skolstrejkar för klimatet

"Nobody made a greater mistake than he who 

did nothing because he could do only a little"

[prev quote] Edmund Burke

Skolstrejkar för klimatet - it's a thing . . . in Sweden because one 15 y.o. kid [Greta Thunberg above] decided that a) nobody she knew, nobody she heard on the radio or TV, seemed to be doing anything very much about Climate Change b) she'd have to do a little. Poor child couldn't live with herself, didn't see much point in living, with this cloud, this gathering storm, hanging over everything she knew and loved.

When I was 6 or 7, there was a conjunction of several planets. This event was trailed on BBC news with some footage of folks from India preparing for the consequent end of the world. Much wailing and gnashing of teeth, sack-cloth and ashes in the sub-continent. I spent the whole following day sick with apprehension, silently looking about me saying goodbye and wondering if the end would be painful. By tea-time I'd come to terms with oblivion but as dusk fell and we were all still walking around, I reckoned that the sun would probably rise in the morning and the BBC had been misinformed.

Half a century later in Sweden, Greta Thunberg worry's was not similarly and quickly relieved because her armageddon with not time-limited - although no less distressing for that. She was so shoulder-slumped with apprehension that she stopped eating and speaking - because, what's the point? Very distressing for her parents who stopped working to face and corral the agony within their family. Part of the problem was that Greta is labelled Asperger's; as she says, for her things are black-and-white and she is physically unable to lie. The fact that she has no time for social play is not the most important aspect of her syndrome. Eventually, Greta came to align with Ed Burke: it wouldn't help Greta or her parents or The Planet if she starved to death. What to do? Stop going to school for starters: the whole school-system seemed predicated on inertia, status and status quo. It seemed more useful to make a big placard and start a sit-down strike outside the Swedish Parliament. She did this alone for one day in September 2018 and then in like-minded company for several weeks. Right now her protest has rowed back to Fridays. Greta and her pals were consciously emulating the response to yet another school shooting a year ago in Florida - macabrely named the Valentine's Day Massacre. There, in the National School Walkout, students refused to go to school because the adults in the room were spineless about doing something about the American way of death. It probably seemed safer at home.

Eventually some people in Sweden paid attention to Greta's sense of urgency and she was invited to speak in mid-December at the 24th UN Meeting on Climate Change at Katowice in Poland. She gave it to them and the wider world insofar as anyone tuned into the reportage. One of her stop-the-world-I-want-to-get-off statements is that people in Sweden have enough - surely to goodness we have enough stuff. It might be a start if people like her (and me, and probably you) stopped now buying new clothes, phones, lactose-free milk and allowed the Third World to catch up. It would be far too much for us white-folks to tithe our disposable income for the less fortunate - heck we need that Summer holiday after the hard working year.

Her story was picked up by Amy Goodman at Democracy Now. If you could not make it to Katowice, you could have caught her a few days earlier at TEDx Stockholm. Greta and her dad Svante have to be circumspect about their bookings because part of Greta's climate-healthy living regime is that she won't fly: it took two days to drive (electric car!) from Stockholm to Katowice. She's given up meat too and encouraged her folks to follow her in this - all those cow burps, all that methane; she really didn't want to be any part of that. Her mother can sing even if she does occasionally eat meat.
Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because teenage girls count for little in our society. Greta Thunberg is speaking the truth to power, the least we can do is adopt just one of the many life-style changes she has embraced.

Related exhortation:
You cannot begin to preserve any species of animal unless you preserve the habitat in which it dwells. Disturb or destroy that habitat and you will exterminate the species as surely as if you had shot it. So conservation means that you have to preserve forest and grassland, river and lake, even the sea itself. This is not only vital for the preservation of animal life generally, but for the future existence of man himself -- a point that seems to escape many people. -Gerald Durrell.

J joker

Don't leave it all to me: Juggernaut - Jinx - Juliette Binoche - Janus - Jet-ski - Jodhpurs - Joxer - it's a J J Day.

• Jack o'  Diamonds - Lonnie Donegan
• Junebug - Robert Francis
• LumberJacks in BC. From fellers to the saw mill via the Johnstone Strait.
• Jason Hazeley talks about his dead dad. Part of Griefcast, a large series of podcasts by Cariad Lloyd. End of Life issues interest me, but these are too long, too self-indulgent. Try the index to see if there's anyone of whom you've heard?
• Juno - for the other end of life?
• Jonathan Irwin - Jack and Jill story
• Jacob Cockle - a sad story
• Judi Dench on speaking Shakespeare [Shagsprev]
• Jelly Roll Morton
• The Crave
• Tiger Rag
• Jenever - Holland's national tipple.
• Juniper as medicine.
• Pączki = Jelly donuts Warsawa style
• Jättikuljetus - Finnish freighting
• Goodnight Jim-Bob - remember the Waltons?

Jewish humor. Moshe [94] and Miriam [92] go to visit the family lawyer because they want to get divorced.

Lawyer: But you've been married for more than 70 years, why get divorced now?

Moshe: We wanted to wait until all the children were dead.

A time to die

There's a famous Zen story about an apprentice monk who breaks <ooops> the Sensei's favorite tea-bowl. He cleans up the pieces and seeks out his teacher:
"Sensei sensei what is death?"
"Ah so, good question, nobel pupil. This has engaged the great scholars of today and previous times. The surest thing we have established is that for everything there is a time to be created and a time to die"
Bringing the pot-sherds from behind his back, the apprentice says "It was time for your cup to die".

[Optional Cue Blade Runner]

When we left the tree-felling story, I was feeling soiled and ashamed at being unable to address avarice and cruelty in another person. The bloke next door did sell his property . . . to an unhappy couple for whom rural isolation in a foreign country was the last thing they needed to cement their relationship. Within a year, the house was on the market again and eventually bought by a couple from town with a personable and chatty sub-teenage chap and a small dog. I started waking up at 0300hrs on stormy nights imagining the last substantial macrocarpa cypress falling over and crushing their cottage like a bug. That tree was now exposed to winds from half the points of the compass and had lost several large limbs after the trim and tidy of February 2016. My favorite timber-team were unable to give me a quote but eventually a tree-surgeon came recommended and said he'd come a look to see what he would advise.

Owning a tree comes with responsibilities; same as owning a dog and going hill-walking among sheep. If it does damage you can't just claim act of god or nature's whim. I felt particularly wrong-footed because I'd had to defend tree's very existence against the 'expert' opinion of the local tree-surgeon. It was hard, having thus committed myself pro silva , to turn 180^o and agree with a man I found personally repellent. Accordingly, on the night before my appointment with the new tree-feller, I went to ask for absolution from Fr. Rissoles of Forth & Bargy. I was feeling wrung out by the whole emotional turmoil of it. But a cup of strong tea and a wodge of sourdough soon braced me. "Sometimes", said His Rissoleness, "you just have to do what you have to do . . . that will be two decades of the rosary and five shillings please". He's old style/

It was therefore with a reasonably clear conscience that the following day, I shook hands on a several days deal to trim, limb, chip and fell a tree under which countless children had swung since at least 1989 when it came into the family. Dealing with a contractor, who comes with a team of more or less well-integrated workers, is thatworks because a) I do far less work b) the work goes quicker and so it's often cheaper. The disadvantage is that the workers are underpaid and overworked and ultimately expendable.

The Thursday and Friday after Christmas I thus stood on the solid earth as another arborist got his bearings in the tree and started to rain parts of it down to ground. 'Stood' was entirely the wrong word because I was tasked with keeping the felling zone clear and sorting everything into piles for chipping, splitting and cutting. Jakers, b'ys, I may be getting too old for this sort of mullarkey. I have to use muscles which normally sit in a groove of the sofa. And even the more active muscles are brought to bear in quite novel combinations. If you don't limber up and take it handy it's easy to get a crook back or a hernia. At tea time on Friday as dusk swept in from the sea, I was knackered but there was nothing left upright except a single 5m tall knobbly trunk pointing like an accusatory finger at the sky.

TBC: yesterday . . . and today.

Sercquiais

It's a while since I did a pitch on the Island Index.

