WOFFAL!

For months and months, I've had a book lurk unread in my Borrowbox reading list. Finally, a week ago, I brought 21st Century Yokel [2017] by Tom "never 'eard of 'im" Cox into play and it was a treat. He was born in the same year as Caitlin Moran [prev] and had a similar early career trajectory: working-class kid from Up North with a good ear and zeitgeist taste gets job as mainstream music journalist in London. They've branched out on different paths since then, but are both still writing and still lol funny. Tom Cox has a good dozen books out and about.

Cox [as R on a Devon cliff] found the pace and prices of late 20thC London a bit much and went upstakes to the country, first in Norfolk and then to Devon. He reflects in one chapter about the richness and variety of landscape to be found in such a small island as "Great" Britain. It ranks 9th after Honshu, ahead of Ellesmere. The coast of Devon and Cornwall is all cliffs, storms and sandy bays [much like Costa na Déise] while East Anglia is is a pancake haunted by fogs, and getting eaten away through erosion [bloboprev].

Cox embraces the fractal nature of landscape, asserting that there is a life-times interest and engagement to be had in the square mile surrounding his home outside Totnes. Indeed any square-mile, if you live nearby and pay attention. It's like Louis Agassiz spending the Summer vacation working his way across his back yard. We don't need to go to Bali or Iguazu for The Amazing: head to the nearest hedgerow be small.

The interface between domestic and wild in Cox's world is his cats. He's written a tuthree whole books about them. One chapter of Yokel tells how one of his cats was savaged by an off-leash dog and needed two operations and days of veterinary care to survive. The [enormous] vet bills were mostly covered through a crowd-funder organised by his fan-base. "wollen sie ewig leben?", it's not for me to judge how folks spend their own money.

21stC Yokel was published by Unbound, a cunning publishing venture which laid off the risk by crowd-funding the books they accepted for publication. It worked extremely well for Cox, who had a) track record b) loyal and extensive fan base. And his next handful of books were published by the same venture. For other authors, not so much. Unbound went into administration in 2025, 14 years after launch, owing royalties to multiple dependent authors. One of the directors John "QI" Mitchinson [whom prev] acquired the assets of the bankruptcy to create Boundless. "Author Tom Cox, whose latest book Everything Will Swallow You was due to come out this Thursday, became suspicious after months of not having received payments he was owed." That's the thing with bankruptcy, incompetent or unlucky entrepreneurs get to cut their losses and walk away to start new ventures. Their suppliers, clients, customers just have to suck up the losses - counting themselves fortunate to get pennies in the pound of what they are owed. 

otoh!! Walter Scott's printing business went tits-up in 1825 owing £130,000. Scott undertook to write himself out of his debts and died doing it. But the creditors' investment was returned and we got Woodstock, The Fair Maid of Perth and Castle Dangerous.

Tom Cox has a Dad, Mick (not Michael) Cox whose antics make an excellent foil for some of the book's humor. His catch-phrase is “WATCH OUT FOR FUCKWITS AND LOONIES!" [WOFFAL] while his aphorisms, and peculiar certainties, are always delivered SHOUTING. Apparently, this ALL CAPS conceit was first used by John "Garp" Irving in A Prayer for Owen Meany [1989], which is the favorite book of Cox Sr. John Irving was making a lot of waves when we was living in New England in the early 1980s but I never got further than The World According to Garp [1978]. Owen Meany sounds like a rec to me and I've reserved a copy at the Library.

A Life in Pictures

Whoa! The damsons are in.  We have a single scraggy damson Prunus domestica tree on a ditch in the fields across the lane. Recently we make jam from the fruit. 03Sep24 picked 1.15kg; 07Sep25  picked 0.85kg. The shortfall was partly due to fruit-fall and bird-attack, I conclude that timing is important: the fruit are pucker-up sour in August but compost by mid-September. Blossoms appeared this May. On foot of a phone-call from Dau.II, I lugged the ladder across the lane on 04Sep26 and picked a record 2.5kg of fruit [top L]; discarding A Lot blighted by brown rot Monilinia fructigena. 

