Bradán an Eolais

Bradán an Eolais = Salmon of Knowledge. Chekkitout? - Amabie in Japan.
Wot's with the fish, Bob?
Dear Reader, you may well ask. We're going a little rat-traps with being banged up at home. We're had worryingly good weather for the last several weeks - so I'm hoping for a drop of rain before we come to The End of Days: otherwise me beans and beets will be at nothing. This time of year, with this sort of weather, The Beloved has been known to turn everything out into the yard for a Spring Clean. It is crazy how much stuff there is. I think we have the intention to do triage on it but pretty much everything that was carried out gets carried back inside as darkness falls. I hope and believe we are getting a little better as we get closer to that final door. It would be a terrible thing to leave the sorting to our poor children.

Whatevs, I found a box full of old HEN [yest] newsletters dating from the tuthree years in the 00s when we were editors. I was struck by the peculiar random pictures of fish [Top] drawn by Dau.II before she reached double digits: Sea Witch, The Wizard of Cod, Sir Pilchard of Bass, the Fisher-King. Ephemera? Not anymore. That composite image will be captured by The Feds and The Reds equivalent and stored on secure server farms until The End of Days, which by my current reckoning will be about 19th August this year.  I was obviously primed for fishing because, a few minutes later, I flicked open a mold-dusted book to find a sheet of paper with a deeply meaningful pretentious [see kenning] oracle from Bob the Younger:

I am the salmon of knowledge:
With fin-waft

I floated by the fountain of facts

With tail-thrash

I thrust through a deluge of data

At stream start

I am sage: soaked in sound science

Then riddle-free

I impart right reasoned words

I sieve, I shuffle, I know, I think, I am.

An Filí Chontae an Rí, 1996

This is actually a bit more meaningful [if such a thing could be possible in the context of such profundity). 24 years later, I am significantly nearer 'stream start' which for anadromous [prev] fish like salmon is the final curtain. That was 1996, this is The Now, and hopefully not The End of Days because I've a couple of Gdau's over the whale-road [hron-rad] who have been banged up with only their parents for several weeks and coping remarkably well considering they can't exchange cooties with any of their pals. Gdau.I wrote a poem to work out her anxiety and after much sharpening of my quill-pen and making some ink I replied: