Tree sourced

We don't believe in Santa Christmas trees. Rather we have, for the last 50 years, brought a Christmas twig in and suspended it in/from a living-room corner and festooned that with familiar fetish.  It's what we do but it has the objective advantage that our tradition takes up zero floor space in our modest home. I will add [high moral ground alert] that, as many now appreciate, growing a small conifer to 2 meters tall takes maybe 5 years. It then typically gets 5 weeks of useful 'life' and then becomes a burden on municipal disposal, locally: For the month of January at Powerstown, Christmas Trees go into Recycling area with no charge. That's moral hazard right there. You buy this thing, but everyone subsidizes the disposal of your choice.There is no way I would buy a Christmas Tree [YMMV, you do you, we're not normal]

But we-the-farmers are now being incentivized to extirpate "invasive conifers" from the common, these mostly sitka Picea sitchensis have seed-blown in from the Coillte forest immediately downwind. We've been on several collective sweeps through the more accessible parts of the Common but know there are trees further up that are beyond the jaws of loppers. You can see [not in this crap-pic but in reality] one near the skyline from the hill-road that runs along the border of the once-and-future forest.

Last Friday was a brilliant, sunny, crisp winter's day. I girded my loins, binocs, bushsaw, and a hank of rope and yomped up the hill. The roadway bit is easy: about 1,000m on a 1in10 grade, latterly a bit rough under foot. From the view above, it's another 70m at 1in1 = 45° through dead bracken Pteridium aquilinum and knee-high heather Erica spp. and gorse Ulex gallii and quite uncertain footing. But eventually . . .

Like I said, a gorgeous day. In short order, not without misgivings, I felled out this handsome neatly symmetrical tree [species unknown, help me out?] and rolled and dragged it down (much easier than going up) to the roadway. Where I was able to tie it down on a wheelbarrow and push it downhill all the way to the yard.

I've left the wheelbarrow in for scale, but this tree is 250cm = 8ft tall and looks as good as anything normal people would pay money for. The whole escapade took about 2 hours, which at minimum wage, is about what it costs to buy such a tree cut more efficiently with all the economies of scale beloved by Capital. I'm pretty chuffed with myself: using my ould knees while I still can and it's fine to be up on the hills sharing them with nobody. Now for the Twig

Hard Work at Patriarchy

I'd like to think I've become a better person over the last ten years. Although I fully expect Alphabet = Google = Blogspot to pull the plug at short notice and cast The Blob into dustbin of history, today it is still a searchable 2 million word archive of my evolving self.  In 2013, I wrote a fanboi piece about Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman a book of anecdotes related by Richard Feynman to his bongo-pal Ralph Leighton.  Five years later, I was forced to see that I, Patriarch had been blind to the running sore theme of misogyny that pervades SYJMF. Five years after that (last week) I was compelled to watch a three hour take down of Richard Feynman showing that he'd been a bad influence on young scientists. 

Angela "Physicist" Collier is a critical thunk science blogger in a similar space to Rebecca Watson [whom BloboPrev] who devoted the last 12 months to rage-reading everything on Amazon about Richard Feynman. Her reason for doing the work being that there was A Lot of SYJMF circulating among the physics bros (skewed bl♂ke even more in the 90s than now) when she was making sense of the world in college. Collier's position is that some = far-too-many young men reading about Feynman's clever clogisms and iconoclasm had not ignored the sexism but rather leaned into it . . . and blanked or insulted or disrespected her. Particularly galling examples included young chaps who assumed that, because they'd been top of the Calculus class in Bohunk High, they could continue to get As in college without doing the work. These chaps were baffled when Collier did get the As because she was serious about Project EduCollier and put in the hours.

Collier's 3 hour piece-to-camera came up on MetaFilter and that generated a little light and a lot of heat. I R retire, I am invested a bit [clearly too much with all the sexism] in the Feynman myth, so I watched it through (with a 24 hour intermission) despite it being a bit woolly in the edit and so far too long. In the last part of the YT, having cut the misogyny down to size, Collier looks at a might-have-been Feynmyth [he's 40 years dead now] which drew attention [summarized / clipped in black-and-red above] to his many good qualities.  

There are lessons in SYJMF even if they are fables: don't be (a) Dick; pay attention; do the work; polish your crap-detector; be kind. Collier adds [point 5 above] condemn least publishable units LPUs to the flames of hell even if, as now, no trees were harmed in the process. MeFite ngaiotonga put in the work to make an executive summary of Collier's YT: part1 + part2 + part3.

