Farmer wellbeing

Despite Silicon Dock in Dublin and MegaPharm in Cork, it is politically necessary to maintain that Ireland is an Agricultural Nation. Pharma accounts for [55%] five times as much export earnings compared to Farmer [9%]. There are 15 million mammals on Irish farms but only 130,000 [9%] are, like, farmers. As farmers are outnumbered by their livestock [soon enough to be deadstock on your plate], so there are thousands of salaries coat-tailing on their hard graft and long hours. So many advisors, creamery managers, feed suppliers, agri-bureaucrats, hauliers, auctioneers, researchers, slaughterers meat-packers. My pal Mick, a reluctant farmer and enthusiastic historian and yomper, rocked up to a Teagasc sponsored demonstration a few years ago.  There were two farmers present, Mick and a bloke in a trench wrastling with hanks of yellow land-drainage pipe. Observing from a safe distance in spotless green wellies were two dozen suits, scoring a day out of the office and a generous mileage claim.

The wider agri sector does provide useful services to workers at the silage clamp face [L]. IF the poor bloody farmers can win a half day between mucking out and applying a top-dressing of lime to the 9-acre. I'm not the farrrmer here, I'm just The Outdoor Man, The Beloved is the one who fills in the forms and has an accountant. This year, she signed up for a knowledge transfer KT scheme which paid for her to go on monthly jaunts round the county: learning stuff and sharing information. It was under this rubric that we hosted a visit to our traditional hay meadow in June. The Outdoor Man was allowed in the kitchen to bake a great big brack and a slab of flapjacks. 

The penultimate jaunt of the year was a  Farmer Wellbeing Day, at Carlow Mart sponsored by Healthy Ireland [Hi] and Carlow CoCo. A couple of cars-full left the valley in good time to be sure of parking and a trip to the jacks before things got going. Only one of The Beloved's passengers availed of both the free hair-cut and the free health-check. When I worked at the institute, I used to take the annual free health check done by the Strength & Conditioning students: my BMI went down and my BP held steady. The "Enjoy a delicious complimentary lunch" was a disappoint: cardboard cup of soup and ham&cheese sandwiches but the Merch was mighty . . .

• Merch
  
• grey Hi watch cap
• grey Hi baseball cap
•  HiViz  waistcoat
• a brace of snoods, if you believe in such things
  
• First Aid kit with enough sticking plasters to outlive their sell-by date
• a new A5  hard-cover notebook  to take over from my nearly full [Nov 2022 start] one
• a  Positive Mental Health  wrist-band
• pens and post-its I guess farrrrmers don't have as much use for them as scientists
  

So a win for me: all that kit and no requirement to stand around in the cold being advised by <synecdoche alert> suits spotless green wellies.

Higher than a breadbox

One rough locator which I've used to describe where we live is "the South Face of Mount Leinster" , as an ironic parity-of-esteem claim to the Eiger-Nordwand, ahem aka Mordwand. Let's face it, Ireland is really not mountainous on the global scale. My old biochemistry Prof Frank Winder is chiefly remembered as the first person to climb a particular route in a quarry in Dalkey, Co. Dublin which was thereafter known as Winder's Crack (1949). And you're welcome to wedge your fingers in there. Frank had to go to The Grand Tetons to climb, like, mou⛰️tains.

As Bill Bryson noted, for the notoriously monoglot USAians, Grand Tetons means Big Titties. Mountaineering involves two quite different goals: a) getting to the top, for the view b) stretching body and mind to make progress up rock-faces. Mt Leinster, for example is a walk in the park. There is a metalled road to the summit which services the TV station there; and Dau.I walked from ours to the summit in bare feet as an 10 y.o. Some mountaineers / yompers in WEA = these islands, are Munro-baggers. Munros were first defined [> 3,000 ft = 940m] and listed (1891) by Sir Hugh Munro, a tweed and hobnail mountaineer, like Irvine. The Munro list is long enough [N= 282] to pose a challenge that can be completed in adecade of determined weekends or a life-time for reg'lar folks.

