Wednesday, 5 February 2025

Seville Savvy

I have written records of our marmalade making adventures going back to 2002. I must have made it before then because when, we lived in England 1983-1990 a lorra jam was made from a lorra different sorts of fruit. What couldn't be boiled up with sugar and sealed [jam] was warmed up with sugar and yeast and bottled [plonk some mildly radio-active]. But around 2002, I got alongside a canny method for fool-proofing marmalade. This involves separating 

  • process "pectin release" [simmer oranges for 3 hours in enough water to cover] from 
  • process "combine pectin, acid and sugar to make jam that sets" [bring orange gloop (less seeds and pith) PLUS 2x as much sugar PLUS coarse chopped skins to a roiling boiling and keep it there for 10-15 minutes].

Looking back on my early marmalade notes shows that we've made considerable changes to the protocol mostly in the line of simplify simplify.[that would be Thoreau]. Now we've got the right kit and the lived experience and the notes to reliably knock off a year's supply of marmalade from nothing more than oranges, sugar, water and time [maybe seven hours elapsed time from a standing start, of which half is actually working]. The other solid is that we have a reliable "3 generation" team: BobTheSeville, Dau.II and the latter's odd-mother who have known and liked each other for 30 years.

We haven't made marmalade since Jan 2023. Our Seville supplier from 2 years ago has retired and I had to scrabble for another. Top-tip: make sure your dentist and your fruiterer are much younger than you are. Shout out for Bolger's Fariview of Waterford: serving the SouthEast retail and wholesale for 75 years!  Although it was late in the marmalade season, Bolger's sourced me a 12kg flat of Sevilles, to be collected on the morrow, for €25. The next Saturday, Lá Fhéile Bríde, I was alone in the house and started on processing 24/93rds of the oranges as a first batch . . . to see if I still had the touch. 7 hours later, result! [L] showing that I could still do it. Note also the latest bit of kit - a 2kg quartz boulder to keep the wafer-thin lid down on the stainless steel saucepan in which I now do the 1st 3-hour boil. Seville oranges float, hot Sevilles positively bob and the pan is Full. A weighted lid really minimizes water-loss and a steamy kitchen. Cast iron 7.5lt Cousance? so yesterday! And so damnably heavy.

Cost: it is remarkable how well oranges have held their value over the last 20 years: between 2005 and 2015 a crate of Sevilles cost €20±€2. Now it's about €25±€2. Sugar otoh has gone vertical: up 50% from 2021 to 2023. For this batch 

  • Materials. Sugar €6.80, oranges €6.45, water €0.00. 
  • Labour: 1 hour prep. 2 hours process. 3 x €MinWage = €38.10 
  • Total €51.35 or €2.85 per jar
  • cf: Fruitfield Old Time Irish Coarse Cut Marmalade 454G €3.29 
  • If you ignore labour it’s €0.80 a jar
  • cf: cheapest Stockwell & Co Orange Marmalade 454G €0.49

Team Seville assembled on Lá Fhéile Blaise the Monday following Lá Fhéile Bríde which has been a public holiday since 2023. I sprang out of bed at 06:30 so that Process Pectin for Batch II 2025 could start at 07:00 and the hard work could start after breakfast at 10:00. As soon as the the Pectin Process Pan PPP was empty, I started off batch III for after lunch.

By the time we'd enjarred Batch III we were all kinda knackered: but were revived by tea, toast and . . . marmalade. Over the weekend we created 18 + 18 + 23 [some kinda a small - we ran out of jam-jars] pots which should see us through the year. We still have [rotate your stock!] 5 pots of vintage 2023 to eat first. 

I froze the last 20 oranges after first scrubbing them down with a 4:1 solution of white vinegar against the surface fungi.

Monday, 3 February 2025

ill thrift

Farm animals are subject to all sorts of conditions & diseases with exotic names: bloat, braxy, fluke, hoose, scour. These can be congenital or infectious or some sort of trace-element deficiency. It can be difficult of diagnosis: the symptoms of too-much selenium overlap with those of too-little. Once they've got a reliable diagnosis, farrrmers want to knock it on the head in a way that is timely, effective and cheap.

