Folding money

The great Euro currency project is 25 years old and Der Mann has decided we need a new design on the banknotes. Which is kinda quixotic given how much change kaChing! has happened in the world of currency transactions. On the shuttle bus to Bristol Airport last week, for example, I sat behind two Australian backpackers who were settling up their debts [in UK£ AU$ and €€€] with a few swipes on their smart phones. The olde tea shoppe in Bath refused to accept cash. I can use "quixotic" because Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra features on half of the proposed designs of the new €50 note.

The design brief was either famous European cultural icons: €5 Maria Callas €10 Ludwig von Beethoven €20 Marie Curie €50 Miguel de Cervantes €100 Leonardo da Vinci €200 Bertha von Suttner. Gaah! Marie Curie is such a usual suspects choice to represent European Women in Science: I have blobbed a couple of dozen more interesting names. And Baroness Bertha Sophie Felicitas von Suttner née Countess Kinsky von Wchinitz und Tettau ?? - never 'eard of 'er, although she clocked the 1905 Nobel Peace Prize.

The other option involves specified birds with a compulsory river feature  and Eurobatimentson the reverse

• €5 wallcreeper Tichodroma muraria || European Parliament 
• €10 kingfisher Alcedo atthis || European Commission, 
• €20 bee-eater Meropidae || European Central Bank, 
• I think they mean Merops apiaster the only bee-eater endemic to (Southern) Europe
• €50 white stork Ciconia ciconia || Court of Justice of the EU 
• €100 avocet Recurvirostra avosetta || European Council & Council of the EU
• €200 northern gannet Morus bassanus  || European Court of Auditors 

These banknotes are so freighted with 'meaning', stipulations, baggage & metaphor ["embodying cohesion through diversity" etc. etc.] that they are camel (a horse designed by a committee). That's probably okay because new banknotes, in contrast to new flags [NZ and AU], are meant to be hard-to-draw but it is a handicap preventing designers reaching for the sky. I liked series B because they cut us some slack by including some small print info including Linnaean binomers for the birbs and IDs for the EuroGebäude on the reverse. But I think my final pref is for Series I by Isabelle Daëron from which the €10 kingfisher is clipped above: a) having portrait banknotes is cool / different b) there are Easter-eggs like the radio-telescope and the dragonfly [sooo River] c) all the birds are haloed by the 'sun'. You / we are all invited to vote and give crowd feedback on all the designs. From me: please, no people on currency, they always turn out to have feet of clay.

Did I mention see a kingfisher? I did. Which gives me the opening to cite Halcyon or The Kingfisher of Gortrush Wood a poem [vimeo] embedded in an essay about loss, trust, family by Mark Roper. A few years ago, Jack, my more famous brother, was on the bill at an Arts festival in our post-town. Because family, I was invited to Sunday lunch at the home where he was billeted. There was one other couple at table and everyone were chatting away about, like, The Arts. I didn't have much to say! Until I suddenly twigged that the 'Mark' sitting opposite was Mark Roper the poet. I became a blushingly effusive fanboi stammering how much I'd been affected by Halcyon.

Trinity House

When I was a teenager, I spent a tiny bit of time at sea on a working ship. The gig was finagled for me by an old boyfriend of my mother. Note the passive tense: I did essentially nothing to make this happen. Nowadays, there is a whole industry mapping out Gap Years for privileged youth so they can get into the socially preferred colleges and universities. One week as a supernumerary 'working' for Trinity House was plenty enough to convince me that actually working at sea would be a long old way outside my comfort zone. Trinity House* are / were responsible for maintaining and operating lighthouses, lightships and buoys round the coast of Great Britain. The Commissioners of Irish Lights = CIL = Coimisinéirí Soilse na hÉireann does the equivalent work for the island of Ireland.

While in England recently, I idly picked up a copy of Granta 61: The Sea - Voyages, Mysteries, Discoveries, Disasters 1998, like all Grantas there were a number of interesting pieces inside. Including one about the North Carr lightship by the son of one of her last skippers. In December 1959, that vessel broke away from its moorings in a gale and drifted engineless out to sea. The Broughty Ferry lifeboat was launched but came to grief on the rocks and the entire crew of eight was drowned. By luck, determination, situational awareness and bower anchors the lightship was just able to ride out the gale on a lee shore and everyone aboard, and indeed the ship itself, survived. Let us bow our heads for the RNLI.

It was natural in that context to reference an earlier lightship tragedy, when the South Goodwin Sands lightship's anchor chain parted in a gale on the night of 26/27th November 1954. The only survivor was a 22 y.o. government scientist Ronald Murton who dived through the galley hatch as the ship rolled onto its side on the notorious sandbank. He clung to a topside stanchion [pointed out with broad arrow L] for eight hours in the dark until he was winched off by a USAAF rescue chopper from RAF Manston. That aerodrome is more recently used as a lorry park to mitigate the logistical disaster known as Brexit. RIP the crew who perished that stormy night: Horace Skipp (Master) George Cox, Ken Lanham, Sid Philpott, Walter Viney, Henry Lynn, Tom Porter. [Wreck picture credits Lighthouse Digest September 2009].

