Scholar gone

Did I tell you my grandfather was born in The Big House in King's County? Yaawwwn, yes you did. There are pictures of us, as tots, in the 1950s trying to catch goldfish in the ornamental ponds. Shortly after that the house was sold to the Salesian Sisters who ran it as a girls' boarding school until that venture failed in the 1980s. 10+ years later we were visiting friends in Roscrea. He was a national school teacher, community stalwart and amateur local historian. That afternoon I was used a battering-ram to get an inside view of The Big House. We presented at the front door and I was introduced as "The General's great nephew". There were but three nuns remaining of the community but we were ushered into the parlour and diligently plied with tea and biscuits. With a little cry, one of the aged sisters rose to her feet and bustled out of the room. She returned with a slip of paper recording a name and a London address. Seemingly, a few months earlier, an antipodean scion of our family had visited The Big House and left his address in case any other sprigs came visiting The Home Place.

I send him a postcard. He wrote back saying he really wasn't interested in genealogy or distant rellies and he'd only visited The Big House because he was bullied into it by his Great Aunt May. He, and May, came from New Zealand and he was only in London for a year as part of his medical training. I passed her address back up the line to my father and they engaged in an active over-sharing correspondence for a decade until they both died in the fullness of their years. While May lived, any member of the New Zealand branch of the family who came to Europe was similarly urged into making contact with either me [.IE] or my father [.UK].

That's how I came to meet my 3rd cousin Trevor Lloyd the Linguist [L holding up the roof with The Boy 2009]. In the 00s, in retirement, he and his wife Heather gave notice of a European Tour and we invited them to lunch. In the afternoon we all walked up the hill with Dau.I and Dau.II. Somewhere I have a picture of us leaning against a dry-stone wall with the Plains of Wexford spread out as a backdrop. That was the start of a beautiful friendship between two distant [both senses] rellies. The Boy went to visit them in 2009, but Trevor and I relied on e-mail. I read many drafts of his research into linguistics, he occasionally read The Blob. We were somehow on the same page on most things and I valued his positive, inclusive, generous and caring soul.

In 2023, Trevor was so indignant about Ukraine, that he and some (younger, he was 90!) pals were picketing the Russian embassy in Wellington for an hour every Tuesday. I sent him a Phil Ochs verse from the 1960s You must protest // It is your diamond duty // In such an ugly time //The true protest is beauty and Trevor replied "Thank you for the Phil Ochs poem. I read it at our protest today and it was greatly appreciated. We had a Christmas celebration with lots of food. I used the intercom at the gate to invite the Embassy to join us but they blasted the Russian national anthem at me."

In Easter week this year, Heather wrote to say that, after weathering a succession of medical assaults (broken hip, serial infections, dodgy kidneys), he was coming home from hospital for hospice and vigil. I replied that I would yomp up the hill in the morning and have a quiet word [in English! not te reo Māori] with Trevor.  So I did that. I walked up past the wall where we'd paused for pics in 2007 and then sat on my hat upon St Fursey's Altar and listened to the larks. 

Having arrived, it wasn't totally appropriate to run through what I could remember of CP Cavafy's Ithaka [whc prev], but I did it anyway.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Trevor died, after a good innings, surrounded by his family, on Good Friday: fair do. Here's his, much more impressive, backyard hill - Mt Takanaki.

Thanks for being a close friend and distant relation!
 

Bandits angels 15

A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

That would be W.B. Yeats, who never drove a plane in his life. My godfather was called "Ace" because he was a successful fighter pilot in WWII . . .  and survived. Like my parents, who also served in uniform in the second war, he never talked about those days. We weren't particularly tight but every birthday and Xmas, he (or rather his wife Bess) would send me 10/- [that's ½ a £ in old money ≈ £15 nowadays]. At school, aged eleven, we used to run around with our arms outstretched being Hawker Hurricanes shooting up Messerschmitts . . . and never getting killed. It was like TopGun on the Xbox but with more fresh air and less sitting. 