Thyroxine is essential for growth and metabolic health in humans and livestock and also incorporates iodine. Just a little I goes a long way, but if your soil is deficient, iodine won't appear in the fodder and something must be done. Likewise with vitamin B12 and cobalt. Lambs which get along fine, and meet their weight markers while on their mother's milk, sometimes fail to thrive after weaning. This is known as ill-thrift or [cobalt]-pine, and becomes a known thing on some farms because,

 like our selenium deficiency, there isn't enough cobalt in that soil. It then becomes an addition on the long list of ThingsToDo to prepare the product for market. The treatment is known, readily available and the cost-benefit is clear: "Oral cobalt supplementation costs less than 1 penny per 25 kg lamb. Production losses from poor growth and delays to marketing may cost £10-£15 per lamb." But it's a time-eating pain to bring the lambs in every month and given them the cobalt or vitB12 that they need.

Well, it turns out that some varieties of willow Salix spp. are hyper-accumulators of cobalt and lambs have a taste for the stuff. It also grows fast, especially in the wet soils that are suitable for sheep . . . because barley or spuds or mangolds or cattle aren't an option. A trial in NE England sponsored by The Oglesby Charitable Trust, has been investigating the effects of feeding willow to lambs

It's interesting that lambs are avid for willow; because our sheep feel the same about ivy Hedera helix. When we had snow followed by 5 days of sub-zero temps two weeks ago, we were a bit caught with our pants down. We had only one 25kg bag of mmmm good sheep muesli but that's like dessert and not enough to sustain 15 sheep indefinitely. We also had a big round bale of hay but about half of each armful gets trampled into the snow and/or shat upon. Accordingly I coursed about the property looking for the biggest, greenest, nearest sources of ivy and dragged them up to the top field where the sheep where sheltering in place. It's not clear if ewes love ivy because if supplies a dietary deficiency or because it is green and available in the winter.

Back when I was still active in science I spent a few years facilitating an enthusiastic young scientist towards his eventual PhD in Lithium Sudies. One of the sub-projects which got published was an investigation of whether different species of plant preferentially extract lithium from the soil. It turns out that they do:

The local garden centre was selling seeds for oilseed rape Brassica napus; cabbage Brassica oleracea; sunflower Helianthus annuus; tomato Solanum lycopersicum and bittercress Cardamine hirsuta. The Effective planted them out, dobbed the soil with lithium and measured the concentration of that element in the leaves and stems. Figure 2, shown above, suggests that some species, like bittercress, suck it up goodo while others, like tomato, won't have anything to do with the stuff. Crap-detector: you shd be suspect of any paper where none of the authors and none of the editors noticed a typo H. annuus and also that the publishers MDPI are flagged as predatory: they will publish any-old-shite so long as someone pays the page-charges. So a pinch of lithium salt here although the observation can be easily replicated. 

And it is known that some species, like the daisy-adjacent Berkheya coddii, can hoover nickel and cobalt out of the soil. This can be an elegant way of remediating old industrial sites or mine tailings.

Friday, 31 January 2025

Credit for everyone in the Union

I R retire. There is little enough to amuse me in the Winter evenings, now that I've given up YouTube; gone half throttle on The Blob; and can only spend so long eating dinner and washing dishes. Then I remembered that January is Credit Union AGM season and checked on the web for the date. It was only there that I discovered the option to not get mailed a 36-page booklet with the accounts & agenda for the last financial year. I filled in the no mail application on line and got a phone call the next day telling me a) I was 5 weeks beyond the deadline b) my AGM bumpf had been sent the day before c) I was no mail registered now & forever d) the AGM was scheduled for 8pm Weds 29 Jan 2025. If they want to get more members saving the cost of a stamp, they could be more proactive on the comms.

I thus more or less obliged myself to leave home in the dark, with 1°C on the car-dash, and drive 20km to bear witness. I dumped our glass-trash in the bottle-bank [✓] on the same trip. There were 12 'officers' on the top table, three employees getting some overtime [I hope! they get paid buttons], and . . . 19 members incl me. The average age of the latter was about 70. It took 90 minutes to cover the 20 item agenda.

Gotta say that much of the information was given redundantly in different reports by auditor, chair, different sub-committees and it's all in the AGM booklet anyway. And without a powerpoint prez, reading a lorra numbers off a sheet is kinda useless, There were three different elections, which were tallied by 'independent' CU-volunteer tellers and all officers up for re-election were re-elected. We weren't told how many people voted "not this person for the love of Mike" which is the only really interesting info. In the past I got snitty about starting the meeting with an invocation aka Make me an instrument of your peace supposedly by St. Francis of Assisi. And also about failures to embrace modern tech [heck, even PPTx is an Ask!] These are related: if you're going to attract a younger, more techie, class of volunteers, let alone muslims and wiccans, ya gotta ditch the "Invocation". Vote for next year: Prayers Out Powerpoint In.

