Bearing witness

About 40 years ago, I was invited to upskill myself in the white-coat, real-science lab across the corridor from my office. I had been hired to teach population genetics because that _had_ been an important and edge-cutting area of genetics. Pop.Gen. was quite the doldrums in the early 80s, but someone had to teach it, and I was that person. The technology to look quite directly at variation in DNA was coming on-stream and they were about to inject steroids into Pop.Gen. So it was a smart move to learn which end of an Eppendorf to open [hint; not the sharp end]. I spent half a year getting to stage where a) I could generate useful, repeatable results b) I knew it would always be hard work. I recognised b) because I was working back-to-back with someone who really understood what she was doing.

I had a long weekend in England recently because my molecular mentor MolMent was having a knees-up to celebrate her 50th wedding anniversary. My parents celebrated their 50th in 2000AD and my father dropped dead [of "medical misadventure"] 6 months later. It seemed better to bear witness at the anniversary, than at a funeral, so I booked a bed-in-a-shed with The Boy in Bath, which is a 2 hour train-ride from Weymouth [as L Donald McGill, kiss-me-quick, candyfloss & sandy sandwiches] where my friends had retired early about 10 years ago. 

They were able to do that because MolMent left real science shortly after teaching me everything I know about it and put herself through Law School. She parlayed that qual to London working as a Patent Lawyer specializing in molecular biology for MegaPharm. Developing and marketing new biologics generates billion$ for shareholders, with million$ crumbs available for the Effectives. Obvs she was an asset - knowing both the law and real science to exacting standards gave her powerful negotiating power round board-room tables.

At these things (weddings, funerals, celebrations) I've learned late in life to follow my mother's lead and wade in despite being the emotional basket-case that I am. At one point I strolled to the end of the garden where a 50ft cliff fell away to the tide-line. Standing at the top (and not falling away under the influence of fizz) there was a fine view out over the bay to Portland Bill and Chesil Beach. The view point was already occupied by a husband and wife - who were not made of the same wade-in social steel as I was affecting. I told them the story [not for the first time, not for the first time that afternoon] of me and MolMent and how I'd never met anyone with such a deep "feeling for the organism" understanding of sub-microscopic molecules and processes. "Molecules schmolecules" replied the bloke, "that woman really understood Intellectual Property"; and proceeded to tell me a £15million board-room war-story.

Errrm, quite so. Some people, by genetics or upbringing or both, are destined to be lucky make their own luck by hard work, long hours, good memory and finely tuned crap-detector. It doesn't matter which college, or no-college, such folk go to, they do well anywhere anytime anyhow. That's another reason not to agonize about which college or course to choose.

Their was-delapidated, now painstakingly refurbed by Himself, Edwardian mansion with sea views is about 300m from the flat where my newly-wed parents lived in 1950 . . . and scavenged coal from the train-tracks to Portland. 

Waking the dead

Born within the slipstream of our father’s and
mother’s lives, we follow involuntarily in their wake.

True dat!  It's a sentence from early in My Father's Wake, how the Irish teach us to live, love and die (2017) by Kevin Toolis. Toolis was born and grew up in Edinburgh but Home was a modest storm-drubbed 3 room cottage on Achill Island, Co Mayo. He thus has cultural feet one planted on each side of the Irish Sea. Me, too.

Whatever about The Past, End-of-Life issues are a foreign country: they do things differently (t)here.

• When we came back to Ireland in 1990, my boss was British but had been living and working in Dublin for 8 years. One  afternoon the department had emptied for the funeral of a colleague's mother. Two pints down in the pub that night, the gaffer had admitted he would be appalled if I or anyone else gate-crashed the funeral of his father. 
• otoh I have an old friend who was working in one of the Dublin Art Colleges. A colleague's mother died back home in London. My friend did her normal, booked a return flight to LHR to show face at the funeral. Consternation among the tiny gathering of neighbours and immediate family.  
• In 2001, after my father died in England, we had a nuclear-family conference round the dining room table with the undertaker. You could see the colour drain from his face when I suggested it would be nice to carry the Old Man into the church.

