Allied again

Almost by accident, at the start of the academic year in 2018, I got me a rainbow silicon rubber wrist band sporting the slogan "⚧ The Institute ⚧". I wore that accessory rain shine and shower 24/365. Whatever about signalling to students and Others that I was on their side, it reminded me every day to check my privilege (and mind my gob). That ⚧ symbol did A lot of work at The Institute - reducing the number of wheel-chair accessible bathrooms so that Management could preen themselves on having gender neutral bathrooms on campus. Habit is strong within me and, after I retired two years later, I continued to wear my wristband although I encountered minority students once a year rather than every day.

Then, in the middle of October, struggling into an inherited sweater, my wristband broke. At seven years, it had lasted me longer than the sweater, but I was still a bit bereft. I sent a picture of linear silicon and a message "Boohoo, Ally No More" to my right-on offspring.

A week later, we had a multi-generational friends&family knees-up and two younger people, friends-of-family, whom I'd never met before, presented This Old Ally with replacement merch. a) a new wristier made of pastel rainbow plaited wool [new for old shown above] 

b) a brace of Ally-pins which I wore in the lapel of my charcoal-grey 100% woolmarked interview / funeral / wedding / knees-up suit. I won't take this clobber into the shower, not least because the suit is "dry-clean only" but will sport it when I'm out and about. There are plenty of opportunities for an Ould Buffer to be passive-aggressive; to be passive-inclusive, not so much. A few days later, I went for a yomp up the hill with Gdau.I now approaching 14. She said that, if I said something dopey about chromosomes in a discussion about gender and sexuality, her generation would likely forgive me. Making some allowance for the Old, in the same way as my generation used to get up off bus-seats for them. Unless it was clear that my comments were uttered as cruelty or a wind-up. Then again, it seems that 14 y.o's can be quite neanderthal in using casual racist slurs. 

Decadance

In our family the birthdays are all crammed into the last third of the year - except for me as Son of Somer Solstice. We mark these days with cards and a meal together for the adults rather than presents and cake whc are still traditional among the not-yet-voters. And the meal together is optional because half the family live in a different country. But lookit: The Beloved was born in 1955; The Boy in 1975; Dau.II in 1995; and Gdau.II in 2015 and this is 2025. Sometime over the Summer we all woke up to this alignment of the quinquennium and reckoned it was worth a knees-up sometime between mid-Sept and mid-Dec.

And so it was that a 70-50-30-10-decade Tea-dance with a glass of fizzz was organized for the afternoon of the Hallowe'en Bank Holiday Monday. We rented a room in stately Mount Congreve which is a about 15mins from the centre of Waterford or Tramore. We've been to their caff a few times, but it was only this Summer that we stumped for entry Tix to wander through the desmesne. Ambrose, last of the Congreves, was mad about the gardening. Living to the age of 104 and i/c the estate for more than half of that time, he was able to see his arborial plantings reach maturity. And the complex of walled and kitchen gardens is extensive, varied and rather wonderful. Bring a book and sit on one of the benches listening to the beezzzz fumbling the flowers.

The catering was a separate ticket but the whole event was much cheaper than a wedding. They say that you should arrange wedding receptions without mentioning the word 'wedding' lest the bill doubles. 

We saved a mort o'money on one item four items on the ticket because Dau.II has been baking and decorating cakes since she was tall enough to get her nose above the kitchen table. It is definitely not about the money because Dau.II has Standards which are far above those of most people in the business who have spent 3 or 4 years in catering school. The initial plan was to make cakes of different sizes to reflect the different ages of The Principals but that was soon ditched because it is obvious that 10 y.o. eyes are bigger for cake than those of someone with a bus-pass. Whatevs: these cakes, separately or together,  give the lie to never eat anything bigger than your head. Just wield a cake-slice and take your time. 

• Hazelnut, pear and cardomon
• Lemon meringue with 'guests'
• Chocomalt and Maltesers
• Red velvet wi' cream-cheese frosting & capybara  

In real-life, of course, you'll share your cake with the couple of handfuls of true friends who have had your back for decades. Some of these pals were unavoidably tied up promoting World Peace, but most of those invited made the trek from all over the Western European Archipelago WEA. It was a like a wedding (or a funeral) insofar as we all got to meet people whom we haven't seen for twenty "my, haven't you grown!" years. And many [partners, offspring] of whom we'd never met before.

