Darragh felled out a mountain-ash Sorbus aucuparia from our ditch so it blocked the lane. The first thing I did the next morning was start to clear the right-of-way. It took me a while, but by Christmas I had cut it back the the stump and propped the stump up against the ditch so it could fall out any further. It was, I thought, out of everybody's way. But Neighbour-above threw a tantrum one day and tore the stump from the retaining wall bringing down half the ditch along with it. We had words, but didn't get too angry . . . because, like the sped arrow, you cannot recall [shouty] spoken words. In August, Sean O'MF35 [whom prev] came by with a cutie-pie Kubota mini-digger and we rebuilt the wall so it was again chest-height and more-or-less vertical [with a slight batter on it to settle back into the bank rather than totter forward into the roadway]. Not starting from a clean foundation, but starting off doing some dental work to get back to solid wall at bottom and both sides, it took us about 5 hours. The result is not too shabby functional [it's still on me to tidy up the fence!]:

The two walls are right opposite each other [classically educated folks may call them Scylla and Charabdis but for me they are W.all and E.all]. Almost all the many hill-walkers yomp past them without a glance: failing to appreciate what mighty works allow them unlimited access to the uplands.

PS In contrast to an iron-bar and a shovel, a chainsaw is a reet ould prima-donna. Delicate and attention-seeking. Last time I borked the chain, in the aftermath of Storm Darragh, it was cutting through a fallen tree-trunk as fat as the chain-bar was long. This time, it was twerking it against some twigs. I should maybe pay attention to myself and clear brash&briar by hand, keeping the noise-maker for the big stuff.

Fado fado 25 years ago

I've written abit about my father, from growing up on the quayside at Dunmore East to his exciting war in small ships. 25 years after the picture captured in the first link, he was caught [cropped R], all pensive and/or embarrassed, at another seaside location with my mother [off stage R]. He was an only child, doted on by a handful of Victorian vintage maiden aunts and some of their buttoned-up primness descended upon his shoulders. We're not sure where or when he started to hoover up, and retain, facts obtained from books. He read a lot, and widely, and in another life and time he might have been an Oxbridge don. Indeed, he used to articulate a fantasy that, if the family hadn't sent him to join the UK navy aged 14, he might have gone to college to read History. Whence he would have been called up in 1940 and, shortly thereafter, been killed in the Western Desert. 

As we all know, he survived WWII, and continued to read [so many books] all through the rest of the 20thC. Indeed, aged 80, he enrolled in a speed-reading course because the books on his bedside table (and on other surfaces through the house) were accumulating faster than he could get through them.  It was, in hindsight, kinda weird: what did he hope to Do with all the data which he had warehoused in his mind. If his kids tried to tap into it [What's the capital of El Salvador, Daddy? How do you spell lighthouse? What treaty ended the War of Spanish Succession? What happened to Voltaire's library after he died? ], his standard response was to tetchily invite us to "look it up!". He died in the wee hours of 15th Jan 2001, 25 years ago this week, having fallen down the stairs encumbered by more reading material. 

A few hours later, Jimmy Wales uploaded the first words ["Hello World" apparently] into what grew into Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not without its detractors: critics of both its policies [deadnaming etc.] and product [invisible women etc.]. Oh and more MeFi Wikipedia knockers. But I've been coffing up supportive donations on the regular for ten years and <new policy> I use Wikipedia as my primary search engine [works really well for Central American capital cities]. I like the idea that, during the great transition, my father downloaded 80 years of accumulated knowledge and it was captured by the Great Wikipedia Ouija Board. 

And [bonus] a Wikipedia Quiz. I clicked on Random Article until I got ten people, each from a different country and 'notable' for a different thing. Then sorted each category alphabetically. Women are not invisible but the sex-ratio i'nt great. Your task, should you choose to accept it, is the match up the data. And No scientists! Personal name shd be a hypertext link to the answer.

