Between jigs and reels

Ah Christmas. When everything is a bit exaggerated. Reg'lar Sunday dinner might be roast chicken or roast pork; Christmas is turkey AND ham. Too much drink; too much food; too much regrettable honesty; far too many dishes to wash. For the last tuthree years in the family we've scotched Too Much Stuff with a Secret Santa for all the over-12s. This year the rule was "home-made or re-gifted" which didn't do much for the economy but was good for social capital and creativity. I received a home-made jigsaw, which added an addition level of challenge because the pieces (cut with scissors) wouldn't sit flat on the tray and didn't really lock together -- but the picture was hand-drawn and -coloured so t'was a labour of love; which is always better than any labour of card. 

In short order, we secured the edgy bits and the central word  áthas ; was feeling pretty smug until I found three more edgy bits in the general piece store. But that was soon resolved and:

It is not clear at this stage whether the frame and word need rotated 180°. The End Game posed a problem because the design consisted of several very similar yellow and orange Celtic knots interlocking across a ground consisting of Swiss crosses and squares. But within 30 hours, with a little help, and breaks for more food I was able to pop the final piece into my 2024 Christmas present:

Done! áthas is joy in English. ath [no fádá] is a ford . . . as in Baile atha Cliath [town of the ford of the wicker hurdles] aka Dublin. athair [no fádá] is father aka Patriarch. That would be me nowadays: gazing across the dinner table at the grandchilder with eyes slightly squiffy from drink. Joy to the world at Christmas.

Frayed knots

At the end of November there was a family event and an uncertain number of incommmmers, so I threw money at the problem of my comfort and equanimity (quite the adult, me) and booked TB&Me in for two nights at the Generic Hotel & Wedding Venue in Tramore. It was where the family had hosted the tea and sangers after Pat the Salt's funeral a month earlier. The Hotel was fine, the breakfast was fine, the anonymity was fine, I guess the price was fine, too. ProTip: off-season breakfasts midweek are cooked to order; at weekends guests are confronted by 40 unblinking fried eggs in a steamer; which cannot be great when/if hungover. Also, in a cost-saving refurb, all the baths have been replaced with poky showers that leak over the bathroom floor. I should have checked that prior because having hot baths is one way of getting value out of the room-price: I can't afford 'em at home. Notice anything strange in this view from the en-suite window? (apart from the whipping on-shore salty wind).

Flying a tattered flag is romantic enough when flown from the mast The Revenge at Flores in the Azores in 1591 or  HMS Glowworm as she turned to ram the Cruiser Hipper in 1940. Outside an off-season hotel in a slightly tatty resort in Ireland, not so much? I am ambivalent about patriotism: born in one country, living in another. I am happy-out as an EUropean which has done so much to shake-up and stir nationalist silos. So my response to seeing the Tricolour of this our Republic being displayed like an old rag is not visceral. But I nevertheless find it disrespectful . . . and unnecessary. If the hotel's Holding Company can't afford the cost of a client's bathwater to replace the flag outside their premises, then don't display the flag at all. 

Once a navy brat always a navy brat? My father was retired from the British navy at the age of fifty, when I was 17. So for all my childhood, I shared a home with a naval officer. He taught us kids . . . how to knot and splice; how to sew on a button; semaphore and Morse coding; the names and functions of rigging and sails [and parts of sails!]. He explained that matelots saluted the uniform and not the officer inside it. And, on occasion, they saluted the flag. Those occasions included hoisting the flag in the morning and hauling it down at sunset. Flags have accrued quite the charge of symbolic meaning and you can really rile up patriots if you seem to disrespect the flag.

The USA has codified a protocol for respectfully disposing of worn out flags: "The approved method of disposing of unserviceable flags has long been that they be destroyed by burning."  In Ireland similar conventions pertain: "In raising or lowering, the National Flag should not be allowed to touch the ground. When being hoisted to half-mast, the Flag should first be brought to the peak of the flagstaff and then lowered to the half-mast position". And "The National Flag should be displayed in the open only between sunrise and sunset." I've written of my father's Thang about seeing The Flag fouled or snagged on the pole and how he would habitually take steps to [have someone else] tidy it up.

Merrie Christmas 2024

Last week rabbiting was I, about Christmas Trees: though they are not really part of our tradition. Since 1975, when The Boy was just born, we've leaned towards a Christmas Twig. This year, as for the last tuthree, I cut off a spreading oak (Quercus robur) branch, about 4cm ⌀ at the butt and 2.5m to the last twig. Here it be, trimmed slightly to ensure it sticks to the ceiling rather than poking any eyes. And bedecked and bejewelled with half a century of fetish, bauble, memory. Also an unwalk-on part for the new sofa.

God bless us every one!