I came across First Light by Geoffrey Wellum [obituary] earlier this year on Borrowbox. It's not something I'd usually read, because I'm not 11 anymore. But I couldn't find anything better when I needed something to plug in while I was chopping wood and sieving compost.

First Light is surprisingly good. Wellum became a Spitfire pilot before he was old enough to vote and, against the odds, survived through the Battle of Britain and, later, Operation Pedestal flying off a carrier deck to deliver planes to Malta. So many of Wellum's pals didn't make it: bad luck, sleep deficit, pilot error, bullets all conspired to scythe through each squadron. My mother dated a succession of aircrew while she was serving in the ATS and, as she married my father later, I guess none of them came back from all their missions. I suspect that she was a) too busy and b) too terrified to be sad.

This is one of the rare cases where it might be better to use earbook rather than page turner: Andrew Brooke captures the laconic modesty of doing very dangerous things while flying a plane very fast.

Ephemeral snow

in mid-April? It does happen but it's not expected. We have to prepare for frost as late as the first week in May although that doesn't happen every year. A sharp frost so late in Spring can shatter the blossom trees and shrivel the salad, so we don't plant lettuce outside [of the polytunnel] until St Pancras Day (12th May). Person or persons unknown set fire to the mountain on Sat12Apr - possible because of the super-dry Mar-Apr this year. EcoHorizon Solar finished up their groundworks on Mon14Apr - phew! in a nick of time to keep the mud under control. But on Wed16Apr, the drizzly rain turned to a slobby snow which a) covered the polytunnel an inch deep, then b) slid off and crushed the rhubarb - which had been doing so well up until then. MetÉireann made no mention of snow, so it must have been one of those rare local mountainy meteorfreaks.

That evening I was informed that my treasured Kiwi cousin had been returned home to die, so I promised that I would yomp up the hill to say goodbye in the morning. What a difference a night makes. I set off at 07:05hrs in bright oblique sunshine. You can do that if you don't have to go to work! The snow was largely gone from our yard but I knew it would hang around for longer on higher ground and I wasn't sure how far I could progress. Multi-tasking me took the branch loppers to cut back the gorse from the roadway, so I didn't arrive at the mountain gate looking back South until 07:30hrs:

Two things: a) that yellow gorse bush [R] is the last one unburned on the hill b) the fire-brigade failed to close the gate  - tsk! - when they finished fire-watching on Saturday and it was now stuck open in a snowdrift. I was very happy to see, looking up along the Narrow Road to the Deep North that our Stephen's Day sceagh hawthorn Crataegus monogyna was untouched by the fire:

"our" sceagh because for a few consecutive years in the 00s, we snuck up the hill at Christmas and festooned that tree with Cadbury Celebrations . . . knowing that at least one neighboring family with small children would walk up the hill on Stephen's Day if the weather was the least bit permissive. It's harder to walk in snow than upon dry ground but I plodded on until the road got to be dangerously icy. Then I turned diagonally up the hill heading for St Fursey's Altar. Despite the snow it was A lot warmer than it was in January upon St Fursey's Day. In fact, it was just plain delightful . . . to be up on the top of our world listening to the larks; and watching the crows pacing along with the wind.

The skylarks were doubtless pissed off that their nests had been swept over by heather burning at the end of the previous week, but I couldn't tell that from their song. My shortie boots didn't quite over-top in the snow banks - there's a lot to be said for dry socks in achieving a quiet contentment. When I headed downhill for breakfast, the snow banks were sparkling like a Disney princess and the water was just starting to thaw - burbling and lupping under the ice. Good to be alive.