 In the Spring, our friend-and-neighbour La Torbellina delivered a tray of very miscellaneous tomato and squash seedlings; not more than two of any variety. I carefully trans-planted them all: outside and in the polytunnel in a hope for the best fashion. I also started a variety of beans. It's been one of those years when it hardly seems worth the effort; the beans came late and grew scraggy and had a very brief bearing season. I saved about 1kg, blanched and frozen for Christmas and ate the rest. The squash were also disappointing: two scrawny courgette (which are the only variety worth eating [fry in butter with black pepper and a sprink of salt]. And a handful of uglier larger squash of uncertain name. Including the monster [mid L] which shouts the sage advice: "never eat anything bigger than your head" . . . free to good home, lads.

Me, I take 'less perfick' beans which would be rejected by Bird's Eye (and most of my family) and cook t'buggers up in a cozido: fry chopped onion and/or other allium in olive oil [it's a Portuguese recipe]; cast thereto available chopped veggies (beans, toms, spuds, carrots, squash); tarragon if possible, parsley oregano thyme else; sliced chorizo if the vegetarians are off-site; a handful of lentils. Cook till cooked. Gob more olive oil into the bowl. Eat with bread. 

A month ago, I started doing triage on the 000s of 'snap-shots' dating from ~1975 to ~2025. The collection / hoard cannot be dignified by describing them as Photographs. Photographs are composed, appropriately lit and in-focus. I am aware that Robert Capa and Henri Cartier Bresson loosed off a roll of film to cover one event / shoot . . . and left almost all of them on the cutting-room floor. That is probably appropriate now with digital cameras. But when each roll of film cost ready money while development and printing more than doubled that cost, it seems a ruinous expense to secure a couple of, like, Photographs. The stack of duff snaps [bot L] is 25cm tall and weighs 3.4kg. Their next and final move is to the dump; I will no longer schlep them, unviewed, from home to home over several decades. I have spoke! It's pathetic really, I look at images from 40 years ago and cannot recall the name of several of the friends thus captured. How much harder will it be for The Daus who weren't even born when the snap was snopped?

How do we know that Babe Ruth existed?

I am a fan of Sean "Mindscape" Carroll. He's a respected theoretical physicist, who has a chair in Philosophy at Johns Hopkins U. For his Mindscape Podcast he cast his net wide and pokes the expertise of his guest: chemistry, ecology, fashion, immunology, mathematics, medicine, oenology, philosophy, as well as physics. After an hour and a bit, I feel a bit better informed if not actually cleverer. Because clever is not about knowing stuff [Babe Ruth was 53 when he died; the Capital of Hungary is Budapest; Brobdingnagians are Big] it's about being able to process stuff. I know a lot - to wit decades of success in Table Quizzes. But there are limited areas [the chicken genome, Portuguese cats] where I know stuff because I've made it my business, through observation and research, to find things out from first principles. For everything else, I rely on trusted sources: hoping, assuming, trusting that someone else has done the deep digging. Because, for certain sure, we can't reinvent the wheel for everything we are certain sure about.

I bet you're convinced that the Earth is round like a ball, as is the sun, moon and planets. But what is the evidence for this hypothesis? Could you marshal that evidence for a crowd of skeptical fans of Terry Pratchett? I wrote some years ago about being wrong-footed on my belief in evolution. Research biologists, even biochemists, accept the theory of evolution by natural selection as fact. But only 1-in-20 of their serried ranks could articulate the evidence for this belief. But many of those same people are prepared to be rude to, and about, people from Tennessee who reckon nature's wonderful diversity and complex interactions are the creation of The Deity.

In August Carroll was chatting to his friend and colleague Stuart Firestein about how science lurches from blunder to error and drags the participants from ignorance to insight . . . and a well-cited paper, or tenure, or a Prize. At one point, the chat revealed that there is a [conspiracy] theory to the effect that there is no evidence that Babe Ruth even ever existed. This [un]hinges on the observation that there is only one moving image purporting to be Babe Ruth. There are loadsa copies in different contexts but it all boils down to this one movie clip. Given a) He died in 1948, decades after moving images became main-stream, b) His baseball stats are frankly incredible c) He is [therefore] probably the most well known baseball player who ever lived. The Theorists consequently experience a too-good-to-be-true meltdown of cognitive dissonance; which is resolved by concluding (and propagating) that Babe Ruth was a madey-uppy construct. Maybe as a conspiracy by Big Baseball to have an unattainable summit to inspire merely mortal players. Who knows with these crazies, huh? After all, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin never walked on the moon: the whole thing was staged at a studio in Houston.

