Car Ha Ha Ha Hire

This Summer, on so many axes, I've been hatching from the cocoon of corona-mediated sofa comfort.  Went flying and speaking French after a gap of five years in June. Rented a car in foreign two weeks ago. I've had rather a lot to say about car hire in the past. The general practice at the rental desk is to require A Lot of explanation about the extent of the customer's liability for damage to the paint-work and alloy wheels and very little about the added features on modern cars. It kind of ruins the holiday worrying that the car will get scrorched by a 20 year-old [in a] Ford Fiesta while you're having dinner at a restaurant.

We rented a car in Ireland for a few days last September to facilitate the transition from the dying Citroën Picasso aka The Grape to a new-to-us Toyota Yaris. The hire-car was a head-ache: the previous renter had set up but not cancelled a relationship with a Road Toll company that land us with charges; concerning 'failure' lights appeared on the dashboard just as The Beloved was embarked on a trip to Dublin. That trip was therefore cancelled. otoh Enterprise Car Hire bent over backwards to comp us for our troubles and sort out the problems.

That's not a very good reason to choose to rent from Enterprise in England two weeks ago but that's what I did. We were two hours delayed by Aer Lingus hassles at DUB airport but not in a tearing hurry when we landed at BRS Bristol. So we suffered through their weird obsession with dunts and scratches and £1,700 liability for such damage [and £1,700 for damage on the other side of the car!]. rather than getting cross. I didn't get really cross when the under-employed Enterprise Chap at the next desk started in about how cool our Ford Puma was. But I did invite him to "SHUT UP", so I could concentrate on the CDW excess.

Despite having an extra hand larking about, nobody from Enterprise troubled to explain how to open the petrol cap on that particular car. I've been caught on that before as well as not finding how to select reverse gear. Youngsters in the car trade know all about the latest bells and whistles and so assume [Curse of Knowledge] that An Old like me will too. Lucky I had two 30-somethings in my party to handle the SatNav, the Bluetooth and the AirCon, eh? 

You have to wonder at the adolescent mind of car designers. 

• Did I say we rented a Puma? I did [and see R]. When the car is activated by the unlock button on the fob, a light from each wing-mirror projects a pouncing puma onto the pavement beside the car. 
• More useful in theory is a bing-bong alert and a light which appeared telling us that The Driver is Sleepy, rest soon. Followed 10 minutes later by The Driver is really Sleepy, rest Now. 
• Ditto for the disconcerting periodic wobble in the steering. That is not the wheels are out of alignment and about to fall off but the lane assist feature which eases the car away from grassy verges. This can be disabled IF you know it's called the Lane Assist feature and have time to read the online onboard manual.

Enterprise customer service called me on the phone the day after we got home to re-assure me that my tab had been closed and the £200 credit card lien had been refunded. That's pretty good service. Less so the barrage of txts and emails the system sends out including "Hi Bob, please confirm your existing details or modify them to add new information for your upcoming rental return." Go away with that! 

India & Ireland

A couple of weeks ago it was, as every year, 15 August, Indian Independence Day. Which for reasons of callous Imperial convenience, was exactly 2 years after VJ Day 1945. For callous Imperial realpolitik short-termism, the Raj had been dismembered and "Pakistan" celebrated its independence the day before on 14 Aug 1947. Pakistan didn't last even 2 dozen years before it, in turn, had to hive off Bangladesh as an independent polity. Both these partitions resulted in uncountable ethnic cleansing deaths  There is, has to be, more to defining a nation than we're [almost] all Muslims or Protestants

Over the last ~6 years, I've acquired far too much information about, and a deal of affection for, a student from my days at The Institute. It started when I was assigned to mentor him during the writing of a thesis for his Masters in Pharmaceutical Regulatory Affairs. Correcting his English and polishing his crap-detector developed into buying him morale-boosting cake and listening to him [Bob the Scientist for The Win!] as he ran through career and domicile options. Around about this time of year, I will send him a how's she cuttin'? sort of e-mail because I know that, despite living in The Independent Republic of Cork Ireland he identifies as a) a citizen of Tamil Nadu b) Indian. I know this because of his description of reacting to the turkey-cock strutting at the Wagah Crossing, when he visited there.