Toolis had a couple of medical NDEs as a child and had sojourned in Male Medical wards in the local hospital for several weeks. He witnessed more death in that time than his school-mates would come up against in their entire lives. When he grew up, he became a free-lance journalist covering The Troubles. He seemed to have a talent for blagging his way into people's homes and asking intrusive questions; which the bereaved or traumatized were too avoid answering. From there he became a war correspondent wherever hell was going down and he witnessed grief, loss and coping in each different place & culture. Because [troubles, Palestine, Bosnia, Sunni, Shia] alien cultures can be your next-door neighbours. But East West - Home is Best. IF Home is Achill rather than London.

Toolis is firm in his belief that the Irish system is the Norm even a Universal manifestation of the human condition and has been since Homer wrote the Iliad. Or even since Cro-magnons were banging two rocks together picking flowers for their beloved dead. In La Douleur et les Regrets d'Andromaque sur le corps d'Hector son mari [R 1793 Jacques-Louis David via wikicommons] Hector is clearly 'open coffin' in the Irish way. But he has a book to sell, and the Irish market for end-of-life issues is microscopic (folk would rather read death-at-a-distance through Donna Leon, Patricia Cornwell, PD James). The hook is to demonstrate that the Western way of death is sanitized, medicalized, disempowering and Closure-avoidant. Readers in USA, Canada, UK etc. are doing it all wrong. Indeed Merriam-Webster tags wake "to remain awake on watch especially over a corpse" as archaic because Americans don't do that anymore.

His lifetime accumulation of experience as a death-witness for strangers qualifies him to critically evaluate his own father's short, messy, painful end from pancreatic cancer. Sonny was not lucky, I regret his early loss. Sonny would have dismissed the thought. Under the sun, death comes when it comes. In Ireland because death is integrated in community life it becomes normal - as well as inevitable. In England it is invisible. One of the great aspects of Sonny's death is that the community knows what to do without having to involve The Man at all. And yes it is, since Homer's day, women's work. The body is washed and dressed [A Lot of cotton-wool will be required]; a coffin and hearse is booked; hang-sangwiches for 5,000 miraculously appear; along with a monster tea-pot or two; extra chairs and delph are borrowed; hugs and handshakes; sorry for your troubles on repeat.

It's nice that "wake" is used in it's other meaning in the opening quote; because Sonny went shoring [beachcombing] every day he lived on Achill. It me! It Grace! Caminante, no hay camino, sino estelas en la mar. Traveller, there is no path only your wake on the sea.

Radio Tirana

In April 1939, the self-proclaimed King Zog of Albania [L lifted from commons.wikimedia] fled the country with the country's gold-reserves in his carry-on luggage. The power vacuum was filled by the Provisional Administrative Committee of Albania until an "army of liberation" arrived from Italy. The PACA issued a bulletin to its diplomats abroad including the advice . . . stop Listen regularly to Radio Tirana stop . . . which was moderately amusing because I did just that when I was learning Portuguese in the mid-80s. In addition to formal lessons from a wonderful me-local officer from the Instituto Camões, and reading novels in parallel text editions, I had scanned the airwaves hunting for Portuguese language broadcasts. By far the strongest signal was from Radio Tirana blaring out Marxist propaganda, music & current affairs to former Portuguese colonies in Africa many of which were still in a state of unresolved armed struggle aka USA/USSR proxy-war. I listened into Tirana while doing the washing up: it certainly tuned my ear to the cadence of Portuguese.

I only know <TMI> about King Zog because I was urged to read Indignity, a Life Reimagined by Lea Ypi. Her great-grandfather Xhafer Bey Ypi was leader of PACA and had been briefly Prime Minister of Albania in 1922. Indignity follows Lea Ypi's journey through The Archives to discover what happened to her grandmother Leman who grew up in Salonika but emigrated to Albania as soon as she could. 100+ years ago, Lea Ypi's forebears lived in Salonique le Magnifique where French was, since Crusader times, the lingua franca for that cultural and religious melting pot. But in the family they might switch to Turkish, Albanian, Arabic or Ladino. It was impossibly romantique. One of them died of a surfeit of baklava!