Hard work at Mildmay

eeee but I do like a colourful map. Sadiq Khan, the colourful Mayor of London has commissioned some bling on the TfL map of railed traffic routes. When I lived close to the end of the Central Line as a teenager, The Tube was transport into and around the capital . . . and a lot of walking. I only used buses and overground rail when I was off somewhere else - Dover for Paris, Holyhead for Dublin, Edinburgh, Harwich for Hoek. The [Victorian] Overground rail lines providing local sub-urban services round London were there when I could have used them in the 1970s but I wasn't sufficient of a trainspotting rail-nerd to ferret them out. And I didn't know anyone or anything in Stoke Newington.

I referenced Harry Beck's iconic primary coloured Tube map when I was writing about the District Line in 2016. The Overground was codified and coordinated at the end of the 20thC and finally added to the TfL map in 2007 in a uniform [background] orange drab. I guess it kept the grockles out and left more seats for tired indigenous commuters, carers and shoppers. Now 6 routes have been given distinctive colours and new names. Liberty - Lioness - Mildmay - Suffragette - Weaver - Windrush. The names are all chosen for earnestly inclusive reasons. Pity really, some local users already refer to the Gospel Oak to Barking route as The Goblin Line which could have stuck. But The Man would call it Suffragette because a very old acquaintance of Emily Pankhurst lived near the route in Barking until 1996.

We perked up at the news on BBC because one of our oldest friends escaped from Clonmel and lives on Mildmay Road in (increasingly trendy) Dalston. I figured there might be a station at the end of their street which named the whole route. But No: Mildmay is named for Mildmay Mission Hospital which is in Bethnal Green 2km S of our pal's gaff. Who knew? That's a rabbit hole to scuttle down. The Hospital was carved out of an unused warehouse in 1877 and then moved to Austen Street in 1892 to service the stews and slums of East London. It was closed in 1982 during one of the great churning re-organisations periodically ordained by the NHS. Small, local hospitals were no longer fit for purpose in the economies of scale, high-tech mindset then (and now) current in both our polities. Mildmay got a new lease of life in 1985 as an AIDS hospice and was haunted by Princess Diana until her untimely death.

More recently Mildmay is operating as a charitable trust, largely dependent in contract work from the NHS. It is well suited as a step down care-centre to free up acute beds in all-singing, all-dancing larger hospitals. But every week Mildmay bewails its count of empty beds. The beds are a fixed cost for the shoe-string enterprise that is Mildmay and have to be filled (on contract) to keep the charitable trust in the Black. But discharge from acute to step-down is in the gift of the nearest Integrated Care Board (ICB) which replaced clinical commissioning groups (CCG) in 2022 which replaced strategic health authorities (SHA) and primary care trusts (PCT) in 2012 to "organise" the delivery of NHS services. That's A Lot of three letter acronyms (TLA) and a lot of moving the deck-chairs change of admin, with the result that sick people suffer on trolleys in A&E and different sick people are not being shifted through to Mildmay.

Pictured above with Mayor Khan is Comfort Sagoe recently retired as Lead Clinical Nurse at Mildmay. Talk about nominative determinism with Comfort, who was recruited from West Africa 20 years ago because Brits don't do bed-pans. In 2020, I had a rant about putting up a statue to not-a-nurse Mary Seacole outside St. Thomas's Hospital in Westminster . . . because she black and she 19thC. At the end of my thesis on the fatuity of virtue signalling I entered a plea "It's 70 years since - Windrush -Generation nurses started to arrive in Britain from Jamaica, Trinidad and Barbados: surely some of them gave a lifetime of brilliant, thankless, sterling work in British hospitals. What about a statue to one of them?"

Done!  LC Nurse Comfort Segoe will be too modest to model but I propose a statue to her at one end or the other of the Mildmay Line.

Sunday 15Dec24

jBits

• Hold Everything - Mary Chapin Carpenter, Julie Fowlis, Karine Polwart [cw: end of life]
• Leitrim folks still w/o power a week after Storm Darragh.
  
• I flew my folks out to a US aircraft carrier
• Eric Bogle retrospects
• Laura Dekker circumnavigator
• Cast-net fishing . . . beside a sewage outfall
• Food? Safety Fails in Irish premises this month
  
• Greyhound racing banned in NZ
• Tern the Tide: artwork (Sternula albifrons) beside the railway - and the sea
• Firewood stacks dry faster covered
• Time-lapse plant grow (and fungi!)
  