I was hand-clapping delighted when this year's enquiry triggered an invite to his first-born son's 1st Birthday Party. The little chap is not entitled to Irish citizenship because of the Racist Referendum of 2004, but you can bet your sweet bippy that he will grow up speaking perfect idiomatic Corkese and play GAA with the best of them.

As I was in flag-wagging mode I checked out the difference between the green&white&orange tricolours of our two republics. Apart from horizontal vs vertical, the Indian flag sports a saffron stripe, not an orange one. And the Irish green #9A is greener than the Indian green #6A.

India  Green White Saffron  #046A38 #FFFFFF #FF671F
Irela  Green White Orange  #009A44 #FFFFFF #FF8200 

And talking of Wagah and face-off at the borrrder consider our own sublimated hostility to people on the other side of a political frontier in Ireland that is completely ignored by wren and badgers. By their hats shall ye know them?

Hilbert's hOYOtel

We were down in SW England last week distributing, on the turning tide, the final ashy remains of my departed mother. She died in Jan 2020 just before Coronarama shut everything down for a couple of years, so it was only now that her descendants could get closure in an off-shore breeze. Team Ireland [self, Dau.I and Dau.II] flew in Monday evening and out again Wednesday morning, leaving all Tuesday for the obsequial logistics. That required two nights in a hotel and there is a convenient OYO establishment just downhill from The Boy's gaff, so he booked us two rooms for two nights there.

OYO is [comparatively] cheap because they run a tight ship: turning over a lot of the work to software. Because an app, once written and debugged, doesn't require a salary, holiday or employer's PRSI. If they could use a Roomba to make the beds and something from Boston Dynamics to cook a full English [as L] then I guess they would. When we got there on the first night, there was no concierge, no night manager. But we had been e-mailed six digit pass-codes to the front door and rooms 21 and 26. All good: we said g'night and agreed to do breakfast at 08:15 the next day. 

When I left home, I'd packed all my kit in a  small satchel, and it was handier to bring the whole caboodle along with me rather than deciding what I would need [abacus? binoculars? camera? derringer? ear-buds? fork? glasses?] for Tuesday's shenanigans. It had been a long day when we returned to the OYO just before 10pm. Because I R old, Dau.I helpfully coded up my door and flung it open for me to enter my bedroom. We found it occupied by two disconcerted randommers and their luggage. At least they were clothed. We retreated downstairs and phoned the 'manager' (whom we'd met briefly at breakfast 14 hours earlier) to sort things out. He came over "I'll be there in 7 minutes".

He started out with a <<TMI!>> explanation about how the software had, somehow, sent my door-code to the next booking for that room AND overlapped that booking with mine. He then apologised. I replied that the apology should have come first and I was frankly Scarlett about how his company had screwed up . . . just please to find me somewhere with clean sheets to sleep. These people should have been in room 22 please come with me to that room, it will be ready for you. Room 22 was in a different wing of the OYO . . . and occupied by a German called Braun, who should have been in room 31. I refused to go up two flights of stairs until the Manager had ascertained that it wasn't occupied by a flock of chickens. 

Math nerds will immediately think of Hilbert's Grand Hotel paradox which was central to ein gedankenexperiment elaborated by David Hilbert exactly 100 years ago in a lecture about Infinity: Über das Unendliche. Imagine a hotel with an infinite number of rooms, each occupied by a guest. Just before 10pm on a Tuesday, a weary traveller arrives seeking accommodation. The manager moves the occupant of room.1 to room.2, the person in room.2 to room.3 and so ad infinitum thus freeing up room.1 for another guest. And if the weary traveller is accompanied two daughters, they may be similarly found room at the infinite inn.