Funerals? The principal MIA was Pat the Salt, the ancestor of all the decadancers, born 1925, who died last year in the same week as this year's festivities. Errrm, I guess that makes me The Patriarch[y]. As I type, I am wearing one of Pat's sweaters - maybe that will serve as patriarchal robing?

When good men do nothing

I have a younger friend who is, like me, a passionate believer in the EUropean Dream. As a youngster he was happy to articulate his side of any argument about the politics, economics & social benefits of hugging Magyars and Spaniards. In college he widened (or narrowed?) his political horizons to consider the inequities and inefficiencies of Ireland and asked which of the available political parties had the organizational infra-structure to get things done. His analysis decided that Fianna Fail was far-and-away the most Effective machine and so he joined the party. In May 2002, two weeks before the 2002 General Election, our entire lab was on a train to Cork for a scientific meeting. Our Kevin bailed out in Portlaoise and returned to Dublin because the Fianna Fáil website had collapsed and he was the only person in the country who knew how to fix it. We used to tease him about being the next Taoiseach but three.

I've just finished earbooking Running From Office by former TD and Minister Eoghan Murphy. Murphy was a middle class kid who could have leveraged his network and straight white privilege into a comfortable life with two cars in the drive and enough money for beer and skittles. In his 20s he working abroad as an effective UN apparatchik when the 2008 financial crash, the bailout, the Troika set fire to Celtic Tiger. He could not look on from the sidelines and watch his country get flushed down the t'ilet. His family had no party political affiliation, so he was free to choose what colour shirt to wear. Unlike Our Kevin, he cast his lot in with Fine Gael FG, the other right-of-centre party who have carved up the political turkey with Fianna Fáil FF since the foundation of the State 100 years ago.

The subtitle of Murphy's book is Confessions Of Ambition And Failure In Politics. And confessional it is. The quality of political discourse in these Post-Twitter days is so debased, that people all over the Internet are damning the book as a self-serving, self-pitying, pathetic excuse for the fact that there are still homeless people [Murphy was Minister of Housing (. . . Planning, Flood defense, Pandemics, Local Government and Elections) for several years]. We don't have a TV, and indeed I've recently stopped listening to the wireless especially The News. But I remember at the time clocking Minister Murphy as someone who was not merely marking time and blaming others but was having new ideas about how to house the nation . . . and all her dusky dispossessed dependents. 

Politics is the Art of the Possible [Politik ist die Kunst des Möglichen, Otto von B.] and there is so much inertia built into any parliamentary democracy that it is difficult for any one person, as Minister of Whatever, to achieve anything at all let alone deal with a major systemic embedded long-standing political issue like Health or Homelessness. It is otoh very easy for shouty hurlers on the ditch to prevent progress towards a more just and equable society. Lord NIMBY stalks the land holding up the Children's Hospital, Water Infrastructure, Refugee processing. Meanwhile Lord NIMBY's lieutenants are being spiteful and ad hominem on-line about politicians. That's poisonous enough, but now NIMBY's minions think it's brave to spit on the children of politicians or go by night and shit on their family doorstep.

Eoghan Murphy fought his corner on behalf of us all for 10 years but then cried Enough! before he had a total breakdown. He went on to other things which will benefit from his drive and realpolitikal chops. My opinion is that, as with Othello and Charlie Haughey, he did the state some service.  It is no harm to the health of the nation that Murphy chose to create photo-ops of him surfin', wild-water swimming and trekking [he covered 2 weeks of The Camino back in the day]. Better than being performatively seen bulging out of a funeral-and-events suit at Teh Ploughing. So Murphy is gone for now: who among Ireland's young-and-fit will next take up thankless cudgels on behalf of us old-and-not-so-fit and the dispossessed? Also on the reading list But What Can I Do? Why Politics Has Gone So Wrong, and How You Can Help Fix It by Alastair Campbell.

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" Not an Edmund Burke quote. And while we're on the pol quotes page “Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made”  Not Bismarck but John Godfrey Saxe (1869) so I don't need to rustle up the original German statement.

