Trinity treeees

Let everyone bob to their own level. I was happy to be a second rate scientist because it gave me the chance to watch ticking first rate minds at work. I wasn't a fifth rate scientist; although I guess some of them are ignoring Mark Twain's advice about writing and writers and still drawing a salary in colleges round the world rather than sawing wood. Before I worked at The Institute and started The Blob, I was a computational immunologist in UCD and then TCD, the rival universities in Dublin. 

One of the first raters, for whom I worked, decided to formalize the process of allowing teenagers to intern in science. Having Professor Bigcheese bullying his colleagues to edutain his nephew for a few days got to be disruptive, haphazard and [therefore] not a good window into the wonders of science. If the Department could limit interns to a couple of weeks in the year then a) the kids would have some peers to hang out with while the centrifuge span down b) group activities / explanations / safety announcements would be efficient use of employee time c) the disruption to Real Work would be time-limited. And let's make a scientific scavenger hunt round college to get the teens out in the fresh air and explore campus. That would be Let's you Bob make a scientific scavenger hunt. Nothing loath, in 2008, off I went to research and write a booklet called Finding Out in Trinity. One of the tasks was to guesstimate the height of a particular tree near the college rugger pitch adjacent to the Engineering Building.

I was in Dublin recently and made a progress report on tree-growth between 2008 [L] and 2024 [R]. We can take it that the white building hasn't grown over the last 16 years (that is a new build behind it, extreme R). Even if you take the angle and camera differences with a pinch of salt, it looks like [data tabulated below] that tree has grown 2.05 ÷ 1.79 = 14% in that period.

Year	Building	Tree	Ratio
2008	28mm	50mm	1.78
2024	23mm	47mm	2.05
		growth =	14%

The Oregon maple Acer macrophyllum in which I was showing off in 1974 came crashing to earth in 2018. Partly because it was "a hazard", and partly because The Patriarchy prefers things symmetrical to show they are in charge, the matching maple on the other side of front square was felled out the following year. They were replaced with a pair of ginkos Ginko biloba which are native to Clare China. The trees are doing well, so far, although one could, and I do, fault the committee for failure to plant a species native to Ireland . . . and for still obsessing about symmetry as if we're André Le Nôtre in the Versailles of Louis XIV. They never learn. 

The other famous paired trees in front square are the Erman's birch Betula ermanii - also native to China. There used to be two more Oregon maples in the patches of manicured lawn here, adjacent to Front Gate. One of them blew down in a storm in 1945 and after much hand-wringing the College Symmetrists won the day and the remaining maple was felled out and replaced with the pair of birches. Nature, sunlight and soil had the last laugh on the Symmetriarchy: leaving one birch struggling and the other winner-takes-all - a fitting metaphor for late stage Capitalism:

Trouble with tree decisions like these is that they stand testament long after the responsible dusty old academics have passed on to the library in the sky.

Scones across the ocean

For years we lived anyhow with one another in the naked desert,
under the indifferent heaven. By day the hot sun fermented us;
and we were dizzied by the beating wind. At night we were stained
by dew, and shamed into pettiness by the innumerable silences of stars.

It wasn't quite as intense as it was for Lawrence of Arabia [The opening of his The Seven Pillars of Wisdom] and we didn't blow up any trains, but me and my pal Θ shared an office at The Institute for the 7 years before Coronarama. We covered for each other, commiserated when the exams for marking made a Manhattan of our desks, laughed about (but never at) our student's quirks and errors and shared our petty triumphs over an indifferent bureaucracy. Θ lives diametrically opposite The Institute from Caisleán Bob and twice the distance. But since I've retired, between the end of exams and the Summer recess, she's come out for tea&gossip each Summer. Same this June. I was going on (and on) about the wonders of our traditional hay meadow and its biodiversity and Θ said she'd bring her research group out to see this marvel - as a way of broadening her team's outlook and input.