The Blackstairs Film Society BFS [MultiPrev] was killed by Coronarama but also a little by its niche interest. Years ago, an acquaintance from the next county came once to a BFS event [was it Pascale Ferran's Lady Chatterley?] and never again. A while later, I caught up and asked why we didn't see him at BFS more often. hhmmm, he mused, drive 20km in the dark in February as temperatures plummet, to sit in a drafty hall bundled up in a plaid rug watching a sub-titled film about Mongolian tractor drivers? OR stay home and pop another log on the fire?? 

The CU-AGM feels a little like that, because logistics and regulations require a Winter AGM, but the CU has their own incentives. As part of our community's social glue and a public good, in the run up to the AGM, they shake down all the local businesses for contributions to the door prize. Everyone who braves the weather and rocks up is given a single raffle ticket. While the election ballots are processed, the ticket stubs are drawn and winners get to choose from a number of prizes. In the before times, the top prize was a rural appropriate ½ tonne of peat briquettes. Most of the prizes seemed to be sundry vouchers in envelopes. My ticket was 399, and my hopes dashed a little when the first tik drawn was 398 and I was, like, wrong wrong almost right. But I was tangling myself in the gambler's fallacy because the numbers came, in >!data!< order: 398 394 382 392 387 384 388 385 389 399 393 383 390. 382 to 399 more or less matches my [N = 19] members head-count. The top table having, appropriately, recused themselves from the lottery. 13 prizes among 19 people is just about [cw: The Late Late Show is a hateful grabfest] one for everyone in the audience. My 399 was quite a ways down the list but I had the choice of a) two bottles of indifferent plonk b) a €30 voucher for the butcher c) a bottle of Jameson's d) a tin of biscuits the size of a Yaris spare wheel.

See [L with kettles for scale - hot whiskey for the win!] for my choice - the Yaris already has a spare wheel. Afterwards, at 21:30 hrs! tea, sangers and iced-dainties appeared at the back of the hall. That's waaaay too late for tea for me but I couldn't in all conscience just leg it out the door with my loot: I hung around in desultory chat with the other olds. My membership number, from 25 years ago,  is 3894. I met Mary [#324] and her husband [#84]. His dad, long deceased, was one of the CU founders in 1976. 

In Jan 2024 there were 3940 members. In 2024, the CU acquired 92 new members but the total membership increased to only 3960. That suggests that 72 members of the Credit Union died last year. The national death rate in Ireland is 7/1000 but it is 18/1000 in the CU membership - nearly 3x higher but not as high [39/1000] as the death rate for Irish pensioners. Pensioners happily [in the fullness of their years etc.] contribute 84% of all deaths despite making up only 15% of the population. So CU membership skews higher than median age; but CU membership who turn up for the AGM skews higher still.

Ho hum, nothing a few hot whiskey's won't cure.

Wednesday, 29 January 2025

Recumbent nude

I've mentioned George Dawson, my original professor of Genetics before but only in connexion with his monumental study of ABO blood groups in Ireland which posed a relict fire-hazard. But that presents an unfairly1-dimensional view of his cares. Back in the day, after two years being drilled in the basics, students had to choose the department in which they were going to specialize. I opted for Genetics, partly because they could spell evolution, but mainly for

 the collegiate for all-ranks atmosphere fostered by George. Because of the structures he implemented, I was possibly the first person in Ireland to make chili con carne with a dash of cumin

Dawson was also locally famous for his devotion to 20thC art and accumulated an enormous collection of prints, drawings and oils. When my then boss got married in the late 80s, George invited the much younger man up to his rooms in college for a glass of sherry. George pulled out a chunky roll of artworks from under the bed and invited his guest to choose something as a wedding gift. They went through the material and my gaffer said he'd really appreciate this OR this OR this OR this. With an expansive gesture George counter-offered with this AND this AND this AND this. George of the Generous Hand, indeed.

Over 30 years George also blagged his employer TCD into acquiring heavier lumps of crafted metal which were too large to fit under a bed. When I arrived on campus in 1973, extremely green and scruffy, I was not entirely Know-Nothing. I recognised, for example, that the inconnected blobs on a plinth [L] in Front Square Reclining Connected Forms (1969) was the work of Henry Moore.

