Cherish your bowels

One of the gob-blowing experiences of my early life was to consume porridge made with pinhead oatmeal. I was 16 and had been taken on a self-catering holiday for a week in Tobermory, Mull with the family of my oldest pal, because my mother was sick in hospital. The first trip to the shops came back with a bag of pinhead oatmeal, aliquots of which were soaked over-night and boiled up for breakfast each day. Compared to 'normal' porridge it was as oude Gouda to Kraft slices.

[[That was the first time m'mother had been in hospital in her life. She had a bowel obstruction that required surgery to remove a length of her transverse colon and install a temporary colostomy. It didn't require the surgeon to nick her spleen down there in the bloody dark. In recovery, she was allowed home for a weekend, and while pottering about after several weeks in bed, the exercise required some extra red blood cells. Her spleen obligingly puckered up to deliver them and burst asunder. Home was 15 miles from the hospital and she'd lost A Lot of blood by the time she returned to theatre for a total splenectomy. That's when she had her near death experience (tunnel, lights and all). If you've ever had a 'stitch' in your side while running for a bus then you've experienced a splenic pucker-up to release more rbc's as required by the exercise.

Almost exactly 20 years later. My folks were on another Mediterranean cruise. Between Naples and Malta she had a gripe in the guts and was stretchered off the ship in Valetta, operated on by a Polish surgeon and repatriated by plane 5 days later as soon as she could walk to a taxi. Meanwhile back at Caisleán Bob, then in Dublin, The Beloved decided that I should go to Malta immediately to succour my aged parents. In those before-Ryanair days, I had to go to a travel agent to book a charter flight and spend a week there.

And 30 years after that, my mother had a final (asserted to be independent of the other two) blockage at the age of 99. And that is what carried her off. ]]

That's a big long tripartite aside to emphasise the importance of intestinal health . . . and the virtues of pinhead oatmeal in achieving that goal. My correspondent M believes in porridge and bought a 1kg packet of pinhead oatmeal for the full authentico roughage experience. When she got home she twigged that she'd have to boil the oats for "30 minutes" in a 3x volume of water. The 30 min was aspirational, and the porridge wasn't cooked for at least an hour. By which time her teeny tiny bedsit was completely fogged up and even the bed felt wet. The cooking had cost more in gas than the oats. So that's how I acquired 980g of pinhead oats.

I have developed a protocol for beating Flahavan's finest into submission. 

1. soak the oats in 2x water for at least 8 hours
2. bring to the boil on the top of the wood-burning stove [fuel cost = zero]
3. allow it to seeth ["blut blut"] for 10 -20 minutes
4. take off the heat and leave overnight
5. add the final 1x of liquid [make that milk for me, ymmv]
6. bring to the boil stirring assiduously to prevent sticking and to break up the glutinous lumps
7. serve forth to eat with more milk [cream if you have it], {a drizzle of golden syrup | soft brown sugar | maple syrup if Canadien} and a spoon.

Most excellent! Start with a cup of oats and you'll have M-F worth of breakfasts bringing cheer to your microbiome.

The Irish Way of Death

All their life in England, my folks took The Times and The Daily Telegraph. A good part of the reason was to scan the hatches, matches and dispatches small ads to see who among their pals, or their offspring, were experiencing change in status. In 2001 my father fell down the stairs and shortly afterwards died in hospital. His nuclear family sat around the dining table with the undertaker to disburse A Lot of money from the estate to get the Ou'fella up the chimney. We agreed that about ~2% of the spend = €200+VAT should be allocated to The Irish Times, to alert his remaining Irish friends and relations of his death.

In 1997, we bought the farm and moved to the deepest rural midlands of Ireland with two small children. We established a toe-hold in the local community as BlowIns from Dublin - mostly harmless. But we didn't inhabit the pub, nor did we go to mass; so we missed a bunch of funerals which we would def'n'y have attended out of respect to the departed and their relict family. After a few years, our abutting neighbour recognised this deficit in our social connexion and started to tell us when someone in or near the valley had gone. So at least we had a local work-around. 

Then in 2006 rip.ie was launched by Jay and Dympna Coleman, sibs from Co Louth. Dympna lived abroad, and because she was out of the loop, <dang!> missed the funeral of a school-friend's father. They reckoned there had to be a better way for the diaspora to keep tabs on what/who was going down back home. It rapidly became the national GoTo for finding out 

• who had died; 
• times & places of wake, removal, mass, interment;
• where/when of tea and hang-sangwiches continued to be announced, as ever was, at the end of the mass
  
• what were the names of all their collateral relatives, descendants and in-laws;
• flowers/no-flowers; donations; 

Timely transmission of these logistical details is important in a culture that embraces an almost Islamic briskness in progressing the process: if the corpse isn't underground on the Third Day, something has gone awry. In England it's completely different: cold-storage is a Thing and it might be more than a week before the departed, like, departs. It was Ten awkward and fraught days hanging around for this and that in England, before my widowed mother could get shot of everyone and start to process her grief. There is no doubt in my mind that the Irish do it better.

In May this year rip.ie was acquired by The Irish Times, the [protestant] paper of record and a commercial venture. Fair do's to the Colemans to have an exit strategy and be able to cash out on their brilliant and useful service. Their company Gradam Communications,  reported an operating profit of €40,373 for 2023. This is on turn-over of  €1.7 million with four employees. rip.ie is free to use and seems, like FANG, to generate its income from Ads - mostly from funeral directors, florists and monumental masons - who are banking no 60 million page views a month making a return on investment RoI.