The Far Side

Eeee, when I were a nipper maybe ~11 y.o., I was introduced to the conventions of Ordnance Survey mapping. 

• contours close together said "hill"
• blob ⬤ surmounted by + is church with spire
• otoh filled square ■ surmounted by + is church with tower
• coniferous forests were kiki🌲while deciduous / broadleaf forests were bouba🌳
• T was telephone box [remember them?] - PH is pub - PO is Post Office 

With these tools in my carton, the next step was to create fantasy islands with footbridges, gravel pits, houses, power-lines, railways and their stations. It was a Bobby-no-Pals occupation, true; but engaging and harmless. I blame my pal Gibbo for giving map-play a darker more destructive dimension. That's by way of back-story to explain my interest in islands . . . of which there is an index [N = 70!] hereabouts.

I am not alone in paddling my sofa around distant alluring islands. A similar obsessive is Judith Schalansky who was born 45 years ago in Greifswald DDR, so an Ossi as a young child who couldn't travel beyond The Wall until it came down abruptly in 1989.  Schalansky has written a whimsical book about her interest in The Far-off and Sea-girt:  Atlas der abgelegenen Inseln. Fünfzig Inseln, auf denen ich nie war und niemals sein werde (2009). Here auf Deutsch is the N=50 list with links

So when Dau.I the Librarian had the English translation float into the Returns box, she reserved it for 'er dear old Dad and sent it to our branch library down-country. Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands - fifty islands I have not visited and never will. Translated into English by Christine Lo (2010). Here's the island list-of-links in English. I guess a) someone had to create some extra Wikipedia pages for the less well-kenned ocean-pimples b) some islands never made the cut because Schalansky couldn't rustle up even 300 coherent words about them.

For each of  the final fifty, four pages have been allocated 

1. data! Latitude and Longitude; the several and sundry names; the area; the human population, if any;  distances to a selection of other places; a telegraphic and quirky time line of its discovery and subsequent events
2. a lovely map on a 1km:5mm scale. Part of the absurdity is to represent, say,  Tromelin [80 hectare] the size of mung bean in a wash of blue  && Easter Island 160 sq.km bleeding into the gutter margin
3. & 4. A 300-400  essay about some peculiarity of the island's geography or history  . . . because it would be an impertinence to attempt a comprehensive narrative of who did what to whom over 500 years.

One of the peculiarities of this our blue planet is that all the land is crammed on one side map [as R] source and the CC licence. So only a few Europeans can claim that someone else is living exactly on the other side of the world. The Antipodes Islands in the far South Pacific barely graze the coast of Normandy, for example. Most of a flipped New Zealand would be in the Western Med, although Christchurch [43°32′S 172°38′E ] maps close-but-no-cigar to Nice [43°42′N 7°16′E]. Irish people must be content with Campbell Is, NZ [52°32′N 10°51′W] an uninhabited 112 sq.km which is antipodean to a patch of Atlantic Ocean ~60km West of Loop Head, Co Clare [52°34′N 9°56′W].

My fantasy island [above R] takes its perimeter from one of Schalansky's Fifty Favorite Islands. Hazard a guess, which? Answer below the fold.

Domhan beag

In the September of 2006, I rendered a small service to an elderly US Citizen. I was leaning on the farm-gate with a straw in my mouth when a people-carrier containing a family of USCs came up the lane a little hesitantly. They, six adult sibs and their mother, were on an Irish roots tour and believed that their people might have been buried hereabouts before the family upstakes and left for America in ca. 1880. Their data was better than mine on the genealogy; but I knew where to park their bus and for good measure said that the matriarch, or any of the party, was welcome to use the 'bathroom' when they came down the hill after their historical explorations. And it was so. That Christmas I was included in her Holiday Round-Robin and the following Christmas the holiday RR included a bit of teasing (I paraphrase) . . . that Bob - he's been a better son to me than [not all of ] my sons. All good fun. 

