Brimful

Three weeks ago, I was obsessing about the rain [lack of] and how disconcertingly crisp was the yard after a no-rain July. The rain gods delivered a steady drizzle on the 3rd August and then buggered off back to the tropics. On 27th August we were part of a yellow rainfall-with-thunder warning. I took The Beloved to the Dublin train, acquired some groceries, and got back home by 10:00am. Just as the heavens opened. It's not Winter, so I instanter stripped down to shorts [no, not me undies USAians] and a T-shirt, seized my biggest azada, and spent 30 minutes beefing up the berms which divert water from the surface of the lane into the parallel drain. It rained steady for the next 4 hours, at the end of which 37mm of rain had fallen. That's an inch and half or about 5% of the annual average rainfall in East Ireland.  Over the 10:00 to 10:00 24 hours about 44mm fell. And we are forecast for more rain in reasonable amounts over the next week, 

By skipping about between my various pumps, siphons and containers, we are now back to full capacity:

• 2200 lt - 2x 1tonne IBC 
• 200 lt - 1 large herring barrel
• 330 lt - 3x med herring barrels
• 240 lt - 1 blue stable-barrow [R bot]
• 100 lt - 1 orange movers packing crate [R top]
• 100 lt - misc 20lt buckets
• 3 tonnes total 

In June I was delighted to score some as-new bright orange food grade buckets with snap lids [R top]. Hill-walking friends-and-neighbours came by to harvest some hay-rattle Rhinanthus minor seed to put brakes on the grass in their lawn. We had a great time, thrashing the standing plants into buckets until we had a few hundred grams of mostly hay-rattle seed. Bonus: misc other wildflowers. I expressed admiration for the buckets they had brought for this purpose and two days later six as-new buckets appeared over the gate into our yard. Mick was quietly pleased to be presenting orange buckets to the local Prod. But I am colour-blind in these matters: and not all protestants sport a sash.

Give me your poor

M'correspondent G sent me a link from the Kilkenny People about a free bus to the mountains running on Sundays this Summer. The new bus service is a cunning plan from Kilkenny Leader, whose CEO Declan Rice offered  “the great outdoors in rural Ireland almost always requires people to have a private car.” errm quite so, although you could pile 5 people into a taxi and call yourselves the Boomtown Rats Bag'town Ramblers. I live in the mountains served by this bus service and say "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free". Our mountain commonage is 200 hectares in extent, we could certainly disperse a 30-strong busload of TiredPoorHuddled across the heather so that they could not see / hear each other . . . but could see / hear skylarks.

It took a while before the distant bell tinkled by that short piece in the KK People overcame my residual tinnitus and I remembered that I'd been 'involved' with the birth of this worthy endeavour. Around Christmas time 2024, I had some to-fro with a couple of young Effectives from SETU = South East Technological University, including a Zoom-call. They were working on a "Mobility Strategy for Lower River Barrow & Blackstairs Mountains Visitor Region" aka was it feasible to criss-cross this "here be dragons" backwater with bus stops or rentable bicycle stands to link the market towns along its periphery. In 2022, I had researched & written a Heritage Report bigging up the history, ecology and free-breathingness of the self-same Visitor Region. So I had something to contribute. I'm old and forgetful, so my sharing report, opinions, contacts & IP with this project had long since flushed out of my memory-palace and down the streams of times past. Then G reminded me. So harrrumph, it might have been courteous to keep a tally of all the voluntariat contributions to the project and drop them a line to say the Buses are running and thanks for your help. Even if you believed that it was all your own work.

Anyway moan off! It looks like I can catch a [free] bus at Sunday lunchtime from a car-park I can see from The Ringstone, pootle into town, buy a newspaper, skull a pint, and be back on the bus home half an hour later. Other permutations, involving more pints, are surely possible. Last Sunday, they were giving thundery downpours in the afternoon, so I resolved to catch the bus going South to the buzzing metropolis of Graiguenamanagh. Dep Car-Park 1110 arr Graigue 1130 and return 45 mins later. When he got there, the cupboard was bare: because Barrow Bus doesn't know where is the Car Park. I therefore missed that bus and reverted to Plan A: North to Borris. I made an informed guess about where B.B. thought the Stop was, was wrong, but flagged down the bus as it left the mountains for civilization. I shared the bus into Borris with two elderly ladies from St Mullins, who were going for Coffee in Goresbridge (and why not?). 

