Seeing the wood for the cheese

When we were young and foolish and [therefore?] had a 2y.o. at foot, we all lived together in a single room, sharing a bathroom with several other inhabitants of bedsit land. There was probably a 2kW electric fire but sticks were free and I'd go out after dark for fallen branches to burn in the fireplace. This despite having zero rights of estover in Dublin 4. The something for nothing [ and devil take the beetles] thriftiness of picking sticks appealed to me.

A few years ago, I encountered a woman on our lane walking her dog but carrying a large gnarly ash branch which, she said, had fallen from one of the trees [waves one arm vaguely behind her] and she was taking it home for the fire. I felt such a rush of empathy that I forebore to tell her that the branch had fallen from my ash-tree into my lane and, but for her, I might well have picked it up myself. I saw here quite a lot after that because she was renting a converted byre about 1 km West along our valley. Let us call her Geal. About the same time, we acquired another new neighbour, Ford, who moved into the little wooden house at the bottom of the lane. And lo! Ford also came with a dog and soon enough the two canines were besties-on-the-block. I'm not sentimental and defo not a doggy person, but it was touching to see these two middle-aged dogs romping around like arthritic puppies plainly delighted with each other.

In December 2024, Storm Darragh blasted through, and we lost a few trees. But neighbour Ford woke up to a garden catastrophe. Two adjacent grossly overgrown Leylandia Cupressocyparis leylandii had been batted out of his Western hedge and carried away an enormous Eucalyptus. The latter came to rest across his driveway requiring bushwacking skills of those needing access to the house. It took much of 2025 and a mort o'money [and a lot of neighbourly labour] to reclaim the garden.Through the year, a certain amount of the smaller timber was sawn up and taken away by Geal. 

Then, in the back end of 2025, Ford heard that the owners wanted to sell his home of 2½ years. That's the way in Ireland: the Constitution privileges property over welfare. But the new year brought better news: Ford having been approved and on the wait-list for council housing in the adjacent county for nine (9!) years, heard that his number had come up and he'd be able to collect keys to his new gaff at the end of February. I was bereft because, although we had nothing in common, I really like Ford. But I was also delirah, because he was getting a home with better insulation, fewer crashable trees and much closer to his family.

But the change of address put the skids on saving the wind-thrown sticks and passing them up the chimneys of people in Ford's network. A few weeks ago, I offered Ford my labour until the tank ran dry on my chainsaw. It turns out that, if the chain is sharp, a surprisingly large heap of firewood can be generated in ~1 hour:

So much, indeed, that Ford's suburban sister complained her allotmen wouldn't all fit in her fuel store. Geal, who has a proper rural sized wood-shed, was so happy with her heap that she sent me a selection of fine cheese [with a couple of avocados for scale!]:

That was nice, and timely, because I love cheese and it was Caisleán na Cáise for the Clan when they came home for Easter. But the potlatch [mutual exchange of extravagant gifts] was set to continue. On Fig Tuesday evening Ford knocked on our door to ask three (3) favours: 

1. His fridge being shipped, could he borrow a corner of our freezer until he followed  it in a few days time?
2. Could I take him & a last load of household gubbins to the new place sometime over Easter weekend ?
3. Could I give Geal another tankful of gas and reduce another cache of branches to logs ?

A: Yes I said Yes I will Yes. And furthermore I would help load Geal's car and shuttle loads to her woodshed until the wave of firewood ebbed to mere sawdust and grass. And that was its own reward because we nattered about the weather (and the neighbours) as we made the short journey back & forth.

Boot Bonus

 In 2004, I walked from Portugal to France wearing the pair of boots which I happened to have on the go at the time. The brand was Hi-Tec and they pounded away for me for 8 weeks and 900km. In  contrast to Imelda Marcos, I don't have a lot of shoes. For the next 12 years, I was a Hi-Tec loyalist but the last pair of four crapped out on me in ~2016 . . . much sooner than 'expected'. I got far better mileage from a pair of Lidl walking boots that cost €22.95. Though, in fairness, these weren't my hill-walking years and the Lidl-boots did most work between my office and the bio lab at The Institute. At the time Dau.II started to drink the Columbia Coolaid

In the backend of 2024, Dau.II informed us that Rambler's Way [the Nort'side, 1981 era, family-run, outdoorsy shop] was having a going-out-of-business sale. She had already splashed out on two (2) pairs, heavily discounted, of her preferred Columbia runners. I went up on condition that she held my hand because I am the world's worst shopper. In less than an hour, we came away with two pairs of boots for her Old Man: one black&red Hi-Tec with added ankle support plus one grey&gray Columbia [Peer-pressure = ON!] with slightly lower cut. I use my new Columbia boots all the time, except for going up the hill when I'd sometimes give the Hi-Tec an outing. 

