My people My People

On St John's Day 2022, I broke out of the confines of Coronarama and drove across country to the University of Limerick UL to attend the 1st VIBE [Virtual Institute of Bioinformatics and Evolution] meeting after the lockdowns and disruptions of the pandemic. I've been involved in these events from the very beginning in 2002; and played myne host on two occasions 2006 and 2014. That June day in '22 started off with great promise as I sauntered across country in Summer sunshine but the weather turn cold with showers by tea-time and my voyage home was less exuberant. The weather was a pathetic fallacy of how I felt inside.

When I started "analyzing DNA and protein sequences" in 1990 that was the definition of Bioinformatics and our small lab in Dublin was really at the cutting edge. The sequences which I was analyzing were drawn from databases which were tiny by today's standards and I was expected to curate them carefully to eliminate sequencing duplicates and minor genetic variants but retain cases where two or more genes had accumulated changes after duplication from a common ancestor. My first paper considered all 45 genes that were then available for the fungus Aspergillus nidulans. I read every paper associated with each of those genes. In those days it cost ~€1 to sequence one DNA basepair. 20 years later the price was 10 million times cheaper.

And ten years later at the 2022 VIBE, The Effectives were a) 40 years younger than me and b) cranking through datasets which were 40 million times larger. Obvs, these young turks were not reading all the relevant papers, let alone with care and attention. And the analysis hinged on using "pipelines" of concatenated software, some of which they'd acquired off the shelf and some were hundreds of lines of Python all their own work. I had a nice nostalgic lunch with a couple of other crumblies and I did chat to some of the youngsters. But at the end of the day, driving home in the drizzle, I quoted Tennyson "

. . . The old order changeth, yielding place to new,

And God fulfils Himself in many ways,

Lest one good custom should corrupt the world . . .

and resolved to find myself an iceflow rather than going to the next VIBE. So I missed 2023 at QUB Belfast and 2024 NUIGalway but didn't miss missing them. 

In early 2025,  word went out that VIBE was coming full circle back to TCD to celebrate 25 years of sharing ideas about sequences and evolution in Ireland.

• Dublin is a lot more easy of access than Limerick, Belfast or Galway
• I got me bus-pass
• I'd been sort of supervising [by zoom and email] one of the TCD Effectives who might be presenting her work
• Having been at TCD man and boy, I know where all the t'ilets are - not unimportant for an old chap
• They promised a free lunch and there was hope for some merch

I had a great time. There were a few people of my generation, and several of the next generation with whom I'd worked back in the day. And I got to meet 'my' Effective as she stood by 'our' poster. I could follow many of the talks in the morning session - because they were talking more about evolution and less about pipelines. Some of them made me think and/or question my certainties. All in all, a pretty good day.

But come 5 o'clock I was done. I'd been awake for 12 hours. The afternoon session was leaning towards the software end of our field and I was lost at the second or third slide of each prez. But I had an Exit Strategy which was to go out to dinner with Dau.I and Dau.II. We went sub-continental and it was biryani dahlicious. They gave me a bed for the night and I went home by train into Storm Bram the next morning. Midmorning on a weekday Heuston Station is very quiet, and I was able to find a seat to wait my train. A while back Irish Rail installed a public piano in the station concourse and a young bloke was tinkling away on it to pass the time. But the tannoy called the Cork train and he left and nobody took cudgels to the keyboard. There was no Christmas Music which was a relief and a blessing and I had a rather good ear-book.

Eating the seed corn, Not

Dau.I-the-Book was recently working in Coolock Branch Library, settled in the shadow of the Nort'side Shopping Centre, Dublin 17. I wrote a tuthree book-reviews for their newsletter. Dau.I WAS SINCE promoted [woot!] and moved to other libradventures. But a former colleague messaged "your Dad's a scientist, maybe he's like this science book whc I noticed on the return-to-shelf trolley". Which is an engagingly naive view of the eclectic reading habits of yer average scientist. Most of us are woefully hyper-focused: knowing more & more about less & less.

That's how I got to read The Forbidden Garden of Leningrad: A True Story of Science and Sacrifice in a City under Siege by Simon Parkin. Lots to reflect on here. The key theme is the question "what / who shall be saved" . . . when armageddon arrives. As The End of Times are round the corner, these are not merely metaphorical meanderings. Parkin is at pains to use Latin binomers for the species which form part of the extensive but still meagre diet of Leningraders who survived the first dreadful Winter of the siege. Sorrel Rumex acetosella [✓], coltsfoot Tussilago farfara [χ]  - it's the carcinogenic pyrrolozidine alkaloids innit? 

When I was a schoolboy one standard history text was AJP Taylor's The Origin of the Second World War [1961]. It's been a while but I don't remember a chapter on Sleepwalking but that's a big part of how The Allies finished up in WWII. On 23 Aug 1939, one week before Germany invaded Poland, (and my mother sheltered [briefly] under the kitchen table) Foreign Ministers Molotov RU and von Ribbentrop DE signed a non-aggression pact. Over the next two years, the Soviets sold 1.6 million tonnes of grain to the Reich and continued to do so right up until the launch of Unternehmen Barbarossa on 22 June 1941. Stalin was a delusional ideologue: he wanted the world to mirror the ideals of Marxist-Leninism and really didn't like being told that he was wrong. Accordingly, bat-shit five year plans for Soviet agriculture resulted in famine and failure and those responsible were taken out and shot for not trying hard enough. From being students in the 1970s we were always aware of Nikolai Vavilov [stamp R] as a Good Geneticist, pally and parity with the Best of the West in the 20s and 30s. He was undone as a Morgan-Mendelist [=Darwinian whose understanding of the world was informed by him being a 19thCC capitalist], condemned as traitor and spy and replaced by Trofim Lysenko during WWII. Lysenko's theories of plant breeding and agronomy were pure Soviet and pure nonsense but very agreeable to Stalin and the Supreme Soviet. Adopting Lysenkoism possibly killed as many people as the Wehrmacht.

Apart from practicing the standard model of genetics, Vavilov was a pioneer in capturing diversity and studying the origin and biogeography of crop plants. He, his students and collaborators travelled widely through the 20s and 30s seeking out the oldest available peasant and taking samples, seeds and cuttings of obscure varieties of vital agricultural species: potatoes, wheat, rye, barley, pulses, apples everything. |This precious seed-bank of diversity (and potential resistance to plague and scourge) was brought back to Leningrad and propagated in the Institute's field plots. Vavilov was arrested on a field trip to Ukraine in July 1941 and disappeared into the gulags.

By August 1941, Operation Barbarossa had swept through the Baltic SSRs, surrounded Leningrad and the siege began. In Parkin's book, Vavilov is like the ghost of Hamlet's father: always off stage but always present. He inspired fierce and enduring loyalty from those who worked for the Institute: scientists, but also the secretariat, managers, gardeners, lab.techs, drivers, students and field-workers. Parkin interleaves chapters about Vavilov's prison journey with the main theme of desperate hardship in Leningrad.