Who	Whence	What
Andrew Napier	Canadian	actor
Boris Gusman	English	composer
Bruce Carlson	Filipino	cricketer
Isabel Toua	German	FilmProducer
Jim Dale	Netherlands	linguist
Julia Dahmen	PapuaNG	musician
Lope Santos	Poland	NotAPerson
Štefan Maixner	Russian	politician
Tofik Dibi	Slovak	singer
Żeromin Drugi	USA	SoccerPlayer

 For all its faults we're better off for Wikipedia 

I have his Wellington

Today is the Feast of St Fursey. I have a comparatively spartan calendar w.r.t. religious practice: StFursey's 16Jan, Darwinday 12Feb, StPs 17Mar, St John's Eve [w/o bonfires - sooo yesterday!] 23Jun, Santiago 25July, Άγιος Ανδρέας 30Nov. As a believer, I should really make the effort appropriate for the genuflect on The Day. I made a dry run preview yest because the sky was clear. Although that is no guarantee about cloud-cover to the East over the Irish Sea:

There was still a skim of ice on some of the puddles when I left the track and headed up the boggy incline to The Altar [whc lower L above]. "dry run preview" because wet ewwww socks. At least my genu's still flex. My ears were accompanied by Sebastian Barry's Old God's Time on borrowbox: the title at least is appropriate for the legwork.

What a difference a day makes! Today, the actual Feast of St Fursey, I startled awake at 0730. Gulped down 2 mugs of tea and a couple of cuts of yesterday's soda-bread, booted up my tired bod, and left the house at 07:57. I couldn't be doing Old God's Time again, so chose a cartographic episode of BBC's Start the Week to keep pace with my present exploration of the landscape between heaven and earth. The sun was rising but invisibly to this earthly domain. The cloud / mist was trying to lift, though:

It had been raining intermittently over-night and the grass was slicker than yesterday. But my feet didn't go-o-o-o from under me until I was almost there-and-back-again at the roadway. St Fursey held my arse out of the mire, however, so I didn't have to squelch home with a soggy bottom like I had a accident. The interceding saint also held the rain off until I was a few steps from our gate. I just made time to nip across the lane to count the sheep [N = 16, phew!] before shedding boots and socks and making a fresh pot of scalding tea. So here we are and there you are, and I wish you

Lá Fhéile Fursa

My Fursey calculus happened too late for The Day in 2021 but I've made the pilgrimage each year since 2022 -- 2023 -- 2024 -- 2025 with variable success on the ☀️ front, and indeed the frost front.

barracks

 I've written about proximity to my roomies when we worked at The Institute. Back then I was told that the minimum area for offices was 4 sq.m. for each drone. On Tuesdays when both the part-timer staff were at their desks we were possibly the most crowded [within allowable Heath&Safety limits] office in the EU. The HSE has something to say [not our Health Service Executive but the UK Health and Safety Executive]: unless employers allow 11 cu.m. for each person, they are in breach. Assuming a ceiling height of 2.4m, this requires a floor area of 4.6 sq.m. including desk and chair. I thought at the time that this was cramped for professionals working in third-level education and was much less than any office I had in universities. I didn't feel oppressed though because I went to boarding school to acquire a very expensive education . . . and a lot of tics and psychological baggage.

What brought that on? Reading another pop.hist. book by Richard Holmes : Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket (2001) [Guardian review]. I read his The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (2008) when it came out: it describes what happens when Science mugs The Arts Block;  as when Keats references William "Uranus" Herschel [whom prev - and his sister Caroline!] ". . . deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne / Yet did I never breathe its pure serene / Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: / Then felt I like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken . . ."

Anyhow, back to 19thC soldiers. In 1842, a General Order of the British army decreed that, in barracks on home station, each soldier should have 450-500 cu.ft [13-14 cu.m.] of space: to sleep, eat, chat and maintain his kit. But this ideal fell short in at least Brighton [412 cu.ft = 11½ cu.m. each] and Kensington [363 cu.ft = 10cu.m.] barracks. In 1857 a Royal Commission into the Sanitary Condition of the Army optimistically recommended 600 cu.ft. but it was another 20 years before a barrack-building programme, as part of the Cardwell Reforms, came close to achieving this aspiration. 

