Dai the sponger

A good part of my failure to cull the too many books we own is the thought that some forgotten classic will go straight to pulp if I donate it to a charity shop. But it is too much effort to find the only other person in the country (world) who is on the same page in the long tail of printed books which are not Danielle Steel or Harry Potter. It is surely true that some Best Sellers of the 1930s or indeed the 1980s are unavailable in the 2026 library because fashions change.

But I'm the boy for giving The Forgotten of Yest time and attention. When the folks at Faber & Faber [read recent] were raving about, and publishing, Anathemata and other works of David "never 'eard of 'im"  Jones, then I scanned the library catalog to see what was available. There are two copies [Cork and Meath] of his WWI prose-poem In Parenthesis. But I reckoned it was fairer to  myself, and DJ, if I read rather a biography like David Jones : engraver, soldier, painter, poet (2017) by Thomas Dilworth [for whc long expository review] . . . and it was so. 

DJ must have had a charismatic glow because the middle part of his life was like that of eccentric mathematician Paul Erdős who, for decades, lived out of a suitcase. He'd turn up at the door of a fellow math wonk to stay and wouldn't go until he was good and ready. And had knocked off a handful of amazing scientific papers with his host as co-author. Which would give the host immortal fame with an  Erdős number of 1. Jones spent longer in the WWI trenches of Flanders [as L] than Wilfred Owen [prev], Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden or anyone else who left a literary or artistic legacy from that holocaust. And it left him with a bundle of PTSD including anxiety, depression and agoraphobia. He'd come to dinner, drink a lot, be offered a bed for the night, wake up 'shook' and stay for a week. The conversation, mostly with the man of the house, was wide-ranging and entrancing; the extra chores, entirely by the women of the house, were just . . . chores.

Being catered for re-enforced a learned helplessness which his friends, patrons and relations would rush to accommodate. He got [fn p225] £4.10s weekly from Helen Sutherland; £2 weekly from Tom Burns; and random gifts: £2 from his father, £13 from Prudence Pelham; £40 from Ralph Harari. The cooking, sewing, ironing, catering & cleaning are barely acknowledged, let alone accounted for, by Dilworth the author of the biography. And he has an annoying habit of setting the record straight by enumerating the errors of previous biographers.

But I think I can agree with his hypothesis that DJ's psychiatrist greatly diminished the poet-artist's creativity and productivity through over-medication [ft p314-315] Benzedrine, phenobarbitone, phenobarbital, lithium, Nembutal, Parnate (side effects anx, insom, drowsi), Drinamyl (amphetamine + phenobarb), Nardil, Trofanil, Diazepam were all prescribed over the years, several in steadily increasing doses. In the biter-bit spirit of setting the record straight I'll point out that phenobarbitone and phenobarbital are synonyms and Drinamyl is a potent mix of amphetamine and amylbarbitone  and has long been discontinued. They say that UK PM Anthony Eden's judgment was impaired by prescription Drinamyl to precipitate the Sue\z crisis of 1956. DJ was a pal of Clarissa "PM's wife" Eden, sending her gifts of his books and art-works and was invited to tea at 10 Downing Street. Maybe the chaps shared purple hearts over the iced-dainties (provided by the staff).

Title is a reference to the joke about "no, you want Jones the Spy at #37" which hinges on the paucity of Welsh surnames. Our current house-painter asked if the biog here discussed was about Davy "The Monkees" Jones, of whom he'd been a fan in his youth. errrm, No.

Taking the log for a walk

Not last Winter, the one before, we took a slap and a buffet from sequential named storms. Darragh [Dec'24] felled a bunch of trees to the East while Éowyn [Jan'25] laid them out S⇒N. I developed some upper body strength sawing the wood to log-length; then splitting and stacking it for Winter fuuuel. That also involved serially filling a wheelbarrow and pushing logs to stack-site, often uphill. Foolish and/or rich people of my acquaintance pay several hundred dollars a year to get a similar workout in a gym.

Éowyn was particularly awkward for downing three lumpy trunks of a rowan Sorbus aucuparia across a sunken lane and into the edge of my neighbour's field.  The fence was crushed but the gap was still stockproof, so fixing wasn't urgent. I couldn't deal with it myself because the footing was 2½m = 8ft below the cuts I needed to make. But I asked our tree-and-hedge cutting neighbour to come and quote me for lifting the trunks up&out onto our field edge where I could safely cut them up. He came, said he could do it for €100 and then didn't: I stopped nagging after three reminders. By which time the ground was too soggy to take heavy machinery.