The hook that makes the story is that a few dozen people living existing on starvation rations in sub zero [in °F!] temperatures did not eat into several tonnes of irreplaceable heritage seeds which they were hoarding against the dragons without. Those dragons included the German invaders, but also Commissars who didn't care two buttons about scab-resistant wheat, and rodents, and desperate citizens who had loved ones to care for.  Now here's the thing, several of the Institute's staff did indeed die of starvation [and from shrapnel etc.] but having a purpose, being part of The Project, gave the emaciated survivors a reason to live. The sunk costs from their time and trouble in saving the seeds incentivized them to save for the future.

The potatoes were a special case because frost would destroy the seed-tubers and so they had a sell-by date much much shorter than, say tomato seed - which can be good for 20 years. In the Spring of 1942, the citizens of Leningrad were given a commissariat reprieve. The delusions in Moscow and wilful [la la la can't see you] failure to anticipate - or respond appropriately to - Barbarossa had left Leningrad with absurdly depleted reserves when the jaws of the pincer clamped shut in August '41. As soon as the snow melted, there was a concerted effort to plant every available hectare with cabbage and spuds. And educate the people about which weeds were good to eat. The only place left to propagate mere heritage spuds was some fields about a mile from the front lines in full view of German snipers and artillery. The tractors had long ago be shot up and the horses eaten, so the Potato People had to turn sod with shovels and sticks in the dark. And carefully record the location and provenance of each little plot: on the ground and in the ledger. Always anticipating that they could, any of them, die on the instant leaving someone from the future to read their hand-writing. I am sure I don't have it in me to match their courage, determination and fixity of purpose. Hats Off! And hats off to Simon Parkin for digging up the story. brushing off the dirt to reveal a Truth for Our Times.

Media diet

Well, yeah, y'know that's just like your opinion, man.

Over on MetaFilter recently, there was a long and opinionated thread about the nature and ethics of piracy. It's quite difficult to square 
a) journalism is work, journalists should get paid
with
b) there was a time when MegaMedia loaded their intellectual property IP up on the internet and we-all could read it for free. 

I've always maintained that the World would now be a better a place if, like for electricity, we'd all been charged 1c for every MegaByte we 'used'. We'd be more thrifty on the servers. 

Free media was how it was at the Birth of The Blob in 2013/'14/'15. I could surf around the web and read news and commentary; quote something; add my own bit of Talmudary; and post it all on The Blob. Nowadays, not so much, I don't read Food & Wine or Vanity Fair or New Yorker or Nature or Science because they are all behind paywalls. Which is fair enough because journalists should get paid. I'll preen myself a bit by asserting that I always tried / try to add something extra to the debate in any Blobs I posted. Many failed to do that, merely re-churning the basic facts of the case often lifting whole phrases and sentences from the original. A practice [plagiarism] which we used to forbid our students at The Institute. Obvs, my years of Sunday Round-up (mostly YT) were an exception of whc I am now ashamed.

There are ways of circumventing paywalls often involving various archive sites which are trying to capture the ephemeral internet. Just to note that Nature and Science is a slightly different case. Both periodicals employ journalists to write copy: opinion, commentary, overview and explanation. These people are paid and readers should pay for access. But the majority of pages in any issue of these keystone publications are taken up with original primary scientific research reports.  For other scientific journals All the pages are scientific papers. The hard graft of creating the IP and writing about it is already paid for - largely by research grants from government or foundations. So Elsevier are gouging punters when they charge $50 to read one article. Other MegaPublishers are available. I've ranted extensively about this. Sci-Hub will get you older 'copyright' scientific pubs.

Fungible media. But Science is not my beef today. I didn't contribute to the MetaFilter discourse but my hot take is that it don't matter tuppence if you cannot access That article which someone else recommends. If you're alert and curious, the gap in your knowledge will be filled with something else . . . anything else? Literature is fungible, I guess I'm saying. There is plenty of choice [R Easons Waterford Ryw Station 1924]. All grist to the mill of keeping the grey cells active. And maybe less is more? My father enrolled in a speed-reading course at the age of 80 because there was so much to read but so little time. It killed him in the end. 

If you feel you spend too much time restlessly scrolling then cold turkey works for me. I've taken a fortnight off from YouTube, Metafilter in the past just to cool down. And I paused the Blob's Sunday Miscellany a while back because my TY links are contributing to someone else's glazed-eye dopamine issues aka GEDI.

Of course if you're alert and specifically curious you will have already subscribed to Matchboxes Quarterly or Model Railway Tunneller.

Punch & Jamie

 cw: Murder manslaughter 

Things don't "come in threes": we're just primed to be aware of that sort of thing after something odd / outré / other sails over our aware-horizon. I had just finished reviewing O Brother - a harrowing tale of a young chap going off the rails and never quite getting back on track. From quite another field of my attention a similar story burst front and centre. The Rest Is Politics TRIP is a two-hander podcast in which Alastair Campbell [New Labour] and Rory Stewart [Con.] disagree agreeably. They are both white cis-het British centerists, so their disagreements are hardly existential. They chatter on about British and World politics much like other members of the commentariat. They are actually much better networked than most regular journalists and started a sub-podcast TRIP-Leading where they have interviewed past and present prime ministers and Presidents of  . . . Albania, Cyprus, Denmark, Germany, Guyana . . .

But they also share space with other people who are making a difference. In mid November, they did a foursome [also on YT] with James Graham and Jacob Dunne on Prison Reform, Masculinity, and Restorative Justice. Rory Stewart knows something about prisons because he was Minister i/c of them in the brief Theresa May government. He took his job seriously rather than soundbytely: visiting the most hellish and trying to put lipstick on the pig. Jacob Dunne knows rather more because, like Gary "O Brother" Nevin, he was banged up .  . .  for killing a stranger with a single punch while off his face with drink and other drugs.  Because he was 19, and no longer a child, because he plead guilty he was sentenced to 4 years in prison and served 14 months. Prison is not the best place for the dispossessed to find meaning or guidance on what next?

After Jacob was released, his probation officer wasn't able to help him find somewhere to live: there was a long waiting list for . . . zero available places. But she was able to talk to him about Remedi an organization helping people come to terms with their actions and the consequences. They also hold out a hand to the victims of crime, helping them come to terms with their loss. After some time communicating through intermediaries, Jacob got to meet 'his' dead chap's parents and everyone in the room did well with their anger management. Joan Scourfield, the grieving mother and Jacob Dunne the killer got past forgiveness and became . . . friends? They meet on the regular anyway and have done two-handers for / with The Forgiveness Project, demonstrating that being kind to others is being kind to yourself. And that revenge and hate just keeps the juggernaut of self-righteous anger crushing more souls. Jacob Dunne has written a book about his journey: Right from Wrong: My Story of Guilt and Redemption [2022] - co-writer credit → Mark Eglinton. Some months later, the story was flagged by edgy playwright James Graham and he brought the story to the stage as Punch.