I knew this because a couple of years before when I was 17, living in rural Essex, and borrowing my mother's Vauxhall Viva to get to parties, I had a crush on a girl from Much Hadham. She was arrestingly pretty despite having been fired through the windscreen of her mother's car as an infant and acquired a a faceful of tiny cicatrixes. She was also the god-dau of . . . HenryMoore, who lived down the way at Perry Green. There was talk of taking me and my louche companion Dom to take tea at Perry Green and see the sculptures. But that never happened, let alone any recumbent nude stuff. The following Fall, I left that part of the world behind to go to college in Dublin.

About three weeks after the start of term, I was hanging out on a sofa [hey, story of my life!] below the left-hand window behind the sculpture in the picture when The Beloved walked into the room and sat on the other end of the same sofa. She was also arrestingly pretty and we've been taking tea ever since.

In 1996, George Dawson made one his last art acquisitions. Seeking to furnish TCD's brand new Smurfit Institute of Genetics he contacted Arnaldo Pomodoro famous for his rotating brass Sfera con Sfera outside TCD's Berkeley [he bin cancelled] Library. Pomodoro, giving back to his early patron, insisted on donating 8 enormous pictures riffing on the dreams of cuttlefish [‽]. I had a quiet word with the Chief Technician at Smurfit and he allowed me to cart off the plywood packing cases in which the Pomodoro artworks had been delivered. All that timber got a second life on our farm as work-tops, partitions and chicken-coops. Thanks Dave! And thanks to George for demonstrating that scientists don't have to be Philistines.

Monday, 27 January 2025

Ewe woo

John Connell [prev] is getting traction as spokesman for the Irish countryside, although the competition Manchán Magan [prev] has landed his own TV series. And don't dismiss Kerri ní Dochartaigh [prev] just because of the missing Y-chromosome. It is certainly possible to speak {to | of | for | from} The Land as a wordsmith [Wordsworth wandering lonely as a cloud; Yeats having nine bean rows]. And shite happens in the countryside that is nothing to do with farm yard manure. But of the three living spokesppl cited above, only Connell has had his hand regularly up a sheep's vagina and we should therefore listen to him on that facet of rural life.

We were up in Dublin recently and Dau.I the Librarian pushed John Connell's 2024 Twelve Sheep life lessons from a lambing season at me because a) I'd read a couple of his earlier books b) I count a similar number of sheep every day c) we'd both trudged to Santiago at some time in the past. The conceit here is that young(ish) John buys 12 hoggets [equivalent to a heifer; a female sheep up until her first lamb delivery] from his farmer father, and tracks them through twelve chapters sort of based on the agricultural year. Or at least on the 5 months of sheep gestation. 

Early on, Connell floats the idea that the has-to-be-twelve chapters could be based on, or informed by: the zodiac [one of which is ♈︎Aries?] or the Labors of Hercules [mucking out the Augean stables?] or the Lives of the Apostles [good shepherds all?]. But (correct me if I've missed a trick) he lacks the discipline to chunk his anecdotes by these constraints. Joyce's Ulysses is a classic because he did follow through: holding the Odyssey up to mirror one inconsequential day in the life of Dublin.  

Whatever the initial aspiration of structure, the book gets flubby soon enough with too many rambling thoughts unrelated to caring for sheep and delivering lambs. The Sheep Game it is not. In current public discourse, there is a lot of Nobel Hubris about and not only among winners of The Prize. N.H. occurs when, because you've got the gong, people will listen to what you have to say about any damn bee you might have a-buzzzing in your bonnet. Connell has an ingrained expertise in scratching a living from The Land - and nobody claims farming is either lucrative or easy. But when it comes to philosophy (how we can live our best lives) he is no wiser or more competent than you or me. Been to Santiago [✓] doesn't count: I know . . . that I don't know.

There could be another story in there: a bildungsroman about the growth and development of the lambs Connell Jnr as he battles mental health and the patriarch[y] to discover his true self but that theme is very much noises off. And may have been resolved in Connell's earlier books.

A lot of the usual suspects get a mention because something they've said has been written in Connell's writer's notebook . . . and that'll do to pad out this book. Because despite 176 dead-tree pages and £12.99 rrp the generous margins, nice colophons [as above L] and 1.5pt spacing, makes Twelve Sheep only 36,000 words long. 