The going-out-of-business sale has been chuntering on for nearly100 weeks now: rumours periodically  sweeping the streets about an imminent end. The last weekend in March, we were invited to a significant-zero b.day hop and I got to bunk with the girls. On Saturday AM, we strode out for some retail therapy between Smithfield and the ILAC centre, looking for: cheese, flowers, tomato seeds, Georgian flat-bread, hot-cross buns and . . . boots.

We go back in Rambler's Way 18 months after my first trip. For reasons, I'm only looking for Columbia boots same as before. They've run out of my [median bloke] size of preferred boot, but they do have the same model in black&black. While we're faffing around at the till, Dau.I points at a €4 webbing haversack and asks what webbing is. Mis-hearing, I turn to the young chap serving and ask 
"Would you throw in the bag for the price of the boots?"
"For sure, we usually throw in a pair of €10 socks, if anyone asks, but if you want the bag, you got it"
But that's okay, I have socks, so many socks; enough to see me out. But I haven't had a webbing haversack since I was in college 50 years ago.

Many years ago, I went shopping with my father in the small market town in England nearest to where he lived in retirement. Among other things, he needed to buy a new toaster. There wasn't A Lot of choice in the white-goods shop, so he picked one and took it to the till with "What kind of a discount can you give me for this? I am morto entirely. The spotty youth, not having been trained in the souks of the Middle East, was confused and went to ask the manager. A while later, he returned with "My boss says we can knock off 5%". And the deal is done. 5% of a toaster is much less than a cup of coffee, and it didn't seem worth the trouble to me. But I never asked him WTF at the time. He fell down the stairs and died the following year, so I'll never know if asking for inappropriate discounts was evidence that he was slipping into dementia. We'll have to see how it pans out for me.

 

M is for murder

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; etc.

Saw H is for Hawk (2014) by Helen Macdonald on a library shelf and snagged it, despite having a handful of books on the go. Maybe just as well because it is tagged with multiple reserves: doubtless a consequence of the 2025 Claire Foy film of the book. My reading this continues a human goes for wild theme on The Blob: hares - baby hares - shit on yer head magpie.

[a sparrowhawk Accipiter nisus] "looks the hugest, most impressive piece of wildness you've ever seen, like someone's tipped a snow leopard into your kitchen and you find it eating the cat". But A.nisus is a sparrow compared to goshawks Astur gentilis which happily scarf down sparrowhawks as a starter. Macdonald gets themselves a goshawk[R attrib at End] as solace after their beloved Dad dies. It is bad luck to name your raptor something appropriately vaulting like Cutwind or Scythe, so Macdonald dials M for Murder Mabel as a banal, old-fashioned maiden-auntie name. There is a rich literature in the Art of Falconry but the most accessible for a child of the 70s is The Goshawk (1951) by T.H. White. But shout out to Kes by Ken Loach (1969) for a working-class perspective.

I read The Goshawk as a teenager, after Mistress Masham's Repose (1946)  but before the chunkier Once and Future King. My memory of The Goshawk is of a battle of wills between man and beast centred on sleep-deprivation. We now know that sleep-deprivation is a more effective form of torture than the bastinado, electrodes or pliers. I read the 'manning' of Gos as adjacent to 'breaking' horses or 'training' a dog with a rolled up newspaper: something that other people did to animals. I was never about to assert my dominance on/over a sentient being [altho I was heartlessly cruel to insects as a child] - it was hard enough training / reining myself to fit in. Macdonald also read The Goshawk but was inspired to walk the falconers path as a young person and acquired enough competence to teach others; and a network of hawking friends.