 Graham [b.1982] and Dunne [b.1992] both grew up working class in Greater Nottingham, a post-industrial conurbation in the English Midlands. But their lives were very different. As a teenager Graham was figure-skating on the local rink while Dunne was more into getting hammered. Graham stayed in school and went on to college; Dunne failed and then dropped out of school, supporting himself selling drugs. But they had common ground and a similar accent and collaborated to bring a powerful drama to the stage . . . many different stages, on both sides of the Atlantic. Audiences have been shaken and stirred and resolved to do better and be kinder and less judgemental. Who knows, maybe a powerful play can shift the dial where decades of statistics and analysis and hand-wringing has achieved nothing but heartache all round. Like Mr Bates vs The Post Office in 2024 [see also Blob].

There are those who never met any of the people involved and refuse to condone or explain or forgive. For those folks mired in their certainties, evil actions are only carried out by evil people. And of course they themselves are squeaky clean in thought and deed. A sample from FB

• Bindy Beridge How about you change the word ‘scrapping’ in the article to violent assault. 
• John Mccaffrey He killed an innocent man, but we have to listen to his sob story and watch him make money out of the man he killed from his book. 
• Tracey Poole Rehabilitation is all very well but where’s the justice for the victim and their family? It’s like they’re just meant to move on and be pleased that the offender who ruined their lives is having a nice time now. There would be no forgiveness from me. 

What they don't appreciate is that Jacob Dunne is walking right next to Mephistopheles "Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it". It's okay if he cracks on with new dogoodnik path though life; indeed it's okay if he cracks a joke once in a while. He clearly has an inherent reservoir of empathy: when he was a teen, his presence would light up The Gang. Now he's turning that one talent [which is death to hide] on for funders and donors and prison officers and offenders. Getting a more positive message to / for / about the dispossessed whom the state forgot requires time and treasure. We have decades of inertia to turn the ship of state from victim blaming and depriving the deprived.

One optimistic note. In contrast to the friend-group of Gary "O Brother" Niven in Irvine; 'most' of Jacob's pals have grown out of nihilistic self-destruction and are now, like him, 30-something Dads making a better fist of living their best lives than they were when punching people back in the days of their youth.

Mammals suck

Thanksgiving last, a post on FB went so viral that both my correspondent G and Katie Hinde noticed. The latter's not too surprising because the FB post was all about Professor Hinde and her 20 years of research into the composition of milk. And correspondent G? She is the best researcher I know who was never trained in how to do research but worked it all out for herself, and created a sharp set of tools for Finding Out. Like us all, G is focused on a subset of all things, but I haven't yet worked out what are the limits of that subset. In the present case: milk, lactation, evolution and amazin' women in science. 

One interesting facet of the story is how fractal research can be. In 2018, another of 'my' amazin' women, Dau.II, asked a gimlet question about seal milk whc set me off down a comparative composition of milk mammal-hole. It was clear to me then that "a milk is a milk is a milk" [ref] is just not true: the protein content of milk can vary 1% to 13% among mammalian species. Humanity has about the lowest [protein] known. Hinde's earliest milk research documented quite different milk content within the human species. There is even a suggestion that mother's tailor their milk to suit each pregnancy: boys and girls get a different shake. One comment under the Hinde TED talk cited below asks "What about fraternal twins one of each sex" hey I was half of that conundrum in utero.

For reasons which baffle reasonable-patriarch me, human lactation and breast-feeding is highly charged and politicized. We were barred from Bewley's in 1976 for suckling The Boy invisibly in  a café. It is not kosher to advocate for breast-feeding because that will shame mothers who cannot. "cannot" is a broad church from a breast cancer survivor who has undergone a double mastectomy to a 1st time mother from a buttoned-up family who "just can't".  And it's not a linear spectrum! All kinds of reasons, unreasons and circumstances can align to prevent mothers using their own milk-bar. You don't want to get too high horse about this because clearly there are successfully walking talking thinking and earning adults who were formula from Day 1. Thing is blaming 'victims' is sooo much cheaper than blaming systems. Hinde advocates [What we don't know about mother's milk TED alert] that 'society' looks at making it easier for mothers to feed their own with their own in, say, the work-place. How might that happen? 

• there is a place other than the jacks where a lactating manager might get going with a breast-pump
• there is a creche in the building
• there is a government policy to mandate paid parental leave for those who want it 

Your company, your country may be failing here. I think we can all agree that The Answer is unlikely to be "increasingly polarized assertion, please". 

Some statistical number crunching might help: what are the levels of glyphosate in human milk? Is that level higher than in other human bodily fluids? DDT, back in the day, accumulated in apex predators, because it was metabolically stable, so every meal up the food chain had higher concentrations. If kids are loading up with glyphosate from the water or pollen or the air they breathe then breast milk isn't making it worse. And more focused: what's the level in cow's milk from which infant formula is created. Next: what about BPA in milk: same questions apply. 

• Are bottle fed children or their later adult selves different from breast feeders w.r.t. [insert condition here]?
• is the difference statistically significant?
• does it matter; or is the difference just part of nature's wonderful diversity?
• will the difference cost society / the state more than making, and making available, some fun engaging infomercials to ante-natal classes?

One of the rhetorical devices used by Katie Hinde points out that breast-milk is minority interest to the biomed research world. I updated her stats on pubmed paper-counts to reflect the state of play in late 2025:  

I'll add that there were 57 extra hits [erectile disfunction] for the right-hand column from spelinge challenged research groups. Earlier prez at Harvard Thinks Big 4 by younger Hinde: "Why Mammals Suck".  Much more data-rich prez by even younger Hinde: showing how mother's milk differs for boys and girls.

Hard chaw gone

cw: suicide

All happy families are alike; each unhappy 
family is unhappy in its own way. Leo Tolstoy. 

Apparently this phenomenon is known as the Anna Karenina principle. It's probably true for healthy and sick bodies. Take blood pressure: it is driven up if a) the heart beats faster b) pushes more through each beat c) fluid builds up in the finite circulatory system d) the walls of the blood vessels constrict , so that the finite fluid volume is squeezed e) some other effect I may have forgotten. "Normal" blood pressure is maintained by a complex and multiply-redundant system [ACE, ADH, ANP, ANS, ARB etc] of hormones, neurotransmitters, receptors and ligands. Doctors have a rather large pharmacopeia [at least 9 different statins] from which to prescribe. The skill is working out which part of the system is banjaxed and targeting that without jerking around the bits which are doing their best under adverse circumstances.