Sercquiais is the variety of Norman French that the oldest inhabitants of Sark speak. Sark is one of the Channel Islands, and the whole parcel of them are a peculiar political anachronism. They are (separate) personal fiefs of the British monarch, so not part of the EU nor indeed of the UK, but are part of the Customs Union. Sark is part of the Bailiwick of Guernsey. As part of the peculiar feudal political system, Sark is held in fief by the Seigneur of Sark who in turn has 40 feudal vassals known as tenants. This is not the same as tenant as 'one who rents a flat in Dublin' but rather (going back to its original French meaning) a 'holder' of a tenement. Everyone seems to inherit their entitlements and every one of the 40 tenants was entitled to a seat in the Chief Pleas - [Sercquiais: Cheurs Pliaids] the local parliament. The Seigneur and the Seneschal of Sark also ex officio took a seat in the Chief Pleas as well as 12 members elected by the other ~450ish inhabitants of the island. The Seneschal - effectively the local Justice - is appointed for life by the Seigneur. The Serkyee are thus fantastically over-represented. Worse even than Ireland which has 1 TD for every 30,000 population compared to 1 MP per 100,000 across the water in UK.

I put all that representative 'democracy' in the past tense because, in 1993, part of one of the forty tenements - the island of Bercqhou [see map R] off the West coast of the main island - was bought by the Billionaire Barclay Brothers. These lads, twins born in 1934, are the poster boys for venture capitalism; making a habit of buying cheap and selling dear such names as Ladybird Books, The Telegraph, Woolworths, Littlewoods, The Ritz Hotel and . . . Bercqhou. In the 00s, they carried out a sort of putsch; forcing the Chief Pleas to reform itself into a 30 member chamber with 28 of the seats filled by direct election; thus ending the House-of-Lords-like unelected representation prior to 2008. They all had an interesting war during the German occupation of the Channel Islands, but Sark fared better under that imposing regime than the other Islands.

That's all very quaint and medieval. Perhaps more interesting scientifically is to reflect on the fact that Sark is a skim of topsoil on a pimple of metamorphic and igneous rock sticking up out of a tumultuous sea. It is therefore geologically diverse and diversity suggests money to those who put their shirt on digging holes in the ground and coming up rich.  How diverse? Was answered by Ixer and Stanley in 1983:
"The primary ore assemblage is pyrite, galena, chalcopyrite, tennantite, tetrahedrite, sphalerite, marcasite, arsenopyrite, pyrrhotine, bravoite, enargite, and the silver minerals pyrargyrite, pearceite, polybasite, and acanthite. Gangue [ie useless] minerals are hematitic quartz, calcite, and illite. Alteration products include chalcosine, covelline, blaubleibender, covelline, limonite, malachite, azurite, cerussite, and anglesite."

Unless you're a prospecting geologist, that will be mostly a list of foreign-looking words. Galena is PbS = lead sulphide while pyrite aka fool's gold is FeS₂ or Iron II disulphide. I've high-lighted the Irish interest mineral pyrite. That's the stuff which was inappropriately and culpably used as packing under numerous housing estates during the last boom. Pyrite loses its structural integrity when wet so the houses above are sinking unevenly into the ground.  I've high-lighted the words that caught people's eye in the 1830s and 1840s.

In 1833, a British prospector called John Hunt persuaded the then Seigneur Peter Le Pelley to allow him to dig for the silver deposits. The bargain caused the bankruptcy of the Le Pelley family with Peter's nephew Pierre Carey Le Pelley ceding the mortgaged fief to Marie Collings. In all, the venture had cost £34,000 but had yielded only 25,000 oz of Silver which sounds a lot until you convert that to 700kg. Together with several 1000 kg of lead the return only amounted to £4.000 in folding money. The investment was distributed among 200 Cornish miners, and about 70 local laborers over the decade when hopes were high and speculators could be recruited. It is not impossible, the timing being good, to imagine that some of the laid off miners from Sark shipped off to find employment along the Copper Coast of Waterford in the 1840s and 1850s.

Love islands? More Island Essays.