After his ordeal Murton continued his life's work on the migration and ecology of woodpigeons Columba palumbus. He was employed by the Dept Ag and Fish for this project because pigeons were a scourge for cereal farmers. In the 1950s farmers could indent in triplicate for a supply of free shot-gun cartridges and blast away at these profit-depleting avian pests. Murton's [obituary] appraisal of the Evidence concluded that pigeon numbers would never be reduced by any economically justifiable quantity of lead. That conclusion changed government policy on control methods. He wrote the book on his bird The Woodpigeon (1965).

That storm on 26th November was wreaking havoc in other parts of these islands, as noted by my pal Russ in his blog in 2019.  

(*) Formally, by royal charter of 1514 "The Master, Wardens, and Assistants of the Guild, Fraternity, or Brotherhood of the most glorious and undivided Trinity, and of St Clement in the Parish of Deptford Strond in the County of Kent". A mouthful! like “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” my other Trinity.

Only the righteous

Third weekend in July, I was over in England for a Significant Anniversary. International travel can be a schlep, and I wasn't inclined to lease an executive chopper and land on my friend's lawn in time for cake and then zoom off to my next appointment. And that's how I came to spend 4 nights with The Boy and his family in and around Bath = Aquae Sulis. My father was very restless, and so not for me restful. He tended to tack something extra onto a Perfick Day, putting children beyond their sell-by and often in tears. He didn't know when to stop. I think that was one reason why he joined the British Navy as a chap in 1931 - and indeed he did get to see the World. The habit of rushing through places, rather than being IN them, skipped my generation. But the Let's Go spirit seems to have re-ignited in The Boy, so I had a full diary.

On Sunday morning before Matins we walked down to the River Avon, borrowed a Canadian canoe, and paddled up river for half an hour. Eeee, it were lovely: we {didn't have to | couldn't} look at each other so we were encouraged to look out and about. The seating / setting also had some element of the confessional and I 'shared' some of my failings by way of explaining why [unlike some] I never reached the top of my profession and, rather than retiring early, was only able to retire when I became eligible for a free travel pass. It seems that part of the River Avon is now home to beavers, which gives visitors the chance for some 'bigger than a breadbox' observational biology on top of the birds.

I also recalled a traumatic episode of rowing with others from my childhood. In ~1935 my father graduated from 'Dartmouth" aka Britannia Royal Navy College shortly after 'the greengage mutiny' when the cadets protested about the hideous quality of the food. In 1965 a pal of his from those days became officer i/c the College. Me and my sibs had gotten quite chummy with the Duffy boys when we lived close to each other in Plymouth. So it was somewhat natural that I'd go a spend a week with them one Summer holiday. Being there, it was entirely unsurprising that the four of us would borrow a couple of skiffs from the College and row upstream one evening like Swallows and Amazons. All good fun . . . until the tide turned, a stiff breeze blew up and we were a mile from the wharf as darkness fell. I wasn't the youngest, but I was possibly the weediest and, as we will see, lacked the bottle which had won WWII in 1945. In adverse circumstances, I was quite unable to match the pull of my ship-mate and so we were more or less rowing in circles. After a good bit of justifiable ribbing from the rest of the expedition I mutinied: stood up in the boat [cardinal sin!]; gave the sole-boards a mighty tonk with the handle of my oar; roared out "I . just . can't . do . this" and burst into tears. That shut 'em up!

You may be sure that The Boy was careful about criticizing my paddling after that confession. A short time later he called "kingfisher!" and we both turned to follow the halcyon Alcedo atthis pacing upstream. They say that only the righteous get to see the kingfisher, I am so glad we saw that one together.

On the last night with my ex-pat family, three generations of us walked up to the flat-top of Solsbury Hill [whc prev] behind their house. We strode out and and made it to the top just as the sun sank below the hills to West. By way of libation to Sol Sols Sulis, The Boy had packed a small picnic: chai latte and cherries. Perfick!

 

Bearing witness

About 40 years ago, I was invited to upskill myself in the white-coat, real-science lab across the corridor from my office. I had been hired to teach population genetics because that _had_ been an important and edge-cutting area of genetics. Pop.Gen. was quite the doldrums in the early 80s, but someone had to teach it, and I was that person. The technology to look quite directly at variation in DNA was coming on-stream and they were about to inject steroids into Pop.Gen. So it was a smart move to learn which end of an Eppendorf to open [hint; not the sharp end]. I spent half a year getting to stage where a) I could generate useful, repeatable results b) I knew it would always be hard work. I recognised b) because I was working back-to-back with someone who really understood what she was doing.

I had a long weekend in England recently because my molecular mentor MolMent was having a knees-up to celebrate her 50th wedding anniversary. My parents celebrated their 50th in 2000AD and my father dropped dead [of "medical misadventure"] 6 months later. It seemed better to bear witness at the anniversary, than at a funeral, so I booked a bed-in-a-shed with The Boy in Bath, which is a 2 hour train-ride from Weymouth [as L Donald McGill, kiss-me-quick, candyfloss & sandy sandwiches] where my friends had retired early about 10 years ago. 

They were able to do that because MolMent left real science shortly after teaching me everything I know about it and put herself through Law School. She parlayed that qual to London working as a Patent Lawyer specializing in molecular biology for MegaPharm. Developing and marketing new biologics generates billion$ for shareholders, with million$ crumbs available for the Effectives. Obvs she was an asset - knowing both the law and real science to exacting standards gave her powerful negotiating power round board-room tables.