Several years ago, I wrote about Georg Cantor's elaboration on Hilbert's paradox where he proved that some infinities are bigger than others. Guests, rooms and unexpected occupants is a theme in the writings of Saki  . . .  The Lull - The Guests - The Unrest Cure.

It's a week now and I have had neither explanation nor apology [except sort of from the manager as above] nor compo from OYO. ⛥ for the sandstone Georgian Facade.

 

Scatterlings

My folks did their courting in and around Portland Bill in the English West Country. She was working in London after WWII but came down on weekends to roar about the dusty lanes of Dorset in his tiny car. Eventually he proposed to her in 1950 on a bench along the Cobb at Lyme Regis in Dorset [whc prev in re Mary Anning and the Jurassic Coast].  ~50 years later he died and about 20 years after that she followed on. 

There were only five of us to witness logistics at the Crematorium in January 2020. A while later, we squeezed in a memorial service in the quaint local church [with tea and cakes in the village hall after] at the end of February. But the CoViD pandemic and lockdown put the kibosh on any further obsequies. In particular, a cardboard tube of ashes from the crem required something to be done. We do death better in Ireland than across the water. One good feature.ie is the Month's Mind when family and friends regather 30 days after a death - that convention helps with closure. But something similar can be achieved on the disposal-of-ashes front.

As Coronarama drained away, the family agreed to reconvene at Lyme Regis on our ancestors' wedding anniversary 19th August 1950 2025. And it was so. We checked to find that the tide would be on the turn at 15:00hrs and met for lunch at Tom's [menu] beforehand. We were, by geneation: (F1 #3) + (F2 #5) + (F3 #2) + 3 partners  = a coven of 13. There were no ravens but the fakkin' herring gulls Larus argentatus attacked two of us to snatch away ice-creams. Something should be done about that and Lyme Regis Town Council has policy if not a clearly effective strategy. Small boys with catapults for the win?!

The beach, the Cobb and the Marine Parade were heaving with humanity but the breakwater was quieter . . . possibly because there was an unbalustraded 6m drop to the sea. My BiL aliquoted the contents of the cardboard tube into sequential capfuls - with the help [dig dig who forgot the spatula?] of a librarian's pencil supplied by Dau.I. It all went away efficiently with an off-shore breeze and the drizzle held off until 4 o'clock. Job done. We can now move on and start working though my generation.

That's me [back L] masquerading as a parking attendant in Summer kit. I know I pass as Parkie because a large biker with a larger motorbike asked if he could park on the yellow lines for a couple of illegal minutes. "Be my guest, Knock yourself out" I answered. 

Famous for fifteen minutes

. . . locally. Before we bought the farm in 1996, we'd been on a couple of site visits to see what it really looked like, because the auctioneer's description ticked all the boxes: old farmhouse [✓], outbuildings [✓], 16 acres [✓]. The first time, it was June, the previous incumbent had died the year before, the meadows were waist-high; the grass flecked with any number of wildflowers. We parked toddler Dau.I up against a tumbledown wooden gate for a breather and took a photo. That became Dau.I's gate and by extension the 1 acre field beyond became Gort na Dau.I. Over the next 30 years, that rich tapestry of biodiversity has been maintained . . . because we failed to follow standard agribio advice = kill all the dicots [2,4,-D], lurry on the nitrates and watch the perennial ryegrass Lolium perenne take over [this corner of] the world.

Agribio philosophy has recently made a 180° volte face over nitrates and ryegrass; requiring farmers to embrace weeds biodiversity and low impact N instead. Last year we were poster-farmers for traditional hay-meadow - showing our confused neighbours how to embrace their inner stichwort Stellaria graminea. This after two generations of being told that such weeds were a scourge to be extirpated. Our man in biodiversity was so taken with our hay-rattle Rhinanthus minor that he nominated us for the County Farming For Nature event as part of 2025's National Heritage Week; funded by National Parks and Wildlife Services (NPWS). 