Carroll and Firestein conclude that the adult response is not to cry "You're all kookaburra cray-cray" but "You know, it's an interesting question. How do we really know there was a Babe Ruth?" . . . "what do we take seriously? Who do we trust? What evidence do we have? How do we judge it?". Now more than ever we need to have a focused crap-detector when AI-bots can hallucinate, and then publish, plausible sounding facts that jest ain't true. 

Getting shirtings

We were at a funeral last Sat: the penultimate survivor of the previous generation. I feel myself getting hustled penguin-like to the edge of the ice-flow and the leopard-seal of death in the cold cold waters below. I try to brush up nicely for weddings and funerals and someone complemented me on the jacket. Dau.I overheard and noted that, at a previous family gathering, my mother had expressed amazement to have born and bred two such different sons: "Take your Uncle J., when he runs out shirts because he's too busy to get to the laundry, he drops by Marks&Sparks and buys six more shirts. Your father on the other hand, robbed all your grandfather's shirts when he died, and I don't think he's bought another shirt since"

It's true that I looted about 2 dozen of my father's office shirts after the funeral; and a very serviceable dark woollen overcoat - ideal for sleety Winter funerals; and a handful of dark 'service' ties - Royal Engineers, HMS Dolphin Torpedo School. The shirts presented me tidy for the last 20 years of my working life in academia. A few years ago, post-pandemic, after retirement,we were doing The Big Shop in Tesco. Their Winter stock was on sale and I bought a serviceable 100% cotton flannel shirt in what passes for Royal Stewart Tartan in the Bangladeshi garment trade. My father's shirts were worn-through at the collar or stained by hand-to-mouth food accidents. My new shirt cost 1 cappuccino or 2 at the most and has become my GoTo outdoor work-shirt. I've been looking for similar, in a desultory fashion, in charity shops, ever since. But WTF capitalism when you can buy 5 pairs of socks for less than a cup of coffee?

On 3rd September Aldi advertised 100% cotton tartan workshirts. It was great good timing because I was due to collect our latest Brazilian tradie from Bunclody at 09:00hrs and Bunclody has an Aldi. But the shirt-cupboard was bare when I got to Aldi - one pallet of middle-aisle merch hadn't arrived. When I got home I realised I could put my TFI rural bus routes project into practice. 11:35 in Kiltealy >>> 12:10 New Ross . . . 12:40 New Ross >>> 13:15 Kiltealy. By then it was 11:15, so I had to drive the 3.5km to catch the Southbound bus.

Imagine my delight when my journey intersected with the fortnightly 30 minute Kiltealy stop by the Wexford Mobile Library van: there were two books-for-return on the back-seat of the car. The 359 bus arrived on time (empty of passengers). GoogleMaps says it takes 12 mins to walk from the NR Bus Stop to NR Aldi but I did it in 9 (passing Lidl on the other side of the street). Bought two shirts against a working Winter and legged it back to catch the bus home. Proof of principle [✓] half-an-hour would be plenty time to do the messages at Supervalu && the adjacent Polski Sklep && the Pharmacy on Main St && find an ATM to pay for it all. That's pretty damned good infra-structural support for rural Ireland in the 21stC. You could sign up for 3½ hours in New Ross. But I don't think I could.

I do, So, buy my own shirts. 