Not all the Munros are craggy. The easy ones are only really challenging in midwinter, carrying a fridge or with kindergarteners at foot. I was delighted, in a Grand Teton way, to read about Marilyns named by Alan Dawson in 1992 after Ms Monroe and noted for their [> 150m] "prominence".  The Brits call it 'drop' and it is defined as the difference in height between the knopje / peak and the lowest contour that separates the peak from anything higher. It is orthogonal to 'isolation' which is the horizontal distance to the nearest higher mountaintop.  The Marilyn drop is only one of several definitions / lists to set your sights /boots on. Mt Leinster is a Marilyn. As is the much less accessible Stac an Armin [above L] in St Kilda.

• Arderins are Irish hills with a height of at least 500m and a drop of 30m
• Binnions height < 400m but a drop of  > 100m
  
• Carns 100 m < height < 400m with a drop of 30 m
• Deweys 500 m < height < 2,000 ft / 610m and a drop of 30 m in Eng / Wales / IoM
• Fives as Dewey for Scotland
  
• . . .
  
• Wainwrights are hills at least 1,000 ft = 305 m tall with a drop of 15 m in the English Lake District
• YOMPs - Mountain peaks for young and old
• ZOMBs - guaranteed safe during the Zombie Apocalypse

See also HuMPs (Hundred and upwards Metre Prominence); TuMPs (Thirty and upwards Metre Prominence); Corbetts; Furths (Munros not in Scotland); Grahams; Hughs (Hills Under Graham Height); SIMMs (Six-hundred Metre Mountains) . . . and so forth into nicety and pedantry.

Sun Nex

The Feast of St Hilda of Whitby [R hosted the 664 Synod of W]

• In 2005, The Boy headed off for NZ . . . via Petersburg 🚂 Vladivostok and Japan. Here's what it's like in Владивосток 20 years on.
• Canning Sardines
• Minister would be "far better off back in the classroom". Michael O'Leary wants more Effectives in The Dáil . . . teacher's unions react ASTI -- TUI "extremely offensive" . . . "ignorant"
  
• Pics of occupied Paris 1940-1942
• Seems I R a [PubQuiz] genius - 7/7
• Paul Mescal gets quizzed about "Irish"
  
• Rechurning a punt: Kursgesagt scrutinizes the claimed length of tubes in the human circulatory system. 
• All at sea
  
• Cromer UK coastal defenses rip-rap and sand capture
• Steve Marsh yomps across Hoy to unsee the Old Man and visits the Dwarfie Stane
  
• A whole channel of ships passing Passage
  
• Boscastle UK flash flood 2004
  
• Price comparator UK AldivLidl (tl;dr not a Mars bar in  it)
  

 

The Five Giants

The Buddha laid out the Nobel Eightfold Path as a set of principles by which to live a good life: Right Speech; Right Livelihood; Right Conduct etc. When the United Kingdom was back to the wall fighting the Nazis in WWII, several years before victory seemed probable, the coalition government started to plan for a Better Britain. However hard you imagine it is to be poor and/or homeless and/or troubled in mind and body now; life was much shittier in 1938. One of the shameful discoveries is that Joe Median was in general better fed and healthier under a war-footing with rationing [it's the brown bread] and wholesale destruction of the housing stock during the blitz. 

William Beveridge (1879-1963) was tasked to draft a report on "Social Insurance and Allied Services" which was published in 1942. That same month the fortunes of the Allies were decisively turning for the better in North Africa and at Stalingrad.  Looking for a snappy slogan to focus the attention of mandarins and policy wonks Beveridge came came up with Giant Disease, Giant Idleness, Giant Ignorance, Giant Squalor and Giant Want . . . The Five Giants which is the title of Nicholas Timmins' Biography of the Welfare State. I found the 700 page 2017 3rd edition on open shelves in the local village library about 200km West of the nearest bit of the UK. I can't imagine it flies off the shelves to be read in farm kitchens hereabouts. Reviewed at LSE - Timmins piece to camera [1 hour]

This is a brick of a book but readable and occasionally funny in a throw-away ironic sort of way. Timmins is also prone to run-on sentences for which my grad school mentor castigated me 40 years ago. Bafflexample on p.645 "There was a recognition here that if the Labour government had been right to insist since 1997 that poverty and disadvantage were no longer permitted as an excuse for poor results, it remained the case that disadvantaged children needed committed to them more effectively the many services which existed for them - many of which Labour had enhanced or indeed created" aka Blair's people talked large about children's entitlements but failed to deliver.