Last July we had a six-pack of fit young chaps from Glavey Tree Service come and fell out the 4 ash Fraxinus excelsior trees which were most likely to do damage because badly affected by ash-dieback disease. The contract stated reducing branches to 2m lengths and mulching anything smaller than ⌀ = wrist. But it was the hottest day of the year and they rock-borked the chains on both their biggest saws so we were left with a) #4 1.2m x ⌀ 750mm lumps from the biggest tree and b) #2 6½m forked trunks ⌀ 600mm tapering to ⌀ 20mm.

Turns out that Séan the Mow and Sean the Wall-builder are a) the same person b) in possession of JCB 537 Loadall teleporter. He offered to come and do all the heavy log-lifting IF they were left in lengths. It being far more efficient to move one big thing than a clatter of small things whc would need bags. And it was so:

eeee but I do love an expert, who has acquired and internalized a useful skill . . . that I haven't had the time (or capacity) to master. The two long tapering ash trunks had been felled into our 0.4 hectare mini-woodland. From the lane all you could see was was the butts barely poking out over the wall. As a first step, we attached a loop of 20 tonne chain to the first butt and dragged it out across and into the lane. Next a bight of chain was looped round the log at the centre of gravity. Séan's first guess at the CoG was 8-10cm off: so he let down the boom and I shifted the chain. "There," he said, "lay a hand on the far end to stop it swinging and we'll carry it up to your log-pile". And it was so. We took the other log for an identical walk 20 mins later. Séan was once a roofer and spent his working life barracking his workmates to get a steel I-beam roof-truss perfectly balanced while it is still on the ground. It takes 5 minutes to do it right - and saves A Lot of grief aligning multiple bolt-holes in two girders Up There where it's windy, slick with rain, and a long way down. 

Faber & Faber

It takes a village to launch an author!

Over the last 20+ years, I've been making enough marmalade to satisfy a rapacious family and have an inexhaustible supply of 'makes and acceptable gift' for friends, relations and random visitors. The modal response from the latter group is a) thank you very much that was excellent and b) you should go into business selling it. Errm, No! Spending a couple of days squeeezing pectin from pulp and getting spattered by boiling marmalade is my wheelhouse. Standing in the drizzle at a farmer's market for €4 a pot, not so much. When you buy marmalade in Tesco, it is the work of dozens of human hands:  glass-blowers, lid-stampers, fruit-pickers, sugar-refiners, bottlers, boxers, truck-drivers, shelf-stackers. And a pyramid of gangers, QC, marketeers, designers, managers all the way up to Gerry Murphy, the Tesco Chair.

Same in publishing. There are far more authors than there are financially secure authors, and far more writers than there are [published] authors. After writing 500-800 word chunks for the internet since 1996, I've clocked up 2.5 million coherent words. It's never going to become a 60,000 word book, between covers, on  a shelf, because I am essentially a butterfly without the bottle to decide which 98% of it to leave on the cutting room floor. That ruthless copy-editing is part of the work that publishers do.

I'm currently reading Faber & Faber the untold story (2021) by Toby "3rd Gen" Faber. Their Spring 1930 Catalog offered James Joyce's Ulysses by Stuart Gilbert. At the time Ulysses itself was banned in the UK " . . . Even therefore if the original were published in England, Mr Gilbert's exposition would be valuable. As things stand it is invaluable". f&f did, eventually, pull enough teeth from James Joyce to publish Finnegan's Wake in 1939. Another coup was publishing Laurence Durrell's amazing Alexandria Quartet, which I must get round to re-reading as part of my 2026 Leventine book-fest. Also his Bitter Lemons.