Noo dles

I've been baking (almost all) the daily bread for 40 years now. I was happy to buy a decent wholemeal loaf until the relentless industrial rise and rise of Greggs ate all the early rising mom&pop bakers out of business. I could and did make cheap and cheerful - every loaf is different but every loaf is good - bread thereafter. But my bread was never stellar because I was too lazy to put in the time to knead and knead and prove. The Beloved's grandmother put my efforts to shame because she wasn't ever lazy. Cheap + tasty + interesting + nutritious + ethical bread is a myth: you have to sacrifice one or more of those desiderata.

Like a lot of people we have given house-room to a pasta-maker but in our hands it was an expensive and cupboard-cluttering toy. We compromise in pasta and buy from Aldi like normal people. I had an Italian pal who routinely made the family tortellini by hand every day: spending much more time working at the process that it took her kids to eat it. I am in awe of such a parent; but I am not that parent.

I was therefore primed when pulled noodles popped up on Metafilter. As with [ferment] bread, these noodles require physico-chemical energy to make the proteins in flour do the cook's bidding. Leavened bread works best if the dough is worked - by hand or dough-hook - in a series of repeated push-pulls to s t r e t c h the glutenin molecules out into long chains which can mesh together in microsheets to catch the CO₂ bubbles produced by the yeast. The other component of 'gluten' is several types of gliadin which are the trigger for the gut intolerance in celiac disease.

Noodles [R in the making] don't rise but they're better for having a similar push-pull work-over. Dough has two properties: stretchibility vs elasticity. Depending on the product - bread, croissant, pastry-crust, noodle - the cook needs to tilt the balance one way or the other.

• resting allows the dough to de-sproinnnng itself and allow more stretching. When you're rolling and folding the dough and butter laminations of croissants, you pop the block in the fridge every so often to let it unwind
• over-kneading you can totally deconstruct the molecular matrix of dough by grinding it in a stand-mixed for two hours but most stand-mixers can't stand that and the bearings burn out.
• Use penghui 蓬灰 as a chemical dough softener. Trad chinese cooks use "alkaline water" which is a decoction of the plant Halogeton arachnoideus which is rich in potassium carbonate,K₂CO₃ this alk-water makes the noodle dough softer and more stretchable. 
• the carbonate salt is released from the plant by burning and the ash dissolved in water
• H. arachnoideus is in the same family as spinach Spinacia oleracea, fat-hen Chenopodium album; orache, Atriplex spp.; quinoa Chenopodium quinoa 
• penghui is not available in Tesco!
  
• glutathione from 'nutritional' = killed yeast aka nooch this is a potent dough-relaxer

Watch Tim Chin make Lamian pulled noodles: super informative; not too sciencey; practical.

Going Solar

aMonda' I mentioned in passing The Works. Long ago, long enough for me to forget all about it, The Blob reports that I had a medium-deep dive into the economics and logistics of installing Solar panel in 2019. We could have gone for it, but the pay-back time seemed long and other distracting things were going on . . . not to mention Coronarama. I'm glad we didn't go solar solo in 2019 because we are now part of a Community Solar Electric Initiative. - hooked by a series of talks in the Village Hall in November 2023. By throwing our lot (and loot) in with the neighbours we get a) a bitty bulk discount b) a huge amount of expertise and support. What happened to Solar2024?? There are government grants for installing Solar and that incentive has driven a market demand for domestic installations [the tumbling price of solar panels helps too). Lots of entrepreneurs  have been asking "How hard can this be? If I sell systems and installations, I can subcontract all the digging, sawing, drilling, cable-laying, and connecting. and add 30% for myself". Entrepreneurs are, by definition, great for the sales pitch but are not all equivalent on communications, costings, timelines, reliability. The Result [a working system for sensible money] is important, but nobody wants to be chewing their beard or losing sleep over the Process . . . with unreturned phone-calls, missed deadlines inconsistent comms.