Well that happened last Thursday after I'd received a text to say expect six for tea and scones, one each from Benin, Egypt, Greece, India, Kenya and Mexico. hoo-wee, I thought that was a rather wonderful metaphor what New Ireland means. TBH, I've no idea what their status is w.r.t. to The Man in his Indefinite Leave to Remain hat. They may be just passin' through, as I was when I spent 4 years in Massachusetts 45 years ago. But they're definitely contributing to Ireland Inc.! Working hard; pushing the frontiers; jollof rice! cilantro! bakalava! [not better than bacon & cabbage but different].

But it was a pretty good way for us all to spend an afternoon - apart from nearly an hour in a car to get here; and the weather. It wasn't exactly raining but humidity was 100%: like we were in the cloud. They weren't too distressed that they'd missed the biodiversity of the traditional hay meadow (which was knocked 2 weeks ago) and seemed interested in heritage tales about the House The Bomb Fell On and The Ringstone.

We passed through the polytunnel on our way back from a field tour and I was delighted to share mint and rosemary clippings with cooks who use those species in meal prep but just cannot find a source in their local shops. Now most people agree that home-baking can be a treat and I'd made a bowlful of dinky 5½ cm egg-glazed, touch-of-cornmeal, buttermilk scones. I explained that the best, traditional Devonshire, way of eating them was split in half so that each half acts as a vehicle for butter, then jam, then whipped cream. Unless you're lactose intolerant you can't have enough full-fat dairy products.

And soon enough (time flies when you're having fun) everyone had to pile into the cars and return to base - two mums had to lift childer from the creche before closing time. I can think of worse ways to spend a tuthree hours: sharing recipes, moaning about the patriarchy, and chatting about the various microbiomes both inside and out. A blob-back-catalog consult indicates that we'd been Failte Ireland for far-from-home students before in 2013.

Lost in Dublin

I guess I am a diasporan. In 1931 my father left Dunmore East at the age of 14 and more or less didn't come back: like Pat the Salt he ran away to sea; although The Da aka "Sir" didn't ship before the mast, but rather, in time, got to drive very big naval ships in quite exotic [and mundane] places. All his kids were born in England - Dover, because my mother was born there and went home to deliver the sprogs. But all my paternal rellies were in Ireland and, as kids, we returned every year to visit a diminishing store of agéd female relatives - Rosslare - Wexford - Tipperary - Wicklow - and home to wherever home was that year in England.

The year I turned 12 years old, we rang the changes on this round because my folks had business with the family lawyer in Dublin. It was also, coincidentally, the year we came with a 14ft touring caravan to save on hotels. The lawyer occupied fantastically dusty and decrepit chambers round the back of TCD - since demolished for the extension of the Mont Clare Hotel. Lest we die of boredom or from inhaling spores from long dead protestant dust, we three kids were deposited in the snug of Rice's Bar at the top of Grafton Street with minerals and bags of crisps. A peculiar choice? because Rice's, at least when I was a student a few years later, was The Dublin Gay Bar. But then again the whole othering anxiety balloon about The Gays (let alone The Zombies and The Kidnappers) hadn't gone up. So here we are in Rice's [◎pink blob] on the NW corner of Stephen's Green S; the parents are at the solicitor [▶blue arrow] on the NW corner of Merrion Square M. The car & caravan are parked extravagantly occupying several parking bays somewhere on Merrion Square.

As a Plan: so far, so good. But when I'd guzzled my mineral and the crisps were finished and I'd had enough being teased by my sibs, I announced that I was going to hang out in the caravan and stomped out of the pub. A while later, my parents returned to collect their family and head off towards the ferry port. Consternation! Contingency plan to leave one parent in Dublin to liaise with the Gardai and the Bureau of Missing Persons; while the other parent returned to England as scheduled with the rump of the family.

Meanwhile, I'd made two circuits of Stephen's green [we'd parked beside a large park with trees, here was a large park with trees] and found no caravan. I then started cutting through the Green to sneak up on the ephemeral caravan and catch it before it disappeared again. Eventually, I cut my losses and returned to Rice's to endure more [parched] abuse from my brother and sister. Let me tell you, the Prodigal son was in the ha'penny place compared to what I experienced in a torrent of relief-plus-annoyance. So it all ended happily ever after, as we all caught the ferry together that night. The mobile-phone generation cannot imagine the sketchiness of communication protocols in the 1960s.