Chopper

Since as long as I can remember I have been a tree-hugger. Not literally, mind, because the noblest trees are usually too big in the girth to get your arms around. Since we bought the farm 20+ years ago, I have planted thousands of trees both on our home place and as part of a meitheal for friends and neighbours. On balance, I think that offsets the carbon footprint of sending so much wood-smoke up the chimney each winter. But trees require more than hugs and having trees on your property comes with responsibilities. Every storm that crashes in from the Atlantic, trees or parts of trees come crashing to earth and have to be cleared up. I can do the tidy up and enjoy the work because the result of the honest toil is a pile of fire-wood to boil the tea-kettle in a couple of years time. But some trees are too close for comfort and then it is dicey to wait to see when and which way they fall. We were lucky with the Darwinday Storm of 2014 because the wind blew the 4 enormous Mackie Cupressus macrocarpa trees away from the house and not on top of it.

Two years later, in February 2016, the one surviving Mackie [R looming massive previous to treatment], now exposed to the full brunt of the SouthWest gales started to shed its upper branches and so I asked my tree-surgeoning pal Rissoles to tog up and bring them safely to ground rather than waiting for them to fall on the fragile garden shed immediately below. I did the ground works as and when timmmmmber came down from above. While he was up there he did a bit of prophylaxis: evening up the weight upstairs and tidying the ragged ends of previous falls. When he'd finished the tree was safe and looked neat. I was happy and relieved.

A very few months later, the owner / rentier of the house next door announced that he was going to sell his house as part of his retirement package . . . and would we now agree to fell out another large ratty looking Mackie that stood on the property boundary overhanging both his garden and the county road. It looked ratty because about 20 years before a family friend had gone up the tree with a chainsaw wearing jeans and a pair of runners and cut away random pieces of top hamper to reduce the windage. Feeling pressured by a fellow who hadn't been bothered to say hello previously, I didn't feel super-happy about this ultimatum proposal; but agreed to it. At least the neighbour, who stood most to benefit, offered to go halves on the cost and announced that he knew just the man, a contractor from the banks of the Suir, to do the work. I've met a good few tree surgeons and lumberjacks over the years and they are mostly efficient, highly-skilled, mild-mannered people with a hearty appetite. The contractor turned up a week later with 3 workers, a truck, a van and a chipper/mulcher. His people worked like the divil and reduced the whole tree to its component parts well within the working day. But it was ugly to see the teenage apprentice hazed and harried, and the Polish groundsman disrespected while their gaffer leaned on his shovel or made phone calls all day.  At one point he drove his 4x4 directly at me and young Bolivar because it was too much trouble to ask us to step out of the way and it mildly amusing to see the shock and fear on my face as we dived left and right.

When the tree was down and everything was almost all tidied away he gestured at the pruned and tidied Mackie on which Rissoles had worked that Spring and asked <sneer> "Who did that?". The clear implication was a) that I was a fool to pay for the work and b) that sort sort of thing was a waste of time. The next statement was quite explicit "The only thing to do with them big Mackies is to fell 'em for firewood". The idea of respecting the right to exist of a tree that had been 60 or 80 years a-growing was, to him, laughable. The thought that a tree, in and of itself, was a thing of beauty in the landscape or utility in the ecosystem was impossible for him to imagine. Big trees were just something in the way, which had potential to be converted into money. I've told this story to a number of people in the tree and timber trade and they've all had a flash of recognition. I don't have to name the crusher of the treescape because he is an archetype - so common as to be almost the norm - whose chainsaw is a vital part of his sense of machismo. Is it a wonder that they behave like dicks? . . . and they make money by paying the workers as little as possible.

Chick sexing down the tubes

There are strong evolutionary pressures to have an equal 1M:1F sex ratio. Disagreeable British geneticist RA Fisher explained the algebra of XX = XY embryos in the 1930s. In the wild this sex-ratio is the best solution for ensuring success in the natural selection next generation lottery. Agricultural practice does not always find this the best for efficiency or profit. As we saw in cattle: bull calves are better for beef [testosterone makes muscle quicker] but completely useless for dairy. But in a dairy herd half the calves are male unless you use sexed-semen or some other way of subverting the natural order. At least the surplus male calves have some residual value at the mart.