C.P. "Two Cultures" Snow and Gerald Durrell [egotistical younger brother of Laurence] were discovered and launched by f&f but left for green[back]er pastures after their initial promotion and best-seller success. There was a certain amount of wounded hauteur at Faber at this lack of loyalty from these authors but their shift tracked the arrival of Literary Agents as go-betweens in the publishing world. There is no reason why a writer would have the toolkit to drive a hard bargain to turn their fruit of their labour into shoes for their own children. No more than a scientist should be able to manage a $million grant or competently HR a team of 10 effectives. Agents get a bigger slice of the pie (and their 10% on top) for authors but that slice deprives secretaries, copy-editors, typographers, designers, cover artists of their Christmas bonus or indeed their jobs; as publishers are forced to trim their sails. Read the acknowledgments of any recent book to see how many people are involved in the process. Yes, even ebooks and earbooks need work between the author's typescript and your eyes/ears.

Despite being written as a scrap-book of letters, memos and minutes gleaned from the archives with minimal narrative links, Toby Faber's book comes through as a gripping yarn. IF you can skate over the pervasive background of entitlement and snobbery. Having been refused an extension of their overdraft by the manager of their NatWest branch, one of Team Faber had lunch with fellow Old Boy NatWest Chairman to re-open the vaults.

T.S. Eliot, f&f Director, on potential new hire (and TSE's eventual replacement / successor) Charles Montieth: I am inclined to take seriously John S[parrow]'s remark that C.M. has flair rather than taste . . . C.M. is, no doubt, a plebian; but on the basis of one interview it would not occur to me to call him 'common'; and (which is the most important), I would be surprised to hear anyone designate him as 'vulgar'. Gah! This Pleb had a double-first from Oxford, was a wounded WWII veteran (Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers), and [like Geoffrey 'Founder' Faber], a Fellow of All Soul's Oxford [DIB for deets]. He went on to scoop for Faber: Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Tom Paulin, Samuel Beckett and John McGahern [and that's just the Irish]. 2x Heaney's and 2x McGahern's in my pic above L where also Spufford.

TS Eliot didn't win his 1948 Nobel Prize [“for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry”] for Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939) but the latter made him (and Faber) fabulously wealthy after Andrew Lloyd Webber conjured his musical Cats from those children's poems. Indeed f&f would have gone bust in the 1980s without the Cats royalty cheques. 

Pics for posterity

As we get older our [not your] adult children are getting increasingly cross about The Clutter. There are three in that F.1 [1st Filial generation] and the most direct said "Hey, get your shit together, why should I have to process it at the same time as my grief?". errrm, quite so.

All those books I bought in a pre-digital age were snatched from yard-sale oblivion because they were worth 50c to Future Me or Future Children: Historical atlases, Teach Yourself Swahili, forgotten classics by Peter Fleming, Pierre van Paassen, WW Jacobs.  None of these are available in the County Library but the information is [more easily] accessible on-line . . . somewhere. 15 years ago, I cd have been convinced to dump the lot. Less so now that a free infinite forever internet is less credible. But feckit, _I_ - nor any of mine - will not be learning Swahili [nor Romanian, nor Japanese] and I rarely re-read any books. I owe nothing to roaming bands clad in dog-skin and dodging zombies: they can find their own books.

The Beloved decided that This Summer was when the house must be painted. And we've had a very agreeable, interesting, pains-taking slappie more or less living with us for the last 3 weeks. He's moving through the house room-by-room and I am tasked to heft boxes and bags of Stuff out of his way. And then move them back when the paint has dried. It would be so handy if we lived on a farm with outbuildings: just move all the boxes to a shed - or even pay some young fit people to do the heavy lifting - and then move it back. Wait! we do live on a farm with outbuildings . . . but they are also up to eye-level with yet more shite.

So . . . the photographs. I graduated from Instamatic to a Canon semi-automatic 35mm SLR in 1983. I needed it for work during a brief foray into the genetics of pigeon Columba livia colour! Back in the 70s 80s 90s 00s there was a whole capitalist competitive industry selling, developing and printing 35mm colour film. It was sold in reels of 24 or 36 pictures and you didn't know how they looked until you'd left them with the chemist, or later sent the film off in a pre-paid envelope. It is the nature of the amateur world that the returning envelope [samples R] was wreathed in disappointment: so many fuzzy, poorly-composed, over-exposed pictures of The Trees, The Sky or The own-self Feet.  My first gripe is the design of the envelope! Unless you include the woman's cheek [top.L], only Fuji Film facilitates writing a Table of Contents on the outside of the packet. 