At these things (weddings, funerals, celebrations) I've learned late in life to follow my mother's lead and wade in despite being the emotional basket-case that I am. At one point I strolled to the end of the garden where a 50ft cliff fell away to the tide-line. Standing at the top (and not falling away under the influence of fizz) there was a fine view out over the bay to Portland Bill and Chesil Beach. The view point was already occupied by a husband and wife - who were not made of the same wade-in social steel as I was affecting. I told them the story [not for the first time, not for the first time that afternoon] of me and MolMent and how I'd never met anyone with such a deep "feeling for the organism" understanding of sub-microscopic molecules and processes. "Molecules schmolecules" replied the bloke, "that woman really understood Intellectual Property"; and proceeded to tell me a £15million board-room war-story.

Errrm, quite so. Some people, by genetics or upbringing or both, are destined to be lucky make their own luck by hard work, long hours, good memory and finely tuned crap-detector. It doesn't matter which college, or no-college, such folk go to, they do well anywhere anytime anyhow. That's another reason not to agonize about which college or course to choose.

Their was-delapidated, now painstakingly refurbed by Himself, Edwardian mansion with sea views is about 300m from the flat where my newly-wed parents lived in 1950 . . . and scavenged coal from the train-tracks to Portland. 

Waking the dead

Born within the slipstream of our father’s and
mother’s lives, we follow involuntarily in their wake.

True dat!  It's a sentence from early in My Father's Wake, how the Irish teach us to live, love and die (2017) by Kevin Toolis. Toolis was born and grew up in Edinburgh but Home was a modest storm-drubbed 3 room cottage on Achill Island, Co Mayo. He thus has cultural feet one planted on each side of the Irish Sea. Me, too.

Whatever about The Past, End-of-Life issues are a foreign country: they do things differently (t)here.

• When we came back to Ireland in 1990, my boss was British but had been living and working in Dublin for 8 years. One  afternoon the department had emptied for the funeral of a colleague's mother. Two pints down in the pub that night, the gaffer had admitted he would be appalled if I or anyone else gate-crashed the funeral of his father. 
• otoh I have an old friend who was working in one of the Dublin Art Colleges. A colleague's mother died back home in London. My friend did her normal, booked a return flight to LHR to show face at the funeral. Consternation among the tiny gathering of neighbours and immediate family.  
• In 2001, after my father died in England, we had a nuclear-family conference round the dining room table with the undertaker. You could see the colour drain from his face when I suggested it would be nice to carry the Old Man into the church.

Toolis had a couple of medical NDEs as a child and had sojourned in Male Medical wards in the local hospital for several weeks. He witnessed more death in that time than his school-mates would come up against in their entire lives. When he grew up, he became a free-lance journalist covering The Troubles. He seemed to have a talent for blagging his way into people's homes and asking intrusive questions; which the bereaved or traumatized were too avoid answering. From there he became a war correspondent wherever hell was going down and he witnessed grief, loss and coping in each different place & culture. Because [troubles, Palestine, Bosnia, Sunni, Shia] alien cultures can be your next-door neighbours. But East West - Home is Best. IF Home is Achill rather than London.

Toolis is firm in his belief that the Irish system is the Norm even a Universal manifestation of the human condition and has been since Homer wrote the Iliad. Or even since Cro-magnons were banging two rocks together picking flowers for their beloved dead. In La Douleur et les Regrets d'Andromaque sur le corps d'Hector son mari [R 1793 Jacques-Louis David via wikicommons] Hector is clearly 'open coffin' in the Irish way. But he has a book to sell, and the Irish market for end-of-life issues is microscopic (folk would rather read death-at-a-distance through Donna Leon, Patricia Cornwell, PD James). The hook is to demonstrate that the Western way of death is sanitized, medicalized, disempowering and Closure-avoidant. Readers in USA, Canada, UK etc. are doing it all wrong. Indeed Merriam-Webster tags wake "to remain awake on watch especially over a corpse" as archaic because Americans don't do that anymore.

His lifetime accumulation of experience as a death-witness for strangers qualifies him to critically evaluate his own father's short, messy, painful end from pancreatic cancer. Sonny was not lucky, I regret his early loss. Sonny would have dismissed the thought. Under the sun, death comes when it comes. In Ireland because death is integrated in community life it becomes normal - as well as inevitable. In England it is invisible. One of the great aspects of Sonny's death is that the community knows what to do without having to involve The Man at all. And yes it is, since Homer's day, women's work. The body is washed and dressed [A Lot of cotton-wool will be required]; a coffin and hearse is booked; hang-sangwiches for 5,000 miraculously appear; along with a monster tea-pot or two; extra chairs and delph are borrowed; hugs and handshakes; sorry for your troubles on repeat.

It's nice that "wake" is used in it's other meaning in the opening quote; because Sonny went shoring [beachcombing] every day he lived on Achill. It me! It Grace! Caminante, no hay camino, sino estelas en la mar. Traveller, there is no path only your wake on the sea.