Influencers in Connell's journey include: John Clare; Rachel Carson; Henry Thoreau; Henri Nouwen; John O'Donohue; Hermann Hesse; Heinrich Harrer; Martin Heidegger; Erich Hartmann; the Dahlia Lama; the Buddha; Narcisse Blood; John McGahern; Thomas Merton; Father Sean, Bruce Chatwin; Erling Kagge; Thích Nhất Hạnh; Fran Contreras; Paolo Coelho; Saint Francis;  Fergus Kelly; E.M. Forster; David Malouf; Carlo Rovelli; Michael Kelly; Rover Thomas; Raven; Maria Gonzales; Wendell Berry; Nicholas Shakespeare; John Bergman; Karen Emslie; Robert Hughes; Don Watson; Adrian Stimson; Bruce Pascoe; Chief Joseph; Alex Haley; August Schenck; Padriag Colum; Pauline Matarasso; Yukio Mishima; Sam Shepard. They are all given parity of esteem word-count with an unnamed Longford neighbour who claims to cure strawberry orf [contagious pustular dermatitis; a bit like a viral impetigo] by muttering prayers down the phone. Life lessons for the reader? I don't think so.

Friday, 24 January 2025

Éowyn blasts through

While I spent yesterday doing a little light storm-prep, The Beloved took off for the Déise to visit with her sisters. On the way down, she fulfilled our quarterly trip to the Recycling Centre in New Ross, and on the way back, she dropped into the suoermarket for The Dinner. She reckoned that we could be without the use of an oven for several days, so came out with a couple of dinky pot-pies [yum: b/c designed by a food engineer]. The Waterford Blaa is one of very few regional specialties in Ireland [also rissoles in Wexford] and so she picked some up at the same time. It was the second last blaa six-pack on the shelf in an aisle which had been stripped of every sort of sliced pan and almost all the available bread. This morning RTE Brainstorm has a piece about comfort food and siege mentality panic buying. "Despite warnings that there's no need to go mad for the white sliced pan, the impending arrival of Storm Éowyn means many Irish kitchens have more white sliced pans than they might need." Thar she blows at peak Fizz:

I said I'd report back after Éowyn had barged through the country for a shortcut. At 10:00hrs the Sunny South East, incl us, stepped down from red wind to orange. And, amazingly, we still had power. Indeed I woke at 06:15 this morning and rushed down to make a flick-of-the-kettle hassle-free pot of tea: it was still gusty outside and a branch could fall at any minute somewhere along the 15km looping journey the ESB makes from the main grid to here at Castle Backwater. 700,000 Eircodes were without power at 08:00 this morning and the ESB crews cannot get started until it is safe to do so. Even with the best system of Utilitarian triage, fixing that many breaks is going to take several days. It is much better not to be on the list! It's also been pretty good for Dau.I and Dau.II who were both told to stay home from their public-facing jobs on full pay.

Postpubl Sunday noon 26Jan25: Eircodes w/o power maxed out at 768,000 (that's ⅓ of all 2.3m ESB clients). 109,000 w/o water. 183 km/h max gust speed on land.

Hatches battening

I was up the top of the garden on Weds 22 Jan 25. I gazed across the valley, through the scrubby trees to my neighbour Mattie's house. It was windless, Beaufort 0 = calm, smoke rises vertically. I reflected that, when Mattie was a chap in the 1950s, he'd have had no inkling that a big storm was brewing in the Atlantic. They were as ill informed about future weather as people were for Oíche na Gaoithe Móire The Night of the Big Wind on 6th Jan 1839. Sure, people in Dublin might have had 24 hours notice of gusty incommming, but maybe not enough certainty to contact the news desk at Radio Éireann.

We otoh have had Storm Éowyn flagged five days out, when she was brewing over water slightly warmer than usual far out in the Atlantic. I may be the only one who is fantasizing about Miranda Otto escaping from LOTR and galloping at us poor misunderstood orcs, crying havoc. Met Éireann started with an advisory, then an orange warning wind for the whole country reddening for CK KY CE and LK in the SouthWest, where landfall was expected. But as more, and more recent, data indicated more ooomph, the weather bureau went all in with a red warning wind for the whole island. They are saying that it will be as bad as Storm Ophelia [much blob] in October 2017. Here is what the wind looks like 18 hours before landfall eta 02:00 this morning:

Ophelia left us without electrics for 56 hours. Storm Darragh closed us down for 40 hours. I spent yesterday, between flat-calm Weds and fizzy Fri, doing a bit of hatch battening with doors and roofs. But really, there not a lot of prep that can be done. Here's what Éowyn looked like 12 hours later; 6 hours before the red warning kicks in.

The Blob is loaded for autopilot for a week on the usual Mo We Fr schedule, I'll put up a post-op storm report when t'internet comes back.