Toast-rack

When my folks got married in 1950, they were happy to be alive both having been In Uniform and In Foreign for at least part of WWII and been spattered with matter as people next to them took incoming. But life was bleak enough with rationing, austerity and ramping up existential dread of the Cold War. But they had a wedding in London, the in-laws met, and people gave them trousseau to start life together. Three toast-racks! We have one toast-rack: it's handy for storing misc thin clutter in the kitchen = Bellarom chocolate, recipes, wedding invitations. Three toast-racks [hark Lady Bracknell] and/or other examples of giftuplication was not unique to my parents. That problem saw the birth of Wedding Lists where John Lewis or Clery's would corner the market coordinate the giving and shift a lot of product.

Austerity? After the wedding but before the kids, Cmdr & Mrs Scientist lived for a year in Rodwell, Dorset about 100m from a cutting on the railway which went from Weymouth out to the naval base at Portland. As well as the occasional First Class passenger [R], that railway shifted A Lot of coal because both naval and merchant ships used to bunker at Portland. The newly-weds weren't proud and used to take the coal-scuttle and a torch after dark and scavenge winter fuel from the tracks.

In due course that union produced three navy brats. If The Skipper was in port[smouth] my mother would take the family to stay in the Nuffield United Services Club so we had sight of him . . . or his ship. There's a traditional family word-picture of 2 y.o. me out on a breakwater flailing vigorously in the wrong direction when encouraged to wave at Daddy's ship. As an 8 y.o. at the Nuffield Club I could put down prodigious quantities of buttered toast, which the waiters delivered in triangular half slices on a toast-rack. Any empty toast rack on a table was replaced with one fully charged. I, otoh, couldn't leave a bit for master manners and allow 'free' toast to sit before me enracked and uneaten. It was a war nobody could win. Eventually my mother would stand up and sail from the room and I would waddle out after the rest of the family.

The Blob has had rather a lot to say about toast. Maybe those Nuffield weekends set my clock because I still have tea [weak, at least a litre] and toast [buttered + marmalade, 2 slices] for breakfast. I don't bother with the toast-rack or even a plate tbh: just gulp and scarf, gulp and scarf. Butter? I should add that my father was, after 10 years of rationing [prev], notably flaithiúlach with butter: more-or-less equal in weight to the bread beneath.

And while we're on family food-lore, I'll mention that, growing up in 1960s, a fairly strict polish-your-plate policy was implemented. Even if that meant my mother sweeping gristle and sinew from my plate onto hers. My sister's bestie at school used to fish out 'gristle' from skool-dinner shepherd's pie and leave all these suspect bits in a circle round the edge of her plate. Sis: "would y'just eat the pie, already?".  

Years later, after her WWII PTSD had somewhat ebbed away, my mother gave some insight into where the family dinner policy originated. She volunteered for the ATS [Auxiliary Territorial Service] early on, more or less straight from school. In 1944, after many adventures, she and her mates took the tools of their trade [kine-theodolite] to the Low Countries following the front lines and trying to pinpoint the launching sites of flying bombs. One evening, they heard strange sounds from outside the quonset hut in which they were billeted. It turned out to be an elderly gent rootling through their dustbin looking for food scraps. They adopted The Professor (he had taught at the local tech high school), making up a regular ration-pack for him and his family, until they moved on Northwards. They'd reached Breda, in Noord-Brabant by May 1945 and celebrated VE day there with the most tremendous knees-up.

Trigger: Mefi breakfast question.

Solstice Solday 2024

A bit cloudy at Newgrange yesterday morning.

• Joss Naylor, legendary fell-runner, died this year
• Drummin, our local raised bog, got the kids feet wet, so they sang
•  Skepchick gives side-eye to a study on black plastic kitchen utensils
• Months after an earthquake in DC, the cathedral is still shedding lumps
• In a mighty speech Edward Henry KC sums up the case for the Sub Post Masters.
• Free buses in Tallinn - nett good
• Antarcticshipwreck

I think this might be the last Sunday miscellany. They are often top heavy with YT videos, whc indicates how much time I fritter away as a hapless tool of The Algorithm. A few weeks ago, in the middle of a 3 day power outage, we went into the local library to check the interwebs. I there(fore) saw what the YT experience is without an AdBlocker: blimey, it's difficult enough confronting my own ear-wax; I do not need someone else's in my face, like. On Friday last, YT caught up with me and presented a binary choice a) watch our Ads b) embrace YT Premium at €14/mo. But there is a third option: cold turkey with books. I don't mind paying for stuff and I certainly think creators should get money for their work if it is any good. But the YT Algorithm is designed to deliver the same old same old; whereas I want something, anything, different. I dunno about your echo-chamber, I feel utterly unfulfilled by mine.

Tree sourced

We don't believe in Santa Christmas trees. Rather we have, for the last 50 years, brought a Christmas twig in and suspended it in/from a living-room corner and festooned that with familiar fetish.  It's what we do but it has the objective advantage that our tradition takes up zero floor space in our modest home. I will add [high moral ground alert] that, as many now appreciate, growing a small conifer to 2 meters tall takes maybe 5 years. It then typically gets 5 weeks of useful 'life' and then becomes a burden on municipal disposal, locally: For the month of January at Powerstown, Christmas Trees go into Recycling area with no charge. That's moral hazard right there. You buy this thing, but everyone subsidizes the disposal of your choice.There is no way I would buy a Christmas Tree [YMMV, you do you, we're not normal]

But we-the-farmers are now being incentivized to extirpate "invasive conifers" from the common, these mostly sitka Picea sitchensis have seed-blown in from the Coillte forest immediately downwind. We've been on several collective sweeps through the more accessible parts of the Common but know there are trees further up that are beyond the jaws of loppers. You can see [not in this crap-pic but in reality] one near the skyline from the hill-road that runs along the border of the once-and-future forest.