Radio Tirana

In April 1939, the self-proclaimed King Zog of Albania [L lifted from commons.wikimedia] fled the country with the country's gold-reserves in his carry-on luggage. The power vacuum was filled by the Provisional Administrative Committee of Albania until an "army of liberation" arrived from Italy. The PACA issued a bulletin to its diplomats abroad including the advice . . . stop Listen regularly to Radio Tirana stop . . . which was moderately amusing because I did just that when I was learning Portuguese in the mid-80s. In addition to formal lessons from a wonderful me-local officer from the Instituto Camões, and reading novels in parallel text editions, I had scanned the airwaves hunting for Portuguese language broadcasts. By far the strongest signal was from Radio Tirana blaring out Marxist propaganda, music & current affairs to former Portuguese colonies in Africa many of which were still in a state of unresolved armed struggle aka USA/USSR proxy-war. I listened into Tirana while doing the washing up: it certainly tuned my ear to the cadence of Portuguese.

I only know <TMI> about King Zog because I was urged to read Indignity, a Life Reimagined by Lea Ypi. Her great-grandfather Xhafer Bey Ypi was leader of PACA and had been briefly Prime Minister of Albania in 1922. Indignity follows Lea Ypi's journey through The Archives to discover what happened to her grandmother Leman who grew up in Salonika but emigrated to Albania as soon as she could. 100+ years ago, Lea Ypi's forebears lived in Salonique le Magnifique where French was, since Crusader times, the lingua franca for that cultural and religious melting pot. But in the family they might switch to Turkish, Albanian, Arabic or Ladino. It was impossibly romantique. One of them died of a surfeit of baklava!

Indignity built upon last Summer's book about the Near East Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean. That looked at commerce, wars, parties, fires, punctilio & pogroms in Beirut, Smyrna and Alexandria - but it could have included similarly cosmopolitan Salonica. By happenstance I was simultaneously ear-booking Love in a Time of War: My Years with Robert Fisk by Lara Marlowe; like Lea Ypi's family 100 years earlier, Lara and Robert are ducking in and out of Paris and Beirut in search of culture and pastries.

Bannister

I have, so, a camera, several cameras, but that does not make me a photographer. Dau.II otoh has a bit of an eye. She was down to the Déise in June, being handy. We seized the moment between chores to clamber over a headland that is only accessible for an hour each side of low tide. You can tel it's low tide because the tide mark is halfway up the rocks:

Credits: Dau.II for the crisp picture; me for the tacky sentiment.

 We've been beach-combing together for at least 20 years, but we aren't in competition. She is more for 

may came home with a smooth round stone 

as small as a world and as large as alone.

while I lean towards the discarded work of human hand. 

I swear I offered free choice of beach from Benvoy to BallyDwan. But we found ourselves on a stretch of coast which I'd visited about 10 days [20 tides] previous and given up on 7m of bright orange hawser with an eye-splice at each end. I had come with a collection of sharp objects to separate the useful from the tangle. The  hawser had, after 10 sleeps, become even more useful than it had seemed on first presentation. So I worked and worried until I had reduced the load to what a 70-something can carry away [L sic transit] over some modest cliffs.

I think it will do for a fixed-rope adjacent to the stairs between our house and the garden above and behind it. Me, I trip lightly up and down this familiar route even in the dark, even with armfuls of laundry, but I have noticed that [much younger and seemingly fitter] visitors approach the task with trepidation. Sooo, the local bainisteoir = gaffer [L] intends to install a bannister for safety.

Kick-sampling

Kick-sampling is a technique for assessing water quality in the wild. I've done some kick-sampling myself. Heck, I've taught kick-sampling. Almost the only time I ever used the Lidl middle-aisle fisherman's waders were for kick-sampling up to my knees in a stream.

This year, for the first time, we're doing something different with our traditional hay-meadow: harvesting the seed to [potentially, hopefully] propagate wild-flowers away from our nursery. We were requested-and-required to remove and Ragwort Senecio jacobaea from the meadow before harvest. Insects and pollinators like the bright yellow flowers but the whole plant is generally poisonous to live-stock, especially horses. It is a prolific of seed which are wind-dispersed, but the plant is a biennial, so a rigorous regime of uprooting [traditionally by small farm-children] will eventually get the scourge down to manageable proportions. Every year, if we look, ragwort will be found; but only a few scattered plants which are a distinctive green at a moderate distance and have unmistakable leaves close-up. Ragwort is thus a 101 task but it takes a little time to course systematically over the estate.

We were also instructed to remove "thistles". As I found last year, there are two closely related thistles common in Irish fields one of which Cirsium dissectum is a desirable indicator species and the other Cirsium arvensis a terrible creeping thing altogether.  But in the priorities of seed-collection it is Caedite eos kill them all - or at least stop t'buggers propagating.

Accordingly, over a couple of days, whenever the spirit was upon us (and it was not drizzling - for who wants wet socks?) one or other of us would sally forth with clippers and a feed-sack to heap cut thistles into sheafs and dump them at the field margin. 

Gotta say that it's the best sort of work: necessary, a bit physical, a bit mindless, in the fresh air <hello trees, hello sky>, WFH. I clocked off several hours of my then current ear-book The Education of an Idealist [2019] by Samantha Power: one time Dubliner [Hartigan's], one time war reporter [Bosnia]; one time US Ambassador to the United Nations [Obama]. It is readable and gives good insight about how firm beliefs and election manifestos turn squidgy under the pressures of Realpolitik. Despite pre-election promising to close up Guantanamo Bay, Obama was still its commander in chief at the end of his 8 year presidency.