I've been ear-booking a memoir, O Brother by John Niven [Guardian review], which is disc-harrowing and redemptive by turns. Niven and his wee brother Gary were raised in the 1970s among the dispossessed of Irvine, a New Town SW of Glasgow. There was plenty of scope, and many role-models, for having dumb-ass, often violent, adventures on the move fast and break things spectrum. It was easy enough to get aff their heids with glue, Bucky and vodka - and later (with more money) ecstasy and cocaine. Yet these boys had quite divergent life-courses: 

• John pushed himself to, and through, college [1st class hons, no less] and became [eventually, much struggle] a successful author and screen-writer with fast cars and nice suitings.
• Gary became a woefully inept drug dealer; serving time for possession with intent to supply. 

One late-onset tonk the brothers had in common was being afflicted with cluster headaches - a rare [1/1000] crushingly painful, episodic condition. This was seriously and serially mis-diagnosed in the boy who was left behind in Irvine: his GP clocked "headache" and prescribed Nurofen. John, in London, with college education and access to Google, got both diagnosis and access to treatment (insofar as there is effective treatment!). happy heads are alike; each unhappy head is achy in its own way and aspirin won't blatt a brain tumour.

Poor wee Gary, broke and broken, finally managed to off himself . . . while in hospital [having called 911 after another evening of suicidal ideation and dead-end despair]. It shouldn't happen under those circumstances. But my father shouldn't have died "unexpectedly" in hospital after falling downstairs and being subjected to a succession of 'hilariously' inappropriate medical interventions. My brother and I went to identify the body half expecting to meet The Other Mr Scientist on the hospital books whose treatments had been shuffled and intercalated with the Da's. There was an outside chance that our father was on a trolley awaiting an MRI in the other hospital in the same Trust. Oh, and they lost his medical records! 

Gary was kept on life-support for four [4!] days after he'd killed himself. X-rays, and oxygen and intubation and MRI were readily available for the dead. But simple care-and-attention were not there for the living. The family never faulted the coal-face staff at the ER and ICU - they were kind, professional and effective. The System and The Management; not so much. John and his surviving sister went, through three [3!] FoI requests, after the transcript of Gary's 911 call. They sued the hospital for negligence and cover-up and won.

It was a Pyrrhic victory. No amount of win, no amount of compo, could bring back the wild beloved boy who never grew up. It took ten years of process before John the Writer could get their story down on paper. By that time, John was able to record that all of Gary's pals were dead. Some additional back-story in Holyrood.

Tolstoy's quote in the original Russian: Все счастливые семьи похожи друг на друга, каждая несчастливая семья несчастлива по-своему. 

DKFL

I just finished ear-booking a memoir Eyewitness: The Rise and Fall of Dorling Kindersley by Christopher Davis. In a first for me, it was read by a voice-bot; but it would have been hard to determine this from the aural evidence alone. It had about the same number of egregious mispronunciations as the, like, people they employ to create audio-books.

In our pantheon of the Saints of Kapital, Peter Kindersley ranks second only to Sir Clive "ZX81" Sinclair, [of whom multiprev].  We were distantly aware of Dorling Kindersley as a publisher of gorgeous glossy informative non-fiction for families. Dau.I and Dau.II were born in 1993 and 1995 and by 1996 we joined Sa Bhaile [At Home] a community of woo-folk [a lorra Birkenstocks and rice-cakes] who chose intentionally to keep their kids out of school.  In 1998, The Education Welfare Bill threatened to regularize Home Education in Ireland. Some of us in Sa Bhaile had a [interminable] series of meetings to create a new more structured disorganization; the better to fight or divert The Man from interfering in our version of educating kids at home. It was quite heady as we decided to organize the first conference sponsored by our nascent Home Education Network HEN.

Around this time, The Beloved went to London for a meeting [AGM??] of Education Otherwise EO, the well-established British equivalent  of HEN. The key-note speaker was Peter Kindersley, riding high on a direct selling pyramid scheme venture called Dorling Kindersley Family Learning. The business model for DKFL was for wannabee thousandaires to host DKFL jamborees at their homes - think Tupperware Parties for heavily discounted books, CDs and other merch. After his talk, TB barrelled up to him and said how inspiring DKFL was . . . and would DK like to sponsor the launch of HEN across the water in Ireland. Kindersley answered positively in a way that was not just "ho ho an untapped market". But businesslike, he asked for a business plan and proposal to be sent to his PA. 

Within a month a personal cheque for £2,000 had been lodged in the HEN bank account! In those far-off days, £2K was enough to cover all the upfront costs of running the 1st HEN Conference in Newtown School in 1999. That conference broke even - turning a modest profit from The Raffle. The Peter Kindersley Memorial Fund was rolled over to float the 2nd Conference in 2000AD. And so on! That subsidy enabled HEN to stagger on from year to year without requiring any Effective to raise funds for the major expense of the HEN financial year. Which was just as well because the HEN community was long on visionaries but short on grunts. So long and thanks for all the fi$h, Mr Kindersley.

The Beloved also signed up to be a "Presenter" for DKFL which didn't make us hundredaires let alone thousandaires but did allow us to acquire dozens and dozens of books at cost-price ad maiorem edu glossiem of our girls:  

The title of Christopher Davis' book Eyewitness is a reference to the long series of Eyewitness Guides whc fill the bottom right corner of the picture above: Sea Life; Mammals; Sports; Plants; Transport; Your Body; Space etc.. Those DK books formed the core resource for Dau.I and Dau.II to educate themselves from the comfort of their own sofa.

Davis was the 2nd Hire when Dorling and Kindersley launched DK at the Annual Frankfurt Book Fair in 1976. He was therefore witness to [and co-cause of] the Rise and Rise of DK through the 80s and 90s as they launched a string of million copy best sellers including John Seymour's Self-sufficiency which got us where we are today. Davis was "let go" just before DK imploded spectacularly by investing in millions and millions of unsellable items of Star Wars merch in 1999. The book is wry, funny and a good lens on booze, deals, hubris and humility. The bare bones of DK's history and timeline is captured here.

Th5n1ksgiving 2025

Bird flu is endemic now. The H5N1 strain of the virus, which has been found in turkey Meleagris gallopavo flocks in counties CW MH MO this November, is notably concerning because it is particularly virulent if/when it jumps the species barrier and starts to scythe through, like, people. One problem is that bird flu circulates in wild birds, and the Department of Agriculture has NO resources to prevent sparrows or rooks vectoring the virus into free-range commercial flocks. What they have done is mandate that poultry farmers get their birds indoors to minimize the chance of passerine poop in the feeders or water troughs. We are a teensy bit concerned for our favorite free-range && organic egg farm halfway between here and The Déise. In supermarkets in Ireland you can but organic eggs or free-range eggs but not organic-free-range and I go all Buridan's Ass on making the choice.