Square bash

I learned to read and write late, but in my teens read all around me. I even read telephone books during my PhD, to get a handle [surname analysis] of the amount of immigration to Halifax, Nova Scotia from the Isle of Man. Once you get the habit, you have to read something. I could fritter away my evenings with fluffy but in reality I generally plough through non-fiction, often history. Having knocked off 700 pages of the life and times of the British welfare state, I started on a parallel investigation of National Service [conscription] in the same country . . . of my birth: National Service: conscription in Britain 1945-1963 by Richard Vinen. I was born plunk in the middle of that era, and the idea had been consigned to the dustbin of [British] history by the time I turned 18. National Service, in conscript armies continued long afterwards in continental Europe. Two of my pals in Rotterdam Zoo in 1978 could converse in Morse because they'd served time in Signals. After a hiatus (2010-2017) conscription is back in Sweden. A 2013 referendum about abolishing conscription in Switzerland was rejected by 78% of the voers.

The place I was acquiring my very expensive education was more conservation than most and for a couple of years in the late 60s, almost everyone of my age [14-15] was playing soldiers on Thursday afternoons. I learned to 

• strip down, clean and re-assemble a Lee-Enfield .303 rifle; 
• polish hefty black boots; 
• apply blanco to webbing belt and duraglit to brass; 
• march lef' ri' lef' ri'; halt; salute 
• how to fix a puncture on a 3-ton truck tire (REME)
  

all good dreary-if-wet fun and it would have made my Basic Training easier, if "the balloon went up" and we'd had to report to barracks. 

One of the solid outcomes of National Service was that it stirred the demographic pot a bit: Geordies bunked beside Wurzles, and Cockneys learned a bit of Scouse. Or, as [R], random squadie meets Prime Minister Attlee in Berlin. Much was made, at the time and in the book, about the democratising effects of everyone [toffs and toughs] having to 

• lay their kit out in exactly the same way; 
• march to exactly the same beat;
• eat the same appalling food;
• suffer verbal abuse from a psychotic corporal

It was no use putting on airs unless you wanted to get a telling ironic put-down. After induction, the Gordon-Lennox twins parcelled up their civilian kit and sent it to The Duchess of Richmond, their mother. 'Blimey', said the corporal, 'blokes here sending their clothes home to a boozer'.

It is not surprising that this book intersects with the Wolfenden Report [whc prev] because that committee interviewed extensively among members of the armed forces . . . where sex happened. A regular soldier was discharged and sent to Borstal for having had sexual relations with a horse. His sentence was, apparently, more severe because the horse belonged to his colonel.
 

Icing on the crumble

My mother was born in 1920. she stopped working when she got married in 1950. But as soon as her kids went to school, she started getting out and about. One of her wheezes was meals-on-wheels. Round about noon, she'd take delivery of a hot box of dinners [mostly meat-and-two-veg with gravy + crumble-and-custard] a deliver them round the county. The service was as much about the di♬g-do♬g on the doorbell and the bit of chat, as it was about calories and five-a-day.

My late-lamented FiL Pat the Salt had a brief encounter with Meals-on-Wheels in Waterford when he was still married, still ambulatory but getting a bit vague. In his case, he was induced to use his free bus-pass and go into Lady Lane House like Mohammed to the Mountain; get his dinner and the bit of chat; and then take the bus home.  He cd/shd have stayed there in the warm-and-dry playing cards with the other chaps and got tea and a biscuit before leaving. But he had no interest in cards and would only stay if there was a bit of music put on instead. 

After his wife died, Pat was untethered, of course, but the Alzheimer's Society of Ireland found space for him at their Pinegrove Resource Centre. He used to spend a [short] day a week there on the reg'lar and enjoyed the sing-songs; the nostalgia quizzes, not so much. Bob's Taxis picked him up several times. It was confusing the first time, because I hadn't done the delivery and nobody (not me, not Pat, for sure) knew which was his top coat. Next time we communicated with Team Deliver. Coronarama clobbered all that in person stuff with vulnerable elders. But Pinegrove also ran / runs an outreach service, where, for a nominal fee, a kindly person would appear at Pat's home and hang out with him.

Seamus, and after the lockdown, Gwen, came on different days with different toolkits. In the early days, when Pat was still able for it, he and Seamus would, weather permitting, tramp the golden pavements of Tramore chatting about the old times - Seamus was interested in WWII, especially the war at sea, in which Pat had <ploosh> been an active participant. Gwen knew all the old songs and was usually able to get Pat to si♬g alo♬g. Or failing that, wash away his anxious cares with a blast from the pipes of the Scots Guards. The bonus was that the family carer could have 2 hours carefree, even if that meant leaving the car in for service, shopping for dinner, or nipping up to the dry cleaners again.