I show-and-told the results of seed-stripping 10 hay-rattle plants. One collateral benefit of coursing over the meadow, stalking and killing thistles was to fill my loosely tied boots with misc wildflower seeds. It was striking a) how much of the kick-sampling was hay-rattle seed b) the huge discrepancy for seed-size among different species [from much smaller than a poppy-seed to big-as-tomato-seed] c) the wild variety of seed shape and seed-appendage and d) how each adaptation might help a seed get somewhere else and then get a grip on the earth and still have some oomph to get something green above ground to start photosynthesis. Chekkittout:

 

Listerham

Could be a mid-sized market town in Norfolk? But no, it is rather a rant from me about the mysterious transformation whereby thinly slicing food quadruples the price paid by consumers. A couple of weeks ago, Dau.II foodie sans pareil had day release from Dublin to help her agéd parents with some domestic task. She has hank when she poured off the train at Plunkett Station and we had to repair instanter to a supermarket for the makings of a hang sangwich. Nope, LIDL ham would not answer, we must go across the way to Supervalu for a packet of Brady's Family Ham . . . a  Stafford's turn-over Ingredients Wheat Flour, Yeast, Water & Salt. I buttoned my lip, because Dau.II, as a child, could get hangry and I had no wish to witness the adult version.

But my inner dialogue was to the effect that LIDL ham was quite likely made in the same factory with pigs from the same farm injected with NaNO₂ from the same vat.

Then on the last day of June, the food-safety authority FSAI issued a Listeria recall directive on

• Brady Family Wood Smoked Real Irish Ham 6 Slices €37.40/kg
• Brady Family Hand Crumbed Real Irish Ham 6 Slices 
• Lidl Deluxe Triple Oak Smoked Carved Irish Ham 5 Slices 
• Lidl Deluxe Honey Roast Carved Irish Ham 5 Slices 
• Tesco Finest Crumbed Shaved Ham 16 Slices €20.75/kg

all with a bbd of 16 July 2026. I rest my Lidly=Brady equivalency case! You do you, listen to the radio adverts, and buy Brady Family Ham at €37 per kilo. In a hangry emergency I might buy the same stuff in a yellow pack from Lidl or Tesco. But really, I'druther can a [half] kilo of uncooked ham for €7/kg, b'ile it up and cut generous tranches for a week's worth of lunches. Can't be piffling about with waffer-thin slices of honey-shaved wood-roast hand-carved over-priced product.

It could be worse for Brady's rep. It's "only" Listeria!? [whc bloboprev] Unless you're pregnant, very young, very old or undergoing chemo, you'll get through the infection with some fluid loss [both ends] and some discomfort. And (this is important) the contaminated batch was detected by routine in-house QC at Brady. Accidents and boo-boos will happen in any institution; if the errors are detected, then nobody dies. I hope the recalled ham gets chopped up for soup; it would be a shame and a waste otherwise.

By coincidence, the day before the recall, Wikipedia featured On this day the 1971 case where Bon Vivant tinned Vichssoise avec Clostridium botulinum killed one, disabled one people. "On July 3, Bon Vivant voluntarily recalled all remaining cans of their vichyssoise, including soup manufactured under 22 different private label brand names". The FDA came down all heavy and Bon Vivant went bankrupt. I hope Brady's weather the storm because they employ a bunch of people in Co Kildare and are tuned in to Food Cloud, the no-food-waste charity. 

Map Man

Barry Dalby [multiprev] the cartographer [EastWest Mapping] lives close enough that, 20+years ago, I helped barrow the concrete for his kitchen extension. That's what neighbours do. In 2013, he published a 1:25,000 scale rambler's map was definitionally (50/25)² = 4x and possibly10x more informative that the equivalent 1:50,000 map put out by the salarymen at  OSI Ordnance Survey Ireland. 

Back then, at the birth of The Blob, that map was the handiest, handsomest, most convenient data-source for "Blackstairs, Mount Leinster & The Barrow Valley". Part of Dalby's job was seeing that his creation was stocked in local shops. I made and framed a publicity poster and screwed it to the side of one of our sheds [still there, as R]; tempting passing hill-walkers to buy their own copy. Periodically, I'd go visit EastWest Centraal and purchase a bunch of Blackstairs maps, knowing I'd be giving them away to visitors (and passing strangers!). Barry generously cut me a wholesale deal. Which, fair enough, I was possibly shifting as many as Bowe's, Kiltealy or O'Shea's, Borris.

Then, as Coronarama ebbed, I gave away my last copy of 'our' map and contacted Barry for more. But the cupboard was bare! It had taken him 10 years to off-load all copies of the first print-run [joy!] . . . but a  second edition was in process [we're notnin America so defered gratification is okay]. And last year, Dalby went sideways and self-published a book "Map Man ~ Irish Maps & Mapping" a snip at €21!. On my way home from a [miserable washed-out] organic open day in Wicklow, I left the motorway and pootled across country to EastWest Mapping with €100 burning a hole in my pocket. There, after catching up on descendants over a cup of tea, I bought a) a spare copy of EastWest Comeraghs for when we're down the Déise b) a copy of Map Man to work out how Barry ticks c) the balance in Blackstairs II maps to share over our gate at home.