Indignity built upon last Summer's book about the Near East Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean. That looked at commerce, wars, parties, fires, punctilio & pogroms in Beirut, Smyrna and Alexandria - but it could have included similarly cosmopolitan Salonica. By happenstance I was simultaneously ear-booking Love in a Time of War: My Years with Robert Fisk by Lara Marlowe; like Lea Ypi's family 100 years earlier, Lara and Robert are ducking in and out of Paris and Beirut in search of culture and pastries.

Bannister

I have, so, a camera, several cameras, but that does not make me a photographer. Dau.II otoh has a bit of an eye. She was down to the Déise in June, being handy. We seized the moment between chores to clamber over a headland that is only accessible for an hour each side of low tide. You can tel it's low tide because the tide mark is halfway up the rocks:

Credits: Dau.II for the crisp picture; me for the tacky sentiment.

 We've been beach-combing together for at least 20 years, but we aren't in competition. She is more for 

may came home with a smooth round stone 

as small as a world and as large as alone.

while I lean towards the discarded work of human hand. 

I swear I offered free choice of beach from Benvoy to BallyDwan. But we found ourselves on a stretch of coast which I'd visited about 10 days [20 tides] previous and given up on 7m of bright orange hawser with an eye-splice at each end. I had come with a collection of sharp objects to separate the useful from the tangle. The  hawser had, after 10 sleeps, become even more useful than it had seemed on first presentation. So I worked and worried until I had reduced the load to what a 70-something can carry away [L sic transit] over some modest cliffs.

I think it will do for a fixed-rope adjacent to the stairs between our house and the garden above and behind it. Me, I trip lightly up and down this familiar route even in the dark, even with armfuls of laundry, but I have noticed that [much younger and seemingly fitter] visitors approach the task with trepidation. Sooo, the local bainisteoir = gaffer [L] intends to install a bannister for safety.

Kick-sampling

Kick-sampling is a technique for assessing water quality in the wild. I've done some kick-sampling myself. Heck, I've taught kick-sampling. Almost the only time I ever used the Lidl middle-aisle fisherman's waders were for kick-sampling up to my knees in a stream.

This year, for the first time, we're doing something different with our traditional hay-meadow: harvesting the seed to [potentially, hopefully] propagate wild-flowers away from our nursery. We were requested-and-required to remove and Ragwort Senecio jacobaea from the meadow before harvest. Insects and pollinators like the bright yellow flowers but the whole plant is generally poisonous to live-stock, especially horses. It is a prolific of seed which are wind-dispersed, but the plant is a biennial, so a rigorous regime of uprooting [traditionally by small farm-children] will eventually get the scourge down to manageable proportions. Every year, if we look, ragwort will be found; but only a few scattered plants which are a distinctive green at a moderate distance and have unmistakable leaves close-up. Ragwort is thus a 101 task but it takes a little time to course systematically over the estate.

We were also instructed to remove "thistles". As I found last year, there are two closely related thistles common in Irish fields one of which Cirsium dissectum is a desirable indicator species and the other Cirsium arvensis a terrible creeping thing altogether.  But in the priorities of seed-collection it is Caedite eos kill them all - or at least stop t'buggers propagating.

Accordingly, over a couple of days, whenever the spirit was upon us (and it was not drizzling - for who wants wet socks?) one or other of us would sally forth with clippers and a feed-sack to heap cut thistles into sheafs and dump them at the field margin. 

Gotta say that it's the best sort of work: necessary, a bit physical, a bit mindless, in the fresh air <hello trees, hello sky>, WFH. I clocked off several hours of my then current ear-book The Education of an Idealist [2019] by Samantha Power: one time Dubliner [Hartigan's], one time war reporter [Bosnia]; one time US Ambassador to the United Nations [Obama]. It is readable and gives good insight about how firm beliefs and election manifestos turn squidgy under the pressures of Realpolitik. Despite pre-election promising to close up Guantanamo Bay, Obama was still its commander in chief at the end of his 8 year presidency.