H is for Hawk is a griefwalker's journey but also a critical evaluation of T.H White as a person [they fuck you up your mum and dad and their proxies in boarding school] and as an austringer [barely competent, would not be licensed]. But hey, where I live anyone is allowed to be a parent, altho 'we' require higher standards for would-be adoptees. Falconry is a minority sport and, for the greatest good, we should require a dog-owning test before a falcon-training test. In Maine, I learn, falconers are tested and licenced. In contrast to TH White, Macdonald comes across as much better at not visiting their baggage on the poor bloody hawk. The end result is that, whereas White lost his bird in the woods, Mabel will fly off after pheasants and rabbits . . . and come back to Macdonald's fist. This success is aided by making the human self small and reading the bird. Gets crotchety when tired, perky when prey present; tendency to hangry. Read her wrong and you might get a dig . . . from 4 sharp talons.

cw: Whatever your position on cruelty in the process of taming / training animals, spare a thought for the rabbits, pheasants and passerines which get terminated by Mabel. Eaten alive, they be; unless the falconer interferes with an efficient cervical dislocation. 

Picture credit: "Goshawk" by Andy Morffew is licensed under CC BY 2.0. via OpenVerse.org

 

 

Homo conflagrans

Someone recommended John Vaillant as a book-writing journalist, so I snagged Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World (2023) off the shelf in Wexford Town library. The inspiration of the book and about 2/3rds of its content is the Fort McMurray wildfire which swept out of the surrounding forest and destroyed about 20% of the homes and emptied the city of ~88,000 people in a matter of hours. Nobody died! but damage was estimated at $10billion. In addition ~600,000 hectares of forest and muskeg were swept by a wall of flame - that's 3 medium sized Irish counties [KK + WX + WW] or the state of Delaware or an average département de la France.

Vaillant's thesis is that the McMurray fire and the other uncontainable conflagrations of recent years are a direct consequence of galloping climate change, in particular the way we have been spewing out greenhouse gases like CO₂ and CH₄ without heed or hindrance during my lifetime. Of course, my grandfather was pottering about Co Wexford in his own car for his own convenience in the 1940s so it's not all on me. But I've driven 100x further than my ancestor and I'm not dead yet. 

So here's a thing, known to all foresters and fire-fighters, but not obvious to all thinking people until it's e x p l a i n e d. "Crossover" occurs when the relative humidity in % is less than the temperature in °C; this makes conflagration much more likely - just a spark will do. We got a dehumidifier for the kitchen last November - hilariously named R2D2 R1DH. Our whole house, not just the kitchen has 500mm rubble-in-courses external walls. The windows used to weep and the walls developed a palette of fungal colours. We achieved a lowest ever RH of 52% at tea-time on the Spring Equinox after 3 days of cloudless sunshine. tbf, I opened the window and the front door for a warm draft to get from 55% to the shown [R] 52%. It has never gotten close to 52°C in Ireland. It's going to take another bomb to set our soggy house on fire. A weather station close to the 2018 Redding Fire recorded 44°C and 7% RH!

Here's another rule of thumb: firefighters need a water supply in gallons/min equivalent to the BTUs generated by the fire. A US gallon is about 4 lt and a BTU is about 1,000 Joules. That energy is enough to raise 250ml of water by 10°C. Now before the gas-grill goes on fire check to see how much water you can dribble out of your 12mm garden hose in a minute

Then again, then again, one of the tropes in Vaillant's tale is the Lucretius Effect, a cognitive bias where the biggest [whatever] you can imagine is the biggest example you've heard about . . . and a little bit more. But the temperatures of these MegaFires haven't happened since the end of the Permian 250million years ago. When the wall of flame stormed into residential sub-divisions of FtMcM they vaporized 200sq.m. million-dollar homes in 5 minutes - one big whooomph and there's nothing left but the [reinforced concrete] walls of the basement. Because it's a boom town and everyone was making silly money demand/supply drove up the cost and drove down the standards. Even the best homes in North America are thrun up from 4x2 studs and sheet-rock with vinyl siding and tar-paper shingles on the roof. To a regular fire that-all looks like so much fuel with convenient pockets of oxygen in each room. A garage full of cars and snomobiles with full tanks && propane tanks to service the BBQ grills && several fire-arms with boxes of ammo: that's just a source of pop-off shrapnel. If the owner and their bank pays a million dollars for a big-old shanty, lots of folks along the supply chain are laughing all the way to the same bank.

In Ireland one of the scandals of the Celtic Tiger was that developers and regulators conspired to cut corners with fire-safety - failing to separate each apartment from the next. But at least the structures were /are built of bricks not tar-paper.