Team Biodiversity returned earlier this Summer to craft a 5min video [from ~2 hrs of footage] about us, our foxgloves [as R], our stone walls, our ring-stone and our steading. That video [5min FB media] summing up 30 years of caring for the plan[e]t life, was given its first public airing in Myshall Community Centre  on Saturday 16 Aug 2025. Not only us: 3 other farms and their custodians - each with their own passion for the natural world - were shown off to a packed  meeting room. We also had an official photographer [and therefore!] two TDs, and six County Councilors: all to be looking for their face in a square of the local paper the following week. 

It was nice. The plain people of Myshall made tea and scones to greet; and sandwiches, tea and iced-dainties for lunch and did the wash-up afterwards. We got to hear how other farms were managing the transition to a bee-friendly landscape. And talk to some of the politicians including the resourceful youthful Dan Pender whom we met last Summer. Amazingly, this chap - he will go far! - remembered my name, where he met me and my connexion with TCD from a brief encounter 14 months earlier.

We also met an official someone who maintained that hay-rattle Rhinanthus minor is now sufficiently rare that there is a market for hay-rattle seed. Apparently there are machines which can selectively pluck the rattling seed heads from the meadow [timing is important]; thresh out the seed, bolt out the impurities, dry the seeds and pop them in packets for sale. Could be a nice little earner. This year, we intentionally gathered seed for the first time from our cowslip Primula veris corner of the yard.

But enough already. I hope that someone else (anyone else) goes forward to represent the County in the National showcase of FFN Farming for Nature. 

Up Sturra

The family were round the kitchen table for a few days in the middle of August. With 3 generations we seat eight. Everyone has their particular druthers [me: sofa, cuppa, flapjacks], but Dau.II had her sights on Blackstair / Sturra which fills our view-finder [as R] to the South of the farm. She [~30] persuaded by brother [~50] and father [~70] to keep company. As family we only needed one rucksack with 3 apples a bottle of water and a small slab of kindle mint cake. When something tall is literally in your face everyday, it takes somebody else's oomph to make a closer inspection.My mother spent her entire childhood in the shadow of Dover Castle. But she didn't go visit until her own children were bored and fractious one drizzly Dover afternoon.

The forecast was phew wot a scorcher, so we set off before 09:00hrs and <shame> drove the first 'boring' 1.5km along the metalled road. It's a fine, varied walk through Coonogue, Rathgeran & Knockymullgurry with maybe our left feet straying onto Bantry Commons on the Wexford side. We started off along a walled sunken  >2m< narrow lane canopied over with scrubby trees: noting a riot of sloes Prunus spinosa for gin later in the year. 

At the top of the lane you should, and we did, ignore the broad 'dray road' heading East for Coonogue ridge. Instead veer right and pick up a much travelled footpath heading straight uphill and more or less due South. The path pushes upwards through the heather (Erica spp and Calluna vulgaris) and other species typical of dry heath. In other words: same as we have on our hill on the N side of the valley. After a while things flatten out into a pavement [called Móin na Gaoithe = Bog of the Wind] of worn granite and schisty slabs which make for dry footing and yompy progress. It was quite blowy when we were on the face of the hill but warm and dry. Dry esp. underfoot with what sphagnum was present bleached a delicate pale green. 

At the end of the pavement there is a little rocky cliff after which the way marches steadily uphill to the summit. We had been paced by three young[ish] chaps; passing them out as they rested and vice versa.  They turned out to hail originally from County Nepal. It was rather endearing therefore, when we compared notes at the Summit cairn, that they reckoned the view was a) extensive b) magnificent. All things are relative: Mount Leinster [800m], in context, looms over the landscape like Mt Everest [8,000m].

I liked it better 30 years ago when heights were still given in feet. Our hill, Knockroe, was about 1,000 feet further from the Earth's centre than our front gate, and Mt Leinster was another 1,000ft higher. 220m - 540m - 795m doesn't have quite the same ring.  

The first time we three yomped to the top of Blackstair was about 20 years ago. For several consecutive summers in the 00s, we hosted a Summer Camp for Dau.I, Dau.II and their pals. Their big brother usually came back from wherever he was roaming and our pal Lulu was the other adult in the room outdoors as well as being caterer-in-chief. As the kids got taller we stretched the expeditions further. The year when Dau.II was prolly ~10 they all made it to the top of Blackstair; which meant that none of the adults had the excuse to rest with the asthmatics, emblistered or exhausted. It stands to everyone involved that a few handfuls of sub-teens were separated from their parents and forced allowed to walk through I'm tired to the local top of the world. They washed A Lot of dishes too.

Wimmin in STEM

The Blob was born when  I started a new job in The "Not-a-University" Institute. It wasn't in the original programme of works, but I soon decided that my mission was to recruit and maintain more Women in Science. The Future of Ireland as a Technological Nation [FITNa polybloboprev] would be better served by including the 50% of the population who identified as women: different ways of seeing; different ways of interacting with peers; different lived experience . . . might bubble up a greater choice in the solution space. I started to write ~700 word Brief Lives of women [living and dead] in science & tech thinking that one of those tales might inspire one student to come aboard and stick it out and get qualified. There are more than 100 biogs there now.

At the end of July, the rest of the family made a site visit to the Coolock branch of Dublin City where Dau.I the Librarian is currently working. After the tour, I borrowed a Book - getting into the spirit of place, like: Female Innovators Who Changed Our World: How Women Shaped STEM (2022 €20!!) by Emma Shimizu. As it happens, I have a bit of a part-time unpaid gig writing 250 word book reviews for the Coolock Library newletter. So there was just a smidgen of pressure to pick a book that was available on the shelves at Coolock.   

Right off the bat, I asked how much overlap there was between Bob's list and Emma's. I'd already written about 8 of Emma's 45 chapters: Constance Tipper, Gerty Cori [R on 2011 stamp], Rachel Carson, Virginia Apgar, Rosalind Franklin, Stephanie Kwolek, Tu Youyou, Françoise Barré-Sinoussi. With another three who are indexed in Female Innovators but don't warrant their own chapter: Florence Nightingale, Grace Hopper, Hedy Lamarr. Nobody on Emma's list has any connexion with Ireland; whereas ~20% of Bob's wear the green jersey. 

Everyone who essays these brief biogs of STEM women comes with baggage if not an explicit agenda. I, for obvious chauvinistic, want-of-imagination, reasons push the Irish connexion. Emma edges towards the dispossessed and non-whites who have played a blinder with life's crappy hand of cards. This makes interesting reading for me because so many of them are never 'eard of 'er. But perhaps that's not the best call for a 15 y.o. girl teetering between science and 'business' or modern dance. That youngster won't have heard of anyone, so may be better influenced by someone who is an 'achievable' role model - a bit more like herself . . . The Blob has loads of white Irish examples! Please please, we don't need to hear the Marie Curie story again (and again), even 15 y.o.s in unacademic catchment areas have heard of Team Curie.

Cruella de Cork

I rarely browse in the library because I think that I want to read non-fiction, especially science; but the overwhelming majority of library books are novels. Most pubic libraries are especially thin on the Dewey Decimal 500s (Natural Science and Mathematics). However, we were in the library while awaiting a train, and I noticed the recent acquisitions shelf. I'll have that, I said, when I saw Missing Persons or, My Grandmother's Secrets [2024] by Clair Wills. I also snagged No More Tears [bloboview] to get ahead of the reservation queue.