This all brings to mind Samuel Johnson's quote about going for a sailor: "No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned... a man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company." Apart from the drowning the same calculus applied to soldiering. And in barracks close packing and lack of washing facilities, let alone hot water and flush toilets was surely bad investment as trained soldiers got sick and died before they could be deployed. And on active service, microbes killed more than "the enemy": Peninsula War 25,000 from disease to 9,000 KIA. Crimea: 17,000 from disease to 4,000 KIA + died of wounds. Although obvs before Koch's Postulates and Pasteur, septic issues were involved in died of wounds,. Hat-tip to Florence the Statistician of the Lamp.

Redcoats is a good read if you like that sort of thing. Plenty of sources and footnotes, although Holmes claims he is not an academic historian. But lots of evocative tales and anecdotes which give a sense of what it might have been like after taking the King's shilling 200 years ago. 

Maybe the last word should go to Thomas Hood's Ben "was a soldier bold" Battle:

'O Nelly Gray! O Nelly Gray!
For all your jeering speeches,
At duty's call I left my legs
In Badajos's breaches.'

Hedge peeling

For many years now, we have been signed up for sequential cunning plans to get the best out of Irish farmland. REPS (rural environmental protection scheme) I II and III followed by AEOS (Agri-Environment Options Scheme) then GLAS (Green, Low-Carbon, Agri-Environment Scheme) and most recently ACRES (Agri-Climate Rural Environment Scheme). The DeptAg clearly employs at least one PAD [plenipotentiary acronym deviser) to keep pace with the constant changes of policy and direction. The basic deal is that farmers are incentivized to do the right thing as currently dreamed up in Kildare Street. The days of pouring ad lib nitrates onto monocultures of perennial ryegrass Lolium perenne are over: the excess of tiger-pee has been running off into lakes and rivers and destroying their delicate equilibria. Farmers rights end where the nose of the pearl-mussel's (Margaritifera margaritifera whc prev) begins.

One of the features of ACRES is a bunch of Non-productive Investments NPIs. These are things which are good to do but do not put bread on the table. Like hanging a gate instead of blocking a gap with a pallet; or planting a strip of trees to shelter stock. Cash is tight for all the farmers I know, so these NPIs are often put on the long finger. Back in the day, I hung a bunch of gates. Dug a deep hole put in a tall post back-filled with rocks, gravel and cement. At least 3 of these posts have rotted out where the wet fill meets the air and microbes have a field day. Accordingly we applied for a NPI grant for some gates although we had the gates but not the energy to re-dig the hole and use steel rather than wood for the post.

We have something like 2km of battered stone walls acting as field boundaries. Where they were not fit for the purpose of enclosing sheep, we have a) topped them off with sheep-wire b) fronted them with new fencing or c) planted a parallel hedge. One of the NPI options is to clear off brambles Rubus spp. and gorse Ulex europaeus and allow the face of the stone walls to get ins☀️lated.  It's not going to butter any parsnips but it will create an alternate micro-climate and provide a niche for species [plants ad animals] that prefer a dry home. Our Ag advisor came on a site visit at the end of 2022 and suggested that I might like to clear one side of That ditch. It was just shy of 90m and faced to catch the afternoon sun. Photos were taken as evidence before the work

We were promised a nice couple of days in mid-Feb 2023 and I set to work. It was very satisfying and satisfactory. And you could hear the wall sighing with relief at getting a haircut for the first time in maybe 40 years. It was three stage process: a) cutting and pulling all the gorse away and into the field then b) reducing each branch to logs and brash, finally c) pushing all the brash back against the foot of the wall as mulch / habitat. We are now burning through those logs.

Later the same Spring, I was told

• I shouldn't have started work without prior approval
•  . . . and more Official photos
• it was crazy to imagine that I could claim money for cleaning only one side of a wall
• and duh, the top of the wall too. 

I was quite pissed off, knowing that the far side of the wall is quite a bit higher (because the topsoil has slumped away downhill since 1830 when the wall was built) and considerably more jungly. I wouldn't have started under those conditions. Not least because the jungle could be an important sheltered wild-life corridor.