Map Man is profusely illustrated [✓] but the pics are only slightly larger than postage-stamps. Years ago I was advised to illustrate The Blob because a wall-of-text is alienating. I bent to the pressure and almost every post since has a pic. But I obsess about bandwidth on behalf of my fans in the third world reading on dial-up. So my pictures are both blurry and pokey to save pixels. Dalby has similar issues although for a print-book there must be another driver than bandwidth. Example [L], the body-text font on the right is 12pt [guessing] so the text in this adjacent illustration might be 2pt and unreadable without a jeweller's loup.

~35 years ago, I published a book . . . with an ISBN and all. We were wildly optimistic about the desirability of this product; printed-and-bound 250 copies; gave way a couple of dozen; sold [eventually] a couple of dozen; dumped 200. I am glad to have had the experience, could afford the loss, but wouldn't repeat. I wrote another book (on the Process of Pilgrimage) in 2004-2005 but was smart enough, burnt enough, not to try printing or publishing it. Dalby is made of sterner, bomb-proof stuff - he is a serial risk-taker: investing time and [loadsa] money in developing product which needs to be stored and distributed for years before the investment is recouped, let alone converted into shoes and sliced pans.

Life ain't fair. When we hefted concrete at Caislean Dalby in the 00s they lived halfway up a hill close to the CW-WW-WX triple point with stunning views to the South and SouthWest. Coillte had acquired and planted land on the other side of the L road. Those trees now form the standard Coillte dark green cliff which completely occludes the outlook towards the Blackstairs and the Plains of Wexford. They can do that because property rights over-ride mental health rights in Ireland. I've never heard Barry complain, though. Perhaps because as a professional cartographer he knows that the other side of his bohereen was forest at least as far back as the first Ordnance Survey in the 1830s. 

What he does complain about is VAT on maps. And being in competition with Ordnance Survey Ireland which The Man regards as essential civil and military infrastructure & allocates a wodge of tax-payers money each and every budget since 1825. Other creatives [novelists, poets, painters, musicians] get tax breaks because The State has decided their contributions raise the cultural tide for all of us and/but they can't sell enough of their product to make a living. Books, including atlases, have been zero-rated for VAT since 1972. But the consumer must pay an impost for maps . . . unless they are produced by The State through the Ordnance Survey.

I believe EastWest Mapping, in the person of Barry Dalby, has done the state some service by recording place-names and other aspects of landscape heritage. The State treats him like a maker and retailer of cuff-links.; nice if you fancy that sort of thing but not, like, essential. But like Luther, he kann nichts anders, and his creations are works of art, engineering and data-science. I urge you to buy one of his minority maps - they are a fire hazard stacked up in the poor fellow's attic. Luther? I didn't realise until the last few pages of Map Man, that Dalby and I [King's County etc.] both come from the Protestant tradition [as R a gem of 19thC church]. As an envoi to his autobiography, he suggests that members of the Church of Ireland have punched above their weight in cherishing, recording and creating the cultural heritage of Ireland . . . because as the outsiders-within they/we do not take it for granted. Go Barry, stick it to An Fear!

 

Much add about Shagsper

A month ago, by accident / in desperation, I tapped into a rich seam of books about math-for-real-life by Rob Eastaway. I enjoyed it, noted another dozen books in the seam and placed a reservation on his Much Ado About Numbers: Shakespeare's Mathematical Life and Times [2024]. For Eastaway, books are both his medium and his métier. For me, I package my copy into ~700 word Blobs. Nowadays, while it might take a tuthree hours of work to get to a final draft, launching the post gives rather effective closure. In a fortnight's time, I won't remember most of what I write this week . . . but at least I'll have a record of what was floating my boat in the present moment.

For Eastaway, his pubs are ~100x longer than mine, and he has gotten A Lot of books off his ToDo list and into the public domain. But it all amounts to about 1 million words delivered. He must have a mental or physical notebook filled with great ideas which fail at the "can I work this up as a book" stage. And he also has to believe his agent and his publisher will continue to take a punt with any new manuscript when and if he finally gets it over the line. Me not so much! Each Blob is essentially one idea, with two riffs and possibly something dreadful I dredge up from the past. And being author, editor and publisher all together means fewer barriers to publication . . . and lower standards. Short-form (paradoxically?) Blobs means far more words in the oeuvre - at least 2½ million.

Much Ado About Numbers started when the BMA British Mathematical Association had its 2022 AGM in Stratford-upon-Avon and Eastaway was scheduled to do a workshop for teachers. I bet I could fill an hour with fact and foibles about Shakespeare, quotha. [rabbit-hole alert!] A careful reading of the complete works, and at least a dozen books about The Bard, and numerous visits to libraries and museums, and interviews with experts and obsessives . . . and two years et voilá another book.