Between 1973 and 2013 we took, processed and stored thousands of photos; in hundreds of envelopes. They fill several 250mm x 350mm x 450mm archive file boxes. Roughly in total 0.25 cu.m or 250 litres of fire-hazard. It doesn't help that capitalism offered many many 2 for 1 deals, so each batch of photos came back as precise duplicates as well as the almost the same crap-pics

Each box is a day's work. I've been looking at each photo and triaging into a) duplicate b) terrible c) keep. Then adding an exec.summ to the outside of the envelope. If I'd just had a cuppa and a chocolate biscuit, I might add an explanation on the back of the picture "Uncle Jim, carpentry again, ~1984?". Because the next person to look through this box never knew Uncle Jim or the colour of our front door 1986-1990. So who is the chap [see L] talking earnestly to Pat the Salt at a family wedding in 1989? Nobody (living) knows! Or so I thought before I canvassed the thumbnail round The Beloved's sibs. Half a lifetime ago, Jody Mulcaire was a workmate and friend and now he is dead. If you want to reach out to old friends, like my ex-student Mike, do not delay!
For credit where due: Dau.II labelled some of the packets while she was 'resting' with us 2022-2023 - that was a great help last week.

Data from (Tuesday 11 Aug 26)'s box: a) dupe 1kg b) crud 1.5kg c) keep 8.25kg. That's ~25% which only needs to be moved one more time: for archaeologists from the Planet Zorg to discover in Cullenstown Landfill in 5026AD.

My mother, the last survivor of the previous generation came late to holiday and domestic snaps. My sister, daughter and I went through her 'Papers' after she died and dumped all the photos where we couldn't recognise anyone (there was nobody to ask who?).  But wait? 
Q. Isn't a set of pictures of Swan-Hellenic Cultural Cruises, Mediterranean, 1980s, useful for future sociologists? 
A. Not enough for us to care. 

Perspective notes: a) My pal Roy couldn't save a much better organized, more extensive, pictorial archive. b) only 7 out of 120+ of the plays of Sophocles have survived the ravages of 25 centuries of indifference.

Poppyseed

This summer is really coming on for The End Of Days. No rain at all for July, then a good bit of persistent drizzle on 3rd August but we're back to desertification for the 10 days since then. There is a hose-pipe ban for those who on the mains, but I believe it should apply to us for ther same reasons. If we lived in burbia, and water failed to come out of the taps, a national emergency would be declared and government water-bowsers would appear at the end of the street so that we could drink and b'il the spuds even if the jacks wouldn't flush. If our bore-hole runs dry The Man isn't going to send out a rescue swat team.

And . . . the well ran dry last Sunday! For he first time in 30 years. Because The Outdoor Man was watering the sheep and forgot to turn off the tap. I've done left outdoor tap running before but never so that the rising main in the kitchen dried up. Big red face, and the water came back after abut 20 minutes, but it shows how close to the edge we might be. The well is 30m deep with ⌀ 100mm. Therefore, standing volume (π.r².len) = 230lt = ¼ tonne = 2x bathfuls. Although, even as we pump water out, it is usually cascading in through rock-fissures from the ground water. So flushing for a tinkle, or running a bath, or filling the kettle or all three together, is on demand sustainable. But not if the well is already only half full and there's a drought on.

In other news, the green beans are bearing - a good handful every day for the last week. They are yum, but that's not really enough to make freezing for Xmas sensible. The very misc tomatoes are just starting to bear fruit. Yesterday at lunch, we shared the first from var = blue pear which is black on top and red away from the petiole [see at foot]. It ugly but quite sweet and not very exciting.

I decided to harvest all the poppy seed. In the pic above left, it looks like something has severed the seed-head of maybe half the plants. I don't mind sharing my poppy-seed with field mice Apodemus sylvaticus but I'm not going to hand it all to them. Accordingly, in batches, I cut off the top ~10cm of stalk and shook them into a large white soup bowl as in previous years. It is usually necessary to snip of the top of the seed-case  with scissors. Took me about an hour and yielded 150g of seed. That costs about €2 at Tesco - why do I bother?? It is organic & local, I guess.