Not so in the chicken industry. Here the competition is fierce and the margins are really tight in the relentless drive for cheaper goujons. Particularly in industrial hatcheries, where the product is 300+ eggs a year from each laying hen, male chicks have no capacity for making money and are disposed of before they literally eat into the profit.  Problem is that, to you and me, male and female hatchlings are impossible to tell apart. When we had chicks we had to wait weeks until the adolescent males betrayed themselves by their obstreperous bullying and we could send them off to René for the pot. No commercial operation could tolerate so many useless mouths for so long. Since the 1930s, by careful scrutiny of the rear-end of 100s of hatchlings, it was realised that males have a pimple in the vent that is reliably larger than in females. In most females no 'eminence' is discernible. But there are a significant number of edge-cases where there is a small bump. The company wants to sort these difficult cases with as much accuracy as possible because errors either way will cost money. Enter >!ta-RARRR!< the Korean chicken sexers.

For some reason, traditionally Koreans and Japanese have this job-specification sewn up. Although as there are non-Japanese sumo wrestlers, I'm sure that other nationalities have shouldered there way into the profession. Here's a chap from West Africa = 10.5 chicks in 37 seconds. I guess the main thing is to prevent repetitive strain injury as each chick has to be picked up, turned over, poked with the pinkie and cast into one of two output streams. If you say Selektion in German it will bring up a welter of WWII associations. The casual ruthlessness gets a bad press among sensitive consumers - although they like eating cheap chicken and don't want to look too closely at their complicity in the process.

There are other methods for sexing chicks. In some "slow-feathering" strains the wing feathers develop at different speeds in males and females, so trained operators can sex the chicks by comparing the lengths of the primary and covert feather stumps. And the Silver gene S is carried on the sex-chromosome, so if you cross an S female with a ss male you'll get a) a 50:50 mix of silver and gold chicks b) which are exactly consonant with gender c) in a way that a child of six can tell the difference. But adding these genetic markers to the breeding mix may impact on direct economics of chick production. The standard now is an astonishing 41 days between hatching and packing for broilers.

Now Prof Dr Almuth Einspanier at U. Leipzig has developed a consumer sensitive pre-hatching biotech diagnostic to accurately determine the sex of chicks 9 days after fertilisation and so 12 days before hatching. The stoutly maintain that, at that age, chicks don't have the neuronal capacity to feel pain. The German market, like the American death penalty market, is all tied in knots about this aspect of the process. It would be uncontroversially humane if those sensitive-flower German consumers just stopped eating chicken then they wouldn't have to implement a high-tech solution to clear their conscience. Einspanier's test hinges on the fact that estrone concentrations are higher in the allantoic fluid of female chicks. A coloured anti-body test for hormones is well-established - think pregnancy tests - but there were other logistical problems to overcome. These mainly dealt with methods to remove a sufficient quantity of fluid from the egg without compromising the internal sterility and also minimising the time out of incubator. It came down to lasering a 300μm = 0.3mm hole in the shell and the inner membrane and squeezing out some drupples of fluid:
Blokes may sub-consciously accept the fate of the cocklets: "high quality feed"? that sounds okay because it glosses over the fact that the discarded eggs are the feed. Eggs produced in this way are now on the shelves in at least one German supermarket chain. They are selling well. But it's another layer of uncertainty to try to incorporate into our clear-conscience shopping. In Aldi you can buy eggs OR organic eggs OR free-range eggs. But not as far as I can tell organic & free-range eggs. Is free range better than organic? For me? for the pullets? for the planet? And where do you rate pain-free eggs?

The art of giving

New Day, New Year, looking forward to a year of Enough Already.  We were down with Pat the Salt, the Ancient Mariner, from Christmas Eve until the end of the week. It being Christmas we probably over-catered but I haven't thrown anything in the bin yet. Given the importance of meat in the traditional spread, it doesn't help that half the family are vegetarians. No way could I persuade Dau.II aka Cookie that chicken OR ham was a valid Boolean alternative to chicken AND ham. I have therefore spent the last week eating, not what I want, but what will go off soonest - it is part of the penance which I make of the Festival of St Mammon. On Christmas Eve, The Beloved popped out with a bag of small gifts for the immediate neighbours, who looked out for Pat and Souad when they were a potentially vulnerable elderly couple. When she returned with the bag filled, I assumed it was because the neighbours were Out. Not so: they were In but had a reciprocal gift waiting in the hall. That was a sweet [literally! biscuits and candies are safe bets in such transactions] thought and part of the tradition but really we didn't need more calories in the house. That festive almond, marzipan and cherry roulade which I made the weekend before Christmas? it weighed a kilo and I had to eat it all - because the family preferred to fill up on nut-cutlets, hang-sangs, and Christmas cake. But for the fact that I spent Th and Fr hauling brash for a tree-surgeon, I would be like a balloon now.