Last Friday was a brilliant, sunny, crisp winter's day. I girded my loins, binocs, bushsaw, and a hank of rope and yomped up the hill. The roadway bit is easy: about 1,000m on a 1in10 grade, latterly a bit rough under foot. From the view above, it's another 70m at 1in1 = 45° through dead bracken Pteridium aquilinum and knee-high heather Erica spp. and gorse Ulex gallii and quite uncertain footing. But eventually . . .

Like I said, a gorgeous day. In short order, not without misgivings, I felled out this handsome neatly symmetrical tree [species unknown, help me out?] and rolled and dragged it down (much easier than going up) to the roadway. Where I was able to tie it down on a wheelbarrow and push it downhill all the way to the yard.

I've left the wheelbarrow in for scale, but this tree is 250cm = 8ft tall and looks as good as anything normal people would pay money for. The whole escapade took about 2 hours, which at minimum wage, is about what it costs to buy such a tree cut more efficiently with all the economies of scale beloved by Capital. I'm pretty chuffed with myself: using my ould knees while I still can and it's fine to be up on the hills sharing them with nobody. Now for the Twig

Hard Work at Patriarchy

I'd like to think I've become a better person over the last ten years. Although I fully expect Alphabet = Google = Blogspot to pull the plug at short notice and cast The Blob into dustbin of history, today it is still a searchable 2 million word archive of my evolving self.  In 2013, I wrote a fanboi piece about Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman a book of anecdotes related by Richard Feynman to his bongo-pal Ralph Leighton.  Five years later, I was forced to see that I, Patriarch had been blind to the running sore theme of misogyny that pervades SYJMF. Five years after that (last week) I was compelled to watch a three hour take down of Richard Feynman showing that he'd been a bad influence on young scientists. 

Angela "Physicist" Collier is a critical thunk science blogger in a similar space to Rebecca Watson [whom BloboPrev] who devoted the last 12 months to rage-reading everything on Amazon about Richard Feynman. Her reason for doing the work being that there was A Lot of SYJMF circulating among the physics bros (skewed bl♂ke even more in the 90s than now) when she was making sense of the world in college. Collier's position is that some = far-too-many young men reading about Feynman's clever clogisms and iconoclasm had not ignored the sexism but rather leaned into it . . . and blanked or insulted or disrespected her. Particularly galling examples included young chaps who assumed that, because they'd been top of the Calculus class in Bohunk High, they could continue to get As in college without doing the work. These chaps were baffled when Collier did get the As because she was serious about Project EduCollier and put in the hours.

Collier's 3 hour piece-to-camera came up on MetaFilter and that generated a little light and a lot of heat. I R retire, I am invested a bit [clearly too much with all the sexism] in the Feynman myth, so I watched it through (with a 24 hour intermission) despite it being a bit woolly in the edit and so far too long. In the last part of the YT, having cut the misogyny down to size, Collier looks at a might-have-been Feynmyth [he's 40 years dead now] which drew attention [summarized / clipped in black-and-red above] to his many good qualities.  

There are lessons in SYJMF even if they are fables: don't be (a) Dick; pay attention; do the work; polish your crap-detector; be kind. Collier adds [point 5 above] condemn least publishable units LPUs to the flames of hell even if, as now, no trees were harmed in the process. MeFite ngaiotonga put in the work to make an executive summary of Collier's YT: part1 + part2 + part3.

Hard work at Mildmay

eeee but I do like a colourful map. Sadiq Khan, the colourful Mayor of London has commissioned some bling on the TfL map of railed traffic routes. When I lived close to the end of the Central Line as a teenager, The Tube was transport into and around the capital . . . and a lot of walking. I only used buses and overground rail when I was off somewhere else - Dover for Paris, Holyhead for Dublin, Edinburgh, Harwich for Hoek. The [Victorian] Overground rail lines providing local sub-urban services round London were there when I could have used them in the 1970s but I wasn't sufficient of a trainspotting rail-nerd to ferret them out. And I didn't know anyone or anything in Stoke Newington.

I referenced Harry Beck's iconic primary coloured Tube map when I was writing about the District Line in 2016. The Overground was codified and coordinated at the end of the 20thC and finally added to the TfL map in 2007 in a uniform [background] orange drab. I guess it kept the grockles out and left more seats for tired indigenous commuters, carers and shoppers. Now 6 routes have been given distinctive colours and new names. Liberty - Lioness - Mildmay - Suffragette - Weaver - Windrush. The names are all chosen for earnestly inclusive reasons. Pity really, some local users already refer to the Gospel Oak to Barking route as The Goblin Line which could have stuck. But The Man would call it Suffragette because a very old acquaintance of Emily Pankhurst lived near the route in Barking until 1996.