Eventually we finished up dealing with Eco Horizon from Mountrath who aren't just a glossy website. Solar panels are 1760mm x 1130mm and the DC to AC 'inverter' has a max capacity of 18 panels - or rather the Watts that will be generated by 18 panels in Ireland in Summer. It would be a false economy to skimp on a few panels because the main cost is the labour of installation. in ~2007 we acquired a polytunnel and decided to construct it in the flattest part of the haggard near the house. The alternative flat areas being too far away to be convenient for an asset used daily.  There was room on the same flat shelf to install the panels and their supporting frame.  But first I had to salvage some blocks.

The site was flat for some definitions of flat but was still pocked with hazards: an experimental frog-pond from 1998, some raised beds from 2008, a quince-tree from 2014; and a ragged-arsed dry stone wall from 1898 needed to be tidied up. I had already cut down the trees directly between the sun and the panels. This is the Before Kubota Minidigger BKM picture:

The grey edge to the L is the polytunnel with the strawberry bed in front. South is to the Right.

A few hours of Tonka-toy scooping and filling and pushing cleared off a rectangle of really level bare earth. Eco Horizon prefers to set the panels at 15° to the horizontal rather than 45°. This suits me because there is less windage in the flatter system. They also maintain that 4 x 250kg concrete blocks is enough ballast / foundation given that we aren't [yet!] in tornado country. Here's one foundation with its frame:

They invest in ½ tonne of 804 roadstone for each block because that will solidify with a splash of rain without sinking. 804 has a uniform consistency which allows one man with a minidigger and one man with a shovel to tip and tweak the blocks in 3-dimensions until they are all in line and the right distance apart. Then it is a matter of clipping on the panels and wiring those babies up [with Goran for scale]:

Minidiggers are heavy and are designed to work in muddy wet building sites, but they churn as they turn and you can see where they have been. But the mess is as nothing compared to what would have happened if we'd suffered a normal wet Irish Spring: so we count our blessings.

Monday, a team of four came from Eco Horizon because the cables [electric + data] from the solar array to the fusebox in the house had to be dug in and buried. The route was a 3-D zig-zag: only a short part of which could be handled by the digger-bucket. And (sorry lads) the fine weather broke and they started to shovel in the not-quite drizzle known here as a grand soft day. We are still due another day's work where the company electrician makes connexions and the last bits of kit, controls and wires are installed.

the company electrician? Eco Horizon employ all their Effectives directly: minidiggerers; scaffolders; pick&shovellers; fitters; labourers; tree sugeons; tilers. As our on-site EcoHoz gaffer confided [paraphrase] "you're at nothing with local sub-contractors: they've never done a solar install before, they don't adhere to our standards, they think they know better, so we have to do it all again after we've paid them off".  With an in-house crew, the company can play everyone to their strengths and compensate for their foibles. And everyone gets a chance to [by necessity has to] wield the Kubota, angle-grinder, screwdriver, Kango hammer, impact drill and pick-axe so there is a good bit of learning by doing.

GoBag

We didn't have rain for about a month from midMarch to midApril. That meant that the ground has been super dry and load-bearing which was a blessing because we had Works going on at Caisleán Blob. From another viewpoint the lack of rain meant that the hills were 'tinder' dry with the gorse Ulex europaeus coming into flower over a bed of dead bracken which has been desiccating in the breeze since late last Summer.  I was up at 0500hrs on Saturday 12 Apr 25 and was surprised and undelighted to see an orange glow to the NW behind the house. The whole face of our hill was ablaze. I was cautiously hopeful because the wind was blowing the fire back on itself and might soon run out of fuel. By lunch time, when I yomped up the lane as far as the Mountain Gate, the wind had turned  and brought the fire to the very edge of the common; with smoke billowing  across the track between our heathland and the incipient forest planted 3 years ago.