We never toured in the caravan again and it was parked up on blocks in the field next to our house in Essex. I adopted it a tuthree years later as my atelier: banging out rubbish poetry on an old Olivetti portable typewriter.

A few years later, I was old enough to vote and old enough to leave home so I left Essex and turned up to try studenting in Trinity College Dublin. I was no longer answerable to my parents who were 400km and an Irish Sea away; so I could get lost in Dublin without causing an international incident.
I was still trying to locate people / things round the periphery of Stephen's Green though.

BIG

small

• gyratory cone crusher breaks rocks
  
• Scythes saving swedish meadow Slåttergubben R
• Saving peat in the Orkneys 
• Merch
  
• Anonymous Bronze-age axe;  Provenance is vital. Metal-detectors illegal in Ireland.
• Martin Hayes gets off the horse and plays The Sailor's Bonnet at walking pace cw: Tommy Tiernan
  
• You may recall this rendition from The Gloaming
  
• Game theory prisoners tit-for-tat
• Games: tight squeeze for pilots and ATC at JFK
• In 2018, I wrote about my  Nokia 3310 . Someone in the Guardian thinks the battery life is mighty. So do I.

Nobody else agrees but I think the US VP hopeful JD Vance bears a beard+eye-brow resemblance to US President Ulysses S Grant:

Noble or narsty?

Are you kind to kittens [L]? Do you bring cookies? Lend books? Rutger Bregman reckons that you, Jan Modal, behave like that, because he does and most everyone he knows does too. We've met Bregman before on The Blob, speaking the tax-truth to power in Davos, and de-demonizing the poor. I'm reading his latest book Humankind: A Hopeful History (2021) - originally De Meeste Mensen Deugen: Een Nieuwe Geschiedenis van de Mens (2019) which flips the statement [Most People Lie: A New History of Man]. Whatevs, the book is a philosophical look at what it means to be human and how we could / should live. Longish sample on Googlebooks.

DO you believe, with Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), that human life is 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short' and we need government to survive the assaults of nature and the rest of humanity.
OR, with Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), that once we were 'noble savages' and the ills of the world started when the first man claimed exclusive ownership of a defensible part of the Commons of Eden.
The side of this dichotomy you lean towards will probably determine your views on . . .  prisons, the queen, redemption, sin, taxation, UBI, volunteerism, welfare and youth mental health.

lean towards because it's surely not a black&white  answer. Although Bregman defo leans towards Rousseau not least because a Hobbesian world is so bleak and uncaring. The EuroEnglish language version of the book [R] allows a neat pun on the etymologically related [O.E gecynd] meanings of kind 1. friendly, deliberately doing good to others originally esp. relatives 2. those rellies = kin. But not kine (cattle) that's another root altogether.

Bregman develops the idea that The Enlightenment, including Adam "The Wealth of Nations" Smith embraced Hobbes in the belief that people were [bad] idle skivers who needed to be incentivized to do any work. Out the window went the idea that lord and tenants were in a mutually dependent relationship - see Levin in Anna Karenina haymaking scything with his peasants - where everyone would take pride in their work because it required deliberate practice and attention to detail. Assembly lines and the parsing of work to a series of mind-numbing repetitive strain injury tasks were more efficient for Capital and some portion [the least possible] of the enterprize was paid as wages.

Bregman cites a number of cases [including the Haifa day-care fiasco] of perverse incentives [bloboprev] where paying (or fining) people leads to a series of unfortunate consequences. Anyone in the working world will know case of gaming the system. If/when The Man[agement] insists on auditing one aspect of work, then that aspect will become paramount on the shop-floor, the ward, the office, the lab, the classroom. Everything else gets sidelined. In my teaching at The Institute, new courses had to present a list of LOs [learning outcomes] for approval by the Teaching and Learning Committee. The LOs determined the curriculum and the contents of the exams. When something really exciting came along like the horsemeat hamburger scandal of 2013, there was no space on the curriculum to dig into that topical topic.