We perked up at the news on BBC because one of our oldest friends escaped from Clonmel and lives on Mildmay Road in (increasingly trendy) Dalston. I figured there might be a station at the end of their street which named the whole route. But No: Mildmay is named for Mildmay Mission Hospital which is in Bethnal Green 2km S of our pal's gaff. Who knew? That's a rabbit hole to scuttle down. The Hospital was carved out of an unused warehouse in 1877 and then moved to Austen Street in 1892 to service the stews and slums of East London. It was closed in 1982 during one of the great churning re-organisations periodically ordained by the NHS. Small, local hospitals were no longer fit for purpose in the economies of scale, high-tech mindset then (and now) current in both our polities. Mildmay got a new lease of life in 1985 as an AIDS hospice and was haunted by Princess Diana until her untimely death.

More recently Mildmay is operating as a charitable trust, largely dependent in contract work from the NHS. It is well suited as a step down care-centre to free up acute beds in all-singing, all-dancing larger hospitals. But every week Mildmay bewails its count of empty beds. The beds are a fixed cost for the shoe-string enterprise that is Mildmay and have to be filled (on contract) to keep the charitable trust in the Black. But discharge from acute to step-down is in the gift of the nearest Integrated Care Board (ICB) which replaced clinical commissioning groups (CCG) in 2022 which replaced strategic health authorities (SHA) and primary care trusts (PCT) in 2012 to "organise" the delivery of NHS services. That's A Lot of three letter acronyms (TLA) and a lot of moving the deck-chairs change of admin, with the result that sick people suffer on trolleys in A&E and different sick people are not being shifted through to Mildmay.

Pictured above with Mayor Khan is Comfort Sagoe recently retired as Lead Clinical Nurse at Mildmay. Talk about nominative determinism with Comfort, who was recruited from West Africa 20 years ago because Brits don't do bed-pans. In 2020, I had a rant about putting up a statue to not-a-nurse Mary Seacole outside St. Thomas's Hospital in Westminster . . . because she black and she 19thC. At the end of my thesis on the fatuity of virtue signalling I entered a plea "It's 70 years since - Windrush -Generation nurses started to arrive in Britain from Jamaica, Trinidad and Barbados: surely some of them gave a lifetime of brilliant, thankless, sterling work in British hospitals. What about a statue to one of them?"

Done!  LC Nurse Comfort Segoe will be too modest to model but I propose a statue to her at one end or the other of the Mildmay Line.

Sunday 15Dec24

jBits

• Hold Everything - Mary Chapin Carpenter, Julie Fowlis, Karine Polwart [cw: end of life]
• Leitrim folks still w/o power a week after Storm Darragh.
  
• I flew my folks out to a US aircraft carrier
• Eric Bogle retrospects
• Laura Dekker circumnavigator
• Cast-net fishing . . . beside a sewage outfall
• Food? Safety Fails in Irish premises this month
  
• Greyhound racing banned in NZ
• Tern the Tide: artwork (Sternula albifrons) beside the railway - and the sea
• Firewood stacks dry faster covered
• Time-lapse plant grow (and fungi!)
  

Square bash

I learned to read and write late, but in my teens read all around me. I even read telephone books during my PhD, to get a handle [surname analysis] of the amount of immigration to Halifax, Nova Scotia from the Isle of Man. Once you get the habit, you have to read something. I could fritter away my evenings with fluffy but in reality I generally plough through non-fiction, often history. Having knocked off 700 pages of the life and times of the British welfare state, I started on a parallel investigation of National Service [conscription] in the same country . . . of my birth: National Service: conscription in Britain 1945-1963 by Richard Vinen. I was born plunk in the middle of that era, and the idea had been consigned to the dustbin of [British] history by the time I turned 18. National Service, in conscript armies continued long afterwards in continental Europe. Two of my pals in Rotterdam Zoo in 1978 could converse in Morse because they'd served time in Signals. After a hiatus (2010-2017) conscription is back in Sweden. A 2013 referendum about abolishing conscription in Switzerland was rejected by 78% of the voers.

The place I was acquiring my very expensive education was more conservation than most and for a couple of years in the late 60s, almost everyone of my age [14-15] was playing soldiers on Thursday afternoons. I learned to 

• strip down, clean and re-assemble a Lee-Enfield .303 rifle; 
• polish hefty black boots; 
• apply blanco to webbing belt and duraglit to brass; 
• march lef' ri' lef' ri'; halt; salute 
• how to fix a puncture on a 3-ton truck tire (REME)
  

all good dreary-if-wet fun and it would have made my Basic Training easier, if "the balloon went up" and we'd had to report to barracks. 