Today, it's Thanksgiving in the USA, the Canadian having given their thanks in October as always. In Ireland it's a just a normal working day but tomorrow Black Friday the shops will be rammed because discounts are to be had. And because Kapital can never have enough retail incentives Cyber Monday is in 4 days time. Whatevs, we have family&friends in the US and I try to remember to send them a greet in the much-to-be-thankful-for vein. My quip for 2025 has been This:

is as close as we're getting to turkey this year. Not that we'd be eating turkey in normal times - a most over-rated thing on which to waste oven-time. A little chicken can go a long way: roast as an excuse for roast potatoes, cold for late night sangers, curry for St Stephen's Day, and soup for the next couple of days after that. And the best of all these, for my pref, is soup. The justification for chicken and ham at Christmas is somewhat diminished because half the family are vegetarians. But our favorite farm does a line in free-range pork and ham and we had an excellent collar roast last year. I am tasked to order another for this December.

But to reiterate: we have much to be thankful for: plenty of firewood, the use of our legs, minds not tooo confuse, and a distinct want of Want.

Arrrrghinish

Bauxite is a locally [Les Baux-de-Provence, Jamaica, Guinea, Hungary] abundant reddish rock which is mostly Al(OH)₃ but run through with iron Fe silicon Si and titanium Ti congeners. Bauxite is the most abundant source of alumin[i]um for our take-out trays, soda cans and airplane wings. In broad terms, getting dirty bauxite to Shiny Al is a 4 step process 

1. Crush it to increase the surface area for chemical action
2. Slop in A Lot of hot caustic soda NaOH and boil it up under pressure to create pure sodium aluminate Na₂O·Al₂O₃
3. Discard the alkaline sludge aka red mud into tailing ponds until the end of time
4. Apply A Lot of electric current to reduce the alumina / aluminium(III) oxide / Al₂O₃ crystals to pure metal

Step 3 is a mill stone round the neck of share-holders and requires the company to divert significant dividend money to maintenance costs for the tailing ponds. In 2014, The Blob described the ruinous consequences of failing to front up these infra-structural costs in Ajka, Hungary. There on 4th October 2010, a berm failed after a rainy ould Summer. Seven people and 7 million fish died in the tsunami of toxic waste.

Long ago and far away??  On 4th September 1983 Aughinish Alumina Limited (AAL), a partnership of Alcan (40%), Billiton (35%) and Anaconda (25%) started operations in Co Limerick, using steps 1 - 3 of the ELI5 protocol above. You can see the consequences of 40 years of productivity from space:

on the South of the Shannon Estuary ~10km WSW of the Airport and about half that distance W of Askeaton, Co Limerick. AAL was the largest producer of alumina in Europe, making 35% of this key industrial resource at one time. Mergers, sales and acquisitions found AAL in the hands of Rusal in 2007.  Rusal is the creation of billionaire Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska Олег Владимирович Дерипаска.

So there was a Russian asset in the Republic when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 but the once and future Taoiseach Micheál Martin claimed Irish exceptionalism w.r.t., like, sanctions and Kevin Sheahan, Askeaton publican and Fianna Fáil CoCo councillor echoed this unprincipled parochialism. Because 450 of his parishioners were directly employed by Rusal and he needed their votes next time around - he had secured 1,246 first prefs in 2019 . . . the Irish for shame is náire. The fact that Deripaska is a citizen of CypRus and deplores the invasion of Ukraine shouldn't make no differ.

A couple of weeks ago the YT algorithm dropped me The Aughinish Incident a very Irish Disaster [26 min] by Kev Collins. It addresses another facet of the Aughinish / Askeaton story . . . tl;dw? AAL started ops in 1983, over the next ten years there was an uptick in a range of human and animal health issues locally. Cattle dying from vet-baffling ailments, stillborn and deformed calves. And children too. It's not much use cherishing AAL as a major likely employer for the next generation of Askeatoneers if those youngsters are disabled or dead before they can be hired. Public and political pressure built up and up until in 1995 the EPA was tasked to determine a) if the uptick was within the normal range b) if not, what was the cause.

After 3 years, and £5million, that investigative study concluded that there was a) nothing to see here b) no cause could be assigned with statistical confidence to the nothing. The skeptical minority report of environmental statistician Dr Sarah Walters from U.Birmingham was suppressed. So only 5 volumes and a summary [PDFs downloadable] totalling 1,280 pages were published . . . in 2013.  Unless a) you live in NW Co. Limerick && b) you're doing a degree in stats && c) your crap-detector is particularly well polished I doubt you're going to read the report with a jotter on the table for taking notes. Kev Collins runs a channel on which he can make articulate assertions w/o itemising all the supporting evidence. A bit like some of The Blob, do I hear you say? His Aughinish piece-to-camera is a useful teaser or call-to-arms, but you'll have to Work to determine if a) the EPA was suborned and bought off by oligarch-roubles or b) the adverse health storm in West Limerick was hard to endure but not attributable to anything but the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or c) little gr👁👁n men.

One of Kev's points is that the fissured limestone nature of the bedrock upon which the AAL red mud mountain is piled up is not uniform in texture. The subterranean fissures have capacity to funnel toxins underground quite a distance from the Aughinish source . . . to blurf up in some unfortunate Askeaton farmer's borehole - but not the neighbour's. The geology around the plant is quite diverse

with a thesaurus of limestones, siltstones, mudstones, shales and sandstones; variously cherty, muddy, laminated . . . and differentially porous. Which is an unfortunate reality because, it seems, the EPA adopted a model of uniform geology which was all about the Mean values while smooshing the variability around those means. Must hunt down Dr Walters' minority report.

Maybe refer back to the cluster of Down syndrome kids born to a cohort of mothers who had earlier attended the same secondary school in Dundalk. At the time my boss and his boss crunched the numbers and concluded that so many cases in such a small cohort was vanishingly unlikely BUT it was a) wrong and b) counter-productive to point the indignant finger of blame at The Brits and their Sellafield nuclear facilities just 100km E across the Irish sea.

The day after YT delivered The Aughinish Incident, Wikipedia headlined "The High Court of Justice in London rules BHP liable for the 2015 Mariana dam disaster in Minas Gerais, Brazil". That is Ten Years ago! BHP was originally an Australian mining corp but went multinational megacorp by merging with Billiton Maatschappij. Yes, yes the same Billiton which [see above] had a 35% stake in AAL when that enterprise floated . . . kleine wereld!  The High Court judge handing down that condemnation was/is Finola O'Farrell. Justice O'Farrell has acquired a lapel-full of gongs and honours from The Brits but I bet she's eligible for an Irish passport. As with Aughinish, the wheels of justice / fact-finding ground slow for downstream Minas Gerais. But a sorry tale of corner-cutting, lack of environmental testing, failures of technical oversight launched 45 million tonnes of toxic crud into the Doce River killing 19 people and uncountable millions of fish. That was +40x as much as at Ajka in Hungary 5 years previous. 

I trust that the EPA, Micheál Martin TD and Kevin Sheahan CC will own their responsibility when/if [whc heaven forfend] corner-cutting, lack of environmental testing, & failures of technical oversight cause a similar breach of berm into the mighty Shannon.

