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!