I used to boast-moan, that our gaff couldn't be further from a regular bus stop [20km East or 25km West] and still be in the populous province of Leinster. I also used to rant at the precarity and unjoined-upness of Irish buses. But in the last tuthree years TFI - Transport For Ireland has really pushed the bus out. There are now five No.359 buses each way between Enniscorthy and New Ross via our mountainy hinterland. Whoa! and, like, woot! They have just installed a bus-shelter [R, as yet unvandalized] at the Dead Centre [note graves in background] of Kiltealy. I fully intend to walk 40mins down the mountain to the nearest stop - for the craic like. 

Or for utility:

• 🚶Shanks mare Home 0720 Kiltealy 0800 
• 🚌359 Kiltealy 0805 New Ross 0840
• 🚌340 New Ross 0920 Waterford 0940
• 🚌360 Waterford 0943 Tramore 1005 

They would still have croissants for sale at The Seagull Bakery in Tramore! I could afford one from the pot of gold saved by not driving 70km in my Yaris. And delighted to report that JJKavanagh buses covering Dublin-Déise have, after 40 years of capitalism red-in-tooth-and-claw, out-competed the state sponsored Bus Éireann to close down its parallel Rte 4.

Going to the dogs

In March this year, I wrote about failing to track and borrow the only copy on the books of a title in the Irish public library system. I mildly moaned about this to Dau.I the Librarian: books are effective fungible, one is as good as another for my edutainment. It turns out that her current role is Acquisitions, Non-Fiction and she responded brightly "thanks for the suggestion, I think We the Library could acquire a couple of copies". And it was so, and she reserved one for me to borrow, and on 13 Aug I was messaged:

• The following item(s) are being held for you until the date shown below. Title: Winterdance:the fine madness of Alaskan dog-racing Author: Paulsen, Gary

Well, Winterdance (note: not Riverdance auf Nuremburg) is a stitch and deserves to be read much more widely by a dog-loving nation. And yet, because of Der Triumph des Neuen, this 30 year old publication had been remaindered  and culled to make room for 313 copies of The impossible fortune : a Thursday Murder Club mystery (2025) then latest by Richard Osman. And 251 copies of Prize-winning The Adversary by Michael Crummey.

Winterdance is the tale of conjuring up a team of sled dogs [Typhoon Cookie Yogi Max Storm Steven Bill Devil Murphy Ortho BigMac Raven Byron - other people's dogs, other people's names] with the intention of running the 1850km Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race [whc Bloboprev] in 1983.

About 20 years ago 7 y.o. Dau.II wanted a dog so badly that she spent lots of time as a dog - gruffling, fawning, crawling about on all fours and eating weetabix off the kitchen floor. This annoying behavious did  manifest her desire [R.ashers] in short order. Paulsen reckoned along similar lines. I had to sleep in the kennel, I had to be with the dogs all the time, learn from them all the time, know them all the time. More than sleep [there], I had to be in the kennel all the time. I had to, in some way, become a dog. Without that 100% commitment, his future as a (-40°F = -40°C) sled-runner was going to be bleak indeed and could get him and his dogs killed.

Spoiler: Paulsen finished the Iditarod with all 15 of his starting dogs, nowhere near the prize money but well along in his transition to become a dog. Whiffs like a dog, pulls like a dog, eats sketchy like a dog. I recommended it to Dau.II who has lately been on a Reading Running jag: Feet in the Clouds, -- Tarahumara, -- Zatopek. What's not to love about endurance, adversity, sunrise from the top of the world . . . with pups? Winterdance is not didactic, it's not a diary, it's a distillation of a process. It is funny hilarious. There are now three copies in the Library.

My analysis of the process of pilgrimage [Santiago etc etc] concludes that internal transformation can occur at walking pace (indeed on crutches) if there is intention, if expectation of failure is dumped, if you go a little bit more. Pilgrimage is something you do on your feet not with your feet up with a book. I have seen with mine own eyes: Dau.II is running.