My mother, for as long as I've known, has used the bottom drawer of her side-board as a holding pen for house-gifts: all those chocolates and biscuits and candles which you get if you invite normal folks to dinner. If the Village Hall Committee comes round looking for donations for the fund-raising raffle, m'Mum doesn't need to go to the shops; just as far as the dining room. I suppose if she hadn't been brought up in the Hungry 30s by my thrifty Scottish granny, she might just have horsed into the sweets as soon as her guests had gone. By not adding a kilo a month to her waist from the unmetabolised calories she is still with us. But her regifting is not doing much for the economy.

In the run-up to Christmas, Dau.I aka Donata got swept up in Basket Brigade. Her local BB was not obviously associated with Tony "Motivator" Robbins: she was recruited by the local chapter of the Repeal the Eighth campaign. Having Saved the Gays and Saved the Autonomous Uterus, the rads of Dublin NorthWest set their sights on saving the dispossessed. In particular those who would otherwise be feeding on a bag chips in a hotel room over Christmas. By actively canvassing in November, they raised €3,000 to fill 100 Christmas boxes for those who had buggerall to celebrate this winter. They also leaned on the manager of the local Supervalu store to donate 100x of suitable festive fare. On Sat 15th Dec, a couple of dozen volunteers filled those 100 boxes with a chicken and ham and a bunch of other stuff to eat. You might think that an uncooked chicken is as useful in a bedsit as a dead rat, but it seems that almost every homeless family has someone who'll have them home for Christmas.
[aside: as the 1967 foot-and-mouth epidemic in Britain continued onto December, Brits were exhorted to Have an Irishman for Christmas dinner because the lads were being discouraged from going home. The waggish riposte was "No thanks, I'd rather have a turkey like last year"]
As well as the ham and chicken, the BB basket had fresh vegetables, tinned fruit, trifle, custard, a box of fancy biscuits, some paper towels, tea, instant coffee, and some candies for the very young and very old. Normal food for normal people with perhaps an edge of healthiness: Carrots and sprouts can seem like a rare treat if you've eaten nothing but take-out for months.

Just as we were packing up to come back to the mountain after Christmas with Pat the Salt, there was <bing bong> a delivery of a Basket's Galore BG hamper from one of our Rellies Abroad. These things are not designed for the dispossessed but rather for "What do you give to the man who has everything?".  I guess the cognitive dissonance clanged loudest when I found that BG hampers <not ours!> often include Heart of Lincolnshire cheddar cheese. I hate madey-uppy designer cheeses: cheddar is a supreme treat; cheddar-with-cranberries is an unnecessary travesty; cheddar pressed into a ❤ shape and covered with wax the colour of strawberry blancmange is an insult to the senses. I had a look at the BG website and was taken by their Gourmet Xmas Basket because it was 40% off. There is very little which is honest food in the table of contents:

Grace's All Butter Oatmeal Biscuits 135g

Ducs de Gascogne Authentic French Pate 90g

Lily O'Brien's Creamy Caramels Sea Salt 120g

Ditty's Bakery Savoury Oatcakes 150g

Louisiana Hickory Smoke Almonds 40g

Nim's 100% Fruit Crisps 20g

Crossogue Country Fruit Chutney 225g

Bandon Vale Vintage Cheddar Cheese 200g

Heart of Lincolnshire Mature Cheddar 200g

Glandor Red Leicester Cheese Truckle 200g

Wyndham Estate’s Bin 555 Shiraz 750g

All those fancy-sounding names speak added-value for the shareholders but not-so-much added-value for the consumers. Happy New Year. There is a no greater treat than a baked potato, slashed open and filled with a normal grated cheddar and a dob of butter.