 A piece on the RTE Brainstorm channel, digs into the not-for-profit value of rip.ie. This commercial venture has been orders of magnitude quicker at recording deaths than the government bureaucracy. Its archives also offer a unique insight into the Irish Way of Death: through the logistical details as listed above; but also through the capture of condolence messages of which there are an enormous number. And it's an on-line bonanza for where are your people buried? ancestry hunters at home and abroad. Here's a nice LiveLine story [1m15s to 10m25s] about how a 1930s communion photo was returned to its family through rip.ie condolence over-sharing.

The other tom-tom of death is the Local Radio. Death notices are read out immediately after the news several times a day! The delivery is always peculiarly dead - drained of affect without being robotic. Funeral Directors will, on behalf of the family, pay the radio ~€150 for 3x readings of the notice. So the still-living really need to check in every day . . . or miss a funeral that they really should have been at. On foot of the Brainstorm report cited above, the story was covered on DriveTime - the tea-time RTE Radio One magazine programme. They put the question out there:
Q: "What is rip.ie to you and how often do you check it?".
A: "I check the site every day before breakfast. If I'm not listed, I get on with my day!" as one wag put it.

Sun son Nov Luv

Whaaa's happenin'?

• Mosse pottery [as R](Co KK) goes green. Who doesn't love spongeware?
  
• Clutterporn on MeFi: dozens of anecdata about parents who won't downsize their Stuff. 
• The bottle-return scheme [Prev] is finally getting some traction
• Bunch of Danes smelt magnetite sand to iron.
• Our Town cover Tennessee Kamanski
• "We are all better than our worst 15 minutes" Clive Stafford Smith defends people on DeathRow and Guantanamo
• Backstory on Larry Lonchar, his friend
  
• Bring back Waterford Airport
  

Domestique

I've written about Team Work in science: after my old boss was awarded a Mentor of the Year Gong. With 10 year hindsight that reads partly like a tale of master and proles; where the Gong-winner may or may not acknowledge that their success is founded on the work of others - not to mention O Fortuna [♩ ♬ ♫ ♪] dealing good cards. But it also gives tribs to those who share, and give and share again. As aside: read the comment which adds another side to an earlier Othering. 

My recent earbook has been Winners by Alastair Campbell which has a niche pre-Brexit, pre-Trump, post-9/11, post-Crash standpoint although Campbell tries hard to tease out eternal verities from the stories of famous politicians, entrepreneurs and sportistas. Campbell was famously ambitious as a journalist, then editor and then Blair's Director of Comms. For his younger self it was all about the winning: putting one over on Losers so he has empathy and understanding for people hewn from the same well 'ard hard stuff. As it happens, and rarely among Britse politicians, he is fluent in German and French and so understands Le Tour de France and its jargon [glossary]. A domestique is one of the riders who puts in the miles solely to ensure that the star of the team gets over the line firstest with the mostest. Don't presume to call such a one "domestique" to their face though: équipier or gregario is more respectful.

In 10 Downing Street in the Blair years there were a number of Effectives, who had risen to the top of their profession about halfway up the Team Blair hierarchy. Offered a promotion, these folks were astute and self-aware enough to refuse: "nope, I know my limits and my comfort zone and I'll leave the stress to you thanks". I know a number of cases of excellent scientists who took the only available path for promotion and finished up as Head of Dept, or even Head of School and perforce left a large part of their scientific chops behind as they took up cudgels in Admin. Science is top-heavy on spectral types: hyperfocus and obsession with detail makes for success. But those attributes often go together with "shy and retiring" and "lack of eye-contact" which makes them kinda useless dealing with boardroom bluster, let alone family crisis or interpersonal tiff from team-members. Promotion? what a waste of talent!

25 years ago I was hired to work in one of the first SFI Science Foundation Ireland multi-million showcase labs to make sense of The Human Genome. I was surprised because I was for sure not the smartest man in the room (nor woman neither!). When SFI hands you money-no-object millions, you can hire the best in the field (who are prepared to migrate to a provincial backwater off the coast of Europe). It transpired that, a few months earlier, I had been talking to my then office-next-door colleague and now boss. I'd given him a candid self-assessment that I was an infrastructural guy whose ambition genes were shot off in the war. At least part of that was true nature but part of it was being brought up as a navy-brat with a strong sense of service. Anyway, my new boss took me at my word and gave me a desk and a laptop and a task to see if human genes were clustered into 'operons': units of related function. I started off robbing code from the Young Turks who were much better programmers than me but then developed a local expertise in displaying data using a particular graphics package. I was happy to have this code robbed by my colleagues when the need arose.

In Campbell's book, there's a neat anecdote about John F "Winner" Kennedy going on a Presidential tour of Cape Canaveral to see how his Giant Step for Mankind project was going. The consummate pol noticed an old black man pushing a broom across an enormous hangar. Although it was kinda obvs, Kennedy asked the elder what he was doing there. "I'm helping to put a man on the moon" was the reply.  Because, dammit, John Glenn and Alan Shepherd and the rest of the NASA team couldn't do their work unless somebody emptied the bins and swept the floor. Quite so!