O Dia dos artesãos

'Twas on a Friday morning
The painter made a start
With undercoats and overcoats he painted every part
Every nook and every cranny
But I found when he was gone
He'd painted over the gas tap and I couldn't turn it on! 

Flanders & Swann 

We do be living on the farrrm thirty years. In 1996, the farmhouse was in neglected, but not ruinous condition: hole in the front door, hole in the roof, missing gutters, no running water. After our neighbours John & Michael sunk a bore-hole to 30m, and famous Paddy Butler submersed a pump, we (by which I mean She) sourced a plumber to capture the upwelling for taps and radiators. The plumber was not local, and nor were we, but nobody told him about the acid groundwater, so he fitted everything out with [industry standard] copper pipe. The copper hot-water cylinder failed within two years; about the same time as the pressure cylinder at the well-head. The pipes to the bathroom lasted a bit longer and were eventually replaced by qualpex plastic . . . but not before serially compromising the kitchen ceiling below.

For reasons, The Beloved decided that 2026 was when we would future-proof the house. She canvassed her network for a house-painter, electrician, plumber, stove-guy. Because our network leans Woo, most of the new Tradies ran eccentric hours and work-practice. Since 27 April, it's been a Napoleonic 100 Days campaign of disruption. It may be, should be, standard practice to supply tea at tea-breaks and who can offer tea without biscuits or brack? Hereabouts, in echoes from pre-1970 haying meitheals, contractors working all day get a full meat&potatoes dinner at lunchtime. In 2026, we found ourselves sitting to dinner [no fish!] at 8pm being regaled with stories about Communist Poland or tea and sandwiches [no crusts!] at 6pm hearing about chai and cricket among Calcutta's dispossessed. Not to mention exchanging cakes for flapjacks with a New Irish family in the next county.

Last Monday was scheduled to be O Dia dos Artesãos [The Day of the Tradies: Sparks + Séan-the-tree + Slappie Mike] and The Beloved was called away to the Déise at short notice.  It's always alright on the night, but I find dealing with people and their hydration is stressful, so I requested Tuesday as O Dia do Cobertor Ponderado [Duvet-day = Day of the Weighty Blanket]. When the Electrician rescheduled for Wednesday, my stress drained a bit but spread a bit and it rather became A Semana dos Artesãos. WTF the Portuguese? Another recent addition to our lives is from Brasil and my Portuguese is better than her English, so Thursdays involves a different sort Bom dia, obrigado of interpersonal stress.

Our new plumber [the sixth!] was called because of an external leak which he diagnosed and stopped in a couple of hours. Predictably, he did the usual thing of looking at the work of previous plumbers, shaking his head ruefully and saying there was Much better way to do that. There are A Lot of T-junctions in the plumbing array in the shed because it's complicated with gauges, pumps and, like, junctions [picture at the link]. These junctions are connected by short lengths of copper pipe, but copper is a disaster waiting to happen if the water is pH5 (acid). Installing the Stop revealed [see L below] a wafer-thin corroded fragment of copper pipe. I guess we are beyond the half-life of copper in acid and we'll have to replace all the pipework if we want central heating this Winter. Not for me, mind, I just bundle up in sweaters if it's colder than 15°C. As an indication of The End Times, you should know that scrap copper is worth $6,600/tonne = €6/kg. That'd almost double the price $3.60/kg at the birth of The Blob [prev].

Gallivanting malarkey

Colm O'Regan grew up on a farm but went to school in Cork City where he had to endure slaggin' about wellies and silage from wannabee urban corner-boys. But he was quick on his feet and on the uptake, so didn't let his head get flushed down the t'ilet by the bigger lads. We was always alert to words, how they are spoke and went viral on Twitter with @irishmammies. I've snagged his most recent published e-book: Gallivanting With Words: How the Irish Speak English (2025) although would be grand altogether to absorb it parallel-text as an earbook. But you can hear him innerviewed by Oliver "RTE" Callan on RTE [L]. Heard on the Luas [p158/468] “will wanayiz gerrup and leave the old man sit dow-en”, for example, really needs both the audio and the transcript. At the mo' only his book Climate Worrier is on borrowbox audio.