By the morning of the following day the fire had burned through pretty much the entire 200 hectares of our Common; certainly everything we could see from the mountain gate was  A Study in Grey  [as L] a camo-parent not to be confused with Arrangement en gris et noir n°1  aka Whistler's Mother (1871). The 3 y.o. forest with its waist-high treelets in a wet valley bottom survived untoasted. They say that brush fires occur spontaneously; or from broken glass lensing the sunlight; or from lightning strike. But those causes are vanishingly unlikely in Ireland in April even if there has been very little rain. 

The county  fire brigade  had been mobilized to our valley all week. Nobody doubts the courage and community spirit of the fire brigade! But it's one thing to go blue-lights and sirens through suburban streets and unreel the hose in front of a burning semi-detached. Another level of fitness and commitment is required to struggle uphill, loaded with PPE and trade tools [Pulaski], through rocks and bushes towards a distant gorse fire. I gather they are on a watching brief - prepared to write off the dry heath, the lark's nests, the blueberries, the invertebrates - but ready for action if forestry or buildings are under threat.

 The Beloved had committed to spending the Saturday in another county, so I was alone with my ruminations. We've been woken in the middle of the night with fire crackling outside the the bedroom curtains. That was totally unexpected and we had only a few minutes to decide what to save if the wind changed direction and rained embers down on our home. This last weekend, I packed a Go-Bag in case we had to leave home in a hurry.  In 1993, I saved the computer, which was then a largely irrelevant and expensive toy. It was only later that I realised that the family photos were irreplaceable. In 2025, we have all moved our electronic world front and centre. All the recent family photos are stored as electrons rather than highly flammable paper. The Go-Bag received the backup hard-drives; the current laptops; the password list!; wills, birth certs and passports. That's all! ymmv, but I won't have time to re-read the wall of books which I look at as I type: so they can go . . . or stay as I go. The rest is just stuff and clutter.  To put that in context (and it reads a tad paranoid) I thought of the strip of forestry planted as carbon offset by the ESB in 2019. Those trees are now 2-3m tall poking through an understorey of bushes and briars. The 15 hectare lot snakes down from the mountain gate ↑ all the way to the County Road:

That forest comes to the very edge ↑ of the farm, about 40m from our bedroom window. Between the ESB plantation and our window there is a jungly copse of miscellaneous flammable trees and bushes. In my mind it was all a bit too close for comfort. Although looking at the actual map, I appreciate that it would be a very determined, goal-directed, Bob-hating fire to get from the blue arrow to the pink one and then jump at my throat while I lay sleeping.

Previous ruminations on The Heather Blazing: Sep 2024 - Apr 2022 - Apr 2020

Ne timere?

I was in the library a tad early last month for Wexford Science Café. Desperate for something to read I snagged Buried Lives - The Protestants of Southern Ireland review (2017) by Robin Bury [History Press of Ireland ISBN 9781845888800].  As we went into the meeting,  I waved it at the convenor and said "My people . . ." to which he replied "Yeah, mine too." As neither of us are Protestants of Northern Ireland the exchange didn't have much weight. Up North, when strangers meet there can be a bit of a dance around trying to establish each other's antecedents [never anything so obvs as asking "What school did you go to?" where's the fun in that?]- 

• mentioning a yorker or cover-point and gauging the amount of recognition of these cricketing terms 
• ditto the score at last weekend's local GAA / rugby derby 
• using mental calipers to measure the inter-orbital distance of your chatee
  

Bury's Buried Lives [a harmless pun? I don't think so: we know The English are mad for puns] is agreeably tendentious - because "My people . . ." - but that doesn't make it less shocking. We live in a multi-cultural society now with Paul McGrath + Lee Chin + Leo Varadkar not to mention pizza, pierogi and polenta:  all lovey and inclusive . . . until it's not. Obvs, travellers have been excluded from the inclusion. If you are Irish and think You are without prejudice, just check your pulse when a neighbour announces "Joe saw a white Hiace van going up Hungry Hill last night while the Widow Hungry was at Mass". Any sense of national smugness w.r.t inclusion is no longer tenable since the Coolock Riots last Summer.