 

Epoch-eclipse

 In 1999, I was the Irish Node [director and sole-employee] of a European academic quango. We had an AGM in one venue or another, and for 1999 some bright spark suggested that the German node at  Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum (DKFZ) in Heidelberg should host it. Because the Great European Total Solar eclipse was due to sweep over the continent on 11 August 1999. So, for immediately after the AGM, a charabanc was chartered to take the delegates to a castle 120km South of Heidelberg and drinks were laid on in the Schloßhof. For reasons which I've long forgotten, I couldn't go. When my pals arrived at the castle, it was cloudy, but some of them caught a glimpse of totality through a cloud-break . . . and some were in the dungeons looking for more, and more robust, canapés.

Meanwhile back at Caislean Bob, The Beloved seized Dau.I and Dau.II, bundled them into the car and drove into our post-town. She had heard that someone was sharing his welder's helmet with his local community and the girls (aged 6 and nearly 4) got a geek at a once-in-a-lifetime partial solar eclipse. Like this year, in 1999 the path of totality skirted the island of Ireland. I was left at home. But after a while I found a large cardboard box and made a pin-hole camera like it was 1899. Crude and lo-tech as it was I spent an hour or so looking at a projected image of the sun getting slowly nibbled into a crescent.

Fast forward 27 years and 1 day. Yesterday evening, it was again eclipse time in Europe - actually also a yellow heatwave warning where we live; and unlikely to be overcast. They were giving a max of ~95% disc-coverage at ~19:10. 

At 15:00hrs on Der Tag, I thought I'd better do something - other than finding an internet webcam with erudite voice-over.  I scared up a tallish, toughish, newish cardboard box, taped over all the corners and punched a 2mm hole in the base, which cast a perfick 6mm ⌀ disk at the other end and a fuzzier bigger splot on the ground. A lawn-chair provided just the right angle (with some tolerance) for projecting when I set up the observatory but the sun was sinking fast towards the tree-line in the yard when disk-eating started at just after 18:00hrs. But I was able to move my contraption to a far corner of the yard and happily clocked the diminution of sun-size over the next 70 minutes, taking pictures every so often. I also had fresh lemons in case the event triggered a zombie puckerlips.

But next time I'll think outside the box and get under some leafy trees, like Dau.II who, at 19:15, captured the crescent sun stuttered all over a wall as the light penetrated the canopy through multiple pinholes:

curloo-oo shall be saved?

We last met Róisín Normanly BC Before Coronarama when she scooped and classified some 000s of beetles out of ponds as an undergraduate. She is nearly the youngest of The Blob's Women in Science list. No shame in transitory beetlemania; at a similar age 200 years earlier, Charles Darwin was an avid beetle collector, famously popping one in his mouth when a greater Coleopteran prize presented. Of course, Darwin's scientific interests broadened out over the next 50 years . . . 20 of them getting down and dirty with barnacles.

At the turn of the century, I shared a house with two long-haired botanists and a long haired cat. The kitchen and bathroom were 'blokey' and the sofa furry but it was warm, dry and watching Match of The Day [The Ref is blind, I tell you, Blind!] could be good fun. I am happy for the younger fellow that he has been working as an environmental consultant for the last 2+ decades: currently looking at the impact of grazing on saltmarshes. If you point science at the natural world, it is possible to achieve trade-offs between diversity and profit to a win-win-win.

As Darwin went full metal barnacle, Normanly graduated [1st class hons!] from beetles to birds. For her MSc in Wageningen NL [been there, me], she GPS-tracked lapwings Vanellus vanellus) to determine the extent of range and interactions. But she also surveyed the invertebrates because that's what lapwings eat

Normanly is a RSPB nature conservation officer across the border in N.Ireland. At the end of April, she found & electric-fenced off a curlew (Numenius arquata) nest on an upland heath. Curlews are 'near threatened' on the IUCN Red List; so it's hard to find nests. A week later 175 ha of that heathland went on fire but [with some help from 85 firefighters] she was able to snatch 4 eggs from the nest, although the electric fence-posts had melted to blobs. [Note to self: always carry a lunchbox and spare socks]. Those eggs have now hatched [R from RTE video] and will be released into the wild later this Summer. RSPB Press Release.

The calculus: 4 curlews saved! The more abundant ground-nesting meadow pipits (Anthus pratensis) and skylarks (Alauda arvensis), not to mention legions of beetles and butterflies . . . not so much.