What I've learned from the book is that Government is Hard. I've had my sofa-bound say about homelessness and UBI and paying for drugs. We have a phrase in Ireland about hurlers on the ditch who know far better how to win than the actual players on the pitch. I suspect that too many people in politics in the UK [and in Ireland] find it easy to trot out a slogan [go back where you came from; welfare scroungers; privatise telecoms; nationalise railways] but couldn't actually run the coal-face of a government department. It's also apparent that politics was a) nicer b) arguably more effective when political parties were less monolithic and less polarized.

But the key question addressed [on and on; again and again; in the evolving circumstances of history] is how do governments apportion money and services (and taxes) among its citizens in a way that is fair given the vastly different starting points from which neonates begin their journey. If you think you know, you're wrong so bad you don't even know you're wrong! [calling Dunning-Kruger]. And can we please have a bit more evidence-based, rather than ideology-driven, policy everywhere in politics?

As a kid who came to sentience in England during the late 60s and early 70s of the last century, it was odd to have then household names [Macmillan, Wilson, Heath], skitter across my eyeballs for the first time in decades. In 1966 I was at boarding school near Southampton. Time was allocated every Sunday for "writing letters". I brought away a stack of these letters home after my mother died in 2020 but haven't yet got the bottle to read them. One week, I discovered that outgoing mail was subject to censorship by The Man. Ringing the changes on writing home, 12 y.o. me addressed an envelope to George Brown MP esq. | Houses of Parliament | Westminster. This was opened up before posting to reveal, not a bomb threat from a disgruntled Young Tory, but a rather pathetic "Dear Mr Brown, how is it being Foreign Secretary? Can I have your signiture? Yours faithfully Bobby Scientist". The Censor informed me that the letter had been resealed and popped in the post . . . also "signiture is spelled wrong and it's better to use autograph". Which all, fair enough. A week later I got a 15cm x 20cm glossy photo of George Brown, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, with his name scrawled across the pale background near his left ear. 

Note: Brown was a famous boozer but the mainstream press of those days were too deferential to mention it. Private Eye coined the euphemism "tired and emotional" to describe Brown (and subsequently many other public figures) when he was blotto in public.

EV Drive mode

There was time, five years ago, when the EU almost got to boot daylight saving time into the black pit of hell where it deserves to live. But Covid put that initiative on hold and the opportunity seems to have passed: it's off the news anyway. One of the petty annoyances of twice yearly hour-shifting is resetting all the devices: the cooker, the car. This is only annoying because a) the change protocol requires an idiosyncratic combo of menu, buttons, pushes and push&holds b) I've forgotten [two week event horizon] the path in the intervening 180 days.  Frustration also applies with rental cars, because car makers are forever fripping about with extra features and the different brands won't talk to each other to find common ground. It doesn't help that car-rental people have neither time nor inclination to give clients a lesson in the peculiarities of This car that you want to drive off the lot, Now.

So we bought a new-to-us Yaris in September, which was a) hybrid b) automatic c) key-free ignition and that all took a bit of getting used to. The fan, for example, to stop the windscreen fogging up in winter the driver has to cycle through options to direct air at face; face&feet; feet; screen&feet. There is no option [R] to go screen only. BUT the designers claim you can set and maintain different temperatures for driver and front-seat passenger. The written manual is trying to service several different models of Yaris Hybrid with quite different controls: some with buttons & knobs; some with touch-screen some with both [a new dimension to Hybrid]. And the index is woeful: there is no entry for Clock except under M for Multi-Information Display.

Then the effn clocks changed on us and neither I nor my two 20-something effectives could discover how to make the Yaris clock go back an hour. That's not the end of the world. But it is still legitimate to take a swipe at the designers of a) the car b) the manual. Then for the first time in my life, I saw a key battery low alert on one of the several Multi-Information Displays on the dashboard. Nothing of help in the user manual but youtube offered several ingles-not-first-language explanations about a) what this meant b) how to prise open a keyfob c) the necessity to buy a CR2032 3v lithium coin cell.