I have to say that I really enjoyed this book: he's not afraid to use tech-linguistic terms and has not been superficial in his research but is laugh-out-loud funny on the reg'lar.  Gallivanting is a standard, if old-fashioned, English word but in Ireland is only used to 'give out' when someone has been having too much of it. Malarkey sounds like a Hiberno-English word but actually isn't and wordies can't even agree on the etymology.

Technical terms, is it? How about words for the state of being intoxicated? balubas - banjaxed - banjoed - blootered fluthered - hammered - in a hape - langers - locked - mawldy - ossified -paralytic - polluted - scuttered - stocious -well on. I've gone alphabetical, O'Regan put more effort into the task and sorted them in order of inebriation. He clearly has more experience in these matters

In 2017, The Blob went briefly viral over the etymology of Lack Déise-speak for girl-friend. I concluded that a Russian origin was probably Бoллiж with a borrowing from Shelta, the argot of travellers, being much more likely. O'Regan concludes [p171/468]: lackeen (‘girl’) comes from cailín by back-slang. It may also derive from shelta, mind you. Back-slang? That's central to verlan, the Parisian argot of the streets. There femme becomes meuf. New-to-me [p.173/468]: in Shelta buffer means Other or Outsider cf gaijin = goyim = gentile. Me, I've been using the self-descriptor "Old Buffer" here and on my LinkedIn page. 

O'Regan is in the Irish Examiner every Friday. His HomePage - somebody should really float him a Wikipedia page.

fn on Oliver Callan. He came over my horizon in the 00s with a weekly dose of satire on the wireless called Callan's Kicks. It was described by The Sunday Independent as "the best comedy show the national broadcaster has ever produced".  I thought it was woeful: Callan doing silly voices sounding like politicians and celebs is not satire the way Spitting Image was satire. I had to leave the kitchen when he came on; or grin and bear it on the car radio. More recently, he's got a life as a radio journalist in his own voice, taking the reins of the morning Pat Kenny Show from Ryan "lightweight overpaid" Tubridy and he's really good: articulate, sharp, interested.

Dai the sponger

A good part of my failure to cull the too many books we own is the thought that some forgotten classic will go straight to pulp if I donate it to a charity shop. But it is too much effort to find the only other person in the country (world) who is on the same page in the long tail of printed books which are not Danielle Steel or Harry Potter. It is surely true that some Best Sellers of the 1930s or indeed the 1980s are unavailable in the 2026 library because fashions change.

But I'm the boy for giving The Forgotten of Yest time and attention. When the folks at Faber & Faber [read recent] were raving about, and publishing, Anathemata and other works of David "never 'eard of 'im"  Jones, then I scanned the library catalog to see what was available. There are two copies [Cork and Meath] of his WWI prose-poem In Parenthesis. But I reckoned it was fairer to  myself, and DJ, if I read rather a biography like David Jones : engraver, soldier, painter, poet (2017) by Thomas Dilworth [for whc long expository review] . . . and it was so. 

DJ must have had a charismatic glow because the middle part of his life was like that of eccentric mathematician Paul Erdős who, for decades, lived out of a suitcase. He'd turn up at the door of a fellow math wonk to stay and wouldn't go until he was good and ready. And had knocked off a handful of amazing scientific papers with his host as co-author. Which would give the host immortal fame with an  Erdős number of 1. Jones spent longer in the WWI trenches of Flanders [as L] than Wilfred Owen [prev], Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden or anyone else who left a literary or artistic legacy from that holocaust. And it left him with a bundle of PTSD including anxiety, depression and agoraphobia. He'd come to dinner, drink a lot, be offered a bed for the night, wake up 'shook' and stay for a week. The conversation, mostly with the man of the house, was wide-ranging and entrancing; the extra chores, entirely by the women of the house, were just . . . chores.

Being catered for re-enforced a learned helplessness which his friends, patrons and relations would rush to accommodate. He got [fn p225] £4.10s weekly from Helen Sutherland; £2 weekly from Tom Burns; and random gifts: £2 from his father, £13 from Prudence Pelham; £40 from Ralph Harari. The cooking, sewing, ironing, catering & cleaning are barely acknowledged, let alone accounted for, by Dilworth the author of the biography. And he has an annoying habit of setting the record straight by enumerating the errors of previous biographers.