One of the solid outcomes of National Service was that it stirred the demographic pot a bit: Geordies bunked beside Wurzles, and Cockneys learned a bit of Scouse. Or, as [R], random squadie meets Prime Minister Attlee in Berlin. Much was made, at the time and in the book, about the democratising effects of everyone [toffs and toughs] having to 

• lay their kit out in exactly the same way; 
• march to exactly the same beat;
• eat the same appalling food;
• suffer verbal abuse from a psychotic corporal

It was no use putting on airs unless you wanted to get a telling ironic put-down. After induction, the Gordon-Lennox twins parcelled up their civilian kit and sent it to The Duchess of Richmond, their mother. 'Blimey', said the corporal, 'blokes here sending their clothes home to a boozer'.

It is not surprising that this book intersects with the Wolfenden Report [whc prev] because that committee interviewed extensively among members of the armed forces . . . where sex happened. A regular soldier was discharged and sent to Borstal for having had sexual relations with a horse. His sentence was, apparently, more severe because the horse belonged to his colonel.
 

Icing on the crumble

My mother was born in 1920. she stopped working when she got married in 1950. But as soon as her kids went to school, she started getting out and about. One of her wheezes was meals-on-wheels. Round about noon, she'd take delivery of a hot box of dinners [mostly meat-and-two-veg with gravy + crumble-and-custard] a deliver them round the county. The service was as much about the di♬g-do♬g on the doorbell and the bit of chat, as it was about calories and five-a-day.

My late-lamented FiL Pat the Salt had a brief encounter with Meals-on-Wheels in Waterford when he was still married, still ambulatory but getting a bit vague. In his case, he was induced to use his free bus-pass and go into Lady Lane House like Mohammed to the Mountain; get his dinner and the bit of chat; and then take the bus home.  He cd/shd have stayed there in the warm-and-dry playing cards with the other chaps and got tea and a biscuit before leaving. But he had no interest in cards and would only stay if there was a bit of music put on instead. 

After his wife died, Pat was untethered, of course, but the Alzheimer's Society of Ireland found space for him at their Pinegrove Resource Centre. He used to spend a [short] day a week there on the reg'lar and enjoyed the sing-songs; the nostalgia quizzes, not so much. Bob's Taxis picked him up several times. It was confusing the first time, because I hadn't done the delivery and nobody (not me, not Pat, for sure) knew which was his top coat. Next time we communicated with Team Deliver. Coronarama clobbered all that in person stuff with vulnerable elders. But Pinegrove also ran / runs an outreach service, where, for a nominal fee, a kindly person would appear at Pat's home and hang out with him.

Seamus, and after the lockdown, Gwen, came on different days with different toolkits. In the early days, when Pat was still able for it, he and Seamus would, weather permitting, tramp the golden pavements of Tramore chatting about the old times - Seamus was interested in WWII, especially the war at sea, in which Pat had <ploosh> been an active participant. Gwen knew all the old songs and was usually able to get Pat to si♬g alo♬g. Or failing that, wash away his anxious cares with a blast from the pipes of the Scots Guards. The bonus was that the family carer could have 2 hours carefree, even if that meant leaving the car in for service, shopping for dinner, or nipping up to the dry cleaners again.

And then, after his decade-long decline, Pat died and, as is the custom in Ireland, 30 days later a somewhat diminished family assembled again for his Month's Mind Mass.  The night before the MMM we achieved a form of closure by inviting all the carers to dinner in O'Neill's at the top of Main Street. At the end of the meal, one of the admin-side at Pinegrove leaned across the table to say thanks for the unexpected feed. I demurred: the thanks were entirely from the family to the carers. I suspect that many outsiders think that home visits are the icing on the cake of care. The preferred, subsidized, business model for elder care in Ireland is Care Homes with all their economies of scale. Run as a business, with minimal wages, and maximum clients, care in Care Homes tends to the perfunctory. There is no time to chat; it's far quick to feed someone than wait for them to feed themselves; and ambulatory elders are a trip-and-fall liability which the Home tries to avoid if at all possible (so many forms to fill in!). 

As I explained to Mr Adminside at the end of the carer's dins, Seamus and Gwen and their peers make the difference between A Life and mere existence.

Fakkn Darragh

There is a sense in some quarters that Met Eireann tends to throw out Orange and Red weather warnings with gay abandon. That leaves them in the position of having to say "no no we really mean it this time . . . don't make unnecessary Crossmolinas". Storm Darraaaaargh arrived at tea-time Friday 06Dec24 upgraded to Status Orange wind for the whole country, Red for Atlantic NW. Obsessively checking on the nullschool weather map , as I do, I could see the storm barrelling relentlessly across the N Atlantic and crumping into the Wild Atlantic Way.

Two hours later, just after midnight, we lost power [with a couple of flickers then plunging darkness] despite being a long old way from any coasts or any Red counties. We are misfortunate living in a sparsely populated rural back water because [and proper order] when the ESB does triage on where to restore power first, sparsely populated rural back waters come after schools, towns, google server farms, hospitals. If you're a dairy farmer you need a generator, because ain't nobody going milk 160 cows by hand . . . and how would you get it down to 4°C a.s.a.p.?