But for me, the bottom line is that the State should cherish all those who are crushed by misfortune [in maternity hospitals, sketchy work-places, on the roads, at the seaside]. Then we'd be less quick to lawyer up and/ or Go Tribunal and assign blame at ruinous cost to everyone involved except the lawyers. 

Just a little closer to the Lord

I've been a fan [have two of his glossy coffee-table books fan] of Andy Goldsworthy since Stone [1994] Time [2000]. His schtick is to assemble or modify natural materials so they better stand out in the landscape. A good part of the oeuvre reflects on impermanence - even gurt big lumps of sandstone are being imperceptibly changed by wind and tide. It can be a salutary lesson in humility: we're on the planet for a few years and when we're gone Nothing beside remains . . . yes, even The Blob will be poofed away by The Algorithm and forgotten.

In the 00s, a Donegal forester called Liam Emery was tasked to cover another Irish hillside [The S face of the Hill of Bogay] with a monoculture of Sitka spruce Picea sitchensis because Coillte the state forestry service likes to cast things in its own image: dull, monolithic, short-termist, tone-deaf. [maps loca] 

But Liam elected to stick one to The Man and interplant 3,000 Japanese larch Larix kaempferi among the spruce. Not randomly but intentionally so that as the trees grew to maturity the golden-turning larch needles would (at certain times of the year [FALL], under certain [rare-in-Donegal, sunny] weather conditions) light up the hillside with the image of a Celtic cross. I am not sure if the project was driven by particularly religious ad maiorem dei gratiam etc.  sentiments. But it surely tuned into a particularly peculiarly Irish heritage [R image clipped YT by Stephen Reid ultimately from Will Reilly].  So park your wonder-fatigue and check out the YT story. 

tl;dw: in ~2002, Liam and his pal Bernard went off piste; they surveyed then planted 3,000 alien-to-the-project larch whips in a 200m x 100m pattern. In 2010 Liam suffered a fatal kayaking accident and it wasn't until a tourist overflight in 2016 brought the arbor-image to the internet. Slightly longer version.

Obvs, being so photogenic and with Liam's tragic death and all, there is a movement to stay Coillte's hand w.r.t. to felling out the forest when its commercial time is done . . . in ca. 2045. But forests must be thinned every ~15 years lest the trees suffocate each other from being too close-packed. Dogoodnik tree-huggers can't just Stop The Chainsaws and think that will solve the problem. Kiwi Sean came and thinned our forest in 2022, bringing in selective light and air and converting crinkle-crankle trees into firewood to warm a couple of Olds in the twilight of their years. So I guess we can expect the picture of the cross get increasingly pixellated with each thinning cycle.

Also earlier Triquetra (Celtic knot) in P. sitchensis and L. kaempferi above the Lake of Glencar Co Sligo 

Hat-tip off also to thelife.of_reilly on Insta for a) the Bogay drone footage and b) flagging that another artificial heritage construct, the Grianán of Aileach lies about 3km NNE from the Emery Celtic Cross. The GoA is a 19thC re-construction of an iron-age hill-fort atop the peak in the distant background of the picture [R]. 

¿Post Title? Bloboprev. 

Bone Dry Ungood

Cripes is Ireland damp for about 5 months every year. When we came home to Ireland after spending the 1980s+ in foreign, we canvassed opinion about what was essential to know / do / acquire to live our best lives At Home. MaryC was strong in her advocacy: "get a tumble drier; vented to outside". Later we acquired a polytunnel which (regardless of tomatoes, wood-storage and my second-best sofa) served primarily as a laundry aid. Even if we give clothes an additional blast with the tumbler before folding them away in the press. So we are not, like Dau.I and Dau.II, in their teeny Dublin flat, forced to dry laundry on a rack in our living room. 

The drier sort of deals with our laundry-damp [other damps are available] but not the fact that we live, breathe, bathe, and braise in a house built in 1941with 500mm thick rubble-in-courses masonry with no [rising] damp-proof course. The kitchen windows weep visible condensation. The walls are also sopping: it's just harder to see the dribbles . . .and the black mould against the grey granite. A month ago, Dau.II cried enough with the musty cotton goods and bought a MeacoDry Arete® One 12L Dehumidifier for their tiny 2-bed TigerBuilt flat in D7. And last week we followed CanDo Yoof and bought another. Come in, roll up, it's R2D2's kid-sister [R] sucking water from the air and saying Farewell to Fungus. We left the machine [its refrigerant actually] to settle for 2 days and then switched t'bugger on. It registered 95% RH [relative humidity] which was unsurprising: 24hrs after a yellow rain warning that had gone on and on for 18 hours.

How much water vapour can a room support aka is the R6X6 reservoir large enough to bring our kitchen down from 95% RH to 55? Turns out it depends on the temperature [see table under]. But the bottom line / rule-of-thumb is that our 4m x 5m x 3m = 60 m³ kitchen "only" holds about 1 litre of water. We set La Demoiselle Dehum going at 16:00hrs and 95 RH. When I went to bed 7 hours later, she had cranked the kitchen down to 65 but by 06:00 the following morning we had reservoir is full and RH had crept up to 76. Clearly this a work in progress.

°C	g/m3
-20	1
-15	1½
-10	2
-5	3
0	5
5	7
10	9
15	13
20	17
30	30
40	51
50	83
60	130

Being too dry indoors is also a problem: we are designed with wet mucous membranes which allow lungs to get oxygen and these membranes are also the first line of defense against microbes. Too dry and the macrophages cannot patrol and you'll get sick. 

Also wooden furniture. In 1967, my Dad retired from the Navy at 50 and bought a cottage + acre at the edge of the commuter belt for his new workplace East of London. It was before the end of cheap oil and, in winter, the family cranked up the central heating. Until he noticed cracks in some of his inherited dining chairs. Thereafter all the rads acquired a humidifier: a plastic reservoir with a 20x20cm square of porous sponge to wick up the water and disperse it to the circulating air. One of my teen-tasks was to fill these reservoirs with a dinky water-can. It was a neat cheap-as-chips appropriate technology solution.

For most domestic purposes the aim is for 40-60 RH. R6X6 trips off at 55. 

• Storing apples for the winter is best at ~1°C and 95% RH
• Storing flour 50 - 65
• Mixing dough 40 -50
• Proofing dough 70 - 75
• High RH was one of the reasons why N England became the centre for cotton spinning rather than doing this nearer the point of production 

Herding vets

I was at an interesting conference last week, which was grand but not quite grand altogether. The following day the organisers dropped me an e-mail requesting feed-back. But all the links there were to the dreaded Tripadvisor. I'm more comfortable giving back a narrative than a bunch of ★★★★☆s.

Logistics. I've run a few day-long meetings in my time and have some ideas about how to make such things run efficiently. And, like, name-badges! Even with a very small team of Effectives managing time, motion and people can be done with efficiency and dispatch. 