Ger Murphy was a colleague and friend at The Institute where/when the Blob was born. He researched and wrote a book The Year of Disappearances, Political Killings in Cork 1921-1922 whose thesis was that Protestants were ethnic-cleansed along the Bandon Valley in Co Cork, during the civil war: under the fiction that they were informers or imperialists. You can get a flavour of the issues in Ger's review of a subsequent book on the subject: Massacre in West Cork: The Dunmanway and Ballygroman Killings, by Barry Keane. 

Not as terminal as being killed, but according to Robin Bury,  "My people . . ." were being given the C🔥🔥l🔥ck treatment - back then arson was carried out not on buildings intended for The Other as now, but buildings = homes actually occupied by people who didn't fit a narrow GAA, Catholic, post-colonial description of what it was to be Irish. People were rousted from the beds in the small hours by armed and trench-coated posses of their neighbours and told they had 15 minutes to vacate the premises which were scheduled to be torched. hmmm, for some definitions of "My people . . ." because both The Big House in King's County (where my Grandfather grew up) and The Big House in Wexford (whence his mother hailed) survived the 1920s Wars (Independence and Civil) unscathed.  The latter was then demolished by the Office of Public Works in the 1960s and 70s. Actually the structure was filleted, with great care, to remove everything that had been incorporated since the dissolution of the Cistercian Monastery in 1540. 

Gotta say though, that not all Catholics still say the crassest things to some Protestants - it just slips out like - one of my colleagues invited me to go back where I came from when I claimed to come from King's County.

Another anecdatum about whether Protestants were excluded from the nascent state after independence is that the same Big House grandfather applied for and got the job of Harbormaster at Dunmore East in Co Waterford and held that billet for 25 years until he retired in 1947. In retirement he lived across the estuary in a cottage owned by his cousin near his own mother's home-place. He died in the fullness of his years in the Summer of 1957. By coincidence, a very short hop down the road, that Summer the Fethard Boycott blew up over the rights and wrongs of the 1907 Ne Temere decree from Catholic Centraal under Pope Pius X. Ne Temere declared that Catholics could marry Others if, and only if, both parties to the contract agreed to raise the kids as Catholics. Sheila Cloney signed the papers when she got married but balked at sending her eldest to Catholic National school when the child was old enough to go. At least partly that decision was triggered by the bullying assumptions of Father Stafford the local curate. A film [poster L] was made about the events 40 years later. And at about the same time the then current Bishop of Ferns Brendan Comiskey issued a formal apology. Four years later Comiskey resigned because of his complicity in the wide-spread sexual abuse of children by members of his team. 

Robin Bury devotes a whole chapter to Fethard. If you live in Ireland, or grew up here, you probably have 'views' on some of the actions of some of the members of The Religious. According to Rev Adrian Fisher, the CoI rector at Fethard in the 1950s, Father Stafford found time to carry out a vehicular homicide on one of his parishioners . . . "One day he killed an elderly man. Ran into him and the body landed on the bonnet of his car. I walked to the village after this happened and saw two elderly country women, simple souls, and I mean this is no disparaging way. I said it was a tragedy that poor old man who lived down the road. The immediate reaction of these two women was to put their hands in the air and say 'Glory be to God, killed by a priest.' Extraordinary. I walked on. The Gardai did nothing about it. In  England there would be an enquiry straight away." [Buried Lives Ch.5 p.131]. Nobody talks about the boycott in 1957 SE Wexford nowadays. No more than the plain people of Granard speak about Ann Lovett - those who live(d) there all know the story and those who didn't don't need to know; but will certainly judge.

What's with Ne timere in the Title? Just a hint that "My people . . ." fear nothing. I do think that Buried Lives is worth reading by those who aren't members of our MOPE community but rather live alongside us. Or read something like Liam Kennedy's Unhappy the Land; the most oppressed people ever, the Irish? [whc Bloboprev]