Charles Darwin married Emma "the Potter's Daughter" Wedgwood in 1839, and neither of them needed to work for a living. 1839 was getting close to peak industrial capitalism. Isn't in peculiar <not> that Darwin's whole world-view of individuals competing for scarce resources so exactly mapped his own lived experience . . . capitalism red in tooth and claw? I can't goog it up but Voltaire said something like "if donkeys were religious their gods would have long ears!". Mid-20thC evolutionary biologists had to tie themselves in "inclusive fitness" knots to explain the many examples of altruism in the natural world: where animals are kind to each other seemingly at some cost to themselves. 

Enough of me, back to Human.kind. Bregman is setting out his stall that if you trust people people and give them autonomy, then they are likely to achieve joy in work, being creative and contributing to the enterprise beyond their reluctant, extrinsically motivated, labour. These iconoclasts, it's easy to dismiss them because they are rocking the ship-of-state which may have been sailing majestically along under a totally skewed set of assumptions based on sketchy data and wishful thinking. Rutger Bregman puts it much more elegantly that I can, albeit at 400 pages of text. Get it out the library! I'm finished with it.

Covered in beees

First we'll get Eddie "covered in beees" Izzard out of the way. Our remarkable - recent - week of agri-progress coincided with another nice example of closure. It's at least 20 years ago since The Beloved started bee-keeping. When we acquired the ruined farmhouse in 1996, the disintegrating soffit and the six-slate hole in the roof were home to seven separate bee colonies. We networked ourselves up to a) an aged bee-keeper who had b) a much younger wannabee keeper in tow. These two came out with no notice one evening to "take those bees away". There followed a drunken, dangerous, hilarious adventure involving card-board boxes, teetering ladders, a pry-bar and only a few stings.

Until the bees vacated, renovation could not start and it was, in all, a full year before we actually moved into the house we'd bought at auction. Over the next tuthree years, The Beloved acquired a couple of bee-mentors, who were beyond kind, generous and knowledgeable. She also acquired lots of equipment: bee-hives, queen-excluders, frames, supers, roofs;  a smoker, a frame-pry, a veil & bee-keeper's jumpsuit, gloves, boots. We looked forward to the sweet life flowing with honey and lubricated with mead. But the new career was set back by an anaphylactic reaction to a bee-sting that added an epi-pen to the bee-phernalia. Apiculture didn't STOP because of epiculture but it definitely slowed its gallop.

It's been 2 years since La Torbalina de Tenerife aka The Biggest Heart in The Valley brought three Ukrainian refugees across for tea and scones. LaTdeT is currently teaching language, cooking and life-skills the other side of the mountain; and last Summer Dau.II went along as intern for a couple of weeks. Between the tea and chat, it fell out that one of the students was a Crimean Tatar who'd escaped the war with his wife and family of tots. So far, so normal, in these turbulent ethnic times. What was a little more niche was that Юсеф was a keen and accomplished bee-keeper back home! You may be able to see where this going. 

In the middle of agri-progress week, through a certain amount of trilingual chinese whispers, Юсеф [and his entire tribe] rocked up to "collect any surplus bee-kit" - that's what we thought anyway. But Юсеф was all "spacibo but where am the bees?". For all the years we've been in bee-land, there has been a hive in the top corner of the Home Field, fenced off against sheep-blunder, but gone completely feral. Most years there are some bees in residence but there have been at least three separate tenancies over the last 20 years. Юсеф's face went radiant when I showed him the roof of that hive surrounded by head-high nettles - there was clear evidence of bee-coming and bee-going.

Now here's the thing. If you want to move a hive of bees, you have to go less than 3m or more than 3,000m. Anything in between and the poor bees don't know whether to shit-or-go-blind, and half of them fail to return to the hive with their first load of pollen & nectar. Also, you want to scope out a strange hive when everyone is off at work in the fields BUT you want to move the hive when they are all tucked up in bed at home. Accordingly it wasn't until the following evening - Friday - that the hive was moved to a temporary home 6km up the valley. The plan being to move them back to La Quinta da Torbalina on the Tuesday following.