Those who built our farm-and-yard were great vernacular architects and faced everything South on a downhill slope with the out-buildings sheltering the yard from the predominant Westerlies and the chilling Siberian Easterly winds. 80 years ago, Old Jim he planted a shelter-belt of Scots Pine Pinus sylvestris round the acre that includes house, yard and haggard. All bets are off though in a global warming world where the warmer ocean fizzes up the wind. We are now in a managed retreat from living surrounded by trees and hugging them as we pass.

After storms, my first light task is to go out for a walk to assess the damage and count the sheep. If N_sheep = zero, a fence is down somewhere and the flock is whooping it up in the next county. Also I need to know if the lane from our gate to the county road is clear. Saturday morning I found a number of trees lying W→E at right angles to the ditches/walls that had anchored them for the last several decades. My next action was to send an ironic txt to my eponymous pal "Fakkn Darragh, throwing shapes agane. We are 3 trees down. How are y'all?" As I was out, I went to visit our nearest neighbour, at the bottom of the lane, and found his front garden full of horizontal trees. Part of his Cupressus x leylandii hedge, allowed to get far too big, had clattered against a lanky 30 y.o. Eucalyptus and brought that to the ground as well. I could hear his voice "I'm okay" and if I knelt down could see the lower part of his legs, but nothing of the [undamaged] house behind him.

My first task, though, was to deal with a rowan / mountain ash / caorthann = Sorbus aucuparia, which like my neighbour's trees had fallen out of one of the ditches and neatly filled the lane with a six-foot wall of ivy Hedera helix and horizontal rowan branches. Two hours later, I had reduced this impenetrable wall to a single trunk-supporting branch which any person or sheep could step over but prevented vehicular access to the uplands. I was just finishing up when the branch settled, pinned my saw and I borked the chain getting it out.  So I had to leave things thus:

you can see the lane up beyond the obstacle. And hey it's sunny after the storm: quite makes you believe in god or at least Gen9:13. That lane filled to the brim with drifted snow in late Feb 2018 which is another sort of impassable.

Sunday afternoon, I had time for him-next-door (an even more recent blow-in than ourselves) and joined a meitheal of miscellaneously skilled and equipped neighbours clearing a path through the Eucalyptus. For every person who was in the garden cutting pulling and stacking logs and brash, at least one car stopped to gawp or get out of their car and offer unasked-for advice to say how the clearance should be done. For the second time [first] in four weeks I can harrumph about the hurlers on the ditch. I dunno why it's so much easier to find fault than pick up a shovel and help. These clear-up operations are so often a Javi Problem: if you set to (with help is better) you can make substantive progress in a couple of hours. And by tea-time yesterday, we were confident that our neighbour could get his motorbike on the county road liberated from his brushwood prison.

We got power back at 16:00, forty (40) hours after it went out. Some of our neighbours were for throwing food out of their freezers. Me, I was for eating a hella gurt quantity of ice-cream in case it was spoiled.

Postscript for posterity: gusts of 120km/h were recorded at Shannon; homes and businesses 400,000 were without power: some are looking a week w/o power + 35,000 broadband fails; the Holyhead ferry terminal was whacked out of commission.

Gan Smal

misc mish mash  Today: the Feast of the Immaculate Conception: shop till you drop

• History of playing cards [via MeFi]
  
• Oktopus Orkestars - Tentáculos
  
• Twenty-one Pilots I bin thinking too much . . . help me.
• Live
• What's Pete doing after Tally Ho
• St Adjudor [prev], Dublin canal edition
• Medal for Model School
  

Clueless in Cloughjordan

Bruce Darrell set up in Cloughjordan when it was rebranded as an/the EcoVillage. His enterprise was the RED (Research, Education and Development) Gardens Project which is a lot more useful and kinder to the planet than TED and all its TechBros. Here he is calling a halt to one of his long-running community actions.  RED Gardens grows food organically and offers surplus next to an honesty box. 12 years ago, looking for more nutrient input, he put out the word that [local] folk could add their compostable waste to his compost bins . . . and he'd turn it - sieve it - sort it - barrow it - dig it . . . [one year later] . . . harvest it.

I've never met Bruce, but a lot of our home-ed & rice-cakes, Birkenstocks & FloatySkirts pals have passed through the Eco Village, so I daresay I've washed the dishes [at the annual HEN gatherings] for the self same people, or their carefree childer, who can't be humped to keep plastic out of their compost bin. Bruce started believing that he was getting an asset for free, so of course he should add the labour needed to transform the gift into something garden-useful.

Poor bugger is now worn out with fetching uncompostable shite [mostly plastic] out of compost as he turns and sieves it. He's spent years cutting his co-composters some slack. Our small veg-peeling knife turned [lit.] up in the compost the year after Javi left: it must have gotten submerged in the potato peel. But the compost of others is no longer worth the candle. And so, earlier this year he stopped managing this community resource . . . but let everyone know that Compost Manager was available in sits.vac. Of course, nobody else stepped up the the plate, just as nobody else had offered to put in an afternoon compost turning in his garden.