Wills [R] is about my age. Her mother escaped from a 30 acre farm in West Cork in the 1950s and emigrated to England where she worked as a psychiatric nurse in South London. Some of her uncles joined McAlpine's Fusiliers to dig drains and pour concrete in post-WWII Britain.  Like me, every year through her English childhood, Wills and her family went 'home' to Ireland. One difference was that my family were 'shy breeders' so that cousins to hang out with were sparse: only a diminishing store of elderly female relatives who died one after the other as we grew up. In the 1960s a whole lot of history [from last week to last generation] was not in front of the children. And much of this material was known-but-not-spoken.

Not murder like in the Case of the Stradbally Postman [whc prev] but othering and exclusion of those who kicked over the traces and got with child. There is a hint of rite-of-passage here, when girls turn ~13 they are inducted into the secrets of those who know. Boys of any age get none of that. And if you're probably gay, like one of the uncles? Not much hope or happiness there. Wills' theory is that attitudes to unwed pregnancies [and the gays] changed for the worse as ALL aspects of social welfare were handed off to The Church in the late 19thC. Before then a) there was nowhere to escape b) communities were kinder and less judgmental. The stranglehold on public morality eased off in the 1970s, although hideous cruelty continued until the end of the 20thC to be habitually meted out on the weak by deeply unhappy spiteful wearers-of-the-cloth. Unmarried mother's allowance (1973) enabled single parents, with some difficulty,  to raise children at home rather than in A Home. “The mother of a friend of mine, now in her eighties, who worked for the local county council before she was married, found herself - more than once – filing the admission papers of girls she’d seen at dances a few weeks before”. I didn't have to be like that, and maybe in isolated rural Newfoundland it wasn't.

In a recent interview [60m YT] about the book Clair Wills was asked whether it was 'history' or 'memoir'. A distinction mainly important for those who are shelving or publicizing it. It is, clearly, both. And she is self-aware enough to acknowledge that, because we all mis-remember difficult things, there might be some fiction in the mix. Talking of fiction: further reading in similar issues in West Wexford with Claire Keegan's Small Things Like These [2021 bloboview]. Further reading on the life and early death of Clair Wills Uncles in I could read the sky [1997] by Timothy O'Grady (words) and Steve Pyke (pics) [bloboview]. Mebbe it's time to re-read  Saints, scholars, and schizophrenics : mental illness in rural Ireland [1979] by Nancy Scheper-Hughes. 

If, like so many Irish families [like mine], yours has mother-and-baby homes looming unspoken in the wings, this book may be too close to the bone. There are several Clair Wills readings, excepts, interviews, reviews on YT and the wider 'net to give you a taster without the full challenging meal.

40 stabs

One of the cognitive dissonances of moving to Ireland as a young adult with a vocabulary formed growing up in England was the existence of linguistic false friends. Prev: slim & dapper; or tête & tapfer & ewe.  In England a ditch was always something dug [concave], although it was obvs cognate with dyke = dijk the convex things which preserve Nederland from washing away with the tide. I'm a fan of The Sheep Game, a YT channel following Cammy "shepherd" Wilson in Ayrshire. A couple of weeks ago, they were fencing a rented field using sheep-wire supported by "stabs". Which from the context was the same as a stake or fence-post.  Which is a too-long intro to today's stakes today.

I am also a big fan of Jim Davis, who owns the sawmill on the Carlow-Laois border in Graiguecullen. He supplied the western reg cedar planks that face our amazing [2016] woodshed.  Those cedar planks keep on giving - to make the [2023] tree-house in the woodlot for example.  I was last in the Davis saw-yard almost exactly three years ago when I bought 40 of his best oak 50mm x 50mm x 1.5m fence posts. Actually, he only had 35 oak stakes ready-pointed, so I took 5 larch ditto. Oak lasts longer in the ground because of they are full of tannins (oak-bark was a source, in tanneries, for making leather last forever). But it can be hard to drive a fence staple [nail, screw] into an oak stake . . . and impossible to get it out.  Steel screws will shear off at the head rather than ease out from between oak fibres. I waggishly called my previous stab saga Ever Last Post . . . because of the longevity, like.