Back to the book. The dust jacket says Vaillant writes for Nat.Geog. New |Yorker and The Atlantic. You can tell from "Steve's wife Carrie, who is tall and slender with wavy dark hair . . ."  and the numerous similar journo tics of providing irrelevant details to establish ?empathy? The style is pacy and engaging and reminds me of Mark Kurlansky and books about Salmon and Cod as bell-wethers for dramatic change in species diversity and abundance. I'm sure Vaillant and his editors thought and fought over the structure of Fire Weather: because he wanted to tell a gripping yarn on the streets of FtMcM but also flesh out the history of climate change and (climate change denialism).

But the transition whacked me into a confusion. p224/359 ends with ". . .It was the fire's third day inside Fort McMurray". And the next chapter begins with "The Middle Ages saw an slowly dawning awareness that there was something in the air . . ." followed by Priestley this then Tyndall that and Teller the other. Much as Ireland appreciates naming Tyndall for his atmospherics, we're still on the edge of our seats waiting to see what Day Four brings in NE Alberta.

"The climate system is an angry beast and we are poking it with sticks" Wally Broeker

Maybe read the book and spend sometime adjusting the content of your GoBag to include a reflective fire blanket and some tubes of Savlon. Always remembering Lucretius: the disaster which next requires a GoBag won't be stranger than we imagine but stranger than we can imagine. 

*R1DH aka Our one de-hum. 

Hail Fellows

In Summer 2024, I was delighted to bear witness when my pal Dan Bradley was elevated to FRS. He has been doing sterling work for more than 30 years in the history of domestic animals incl humans. Almost all my science friends are a) younger and b) more 'successful' than me: so many medals, fellowships and chairs. I guess that all my older science friends are, like, dead.

Apart from Metafilter, my only opening to social media is LinkedIn, which delivers 'news' from /about my LinkPals. It's kinda terrible, the original post is fine - usually about Such-a-one completing their PhD or publishing a paper. But it's followed by a long tail of anodyne responses; regularly "Congratulations Such" or a string of emoji. A month ago, an old [younger!] binfo friend, James McInerney, posted onn LinkedIn that he'd been elected Fellow of the European Academy of Microbiology (EAM). I took him at his word [but found no online evidence of his change in status] and updated his WikiPpage to reflect his elevation. 

Then last week, James posted again to report that (EAM) had published the election of their N=95 new 2026 Fellows, "recognising scientific excellence and long-standing contributions to microbiology". 40% of them are tagged bioinformatics and/or -omics. DNA genome sequencing has given Microbiology a shot in the arm, in the same way that 3-D printing boosted Anatomy - another tired old 19thC discipline.

There are four from the People's Republic of Cork on the EAM2026 list (Gerard Clarke - John Cryan - Fergal O'Gara - Paul O'Toole) plus James McInerney of whom we treat. But also Diarmaid Hughes [R - some years ago] who was in my year in college 50 years ago. Hughes diaspora'ed himself to Uppsala in Sweden when there were no futures in Ireland during the 1980s. And never came back, except at Christmas when/where I'd often meet him over wine-and-cheese at alumnevents. We also spend the 80s away: 1979-1983 in Boston + 1983-1990 in Newcastle upon Tyne, but were fortunate to be able to return in 1990. And get a foot-hold here before the Celtic Tiger boomed and then bust and made immigration so very difficult for ordinary folk.

I posted the EAM multi-Fellow news to the Binformatics in Ireland listserv as leaven from its intermittent traffic announcing job opportunities [still usually abroad] which seems an appropriate vehicle to recognise these significant achievements and propagate the news. LinkedIn, not so much? And you may be sure that Ireland of the Partiarchs will claim McInerney and Hughes and get a proxy glow from their success despite having abandoned them for the decades when it mattered.

A glancing stream of photons.

On Thursday last week, I was crossing our lane when I was hailed by one of our many hikers. Terry Platt was doing a wee recce because one of the arrows in his quiver is guiding groups of walkers from their city stews into the wilderness of County Carlow. He was planning, on Saturday, to Summit Knockroe with a dozen or score of folk under his banner. 

"To whom should I apply for access to the neolithic art . . . and, errrm, where is it?"

I recited my script "According to the Land Registry, we own the land (and the lane on which we stand) but everyone owns the heritage. Usual countryside rules apply: don't leave gates open if you meet them closed; don't annoy the sheep; no dogs for pref, but absolutely no unleashed dogs" And with that I took him down the field to show him The Ringstone. It was quite disappointing because the sun was blasting the face of the stone making a blinding blur of the detailing.