And then, after his decade-long decline, Pat died and, as is the custom in Ireland, 30 days later a somewhat diminished family assembled again for his Month's Mind Mass.  The night before the MMM we achieved a form of closure by inviting all the carers to dinner in O'Neill's at the top of Main Street. At the end of the meal, one of the admin-side at Pinegrove leaned across the table to say thanks for the unexpected feed. I demurred: the thanks were entirely from the family to the carers. I suspect that many outsiders think that home visits are the icing on the cake of care. The preferred, subsidized, business model for elder care in Ireland is Care Homes with all their economies of scale. Run as a business, with minimal wages, and maximum clients, care in Care Homes tends to the perfunctory. There is no time to chat; it's far quick to feed someone than wait for them to feed themselves; and ambulatory elders are a trip-and-fall liability which the Home tries to avoid if at all possible (so many forms to fill in!). 

As I explained to Mr Adminside at the end of the carer's dins, Seamus and Gwen and their peers make the difference between A Life and mere existence.

Fakkn Darragh

There is a sense in some quarters that Met Eireann tends to throw out Orange and Red weather warnings with gay abandon. That leaves them in the position of having to say "no no we really mean it this time . . . don't make unnecessary Crossmolinas". Storm Darraaaaargh arrived at tea-time Friday 06Dec24 upgraded to Status Orange wind for the whole country, Red for Atlantic NW. Obsessively checking on the nullschool weather map , as I do, I could see the storm barrelling relentlessly across the N Atlantic and crumping into the Wild Atlantic Way.

Two hours later, just after midnight, we lost power [with a couple of flickers then plunging darkness] despite being a long old way from any coasts or any Red counties. We are misfortunate living in a sparsely populated rural back water because [and proper order] when the ESB does triage on where to restore power first, sparsely populated rural back waters come after schools, towns, google server farms, hospitals. If you're a dairy farmer you need a generator, because ain't nobody going milk 160 cows by hand . . . and how would you get it down to 4°C a.s.a.p.?

Those who built our farm-and-yard were great vernacular architects and faced everything South on a downhill slope with the out-buildings sheltering the yard from the predominant Westerlies and the chilling Siberian Easterly winds. 80 years ago, Old Jim he planted a shelter-belt of Scots Pine Pinus sylvestris round the acre that includes house, yard and haggard. All bets are off though in a global warming world where the warmer ocean fizzes up the wind. We are now in a managed retreat from living surrounded by trees and hugging them as we pass.

After storms, my first light task is to go out for a walk to assess the damage and count the sheep. If N_sheep = zero, a fence is down somewhere and the flock is whooping it up in the next county. Also I need to know if the lane from our gate to the county road is clear. Saturday morning I found a number of trees lying W→E at right angles to the ditches/walls that had anchored them for the last several decades. My next action was to send an ironic txt to my eponymous pal "Fakkn Darragh, throwing shapes agane. We are 3 trees down. How are y'all?" As I was out, I went to visit our nearest neighbour, at the bottom of the lane, and found his front garden full of horizontal trees. Part of his Cupressus x leylandii hedge, allowed to get far too big, had clattered against a lanky 30 y.o. Eucalyptus and brought that to the ground as well. I could hear his voice "I'm okay" and if I knelt down could see the lower part of his legs, but nothing of the [undamaged] house behind him.

My first task, though, was to deal with a rowan / mountain ash / caorthann = Sorbus aucuparia, which like my neighbour's trees had fallen out of one of the ditches and neatly filled the lane with a six-foot wall of ivy Hedera helix and horizontal rowan branches. Two hours later, I had reduced this impenetrable wall to a single trunk-supporting branch which any person or sheep could step over but prevented vehicular access to the uplands. I was just finishing up when the branch settled, pinned my saw and I borked the chain getting it out.  So I had to leave things thus:

you can see the lane up beyond the obstacle. And hey it's sunny after the storm: quite makes you believe in god or at least Gen9:13. That lane filled to the brim with drifted snow in late Feb 2018 which is another sort of impassable.

Sunday afternoon, I had time for him-next-door (an even more recent blow-in than ourselves) and joined a meitheal of miscellaneously skilled and equipped neighbours clearing a path through the Eucalyptus. For every person who was in the garden cutting pulling and stacking logs and brash, at least one car stopped to gawp or get out of their car and offer unasked-for advice to say how the clearance should be done. For the second time [first] in four weeks I can harrumph about the hurlers on the ditch. I dunno why it's so much easier to find fault than pick up a shovel and help. These clear-up operations are so often a Javi Problem: if you set to (with help is better) you can make substantive progress in a couple of hours. And by tea-time yesterday, we were confident that our neighbour could get his motorbike on the county road liberated from his brushwood prison.

We got power back at 16:00, forty (40) hours after it went out. Some of our neighbours were for throwing food out of their freezers. Me, I was for eating a hella gurt quantity of ice-cream in case it was spoiled.

Postscript for posterity: gusts of 120km/h were recorded at Shannon; homes and businesses 400,000 were without power: some are looking a week w/o power + 35,000 broadband fails; the Holyhead ferry terminal was whacked out of commission.