Now, three years on, it's a bit more like Last Ever Posts. Indeed I was joshing Jim Davis to that effect when I back again in his yard: 

• Bob: "I hope this lot will see me out"
• Jim: "Why? how old are you?"
• Bob: "Just turned 71" 
• Jim: "Well, I'm 77 and, as you see, still sawing wood" 

Maybe he's right. You're not dead, till you're dead. Pat the Salt was still cutting his half-acre with a push-mower when he was 85. Although I think he stopped that mullarkey when he turned 86 and Dau.II and I took up the reins in 2012 - partly to get some daytime TV in, after the mowing, though. Whatevs, last week I went to Graiguecullen for to collect another 40 stabs. This time the proportion was reversed: almost all the stakes were larch with a handful of (significantly heavier) oak. Why 40? Because @€2.50 each I pay €100. They come rough-sawn so I spent a 'happy' couple of hours the following day shaving off the rip-splinters to make handling and creosote absorption easier. 

Then it was getting into my most threadbare LIDL work-pants and my sheep-dip tee-shirt (which lives permanently outside in a shed) to apply pseudo-sote - because old-fashioned, carcinogen-heavy, petrochemical by-product creosote can no longer be sold in Ireland. As before, I used a 90mm external ⌀ heavy-duty plastic tube, originally the centre of a roll of silage-wrap,  I found that the internal ⌀ of a tub of E45 paraffin cream is also 90mm and made a waterproof seal to the bottom of the silage-wrap tube. We haven't bought E45 since the last of our kids became continent, but the tubs have been convenient containers for screws, fence-staples etc. Dunking fence posts sure beats painting them, even if as here, I put each post through two immersions of creo-dunk.

Talc calc

 I don't think I killed my mother. But . . .

When I was 10, 11, 12, at the end of March each year we'd ask our mother what she wanted for her birthday. Her unwavering reply was "Oh, I don't know; Talc de Coty or covered coat-hangers". Both of which were A Thing for middle-aged, middle-class women in the 1960s. The first time small me went on a birthday mission on my ownio, I went to Boot's the Chemist determined to buy a tin as [R]. But noted that Boot's Own Generic Talcum Powder was half the price for 3x the quantity. What had my mother been thinking? She'd been allowing herself to be bilked for all those years! My mother, recognising a teaching moment, explained that sometimes less is more. Well I took that on board as an example of life's diverse ways of thinking. And found it difficult to reconcile with the fact that A Lot of  eye-wateringly expensive talcum powder finished up on the bathroom floor.

I've just romped through No More Tears: the dark secrets of Johnson & Johnson (2025) by Gardiner Harris. This is a long-form scatter-gun volume of investigative reporting listing the manifold times when J&J pursued profit in their marketing of cosmetics, drugs and medical devices . . . let the customers fall [dead] where they may. 

Because J&J is the world's biggest MegaPharma Corp, and they shifted A Lot  of product, the [dead] count laid at their door is, according to Harris (un)comfortably in excess of 100,000, or even 1,000,000 people. Their anti-psychotic offering Risperdal was doled out  to kids with ADHD and to troublesome old dears in nursing homes. To sell more units they suborned psychiatrists, GPs and matrons with 'consultancies', dinners, jaunts to Florida and biros . . . so many branded biros. They also buried any reports of adverse reactions. I've written [too much] about Eli Lilly's rival medication Zyprexa aka Olanzapine.