I show-and-told the results of seed-stripping 10 hay-rattle plants. One collateral benefit of coursing over the meadow, stalking and killing thistles was to fill my loosely tied boots with misc wildflower seeds. It was striking a) how much of the kick-sampling was hay-rattle seed b) the huge discrepancy for seed-size among different species [from much smaller than a poppy-seed to big-as-tomato-seed] c) the wild variety of seed shape and seed-appendage and d) how each adaptation might help a seed get somewhere else and then get a grip on the earth and still have some oomph to get something green above ground to start photosynthesis. Chekkittout:

 

Listerham

Could be a mid-sized market town in Norfolk? But no, it is rather a rant from me about the mysterious transformation whereby thinly slicing food quadruples the price paid by consumers. A couple of weeks ago, Dau.II foodie sans pareil had day release from Dublin to help her agéd parents with some domestic task. She has hank when she poured off the train at Plunkett Station and we had to repair instanter to a supermarket for the makings of a hang sangwich. Nope, LIDL ham would not answer, we must go across the way to Supervalu for a packet of Brady's Family Ham . . . a  Stafford's turn-over Ingredients Wheat Flour, Yeast, Water & Salt. I buttoned my lip, because Dau.II, as a child, could get hangry and I had no wish to witness the adult version.

But my inner dialogue was to the effect that LIDL ham was quite likely made in the same factory with pigs from the same farm injected with NaNO₂ from the same vat.

Then on the last day of June, the food-safety authority FSAI issued a Listeria recall directive on

• Brady Family Wood Smoked Real Irish Ham 6 Slices €37.40/kg
• Brady Family Hand Crumbed Real Irish Ham 6 Slices 
• Lidl Deluxe Triple Oak Smoked Carved Irish Ham 5 Slices 
• Lidl Deluxe Honey Roast Carved Irish Ham 5 Slices 
• Tesco Finest Crumbed Shaved Ham 16 Slices €20.75/kg

all with a bbd of 16 July 2026. I rest my Lidly=Brady equivalency case! You do you, listen to the radio adverts, and buy Brady Family Ham at €37 per kilo. In a hangry emergency I might buy the same stuff in a yellow pack from Lidl or Tesco. But really, I'druther can a [half] kilo of uncooked ham for €7/kg, b'ile it up and cut generous tranches for a week's worth of lunches. Can't be piffling about with waffer-thin slices of honey-shaved wood-roast hand-carved over-priced product.

It could be worse for Brady's rep. It's "only" Listeria!? [whc bloboprev] Unless you're pregnant, very young, very old or undergoing chemo, you'll get through the infection with some fluid loss [both ends] and some discomfort. And (this is important) the contaminated batch was detected by routine in-house QC at Brady. Accidents and boo-boos will happen in any institution; if the errors are detected, then nobody dies. I hope the recalled ham gets chopped up for soup; it would be a shame and a waste otherwise.

By coincidence, the day before the recall, Wikipedia featured On this day the 1971 case where Bon Vivant tinned Vichssoise avec Clostridium botulinum killed one, disabled one people. "On July 3, Bon Vivant voluntarily recalled all remaining cans of their vichyssoise, including soup manufactured under 22 different private label brand names". The FDA came down all heavy and Bon Vivant went bankrupt. I hope Brady's weather the storm because they employ a bunch of people in Co Kildare and are tuned in to Food Cloud, the no-food-waste charity. 

Map Man

Barry Dalby [multiprev] the cartographer [EastWest Mapping] lives close enough that, 20+years ago, I helped barrow the concrete for his kitchen extension. That's what neighbours do. In 2013, he published a 1:25,000 scale rambler's map was definitionally (50/25)² = 4x and possibly10x more informative that the equivalent 1:50,000 map put out by the salarymen at  OSI Ordnance Survey Ireland. 

Back then, at the birth of The Blob, that map was the handiest, handsomest, most convenient data-source for "Blackstairs, Mount Leinster & The Barrow Valley". Part of Dalby's job was seeing that his creation was stocked in local shops. I made and framed a publicity poster and screwed it to the side of one of our sheds [still there, as R]; tempting passing hill-walkers to buy their own copy. Periodically, I'd go visit EastWest Centraal and purchase a bunch of Blackstairs maps, knowing I'd be giving them away to visitors (and passing strangers!). Barry generously cut me a wholesale deal. Which, fair enough, I was possibly shifting as many as Bowe's, Kiltealy or O'Shea's, Borris.