Read the comments attached to the YT: they are an instructive collective confessional of other people's experience with compost, lost sink-plugs and community action. Bruce baulked at putting a DO NOT sign beside the bin because 

• a) he worked as a design-wonk in a previous life and believes signage is only needed because the system is poorly designed 
• b) the people who leave plastic cookie packets in their compost ain't a gonna read no sign 
• c) it seems officious

But I did like his idea [see below] of creating a 'lost&found' board next to the compost intake bin on which were pinned a weird and wonderful selection of what The Community had mistakenly concluded was compostable. See my earlier rant about tea-bags and the difference between bio-degradable [years] and compostable [months].

"Having said that, I was thinking of setting up a big board beside the compost where I could hang all the stupid things that I found in the compost, almost like an art instillation. And label it 'Lost and Found' or 'Is this Yours?' or something like that, to make a joke about it, and so that people can see what does end up in there. I think that would be more interesting, effective and educational, than an instructional sign."

Tortfeasor frolic

Jason Beer KC, is the lead counsel for the Wyn Williams enquiry into the iniquities of Post Office and their hounding and harrying of sub-postmasters [prev]. He's just, justifiably, been called Barrister of the Year . . . and been given an awkward doodad and a glass of bubbly. He works from / for / at 5 Essex Chambers; I idly looked at the back catalogue of their youtube channel. In 2020, in lockdown and all WFH, they put out 'The Sofa Series': some 40min pieces-to-camera about aspects of law. What's not to love about a Sofa Series? I live on / for / at my sofa. I started with 'Vicarious Liability' and watched the whole thing through. Not quite on the edge of my seat, like, but engaged.

My father was a career naval officer, sometime CEO of a mobile, dangerous, battleship-grey enterprise with 600 men under his command. He was very much of the mindset that the buck stopped with him, even if he was asleep or ashore when any untoward event happened. He was quite judgmental [last para] about the Master of the Herald of Free Enterprise when that ship sank at Zeebrugge in 1987. If there was any vicarious liability on HMS Fearless, my dad would suck it up.

Two of the key UKSC rulings on vicarious liability concern the British supermarket chain Wm Morrison. Together they help lower courts set boundaries upon the extent to which corporations and institutions are liable at law for the iniquities of their employees.

Mohamud v W M Morrison Supermarkets [2016] UKSC 11

In 2008, Ahmed Mohamud [R] stopped into a Morrison petrol station and kiosk. On his way to a protest meeting in London, he asked if there was anywhere he could get some images printed from this here USB stick. The fellow behind the counter, Amjid Khan, refused to engage, and told Mohamud to leave with a spatter of racist epithets. Not content with that, Khan followed the uncustomer out to his car continuing to abuse him; opened the passenger door and landed a punch on Mohamud's head; went round the driver side of the car and duffed Mohamud up good and proper.

Nobody doubted that Khan was a Tortfeasor ['e done 'im wrong same legalese root as malfeasance] to / of / at Mohamud: the issue at law is whether he was on "frolic of his own" OR "furthering, however misguidedly, the interests of their employer" if the latter, then Morrisons is vicariously liable. The various lower courts had shillied and shallied citing different precedents in Case Law. The UKSC is at pains to make their judgments clear not only to lawyers in future lower courts but also to The Press and The Public. Their 2 page press summary explains that they key to (Mohamud v Morrison) is "close connection". Khan was employed by Morrison for customer service and there was an unbroken sequence of events from refusing to look at the USB-stick to putting the boot in outside.

a) I don't know whether the continued use of 'frolic' or 'tortfeasor' as technical terms is more out of touch with today's sensibilities b) justice delayed is justice denied hmmm? It took Ahmed Mohamud eight [8] years to get his vindication and he died in the interim: "Mr A M Mohamud (in substitution for Mr A Mohamud (deceased)) (Appellant) v WM Morrison Supermarkets plc (Respondent) [2016] UKSC 11". Four years later Morrison was in the UKSC dock again.

W M Morrison Supermarkets v Various Claimants [2020] UKSC 12

In this case, the rogue employee was found to be on a "frolic of his own" not least because it is very difficult to see how he could have been "furthering, however misguidedly, the interests of their employer". The Press Summary tells how Andrew Skelton, an internal auditor at Morrison, felt aggrieved at his internal treatment [nobody racially or otherwise abused him, let alone beat him up]. Later, tasked to deliver 'the books' to the company's external auditor, Skelton took a copy of the data and uploaded to the internet all the salaries, PPS #s, bank details and home addresses of all employees. He also kited the data to three separate newspapers, who declined to publish. 

The Various Claimants in the case, employees all, felt that a) the Data Protection Act 1998 had been breached [clearly it had] b) as well as Skelton, Morrison was vicariously liable for the failings of its internal auditor. The UKSC disagreed and let Morrison off the hook. Skelton was banged up for eight [8!] years. A bit of google suggests that in Brum, you get eight years for: a) assault with a meat cleaver, b) dealing class-A drugs, c) shotgun attack on business premises.  I cannot discover what happened to Amjid Khan beyond being sacked by Morrison.