Joined up tarmac

For reasons explained in the second half of this post, I entered a rabbit-hole about Irish roads and their numbers. Before there were any Motorways in the Republic, there were T for Trunk roads and L for Link roads [as R from my father's AA Road Book of Ireland] and a spider's web of bohereens and back-roads which were known and used only by local inhabitants, so didn't deserve a number. T and L roads were renamed and renumbered in 1977 as N for National roads. Nobody used these numbers! The main road from Dublin to Waterford, Cork & Limerick was the Naas Road. After Naas [30km from Dublin] you had to memorize the list of towns and villages along the way: Kilcullen, Castledermott, Carlow, Leighlinbridge, Paulstown [L for Waterford, R for Kilkenny], Gowran, Dungarvan [not that one, the smaller one], Thomastown, Ballyhale, Mullinavat, Waterford!

The British system radiates from London and goes clockwise A1 Edinburgh A2 Dover A3 Portsmouth A4 Cardiff A5 Holyhead A6 Carlisle. Splitting the country into zones. A10 to Cambridge, A11 Norwich, A12 Lowestoft A13 Southend etc. A7,8,9 do a similar job in Scotland.

N primary routes  N roads in  Ireland go from Dublin anti-clockwise N1 Belfast N2 Derry N3 Cavan N4 Sligo N5 Westport N6 Galway N7 Limerick N8 Cork N9 Waterford N10 Kilkenny N11 Wexford. N12-N26 are other Primary routes not radiating from Dublin. N17 by the SawDoctors; N25 The great Southern Trunk Rosslare to Cork etc. N50 aka M50 is the Dublin Ring-road and N40 the Cork Bypass.

N secondary routes from N51 [Devlin CoWH to Drogheda CoLH] up to N87 [Belturbet CoCN for 30km to the N.I. borrrder]  stitch up the gaps in the network.

R regional routes are designated to fill the gaps between the gaps. They are labelled Rxxx, and the numbers are sort of regional. They also radiate anti-clockwise round Dublin R1xx in the NE to R7xx hereabouts in the Sunny SE: we can see the R702 from our haggard. Some R roads are re-designated from previous N Primary routes which have been superseded by Motorways and can be wide & straight with generous hard-shoulders. R8xx and R9xx are exclusively short, urban, and designed to help tourists get out of town. 

Local Roads are tiered in three classes and numbered accordingly either Lxxxx or Lxxxxx and the same number may duplicated by different county engineers
L-primary are numbered L1000 to L4999 and should be at least 4m wide
L-secondary are L5000 to L 8999 and may be less than 4m wide somewhere along them
L-tertiary are L10001 to L89999 - Wikipedia says that the first four digits indicate from which N R or L road these tertiary routes originate. But that's not true unless there's some quaint code involved: local tertiary lane / driveway L20185 junctions with the R702 not the L2018 [it's about 500m from my sofa]. It's been a while since I posted about L4015 being in Waterford not LAOIS.

The story continues into anecdote:

In my engagement with the Barrow Bus, I hope I didn't sound too shrill and all somebody is wrong on the internet. I am especially glad that I didn't pass on a "helpful" [ie passive aggressive] note about the location of the Sculloge Gap Car Park: "Not R702 x L3001 but rather R702 x L 7049" because a) I was wrong in reckoning that B.B. thought L3001 was the bus-stop location b) I was wrong in believing that L7049 intersected with the R702. Although you can see why I and google-maps might think that:

The ↙ indicates where that supposed intersection occurred. I was left the bus at that place, after Paul-the-Driver had kindly and helpfully dropped me there and not where [R702 x L3001] he found me. I had a touch of cognitive dissonance when I saw the Wexford CoCo sign for "L6153" where I fully expected "L7049".  

The clue is in the Wexford CoCo. Because it turns out that L and R roads, their naming, signage and maintenance are solely under the control of the local authority. And they do not speak to each other. Citizen Andrew McCarthy at OpenStreetMap has culled and made available all the Co Carlow road ID data. While Citizen pjna at OpenStreetMap has done the same for a chunk of the Co Wexford inventory. Thus [the road of whc we treat . . .]

L-6153-1

NULL

Kiltealy

NULL

170m

is all that appears for the road-fragment in question. NULL start;  NULL end; no checked-by. Whereas on the Carlow side we have [TMI!?]