Then, as Coronarama ebbed, I gave away my last copy of 'our' map and contacted Barry for more. But the cupboard was bare! It had taken him 10 years to off-load all copies of the first print-run [joy!] . . . but a  second edition was in process [we're notnin America so defered gratification is okay]. And last year, Dalby went sideways and self-published a book "Map Man ~ Irish Maps & Mapping" a snip at €21!. On my way home from a [miserable washed-out] organic open day in Wicklow, I left the motorway and pootled across country to EastWest Mapping with €100 burning a hole in my pocket. There, after catching up on descendants over a cup of tea, I bought a) a spare copy of EastWest Comeraghs for when we're down the Déise b) a copy of Map Man to work out how Barry ticks c) the balance in Blackstairs II maps to share over our gate at home.

Map Man is profusely illustrated [✓] but the pics are only slightly larger than postage-stamps. Years ago I was advised to illustrate The Blob because a wall-of-text is alienating. I bent to the pressure and almost every post since has a pic. But I obsess about bandwidth on behalf of my fans in the third world reading on dial-up. So my pictures are both blurry and pokey to save pixels. Dalby has similar issues although for a print-book there must be another driver than bandwidth. Example [L], the body-text font on the right is 12pt [guessing] so the text in this adjacent illustration might be 2pt and unreadable without a jeweller's loup.

~35 years ago, I published a book . . . with an ISBN and all. We were wildly optimistic about the desirability of this product; printed-and-bound 250 copies; gave way a couple of dozen; sold [eventually] a couple of dozen; dumped 200. I am glad to have had the experience, could afford the loss, but wouldn't repeat. I wrote another book (on the Process of Pilgrimage) in 2004-2005 but was smart enough, burnt enough, not to try printing or publishing it. Dalby is made of sterner, bomb-proof stuff - he is a serial risk-taker: investing time and [loadsa] money in developing product which needs to be stored and distributed for years before the investment is recouped, let alone converted into shoes and sliced pans.

Life ain't fair. When we hefted concrete at Caislean Dalby in the 00s they lived halfway up a hill close to the CW-WW-WX triple point with stunning views to the South and SouthWest. Coillte had acquired and planted land on the other side of the L road. Those trees now form the standard Coillte dark green cliff which completely occludes the outlook towards the Blackstairs and the Plains of Wexford. They can do that because property rights over-ride mental health rights in Ireland. I've never heard Barry complain, though. Perhaps because as a professional cartographer he knows that the other side of his bohereen was forest at least as far back as the first Ordnance Survey in the 1830s. 

What he does complain about is VAT on maps. And being in competition with Ordnance Survey Ireland which The Man regards as essential civil and military infrastructure & allocates a wodge of tax-payers money each and every budget since 1825. Other creatives [novelists, poets, painters, musicians] get tax breaks because The State has decided their contributions raise the cultural tide for all of us and/but they can't sell enough of their product to make a living. Books, including atlases, have been zero-rated for VAT since 1972. But the consumer must pay an impost for maps . . . unless they are produced by The State through the Ordnance Survey.

I believe EastWest Mapping, in the person of Barry Dalby, has done the state some service by recording place-names and other aspects of landscape heritage. The State treats him like a maker and retailer of cuff-links.; nice if you fancy that sort of thing but not, like, essential. But like Luther, he kann nichts anders, and his creations are works of art, engineering and data-science. I urge you to buy one of his minority maps - they are a fire hazard stacked up in the poor fellow's attic. Luther? I didn't realise until the last few pages of Map Man, that Dalby and I [King's County etc.] both come from the Protestant tradition [as R a gem of 19thC church]. As an envoi to his autobiography, he suggests that members of the Church of Ireland have punched above their weight in cherishing, recording and creating the cultural heritage of Ireland . . . because as the outsiders-within they/we do not take it for granted. Go Barry, stick it to An Fear!