It's a valiant attempt at introducing the Arts Block to the Math Department and vice versa. I'll just share one idea which is cogent because the math element of the issue was actively in the process of getting nailed while Shakespeare was sharpening his quill to dash off a few iambic pentameters. It concerns probability while throwing dice [in a low pot-house in Stepney, or elsewhere]. The standard belief in the 1500s was that throwing 3 dice to a total of 9 was equally likely as throwing a 10 . . . because of the current sense /theory of permutations. How do I love 9 (or 10), let me count the ways:

Total 9	Total 10
1,2,6	1,3,6
1,3,5	1,4,5
1,4,4	2,2,6
2,2,5	2,3,5
2,3,4	2,4,4
3,3,3	3,3,4

Six different ways of obtaining 9, six for 10: therefore same odds. But whoa! rookie error (but only since Galileo ~ 1618 and especially since Pascal and Fermat's 1654 correspondence, 40 years after Shakespeare's death, had key countervailing insights). The three dice are different [say, colours OR the order in which they hit the table OR Bob's Tom's Kit's] and this needs taking into account.

Total 9	Total 10
1,2,6 1,6,2 2,1,6 2,6,1 6,1,2 6,2,1	1,3,6 1,6,3 3,1,6 3,6,1 6,1,3 6,3,1
1,3,5 1,5,3 3,1,5 3,5,1 5,1,3 5,3,1	1,4,5 1,4,3 3,1,4 3,4,1 4,1,3 4,3,1
1,4,4 4,1,4 4,4,1	2,2,6 2,6,2 6,2,2
2,2,5 2,5,2 5,2,2	2,3,5 2,5,3 3,2,5 3,5,2 5,2,3 5,3,2
2,3,4 2,4,3 3,2,4 3,4,2 4,2,3 4,3,2	2,4,4 4,2,4 4,4,2
3,3,3	3,3,4 3,4,3 4,3,3

Thus there are 6+6+3+3+6+1=25 ways to throw 9 but 6+6+3+6+3+3=27 routes to 10. Smart gamblers might have known or intuited it but not the rubes. Heck, it probably wasn't general knowledge even after Pascal and Fermat cranked the numbers: look at how many people bet on a nag in the Grand National because its name sounded like a dessert. Lots of folk are just unwilling to do the math.  Of course, there is an app for doing dice probs - much easier than writing out permutations in HTML.

I've returned-with-thanks Much Ado About Numbers to the Library - your turn - I recommend!

Beechdrops

I was writing about hay-rattle Rhinanthus minor a peculiarly desirable meadow flower parasitic on grasses. Digging a bit revealed that it was part of  Family Orobanchaceae. Dang! that rings a bell I thought . . . but a distant one. The family name derives from the Greek ὄροβος (vetch, a legume) + ἄγχω (strangler). And that's the key to the family's success. Their roots invade the roots of grasses and legumes to dine off the products of their host's photosynthesis - collapse of grass, which allows other meadow species to thrive in the gaps. Orobanchs all engage in parasitism but some, like hay-rattle, do not inhale and retain the ability to photosynthesize. 

When we came back to Ireland in 1990, the TCD lab in which I started to work had just emptied of a clatter of exceptionally smart scientists who all, eventually, became Full Professors at UCD, the Other University.

One of them, Ken Wolfe, signed up as a PostDoc in Jeff Palmer's Bloomington Indiana lab; tasked to investigate what happens to the photosynthetic apparatus when a plant is no longer required to capture energy from the sun because it's gone full-metal parasite on its neighbours. This required Ken to learn which end of an eppendorf would open and how to extract and process DNA from a homogenate of tissue. He was notably more successful than me in his temporary sojourn as a real [white coat, safety glasses] scientist. In those couple of years, he mastered a whole new toolkit and sequenced the chloroplast genome of Epifagus virginiana [L in Arkansas pic by Eric Hunt] an Orobanch which is an obligate parasite on the roots of Fagus grandifolia the American beech: no other species will do.

If you are adept in the language of molecular biology you can read the whole PNAS paper. Function and evolution of a minimal plastid genome from a nonphotosynthetic parasitic plant.  tl;dr chloroplasts, originally free-living bacteria, have their own reduced genome consisting of a) a bunch of genes to make energy-capture proteins b) another bunch of genes to switch on the 'business' genes. Epifagus, no longer bothered about photosynthesis, has lost about 2/3s of the normal chloroplast genome. This suggests that chloroplasts do something else as well as energy capture. But the plant could also be still in the process of shedding baggage. That's a neat story about the pattern and process of evolution, all tied up from a standing start in two years.

Wolfe returned to our alma mater after his been-to years in the USA and played to his strengths as a computational evolutionary biologist, leaving the generation of primary data to others. Through the rest of the 90s he did World-class beautifully illustrated work on the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae genome. and also contributed to The Paper delivering the human genome.

At the turn of this century he became my direct boss which permitted me fly-on-the-wall status as another generation of brilliant people chipped away at the coal-face of science while I watched. I think I earned my salt; but not really in a tangible papers-and-grants way. None of my three good ideas in science happened during that gig. But I really learned a lot and continue to be grateful for being giving a seat at the table.