It's a bit of a cheap shot to smirk about the failings of Morrison HR in hiring two tortfeasors perps who brought the company into disrepute (and cost the company £2million to fix Skelton's data-breach). Morrison have 100,000 people on payroll, guessing that 2 / 100,000 is a no higher rate of bad-apple than in the general population. I don't think that Morrison should be held to a higher standard than say public representatives in the Irish Dáil - rate 1/ 160.

Sconser

I can see how this might seem from outside. Late in life, a bloke starts new job teaching at an Irish Institute of Technology: decides to document the process of transition and record some funny thing happened in the lab tales to edutain others in the same business. Blog degenerates into rants about politics; poorly informed speculations about exo-planets; and hard-to-follow streams of conscious more appropriate to the psychiatrist's couch. This post tends to the latter; read on . . .

At the beginning of the month, a slightly younger and much more successful pal said that they'd shared my contax with a mutual acquaintance who was trying [very] to reach me. That contact turned out to be a silly, quite snobby, enquiry about The King's County Ancestry [L] which I was able to put to bed quickly and move on.

I'm soooo non-attachment nowadays that I wasn't particularly riled up. Not even about the fact that this was the [checks gmail] third time in 5 years, that I had email contact in similar circumstances with said snobacquaint which needed a third party to mediate the interaction. In my teens I dated a well connected gal whose titled grandfather refused to acknowledge he knew anyone in Surrey [home of riff-raff and -gasp- stockbrokers], so would address letters George Good-Seat esq., Goodseat Castle, Guildford . . . Suffolk.

I did peel off a rant to our go-between: I can't imagine why he wants to contact me. He's spent the entirety of our relationship (and that's 50 years) looking over my shoulder to see if someone more interesting is passing by. Most recently at the 2022 Christmas Do: he turned his back on me when I was in mid-sentence as the Emeritus Dean of Importance hove into view . . . I take this [advice the perp had given another mutual pal] with a big pinch of salty tears. As Protestant in Chief, he has for half a century been sent a steady stream of middle class youngsters for career advice. Invariably he told them "you'll always have climbing / opera / cello / gouache / carpentry /poems as a hobby - make sure you get your [science] degree first". He's possibly done more to scuttle creative Ireland than any man alive. Then again, in fairness, he caused a student to duck under my wing one Summer in the last century: a brief encounter which could be said to have launched that student's meteorically successful career. But that's just bollix, that was-a-student would have been Top Gun in any field they went for. Could now be an EU commissioner . . . editing the Irish Times . . . a patent lawyer in Strasbourg . . . director of policy at McGill U.

It is a categorical error to look back at a life [yours, mine, theirs] from some teleological peak or trough and think that it all turned out fine because of a series of random encounters and lucky breaks. My mother made her own luck when she landed a peach job in post-WWII London. I don't doubt that she would have been happy enough if she hadn't met my father as he blew through town in 1950 and married the local doctor instead (they had been an on again / off again item).

More or less exactly after that to-fro, I found myself listening to Ellen Langer on Sean Carroll's Mindscapes podcast. The sound quality is comically bad: feed-back echo; dogs barking; phones ringing and there is A Lot of push-back in the comments. But a few interesting ideas are aired over the 72 mins. One relevant to the current post, is Langer's suggestion that people start in life with an infinity of possibilities but only live one life: ". . . people make decisions to take action. Once you take that action, there's no opportunity to evaluate the other alternatives that you might have chosen. You can never know". There's no future in beating yourself up about 'mistakes' made in the past. If life isn't a Panglossian "best of everything in the best of all possible worlds" it can be pretty good if, having made your bed, you lie in it . . . rather that complain about the crackers someone ate in the bed since you last washed the sheets.

If you want a modern Pangloss you might listen to Hanif Kureishi who suffered a freak accident a couple of years ago and broke his neck. He's still writing, still mouthing off, still thinking, still being funny from his wheelchair. Try James O'Brien Full Disclosure or wherever your get your podcasts. Which makes me think of Simone Giertz and her tumour. 

Sconser (n.) A person who looks around them when talking to you, to see if there's anyone more interesting about. A defn from The Meaning of Liff (1983) by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd.

One Dec Sun Bit

First December 2024

• Honoring Dixie
• Remembering Charles de Foucauld [d 01Dec1916] friend of the Touareg
• Making pecorino
  
• Maeshowe
• Stonehenge altar stone is Orcadian  
• Weirdly compelling: Dr Tom Crawford does 2023 LeavingCert Maths Paper 1 [Q2  spoiler R]
• Two guys cleaning up storm tree-damage
• IMPORTANT: The 2nd edition of the Agricultural and Rural Inspiration Awards (ARIA) is searching for the greenest, smartest, most socially inclusive, innovative and resilient Common Agriculture Policy (CAP) projects implemented at the local level. Chekkitout and Vote. open until Sunday, 1 December at 18.00 (CET)
• For Irish General Election anoraks: dynamic updating, maps, bar-charts. 
• tl;dr 07:00 Sun 01Dec24: 41/174 seats assigned - Left fragmented, Greens stuffed - as 2020 three way FF/FG/SF - too many independents, of which too many fasch