I R old, I R the Patriarchy, so I felt no compunction about dropping into the Toyota dealer to change the key battery and the clock. The chap behind the service desk was ever so slightly patronizing. He didn't call me Gramps, let alone blithering ould fule, but you could sense him s l o w i n g down to s h o w me how to change a key-fob battery. I was therefore ever so slightly gratified, when he was unable to change the clock and had to fetch one of the mechanics from the shop-floor. Of Course and, like, well obvs the clock change is mediated by an unlabelled menu button on arm of the steering wheel [R]. That menu multi-button services: ABS brakes; Bulgarian dictionary, Cam-shaft optimizer, Dashcam, Eco-Fuel monitoring device, GPS integrator . . . far too much to fit on a label smaller than the steering wheel itself.

It is engagingly peculiar that in a User Guide so telegraphic that it omits mention of clock controls and key-fob batteries, the editors [and indeed the vehicle designers] found room for an oddly specific highly focused image of social engineering. Down on the floor nigh-invisible near the hand-brake is an [EV] button. I quote: EV Drive Mode in EV drive mode, electric power is supplied by the hybrid battery and only the electric motor is used to drive the vehicle. This mode enables you to drive in residential areas early in the morning or late at night, or in indoor parking lots etc. without concern for noise or emissions.

Real Men (don't) eat cake

Years and years ago, when we lived in England, one of our pals had a significant birthday and we schlepped 500km down the A1 to help him celebrate. After a sketchy start in college (booting his first year exams and having to do Autumn Repeats), he had his knees firmly under the table in one of the big corporate law firms in London - his niche expertise was buying and selling airports and power-stations! A large number of brightly coloured helium filled balloons were bobbing about in the flat the following morning. After a restorative fry-up (are we not Irish? after all), we piled into their car with the balloons and tooled around South East London. Every time a short human hove into view, the car screeched to a halt and the child was presented with a free balloon. Reaction was mixed: surprise, some delight, a lot of bemusement. But at least the balloons got a second life.

I've written about how [last para]the youth of a subsequent generation disdained free sandwiches. Giving the lie to the meme of starving graduate students. At that same hospital, we had a New Irish (Uganda via Botswana) IT guy. He was pretty forthright about not wanting Irish dogoodniks to ship clapped out, refurbed computers to Africa as if everyone sub the Sahara should be grateful to receive our cast-offs.

Did I mention that my aged FiL Pat the Salt left his safe harbour on this Earth to continue his v'yage in the Great Beyond? I did! We waked him at home on Friday and buried him on Saturday and there were soup and sangers at The Generic Majestic Hotel for afters. People came from all over to pay him respeck and many, as you do, brought food. We 2x over catered at the hotel as well and the staff packed up dozens and dozens of sandwiches and handed them to the nearest [bemused, bereaved] member of the family. By Saturday evening, the tide of people was ebbing but the fridge was Full of cake.

I too an executive decision & nipped down the hill to the nearest [R] Direct Provision Centre (there are several in town). I've written before about the shame, bordering on horror, of what we do for asylum seekers and refugees. There were two burly chaps sitting in the garden and I went up, introduced myself and asked [because as a young man Pat had lived and loved among the Hausa in Nigeria] "Are there any Hausa Men here?". They, poor fellows, were naturally confused about the micro-ethno-geography of West Africa and it didn't really matter. Changing tack [are you clocking all the nautical metaphors in this piece?] I asked them where home was. 

• Forget Nigeria", I said, "Iran will do: would you like cake? My agéd father has died and we have buried him today and now we have A Lot of cake. I don't want to offend you but if you would like cake, then I will go home and fetch it.
• Yes we would like cake; will I come and help you carry it?
• There is not that much cake! I will return in 5 minutes.

And it was so! I was assured afterwards that they get enough [cheap] cake in DP Centres because those who cater can ring up some carb Kcals to satisfy the official nutritionist: Don't take them cake; rather bring nuts and fruit. Well, I'm sorry, but we didn't have nuts&fruit, we had cake; and my new Iranian pals were all smiles to get it.

sun bit bob nov

Very miscellaneous

• B1M wake-up call [R] for 17,000 'fracture critical' interstate highway bridges in USA 
• Crumbling US infrastructure - inland waterways division 
  
• YE-ZB Hayrake: getting carrier planes back home in WWII
• More info
• Clive Stafford Smith see also last sunday links
  
• Michael Lewis [whom prev] on TRIP
• Hawaii grid gripes
• Small Things Like These [prev] now A Filum 
• Hunicke: Your most reasonable effort is whatever it takes
• We go to the polls 29 Nov 24 - how Irish elections are financed