For example, at our village hall last Friday, from a standing start, all-willing D, The Beloved andI slopped out 30 cups of tea and 5 instant coffees in about 4 minutes. As well as stripping the clingfilm off the [Chocolate!] biscuits and getting the milk out of the fridge and into jugs. The Waterford Museum Team made three rookie errors in crowd management.

1. At the morning coffee break a backup of parched conferees trailed across the room, out the door and down the stairs. Because all the catering supplies were crammed on two 2m long trestle-tables arranged in series.
• The key thing is to put the milk and sugar and teaspoons on a different table from the hot-water bowsers. Preferably so that  conferees can get at the goods from all sides. Then put the petit-fours, micro-viennoiserie, sandwiches and biscuits at an even further remove. Folks dither. Nobody wants the *@!!& ditherers causing . That's what happened in Waterford .
2. The programme was as chock full of passion, interest and information as an egg is full of meat.  The very first speaker, an academic who should know better, made a big show of keeping to his allotted 45 minutes . . . and then ran over. It is about correct to say that if he hadn't peppered his talk with references to clocks and alarms, he would have kept to time. But his over-run set the tone and we were 15% over time by the coffee-break. And a full hour adrift by the end of proceedings! It matters because people have trains to catch and parking-meters running as well as their abiding interest in The Emergency.
• there was, because of over-stuffing the programme, no time for questions, comments or elaboration from the floor. That's a shame because the average age in the auditorium was 60+ and some of them would have info or stuff germane relevant to the discussion
3. The programme included 1.00pm Lunch in exactly the same font as 11.30am Coffee Break. But at no time were were told that lunch was forage for yourself. My Dunmore pal David must be from the inner circle (he was after all alive during The Emergency) because he had brought sandwiches. Obvs we're all adults; we can [and did] go across the square to have bowls of hot soup and soda-bread. And as the conference was 'free', adults can understand that the budget might not run to 1.00pm Lunch at any time. But slack time-keeping meant that there were no tables inside and we dined al fresco in November . . . because we're well 'ard. Better comms is easy: 1.00pm Lunch-break: find your own and be back at 2pm sharp.

This is not to cast a crate of asparagus at Team Waterford Museum. They had a limited budget, so they blew it on petit-fours; thinking "slopping out tea for 80+? how hard can that be?" and did that themselves. But catering is Hard Work - physical and logistical.

Maggot-pie

I was impressed / entranced by Chloe Dalton's Raising Hare: the winner of the 2025 Wainwright Prize for writing about nature, environment and conservation. I don't keep tabs on literary prizes [except wrt to Michael Crummey??] but maybe I should trawl through the Wainwright back-catalog because a dozen past winners / short-listees have been favourably viewed by The Blob. One of the gob-smacking episodes of Raising Hare, is when one of Dalton's adoptees elects to deliver a litter of kits behind a curtain inside the house.  It is a testament to the non-threatening empathy of their host. It is less crazy than you'd think because hares are fastidiously clean about their person and leave no trace - because to do so is to invite the attention of carnivorous predators.

Dau.I the Librarian filleted out a book for me from the book-stream she was processing. Featherhood (2020) by Charlie Gilmour is a memoir and reflection on the [abusive] relationship between fathers and sons over 2 generations more or less spanning the 20thC.  Charlie, the last son in the dynasty, was abandonned at birth by his famous and famously eccentric father Heathcote Williams. He spent the first 28 years of his life working to forge a relationship with this serial evader of parental responsibility.

A key theme of commonality is that both father and son chose to rear tame corvids - treating their homes as free-range aviaries. Heathcote adopted, and wrote poems about, a jackdaw Coloeus monedula called Jack Daw. While Charlie found a magpie Pica pica in a London gutter, named it Benzene and looked after it for nearly three years. Hence the book-title [har har] Featherhood. The difference between hares and crows [and birds in general] is that the latter are not house-trained in the way that small childer, cats, dogs, and hares can be. The most aggravating aspect of keeping a flock of free-range hens in the 00s was that they drifted in to hang about on our warm salubrious South-facing stoop and shat all over it. Don't get me started on the pair of skittery-shittery ducks we had for a while. At least the ducks were adept at hoovering up slugs in the kale. And it's sweet to have robins Erithacus rubecula in the polytunnel - but don't leave the laundry hanging there longer than necessary.

Corvids, like most birds, are just cloacally incontinent. If you choose to keep them indoors expect shit on the table-cloth - and every other surface. But corvids are carnivorous and are programmed to stash surplus food against a rainy day. If you feed the wee darlin's maggots, mince and scrambled [shells-and-all please] eggs, then expect to find giblets poked up your sleeve, meal-worms in your hair, and old meat book-marks. And the smell - whooph! These matters didn't effect Heathcote much because he lived feral, unwashed and surrounded by brimming chamber-pots. Charlie and his avant-garde artist partner Yana adapted to the maelstrom because they were on A Mission.

Benzene isn't a difficult individual to please. Her medieval tastes are simple enough. She likes music. She likes men. She likes to consume small animals when they're still alive. They assumed their magpie was male until, as a yearling, she started building a nest atop the fridge: a most unsuitably slippy surface to start weaving twigs and detritus into a nursery.

Before I lived in their basement, my New England foster-parents had hosted a sooty mangabey Cercocebus atys in the same space. This beast had been rescued from a Boston brothel where he'd endured a miserable existence wanking away in a cage in the lobby. Some of the whores used to torment him, but the clients were in general more kind and supportive. In the cellar, the mangabey would roar blue-murder at the sight of any woman but pause in his frantic business to hold out a hand to men, in the hope of a treat.

Charlie was eventually adopted, and loved and supported by David "Pink Floyd" Gilmour when his mother dated and then married the guitarist. It didn't keep the chap from going off the rails with drink and drugs and mental breakdown as a teenager. But his new Dad was infinitely kind, tolerant and open-handed. Not all men, indeed. For one of his offensive off-'is-'ead escapades Charlie was banged up in chokey for 16 months, but new Dad embraced him at the prison gates when he was released.

So Feathered is less bucolic and meadow-sweet frothy than your average contender for a Wainwright Prize.

Going for Solar

It was dreich ould time last week. If it wasn't raining, it was either just finished raining, or was looking to start raining. The brightest thing on our lane was a dozen canary & green pumpkins which I hooked on the gate for Hallowe'en.

At Friday teatime we were scheduled for a Knowledge Transfer Group KTG meeting down at the mill in the valley . . . to learn about Solar Power. KTG is an excellent scheme to encourage adult education among farmers. Farmers work hard all day, every day, and won't be stopped by a drop of rain: but they are conservative and won't leave the routine, needed, work for fripperies. Being a member of a KTG and turning up to meetings comes with a small inc€ntive to cover time and petrol.  Knowledge is quite the broad church for KTG. Last Friday Solar Energy, last June we hosted KTG to have a couple of dozen farmers be skeptical about our Traditional Hay Meadow. The best thing for many of them that day in 2024 was the brack and flapjacks and the tureen of tea I made.