Because he's a very canny chiel and ever the optimist, Юсеp took the full bee-hive away and left another behind in the same location. This decoy hive was seeded with some fresh comb to say "Hello fellow bees, this is a grand place altogether, make yourselves at home". This cunning plan paid off handsomely: when I checked on Sunday evening I found a modest amount of activity on the landing stage of the decoy hive [see above L]. Who knows? They could be stop-outs who were away late foraging when their previous home was taken away. Or they could be a totally new colony which had swarmed in the neighbourhood and taken up residence in their new gaff. I am given to understand that, in the former case, the queenless rump of the colony can promote one of their number to the top job as egg-laying machine. Note added in press: hive two dang! kiting that second hive eventually failed, so Юсеp only has one working hive in its final destination.

Bonus for us: we have delivered a car-load of bee-equipment to where it can start generating honey and decluttered a corner of the polytunnel: WIN and, like, WIN.

How should we live?

I climbed a hill as light fell short,
And rooks came home in scramble sort,
And filled the trees and flapped and fought
And sang themselves to sleep;
. . . . .
I heard them both, and oh! I heard
The song of every singing bird
That sings beneath the sky,
And with the song of lark and wren
The song of mountains, moths and men
And seas and rainbows vie!
I heard the universal choir,
The Sons of Light exalt their Sire
With universal song . . . . . 

tum te tum? The long, relentless poem of which I've abstracted ~6% is Song of Honour by Ralph Hodgson (1871 - 1962). When I was a droopee, unhappee, wannabee poet aged 16, I transcribed the whole poem as an alternative to writing my own. I transcribed A Lot of other poetry at the time [imagine a world without ctrl-C, ctrl-V] & developed a neat and (thereby) efficient cursive hand. A couple of years later, I graduated to hammering away at an Olivetti manual typewriter which, even at two working fingers, was yet more speedy and legible. Ralph Hodgson is forgotten now, but he was at the centre of The Arts before WWII. Many of his contemporaries looked to The East for inspiration but Hodgson actually lived and worked in Japan for most of the 1930s.

Ralph Hodgson doesn't warrant even a sentence in The Light of Asia A History of Western Fascination with the East (2024) by Christopher Harding. I've just finished reading this weighty tome. There are nods to Alexander the Great, Marco Polo, Matteo Ricci [prev] and even Lafcadio "Tramore's Own" Hearn but the book really focuses on three 20thC adepts: 

• Alan Watts (L 1915-1963), 
• Bede Griffiths (1906-1993) and 
• Erna Hoch (1919-2003).

Alan Watts, looking suitably Mephistophelean [L] has been threading through my life since I was a twenty-something. He went to the same English school as me [not at the same time, I'm not that old] and was often on the wireless with wry, chuckly, profound lectures when we tuned into the BBC or later NPR in Boston. He departed this incarnation early having serially shagged himself to death often in a haze of alcohol. I liked the chuckles [last para]: they made Zen and a contemplative life more accessible to spotty-poet me. Harding's book reminds me that Alan Watts was right at the hub of the Beats [Ginsberg, Kerouac, Snyder] in 1950s California. Sausalito hot-tubs & Howl.

I knew much less about Alan "Bede" Griffiths; an Anglo-Catholic Benedictine who went to India to spread the gospel but found himself consuming the local culture and writing inter alia River of Compassion: A Christian Commentary on the Bhagavad Gita (1983). Westerners bought his many books which found commonality among Western and Eastern religions. We would now probably cancel the poor man for cultural appropriation.

And I knew nothing at all about Erna Hoch, a Swiss physician and psychiatrist who went to India and finished up running The Madhouse at Lotus Lake and transforming it into an effective psychiatric hospital. There they employed Western and Eastern practice to do the best they could to alleviate distress - mental and physical. There is no entry for Erna Hoch in Wikipedia - neither the en. de. nor fr. editions - someone should rectify that.

The Light of Asia focuses on a) What is reality? and b) How should we live? - the meat and potatoes of philosophy since Confucius was a chap. The author Harding is a cultural historian not a philosopher, so you're not going to get the answers here; you're going to watch other, long dead, people wrestle with these eternal conundrums. A bit like getting seats in Centre Court Wimbledon, Athens.