Over the next twenty (20!) years, each one of the adult children from the '06 people-carrier has come by for tea, or lunch, or both, or a pee, bringing their own children; and the younger generation have occasionally come visit on their own as they make their separate pilgrimages to The Ould Country. On one memorable occasion Jim was on a coming-of-age road trip with Jim Jnr. Their visit coincided with the unfortunate death of one of our ewes. We were chatting in the yard after their arrival when the truck from "the fallen animal service" backed into the yard. Oh maybe we can help? offered Jim because that's how the family was r'ared. As the back-gate of the truck clanged to earth, we were assailed by a wall of noisesome smell, a buZZZing cloud of flies & the enormously bloated carcass, legs pointing every which way, of a not too recently dead cow. The Jims retired as gracefully as two city-boys could when Mother Nature presents her more piquant parts. As so often, a cup of tea revived them a short while later.

Last week, Jim Snr.'s youngest brother Dan [whom prev] was on a lightning trip to Ireland to use-it-or-lose-it some 2025 annual leave. He had lost a day stateside when a flight was cancelled and so had to re-arrange a rather tight schedule. That meant that he came to ours twice - on Tuesday for lunch . . . and Thursday to climb the hill behind our house - which, as we've since established, is also behind the house of his ancestors. I am back to my May fitter-than-fatter regime of powering up the hill to The Fork of the Cross (An Gabhal na Croise) [as R]. What with lunch-and-all on Tuesday, I didn't get going on my yomp till dusk. 

Most unexpectedly, I encountered my neighbour below - much further up the hill than he is usually to be found. As we walked down together he confessed that, working from home behind a tight hedge on the county road he got to hear A Lot of quite indiscreet gossip. Why, just that afternoon a large blue Audi had stopped on the road and the driver had got out to have big chat with a pedestrian who was a) wearing a cowboy hat and b) pulling a small yappy-dog. You've been here longer than me, said Neighbour, do you know who the doggone wannabee cowboy might be? I ran though some incorrect suggestions and we left it there. But I did admit to knowing who was driving a rented blue Audi that afternoon.

Thursday noontime, after a cup of tea  in the morning with a possible 5th cousin, Dan rocked up ready to roll up some heathery miles to become the first of his generation to pass St Fursey's Altar to the Summit >!taRAAA!< of our Cnoc. And it was so; && we detoured South to visit the Holy Year Cross; && we descended on a different route to make a satisfying  3 ↩ mile x ↗1,000↘ ft circular yomp of it . . . with plenty of time to pause <puf> <puf> <puf> to admire the view; natter with another couple of walkers at the summit; natter to each other about this and that. 

On the way down Dan threw out:  Oh I almost forgot: as I left you after lunch on Tuesday, I had to go slow because of a fellow walking a dog and, as we do, I rolled down the window to say excuse me and how d'ye do. And (of course) I introduced myself and it turns out we share a surname. Wait. Stop, I said, curtly interrupting him, did your new relative have a cowboy hat and a yappy dog? Of course he did. Because Ireland and its entire diaspora have only 4 degrees of separation it is An Domhan Beag [small world] as The Boy found out in Poland two weeks ago. Dan's new Rellie also shared cell phone numbers for some other potential family members across three counties. Doubtless there will be some comparing of DNA bases at ancestry.com.  The Cousins and The Summit:

an rás don áras

Tomorrow, Fri 24 October 2025, the Plain People of Ireland will be out to vote for the Next President after half a Dau.II lifetime of President Michael D Higgins aka Mícheál Dónal Ó hUigínn; b. 18 April 1941 - former Minister [Lab] for Arts Culture and the Gaeltacht.  When MiggleD was elected in 2011 he was 70 and swore upon the Sacred Chalice of Tara that he would only strut the stage for a single seven year term in his seven inch boots; and then give way to someone different. But no, he got too comfy on the Presidential sofa and nominated himself for a second term in 2018.  He is now 84 and, whatever his live forever druthers, the constitution compels him to lay down his sceptre. He's been fine. He has pushed the boundaries of Presidential speaking rights and political independence in good ways. And I am happy to have a fellow academic and intellectual represent Ireland - whatever other faults you might have as a professor, you're unlikely to be as thick as pig-dribble.