But often education is a seed sown rather than a stick to beat you. Seeing those strangers up the lane managing their fields in 1940s style, coupled with the ruinous increase in the cost of nitrates, might have made a couple of our neighbours ponder whether there might be a better / different way of doing things in their own patrimony.

I have been a Great Solar Bore GSB since our solar panels went live on 30 Apr 2025. Obsessively running upstairs to switch on the immersion heater when the sun breaks through and the panels start to snag kWs; or setting a batch of sourdough going before breakfast when the forecast is giving ☀️ or even 🌤️ after lunch. It was of course ironic that it was all grey drizzle on KTG Solar day - "Hydropower, so it is" as one wag put it. Here we all are [L] looking at a Fronius dc/ac inverter buzzing away in a shed - much drier than us. Fronius inverters are guaranteed fireproof and weather proof. After looking at the inverter and the array of solar panels it serviced on the roof above, we repaired up the hill for tea and biscuits [some chocolate: thanx D!] at the village hall.  Tea and chat [and biscuits] is an important part of these meetings. The organizers hope that folk are talking about alternatives to perennial ryegrass or how many kW does a slurry-stirrer draw. But any ould chat will do to cement community and make people comfortable. If KTG reminds anyone of, like, school as it was practiced in the 20thC it will likely freeze every mind in the room with stress. 

After tea, there was a short, on message, informative, presentation. The take-homes:

• most people, even those who can change a plug, don't really know how much it costs to boil that vs that kettle or do 2 slices in that toaster from Harvey-Norman
• a 10 year guarantee won't do much for you if the company that issued it has folded
• if you are making your own power, try to use it all in-house
• selling surplus to the grid is only possible while it is politically expedient
• the steady state established norm is that you don't get paid for surplus
• there are cheap solar panels and panels which are fire, hail and storm-proof 
• community buy-in may get you bulk discounts 
• informed independent advice from someone who is not selling product may save you heart-ache and money 

The PTSD war distilled

To commemorate the 80th anniversaries of VE [May'45 & Margraten] and VJ [Aug'45 & St Laurens] days, Donnchadh Ó Ceallacháin, Keeper of the Medieval Museum in Waterford organized 1) a trawl through the collective memory 2) a conference about the Déise in The Emergency. The best time to tap into oral history is always 10 years ago; but Now is better than Not. The event was opened by the Mayor of Waterford [seen R guarded by a young chap who has a gig doing cos-play in period kit as a squaddie in the Irish Army of the 1940s].

1) When my pal Russ (historian, researcher, broadcaster, author) contacted me this Summer about what my father and grandfather did in The War, I had a sense of imposter syndrome. My Grandfather, as harbormaster at Dunmore East, definitely had a role to play in The Emergency of 1939 - 1945 because his tenure in office (1922 - 1947) bracketed the entire period. Dunmore would have been the Front Line if Das Dritte Reich had made moves to occupy the country and make quislings of the IRA. But wrack my brains with hammer and tongs but I couldn't come up with a single anecdote about his (second) War and only smidgeons about his adventures in WWI.

About my father I had slightly more information, not least because I had captured a few events and anecdotes in The Blob over the years since Jan 2013. Sinking off Sardinia. - - - Up Dover Beach. My qualms were brushed aside, and Russ'n'Bob filled a generous hour of memory-by-proxy in September. There are plans to digitize and hopefully make searchable transcripts of this material . . . for posterity. It was slim heritage pickings at our kitchen table because my Dad basically did not talk about his War. In an essay typed up [a good bit easier than speaking up!] in the 1990s, my father referred to Bryan Scurfield, a much admired and effective older officer under whom he served in HMS Hunter. Scurfield's later command HMS Bedouin was out-gunned and sunk in the Mediterranean in June 1942. Scurfield survived as a POW only to be killed by friendly fire in the very last month before VE-day. The pity of war, the ptsd war distilled.

And nor did my Mother: she served at least six years in uniform, dated a number of aircrew who never came back, saw one of her friends blown to fritters at a V2 launch site, shared a jeep with French commandos with knives bloody from killing German sentries. But my father died aged 83, while my Mum lived into her 100th year. In her 90s, her PTSD drained away a little and she opened up with some scarcely believable tales of lice, horses, scavenging professors, code-breaking, fur-coats and Hitler-rich photo-albums. Ignore all that, my mother never set foot in the Déise until she married in 1950: three years after her much-love FiL had retired to Co Wexford.

2) Silence among veterans of foreign wars was a running theme at the Waterford Conference. One delegate referred to it as omerta -- neither asked nor spoken about in the family nor the local community. So it seems that the best time to tap into oral history is not 60 years ago; because then the memories are so raw they may bleed if poked.

Another running theme was the fact that The State was less than 20 years old when hostilities broke out [in Poland] in September 1939. Not so fast! Up until the very end of 1937, the polity in the 26 counties was Saorstát Éireann. The Republic was not two years old when it was announced that a state of war existed between Britain and Germany. de Valera [felt he] had to teeter totter so as not to offend either of the belligerent sides and try to bring in enough tea to sustain the people.

Hindsight gives a different complexion on actions and inactions during The Emergency. Would Ireland really have been neutral-but-leaning-Allies if Churchill had fought them on the beaches . . . and lost. I mention this because Nuremberg told us that The Other Side was the sole perp when it came to war-crimes in WWII. There was no killing of prisoners [ooops Katyn] or civilians [er Hello Dresden], let alone weapons [Hiroshima] of mass [Nagasaki] destruction [to use an anachronistic term] by the Allies. Many Waterford folk were definitely leaning-Allies: Serving in the merchant marine in Allied convoys like my FiL Pat the Salt; or Dermote Bolger's Dad on MV Kerlough. Or going full in and sailing with the "Grey Funnel Line" a euphemism for the British navy.

The last talk flagged a monument in Bavaria where the crew of a British Lancaster has been adopted by the village of Bolstern. The speaker was the gt.nephew of the Navigator, F/S Terry McEneaney from Waterford City. The bomber crashed outside the village and the whole crew was killed. It is possible that one of the last actions of the pilot was a swerve to avoid hitting the village. The family took the trouble to find out what happened to ObLt Gunther Koberich, the pilot credited with downing the Lancaster . . . he died 5 days later on yet another mission. The pity of war; the pity war distilled.  That personnel research is of personal interest because we live in the house the bomb fell on that Felix built in 1941. Because it has been on my mind, for the last 25+ years, to mine Luftwaffe records to see which squadrons were out on the night of 1st/2nd Jan 1941and which crew reported a) getting lost b) jettisoning their load at 0600 hrs. Like the folks from Bolstern, it would be nice to go Full Atatürk on these boys who were doing a job of work in severely adverse and dangerous conditions:

"You, the mothers who sent their sons from faraway 
countries, wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying 
in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives
 on this land they have become our sons as well."