But I think I can agree with his hypothesis that DJ's psychiatrist greatly diminished the poet-artist's creativity and productivity through over-medication [ft p314-315] Benzedrine, phenobarbitone, phenobarbital, lithium, Nembutal, Parnate (side effects anx, insom, drowsi), Drinamyl (amphetamine + phenobarb), Nardil, Trofanil, Diazepam were all prescribed over the years, several in steadily increasing doses. In the biter-bit spirit of setting the record straight I'll point out that phenobarbitone and phenobarbital are synonyms and Drinamyl is a potent mix of amphetamine and amylbarbitone  and has long been discontinued. They say that UK PM Anthony Eden's judgment was impaired by prescription Drinamyl to precipitate the Sue\z crisis of 1956. DJ was a pal of Clarissa "PM's wife" Eden, sending her gifts of his books and art-works and was invited to tea at 10 Downing Street. Maybe the chaps shared purple hearts over the iced-dainties (provided by the staff).

Title is a reference to the joke about "no, you want Jones the Spy at #37" which hinges on the paucity of Welsh surnames. Our current house-painter asked if the biog here discussed was about Davy "The Monkees" Jones, of whom he'd been a fan in his youth. errrm, No.

Taking the log for a walk

Not last Winter, the one before, we took a slap and a buffet from sequential named storms. Darragh [Dec'24] felled a bunch of trees to the East while Éowyn [Jan'25] laid them out S⇒N. I developed some upper body strength sawing the wood to log-length; then splitting and stacking it for Winter fuuuel. That also involved serially filling a wheelbarrow and pushing logs to stack-site, often uphill. Foolish and/or rich people of my acquaintance pay several hundred dollars a year to get a similar workout in a gym.

Éowyn was particularly awkward for downing three lumpy trunks of a rowan Sorbus aucuparia across a sunken lane and into the edge of my neighbour's field.  The fence was crushed but the gap was still stockproof, so fixing wasn't urgent. I couldn't deal with it myself because the footing was 2½m = 8ft below the cuts I needed to make. But I asked our tree-and-hedge cutting neighbour to come and quote me for lifting the trunks up&out onto our field edge where I could safely cut them up. He came, said he could do it for €100 and then didn't: I stopped nagging after three reminders. By which time the ground was too soggy to take heavy machinery.

Last July we had a six-pack of fit young chaps from Glavey Tree Service come and fell out the 4 ash Fraxinus excelsior trees which were most likely to do damage because badly affected by ash-dieback disease. The contract stated reducing branches to 2m lengths and mulching anything smaller than ⌀ = wrist. But it was the hottest day of the year and they rock-borked the chains on both their biggest saws so we were left with a) #4 1.2m x ⌀ 750mm lumps from the biggest tree and b) #2 6½m forked trunks ⌀ 600mm tapering to ⌀ 20mm.

Turns out that Séan the Mow and Sean the Wall-builder are a) the same person b) in possession of JCB 537 Loadall teleporter. He offered to come and do all the heavy log-lifting IF they were left in lengths. It being far more efficient to move one big thing than a clatter of small things whc would need bags. And it was so:

eeee but I do love an expert, who has acquired and internalized a useful skill . . . that I haven't had the time (or capacity) to master. The two long tapering ash trunks had been felled into our 0.4 hectare mini-woodland. From the lane all you could see was was the butts barely poking out over the wall. As a first step, we attached a loop of 20 tonne chain to the first butt and dragged it out across and into the lane. Next a bight of chain was looped round the log at the centre of gravity. Séan's first guess at the CoG was 8-10cm off: so he let down the boom and I shifted the chain. "There," he said, "lay a hand on the far end to stop it swinging and we'll carry it up to your log-pile". And it was so. We took the other log for an identical walk 20 mins later. Séan was once a roofer and spent his working life barracking his workmates to get a steel I-beam roof-truss perfectly balanced while it is still on the ground. It takes 5 minutes to do it right - and saves A Lot of grief aligning multiple bolt-holes in two girders Up There where it's windy, slick with rain, and a long way down.