In May this year, a bit ahead of the commentariat, I posted about the [odds against] candidates for the Top Post in this our Republic. The list looked like the usual motley crew of out-to-grass politicians, pundits and personalities. y'have to ask how?why?wha'? it is that so many party politicians get backed for a formally apolitical post. Four months later, in the last month before nominations closed, even less salubrious creatures emerged from the shadows with hopes for The Crown: 

• Sir-Bob-I-took-the-Soup Geldof [prev]; 
• cage-fighter Conor McGregor [prev]; 
• Bertie "The Envelope" Ahern [prev] [May 10-to-1] got delusional about his Right to the FF nomination in September
• Gareth Sheridan [May 100-to-1] got backing from two CoCos
• Maria "Referendum Níl+Níl" Steen got 18 members [2 short! phew] of the Oireachtas to back her right to a line n the ballot
• Michael "HoherMarsch" Flatley [prev]
• Johanna "Weatherwax" Donnelly!!
• Tony "Lockdown" Holohan [May 200-to-1] [prev]

I could go on, but I'd be getting down beyond the barrel-scrapings. You have to wonder why anyone would put themselves in the media spotlight for obsessive adverse scrutiny and blaggarding. As with Adi Roche [bloboprev Chernobyl dogoodnik] who was smeared out of the 1997 race because of [unfounded] allegations against her brother. Or in 2011, David Norris whose campaign tanked when a 9 y.o. interview was dug up to encourage voters (not slow in these matters) to conflate being gay with paedophilia.

Fianna Fáil, failing Bertie Ahern, chose to shunt ~€500,000 towards the election of a GAA-populist outsider called Jim Gavin [R_abbit-in-headlights source & Licence]. But the normally effective FF Machine failed in their due diligence on his financial, moral, social, genetic back story. His campaign was not going great when journalistic due diligence revealed that Gavin as a not-quite-legal landlord had bilked a tenant of €3,300 in 2009. Collapse of GAA.FF party, He's still on The Ballot, he's very sorry he ever forgot about the rent, he was a man, take him for all in all, so you can still vote for him unlike the wannabees above.

We're left with Catherine Connolly [Ind. woz Lab] and Heather Humphreys [former Fine Gael Minister: like MiggleD, was Minister of Arts Culture and the Gaeltacht. Either of them could do the job without bringing shame upon us all. They are neither of them quite eligible for Free Travel so they are younger than the current incumbent was when he started. I've been quite the fanboi for Connolly since I found her speaking the truth to power on YT in 2021. And my radical Dau.I and Dau.II will also be voting early and often for the only candidate of The Left. But really, is this the best that 5 million citizens can come up with? Maybe we don't want somebody too Inspirational in the Áras?

Resistance is useless

Years ago, my neighbour above was hooshing sheep up our lane "by hand". Make that many years ago because hooshing is now done by/with/from his 4x4 and a lorra honking of horn. But at that earlier encounter there was time to pause when I remarked on the fact that the last straggling lamb seemed to have only 3 legs. Apparently his 5 y.o. youngest son, trying to be just like daddy, had gone into the barn picked up a syringe full of antibiotic and injected the contents into the meaty part of the lamb's left thigh. The leg had 'gone septic' and 'dropped off' but the lamb had survived and there we were.  This was in the last 20th century when farmers were exempt from any sensible measure of control w.r.t. the doctoring of their livestock. This was on small [5 y.o. apprentice] scale and huge [profligate use of penicillin as a growth promoter for battery chickens].

We've been in the farrrming biz for 25 years and one of the handiest tools in the chest is a topical antibiotic spray [R] to give the illusion of control when surveying and treating damaged feet. Sheep Ovis aries are designed to hop across a rocky terrain, grazing on grass and forbes and shrubberies. The related goat Capra hircus is more of a browser [shrubberies and bushes and trees] than a grazer - but they also prefer / need a rocky under-footing. Without regular abrasion and sand-papering, the claws of sheep over-grow, and split and break and get infected. And grass, if the slightest bit too long, will deliver paper-cuts between the toes which also get infected.

It is probably not a good idea to be so flaithulach with antibiotics in the environment. At the most recent visit to the Vets for matèriel against the autumn dosing it was revealed that the terramycin spray could only be dispensed by prescription, whc fair enough, and The Vet would have to visit at least once a year to allow such prescription with a clear conscience. Accordingly two days later, The Vet made a Passing Visit [cheaper than a call-out], viewed the sheep at close quarters and allayed our concern about a lump on the lower jaw of one of the ewes. Job Done, see you next October.