Southern

L-7049-0

Three roads at the bounds of Crannagh and Rathanna

via Knockroe

CoWexford bounds at Sculloge Bridge

width 5m

length 3,140m

100%

AndrewMcCarthy

The naming of L-roads is not quite arbtitrary but there is much leeway. How hard would it be to have Roads Wexford talk to Roads Carlow and use the same label for this same road?? Too late now, of course, there is the sunk cost of the metal sign and the label "L-6153" spread who knows where in who knows what media and documents. For further confusion, there are other L-6153s in Cavan and Limerick! Gotta say, by contrast, that the Irish County Library Service put aside their internecine bitchin' to embrace uniform catalogue, searching and loan-software, zero overdue fines, PLUS the ability to return books to any library in the country. 

PS. The following Sunday, Barrow Bus had internalized the data because I met the bus at "my" Sculloge Gap Car Park and tootled along very familiar by-roads to Graiguenamanagh. I doubt anyone else will take advantage of thus correcting the location of one boondock bus-stop.

Stormnamen 2026/27

1st of September each year since 2015 [2021  -- 2022 -- 2023 -- 2024 -- 2025] Met Éireann [RTE], Met Office UK [BBC] and Koninklijk Nederlands Meteorologisch Instituut [KNMI] go handen over de oceaan to name the coming Winter's storms together. Makes sense: we all get largely the same weather; although KNMI might feel the need to name an event [I dunno: Siberian blizzard?] which doesn't merit even a yellow warning for us. But that storm is [✓] off the list. And we recognise that no man island is an island and we'll retain the same names for, say, the tail-end of American hurricanes. Last year, for example, we interpolated Tempestade Claudia which rushed up from Iberia. In all we got through Amy (Oct), Claudia (Nov ES/PT), Bram (Dec), Chandra (Jan), Dave (Apr).

That short stack is typical. In Sept 2023, I maintained that there was no way we were going to get as far as Storm Jocelyn [Bell-Burnell]. But !bzzzt! wrong: we were hammered by Isha and Jocelyn back-to-back in mid-Jan 2024.  So this year's list:

Austen [Nagle 1903-1984], Boelo, Chloe, Dano, Evelyn [Murphy], Finn, Gwendolyn, Heather, Ivy, Jade, Kilian [Rohan 1916-1999] Laoise, Miriam [Lyons] Nicola, Olaf, Phelim, Ruban, Shaun, Theo, Vesna and Wende. Some of the green jersey's are named after famous Irish meteorologists, the others are submitted for consideration by we-the-public. The Brits nominated Shaun the Sheep. Watch out for Stormy McStormface any year soon. On NL side Gwendolyn is named after a girl whose mother threatened that KNMI would name a storm after her if she didn't tidy her room. She's grown up now, and presumably her rooms are within-the-normal-range tidy.

Let's hope that, like last Winter, we are spared tree-fellers in Darragh [Dec 2024] and Éowyn [Jan 2025] - we have plenty of fire-wood in stack, thank you very much Boreas. Then again last Winter was soooo wet we had to move the post-box to the bottom of the lane. The Anglo-Celt has a thoughtful essay on the storm-naming.

Biffer

I was in "Ireland's Greyest town" New Ross last Thursday, shopping in Aldi. To get there, I had to walk past (on the other side of the street)  LiDL  

To be clear. I have for more than 10 years characterized my disdain for Boxing in the person of Katie Taylor, but I am not blaming Ireland's star boxer whom I consider a victim as well as a biffer. The Promoters are the bad boys in this, seconded by Punters. Boxing is different from prize-fighting only qualitatively: we have not come a long way since Kilmaine's Own Gentleman Jim Corbett. The business is better regulated and aficianados are shocked, shocked I tell you if one 334 of the participants dies or sustains a cerebral haemorrhage. But it's still a sorry tawdry spectacle of two human beings waling into each other, with fists, for money, while other people pay-to-view. Four questions:

• They shoot horses don't they ?
• They do 
• How do you spell contact sport encephalopathy ?
• CSE 
• What is the Irish for shame ?
• náire as in Nach bhfuil náire ort?
• Will you join me in boycotting  LiDL  for supporting the 18thC ?