Come Saturday, I was up betimes, ready for the third day on the trot with good sunshine forecast.  I checked my notes on the orientation of the Ringstone: 112° = ESE. Then consulted the almanac to ask 
Q. when would nicely oblique sunlight illuminate the runes to perfection?
A. That would be Now! At 08:55 on the Spring Equinox, the sun has a bearing of 118°.
Accordingly, I scrabbled up my devices and trotted through Crowe's field to strike while the photons were hot. The sheep looked up to ask "Wot, 'im again? wasn't 'e 'ere 20 minutes ago muttering to 'imself". Whatevs, I took a few snaps, picked one and emailed it for Terry to share. Because even 90 minutes later would give a much poorer show. And at this time of year, the sun sets before it gets far enough N to shine an oblique ray from the tea-time direction.

Delighted with myself. And I was able to fill in some details [Far too much TMI TMI detail, I'm sure] for Terry's walking group when they hove into view. At least one of them was on the charabanc round the holy wells gig last year. 

Later in the day, I was sitting on the stoep taking off m'boots when Martina & Dec of The Broad Arrow passed the gate and then backed up to chew the fat a bit. It turned out that the sun had been Just Right for them to pick up the Peter & Paul mark which they discovered up the hill a few years ago. Time is the key 4th dimension for getting the best out of petroglyphery

Make like a cone

More tributes to the Irish way of death last week. About four years ago a friend of ours, a bit older than me, started the process of forgetting and had been declining ever since. The trajectory was similar to that of my late lamented FiL Pat the Salt: every time they rallied it was never quite back to status quo ante the last slump. The trend was ever downwards but ziggy zaggy and unpredictable. Friend's family wanted to keep her at home, and this turned out to be possible to the very end but required A Lot of support from carers, friends and relations. In the last month, and then the last week, things took a tumble. Palliative care was triggered by the GP, and the family abroad was advised to return sooner rather than too late.

The Beloved called over on Sunday (taking my most recent batch of marzipan scones) and contributed one bedside vigil while the nuclear family caught up on sleep, messages and essential outdoor work [hens division]. TB returned with a report that their access lane was cratered: Maybe I could come along the next day to estimate how many tonnes of 804 road-stone would see it fit for end-of-life increased traffic. Obvs, we're more alert than normal to road-fails and potholes. But I did caution that, however well intentioned, visiting your own priorities and solutions on other people was not guaranteed to cause joy. The parable of My Father and the Tea-towels might be relevant.

When we arrived the next day Monday, I snapped some pics: 

. . . and, hearing a chain-saw rattling away behind the house, went to talk manly things with that part of the ménage. I airily explained that I was there pretending to be a civil engineer wrt the potholes. I am not totally incapable of reading the room and my gambit was greeted with a touch of bristle. Because, of course, their pot-holes were a known thing, indeed a tonne of 804 had been been delivered. The potholes had been filled before the Christmas, and again before Storm Chandra in Jan, but Project Pothole was at nothing until the weather dried out. Fair enough, but I did lend him my second-best mattock / azada as the optimum tool for road-works. 

Meanwhile, inside the house, end-of-life issues were riding post. The Beloved sat in for another bedside vigil while two family members went to the undertakers. I'm not sure if Team Palliative got to make even their first scoping visit because, a couple of hours after we left, The Principal left the stage. At almost exactly the same time her daughter touched down at Dublin Airport having dropped everything to fly in from England. At 10:30 that night there was a ratAtat at the door to reveal three neighbouring women. They wanted to assure the family that sandwiches (so many sandwiches) would appear the following day, the catering tea-pot would be borrowed from the village hall, extra chairs would manifest themselves . . . indeed all the necessaries which the bereaved might not have head-space or experience to take on board.

When we returned again for the wake on StPs Tuesday, the lane-lake had been drained of water and filled with gravel and the pot-holes filled! The English daughter expressed wonder and gratitude at seeing how many people had rallied to the family, bringing ham [and other] sandwiches from all over the province and/or being up to their elbows sudsing tea-cups and plates for the next round of visitors. I hastened to explain that, although it wasn't transactional, her mother had already paid it forward by her care and attention for the marginalized and the dispossessed.

Wednesday it was into town again for the humanist service of gratitude and remembrance at the pub-undertakers followed by more tea & sandwiches [other beverages available - it's a pub]. I was tasked to stand 🗼in the street to hold, for the immediate family, the two parking spots adjacent to the undertakers. They also serve who only stand and wait.