But this New Year, after a really soggy November and December, the ground and gorse dried out nicely and I set-to to finish the job. Whether it is eligible for payment or not. My Ould Feller policy is to run the chain-saw for no more than a tankful of gas a day. Which is about an hour or a bit more: part cutting and part hauling.

Crap photo (you'll have to squint as always, but I've cleaned a 30m section of the Far Side;  pulled the bushes away; then gone back with shears to battle the brambles into submission. My gallop was stopped for half an hour when I touched a gorse-like rock with the saw and had to refile all the teeth on the chain. It happens. Work in progress; more later.

I O EU

Post over there on MeFi about how The Yoof of Europe like Europe. Inevitably, the thread went on a US-centric de-rail which I attempted to re-focus on the idea(l) that the European Dream is rather wonderful.

When I came studenting to Ireland as a just-barely-adult in 1973, Ireland was a poor, backward, peripheral theocracy. I got me a partner, a son and an education and, along with Ruth and thousands of others, we spent the recession of the 80s in foreign [NL, US, UK]. When we came back in 1990, Ireland was in the process of _transfiguration_ lubricated by buckets of cash from Europe. From 1994-2000, I was the Irish node of a European quango [science, training, infrastructure] and collaborated with people from all over the continent. In that tiny corner, I was, and am, proud that Ireland was giving back as a nett contributor to the enterprise. My 30-something daughters and their friends are just fakkin' bri'nt: hard working, colour-blind, pluralist, adventurous, righteous, generous, kind. They were able to become their best selves because Europe gave us a leg up and showed us other ways of being human and alive. 
Knowing that defending Europe may require more than a lapel-pin and some rhetoric . . . the pike is in the thatch.

The next comment came from a Minnesotan explaining the pike is in the thatch for their EirIgnorant compatriots. I'll add that hereabouts a pike is used to pitch hay. The croppies [woot woot Heaney alert] of 1798 went rambling that Summer with pitchforks (or scythes) if they had them; otherwise long ash saplings with pointy ends.

Mais revenons nous à nos euro-moutons: being Director and Sole-Employee of INCBI allowed me to commission the creation of a manual for Bioinformatics 101 which I hawked round the island, the continent, and further. A significant part of 'My' EU quango's brief was to equilibrate upwards: bringing training and resources from the well-funded / capable to the under-privileged / need-to-know-some. I had short-term regular gigs spreading the word in Oslo and Helsinki in the final years of the 20thC. But I was also able to bring the late, great Jack Leunissen from Nijmegen to Dublin a tuthree times.

For three years, I was on the quango's Exec Committee, two years as Secretary and one year as Chair. I was better as Secretary [obsessive attn to infra-structural detail] than Chair. Indeed, the year I Chaired was also the year the money ran out and we/I massive failed to write a convincing argument for re-funding. Big red face, me. Ireland was out in the cold w.r.t. Binfo infra-structural support for 25 years until Aedín Culhane and others threw in our lot with Elixir.

Nightmare on Whitchurch Street

Springs springs springs have been giving me work since November. We usually get spongy patches in Winter in the four ~1 hectare fields between us and the river. If the angle of the sunlight is right, the surface water positively sparkles through the boggy grass. But this is the first year I've heard spring water burbling out of a stone dyke between one field and a lower one. Not much we can do: I'm not about to install mole-drains at vast expense in a possibly vain attempt to keep the water flowing away beneath the surface. Just keep tractors and stock off those fields and wait for a dry Summer.

otoh We've put quite a bit of time and treasure into diverting and damping the energy of flowing water bubbling up in the lane to our home-place. It's a finite problem: there are, or have been, 6-8 predictable places where water forces itself up through the stones and gravel of the lane. Years ago we hired John the Digger to trench through half of these springs when they were dry and bury a couple of lengths of perforated plastic land-drain pipe. The pipe was turned sharp right below the last spring and debouched into the drain which runs beside the lane. 