Making welcome

Friday 26 Jun 26 was International Day here & up the hill. Θ, my old roomie at The Institute, announced that she was bringing her research team away from the Mean Streets of SmallTown, Midlands . . . to get some fresh air and see some green fields. It was the end of a not-quite-record-breaking week of heat-wave and it was muggy hot in our kitchen. In prep for an alfresco tea-party I started putting up the garden parasol under the big old dying ash tree at the bottom of the yard. Two young women appeared pushing street-bikes past the gate. I made some quip about mountain bikes being quicker but more dangerous going downhill and they paused to chat. They turned out to be Danish and were heading for the telecoms mast on Mt Leinster having borrowed the bikes from where they were WWOOFing in the next county.  I urged them to leave the bikes in the yard and continue their trek unimpeded; they agreed.

An hour later Greece, Egypt, Kenya, Senegal [I think! defo Afrique-Occidentale française, AOF] and Mexico arrived . . . bearing gifts b/c Θ was ever of the generous hand: two enormous punnets of  enormous strawberries. I had already picked wild strawberries and golden raspberry earlier as finials for ziggurats of scone, butter, bramble jelly, whipped cream. See L for comparison: from what an unpromising natural base modern commercial strawberries have sprung. I like our wild strawbs, I graze them as I pass, but it would be work to gather a kilo for cake or compôt. It was like my pal Dan who picked a handful of fraocháns Vaccinium myrtillus as a gift for the daughters of his AirBnB host but was pre-emptively presented with a whole fraochán pie made by said daughters.

By the time the two Danish cyclists returned for their bikes having yomped up Mt Leinster there were no scones left, forgive me they were delicious. There are no mountains in Denmark: the highest point Møllehøj is 170m above sea-level. A pimple compared to the modest hills we call mountains in Ireland. Indeed, the two strawberries [L] are an apt metaphor for the comparison.

We've been here before with some of the same players. I was hop-skip delighted to hear that, of the July 2024 party, India is now a research officer for the DeptAg, while Benin is working for Tipperary County Council. GO! Ar aghaidh! the New Irish.

Hay rattle and roll

We have, mainly through inattention, created a Traditional Hay Meadow. There is grass in there, even some Lolium perenne, perennial rye-grass. If Irish agronomists had their way, a following wind and infinite money, the island's pastures would be 100% rye-grass; because scientific studies have shown it a) responds well to nitrates b) promotes faster weight-gain in livestock than any other forage species.

One of the consequences of our mowing / feeding / selective killing [ragwort bad; kill ragwort] practice is that we have A Lot [see L: >100 plants per sq.m in patches] of hay-rattle, gliográn, Rhinanthus minor. It was part of what got us nominated as Farmers for Nature last year. We were advised then to contact Wild Flower companies to seed-share. In June, at one of the Organic Open Days, we were button-holed by Saorla Kavanagh from Teagasc. She also waxed enthusiastic about us looking at getting cash for hay-rattle.

Hay-rattle [the round yellow or purple blobs L are the seed capsules] is in Family Orobanchaceae aka broomrapes. Most of the species in the family are parasitic on the roots of grasses and/or legumes including clover: they tap into the phloem and suck out the sugars generated by photosynthesis in the host. Hay-rattle is a pretty comprehensive disaster for farmers who want to grow livestock for money. But it is a useful additive in wildflower plantings on roadside verges and roundabouts, and bougie horse-paddocks If grass is suppressed, poppies and forget-me-nots, bedstraws and orchids can get their colourful flower-heads up and seen.

There is another possible viewpoint for maintaining a greater diversity of plant species where cattle and sheep graze. For us, it is quite possible to subsist on a diet of oatmeal porridge and buttermilk but that's an existence rather than a rich and healthy life.  A more diverse diet is going feed up our gut microbiome to better fight off pathogenic infections and release micronutrients and vitamins. I have an open mind on whether cattle self-medicate. My pal P did some work 40 years ago looking at how ovulation in kangaroos Osphranter rufus is driven by plant estrogens which become available after drought-break.

If I was the scientist I was when I was 18 y.o. I would have done a quadrat analysis to assess how many hay-rattle plants we have. That would require throwing a dart (. . . stick, rock, coat-hanger) at random into the field [with a string attached so it don't get lost] and counting the plants in a 1 metre square of which the dart is the SE corner . . . rinse, repeat say 10x. But 100 plants will do for order of magnitude estimate. We have 11 acres of trad.meadow over 4 fields. Round that down to 4 hectares = 40,000sq.m. I 'harvested' 10 hay-rattle plants on Monday evening and shook out [L] 2½g of seed - they are the size of tomato seed rather than poppy. That converts to 25g = 1oz per sq.m. or 1,000kg = 1 tonne in total! Wildflower folk are quoting €10/kg harvested. That's me on the piss tonight! or as soon as they payola.

Goaded by Saorla's call and with her help, we scared up some names and telephone numbers including Sandro Cafolla [bloboprev on ecotypes of Ash], who Wildflowers just over the far edge of our (tiny) county. He's been doing this for at least 30 years [and his website is about the same hand-cranked vintage]. We went on a courtesy call / informational interview there yesterday: mainly to see what machinery we'd have compacting the soil of our meadows. Could be a Hege 140 or a Hege 125  plot combine harvester.These teeny-combines were invented & developed by a German engineer called Hans-Ulrich Hege [1928-2021] to selectively harvest small plots for plant breeding stations, universities and experimental farms. They tread lightly on the earth. Alternatively a brush-harvester hauled behind a quad-bike. I R excite! New venture, bigging up biodiversity.