Up above the house [where I care less about the road surface] there are two small places where the lane surface is positively punky. It makes squidgy sounds under your boot and the subsurface yellow clay leaks up through the stones. Nothing as dramatic as the collapse of a laden catering trolley through the pavement [second para] because running water had scooped out all the sand under the floor. Over the years, I've been dumping apple-to-plum sized stones into the sludge and it's gradually firming up. 

On the night of 21/22 December 2025 the Llangollen Canal at Whitchurch collapsed in dramatic fashion [L] completely draining a section of the canal and beaching 3 or 4 house boats several meters below grade. The canal is super picturesque and its Pontcysyllte and Chirk aqueducts have been declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.  It was navvied more than 200 years ago but its original coal and iron transport purpose ended between WWI and WWII. Now it's for leisure, pleasure and recreation and some people live on their boats year-round. Neil Jones has been documenting the response to the breach with daily reports.

In that section the canal skirts round a bit of a hill keeping level (as canals must do!) with an embankment on one side several metres higher than the meadow below. You might expect that 'canal breach' involved the collapse of the embankment like a dam bursting. But it actually looks like the bottom of the canal gave out first through waterwolf and the embankment collapsed downwards rather the burst outwards. The owners and maintainers of the canal [that would be the CRT] have installed coffer dam pilings along some stretches of the canal but the canal bottom was originally clay "puddled" to make it water-proof.  In the 19thC labour was cheap and materials available, so regular maintenance was part of the business plan. The CRT spends ~£50million a year to raise ~£180million  which is used to, like, keep water in the canals and repair gates that keep water in the locks. Whence the money? "More than half of our income now comes from property, investments, utilities, donations and other funding". The CRT CEO annual salary is £200,000; but 4,500 volunteers contribute ~100,000 work days a year.

There was a rather sweet comment to the collapsed in dramatic fashion YT video: 

@Roo-s_Slow_Living Oh my goodness, how awful. I live just a few miles away from where this is and if anyone needs temporary accommodation I have a little caravan with double bed and a heater and would be more than happy to help x

 

Thirteen Years a-growing

My correspondent G, always on message, reminded me that today is the 13th anniversary of The Birth of The Blob. I was late to the bloggin' game and by the time I started hammering the over-sharing keyboard, the shortform soundbytes of Twitter was where the commentariat was at. Twitter has also passed into the twilight, replaced by even shorter, often word-free comms on TikTok and Insta. At least with word-based blogs the signal-to-noise ratio is on the side of the planet. Compared to a 700 word Blob, a fat graphic meme might consume 1,000x times as much electricity on a server farm.

Then again, there may be too many words. A recent count came to more than 2½ million words of Blob-blather. Only some of it considered or sensible or, indeed considered sensible. As my circumstances have changed, so has the content. Much less a funny thing happened on the way to the chemistry lab and more counting sheep and sawing logs: both of which reputed to induce sleep. I have tried to drag the worthy but forgotten to the fore giving Margaret Dayhoff parity of esteem with Margaret Thatcher for example. Chekkitout? Use the search box in the top left corner to play "I can't believe there's no [insert word here]". abacus, bibendum, charabanc, decameron, eagle, fadiman, genghis, halmahera, iodine, jerusalem, krypton,  . . . got them all covered.

Gulag-on-Sea

I was a teenage Essex-boy. One of the stranger event of my teen-life was being the chap in a mixed-doubles tennis tournament at Frinton-on-Sea. I could not reliably hoick a tennis-ball over the net, let alone place it to win points and we lost both our games. The tennis club was nice, though, and I spent the rest of the afternoon in their swimming pool. Clacton-on-Sea, 12km SW along the Essex coast elected Nigel Farage to represent them in Parliament. I guess I have Baggage-on-Sea? Nevertheless the post title is quite the cheap shot; because it's about a Good Thing that turned a bit sour when WWII hotted up and stopped being something that was happening over there.

Amazingly there is only a single copy of this book in the Irish Public Library System. But you may be able to buy it.  Four thousand lives : the rescue of German Jewish men to Britain, 1939. [2019] by Clare Ungerson. 

I don't think that the Brits were collectively less anti-semitic than anyone else. Just read pretty much any English novel from the 1920s or 30s for casual racial stereotyping (hair, nose, lips . . . too prudish to mention der schmuck down there). But there was a sharp intake of breath at the implementation of Kristallnacht 9th-10th November 1938, which apart from breaking windows in synagogues and shops saw the arrest of thousands of German Jewish men. A cabal of rich and powerful English Jews were particularly appalled; they raised a bunch of money and called in a bunch of political favours to rescue Jewish men from KZs on the Kontinent. Not women! The SS and SA left the women zu Hause on Kristallnacht to look after the children and do the cooking: so normal, so fucked up.

Meanwhile in London, the self-appointed Central British Fund for German Jewry secured permission to lease an abandonned WWI military barracks outside the Cinque Port of Sandwich in Kent, SE England. They got no money from the British government and the lager-sprung men from Germany and Austria were only given transit visas for Britain on their way to Palestine, Shanghai [a free port], the USA or South America. It was an amazing venture which had 10 months to fill the Kitchener Camp in Kent with 3,500 'handy' youngish men snatched from a rapacious and corrupt, but painstakingly bureaucratic system of Großdeutschland. No women, no children, no olds, no indigents, no homosexuals need apply. Although, in the heel of the hunt, as the jaws of opportunity snapped shut, another 500 dependents of the Kitchener men were able to reach safety in England - there was a demand for 'domestic servants' as the UK moved to an active war footing. 

You probably know something of the Kindertransporte [Bloboprev] which working independently and in parallel trained & shipped about 10,000 Jewish kids to Britain. I was born 15 km due S of, and went to school 15 km due W of, Sandwich, and had never heard of these events. Makes you wonder about all the pub-quiz essential facts [Tegucigalpa is the Capital of Honduras etc] they crammed into my head instead. 

After 3rd September 1939, the men in Kitchener were security vetted and almost all of them were classed "friendly alien" although their well-heeled Jewish sponsors colluded with the British government to keep them confined behind the wire. The former were concerned that a flood of 'foreign' Jews looking for work might trigger a pogrom suppressed anti-semitic feeling, which would adversely affect their own privilege. About half the able-bodied internees volunteered to join the Pioneer Corps of the British Army and  a few companies were shipped to France to build aerodromes and tank-traps for the BEF.   But when the Phoney War morphed uncontrollably into a military debacle, Dunkirk and the surrender of Paris the only explanation was spies, saboteurs and a Fifth Column. This paranoid conspiracy theory resulted in a complete change of status for the guests of Sandwich, which was clearly an early example of victim blaming. Those in British uniform were allowed to keep their khaki and pay but stationed far from possible invasion beaches on the S and E coasts. Those who had failed the army medical, or were too old, or too young to enlist or were in possession of a US immigrant visa and just waiting for a ticket . . . were reclassified from "friendly" to "enemy alien" and sent to internment camps, many of them on the Isle of Man. Kitchener Camp was abandonned except for a roomful of suitcases which the men were told would be held in safe keeping until their internment destination was established.

Never happened! The left-luggage door was bust open by British soldiers who ransacked the luggage looking for items of value. Photographs of, and letters from, central European parents and siblings, wives and children (almost all of whom were destining for Auschwitz and the Endlösung) were scattered, scuffed, soiled and eventually trashed. Q. Was ist das englische Wort für Schande? A. Shame!

2026: it's all ahead of us

I was up betimes and out about m'chores. Sheep fed, self fed, fuel stacked, fire laid, sofa weighted, sunrise saluted, all good:

Now I'm back at the keyboard, ready for a hard day's bloggin'. There is one mince-pie left, it has my name on it . . . for later. Dau.I and Dau.II spent the night with their Besties up in Greystones at least partly so they could catch the sunrise on the beach. Here's one for pilgrims - and we're all pilgrims whether we realise it or not 

Good luck. I fear we are living in interesting times but I'm with Dr Pangloss « Tout est au mieux dans le meilleur des mondes possibles ». And try not to forget The Dispossessed:

While we seek mirth and beauty and music light and gay,
There are frail forms fainting at the door;
Though their voices are silent, their pleading looks will say
Oh! Hard times come again no more.