But perhaps the longest running J&J saga concerned their iconic baby powder the existence of which stoked much of the positive feelings Joe and Josie Public had towards J&J. Talc is a form of magnesium silicate Mg₃(Si₂O₅)₂(OH)₂. It is the softest mineral on the Mohs scale and is dug out of the ground from mines in Vermont and Italy and many other places. Asbestos is another form of magnesium silicate Mg₃(Si₂O₅)(OH)₄. It is an almost inevitable contaminant of talc, some mining locations being worse than others. Long after baby powder became sn essential part of This American Life evidence of the association between asbestos exposure cancer became overwhelming. Folk started testing for the stuff in likely and unlikely places and found it everywhere. J&J's made some effort to mitigate asbestos in their premier baby product but couldn't eliminate the last ppms . . . so STOUTLY asserted that baby powder had no significant asbestos and continued to manufacture talc-based baby powder even after rivals reformulated to cornstarch. the J&J C-suite doubled down on their denials. That change in corporate culture soon spread through every division of the conglomerate: nothing to see here . . . this biro is filled with $100 bills . . . that senator needs a corporate campaign donation . . . christmas bonus for everyone who exceeds their sales targets.

It is certainly likely that the industrial talcum powder which I gave my mother in 1965 had more asbestos than the fancy stuff. But a) she probably dumped it b) she lived to 99¾ c) she never had ovarian cancer. So I can probably damp my conscience on matricide-by-talc.

Footnote on the workings of libraries. Several years ago, all the public libraries of Ireland adopted a common catalogue and reservation system. 'tis brilliant: you can, from your sofa, browse away and wait for the call when the book you desire arrives at the nearest convenient branch. I ordered No More Tears a few months ago and watched my reservation number crawl up the list. It's published this year, involves scandal, there's plenty other folks who want to read it but haven't €20 available for a single read or shelf-space for another hardback. 

Image my surprise to when I was, for the first time this year, in Bagenalstown Library before meeting Dau.II off the train . . . and saw 'my' book on the recent accessions shelf opposite the counter. That's a bit unfair, I said to the librarian when I checked it out, but I could check it out and I did. Then again, each County Library system is still an autonomous unit with its own budget and priorities. Our county had decided to buy 1 copy of that book, so it seems right that local patrons should have first dibs on borrowing it. When it goes back tomorrow, it can get in the queue and get shipped to Sligo.

By the seaside

Been reading, me. Weighty tomes - one metaphorically heavy; the other 480pp 0.35kg = Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean (2011) by Philip Mansel [Guardian].

In reviewing Michael Crummey's Sweetland,  I touched up on a rather inclusive and open acceptance of the diversity of sex and its practice in rural 20thC Newfoundland . . . plenty of native nookie and the results of these liaisons are accepted even if marital non-paternity is known or suspected. I rather enjoyed his description of the end of days in a Newfoundland Outport and noted that another of his works was borrowboxable as e-book. The Innocents (2019) develops the story of a microscopic maritime community  in 19thC Newfoundland. Two subadult children are left alone after their newborn baby sister, their mother and then father are all carried off within a few weeks of each other. The kids have learned some aspects of living and making a living [salt cod, furs] in super-adverse conditions: the ice piles up in their remote cove each winter; they plant root vegetables and forage berries in the Fall; they eat fish in abundance.  

The perennial problem in such edge communities is spreading out the calories and vit-C so that they are available 12 months a year instead of 12 weeks. For the orphaned childer, this necessity is met by the twice yearly visit of the same trading schooner: bringing salt, shot, fish-hooks and flour in the Spring and taking cod-planks in the Fall. A couple of times, the sea delivers a Robinson Crusoe bonus to the kids by wrecking a ship out there and washing the debris [hats, coats, rum, cordage] ashore. Survival is the driving theme but nookie and the results of these liaisons also stitches together the teenage lives. The ending is happy: for some definitions of happy.

Diversity, inclusion and sex are also central to Philip Mansel's Levant his history of the Near East  in 19thC & 20th. He focuses on three jewels in the crown of Levantine cosmopolitanism: Smyrna, Alexandria and Beirut. I worked with a fellow in the 1980s who had, as a student, achieved the epitome of sophisticated cool in 1974: (snow powder) skiing on Mount Lebanon in the morning and water-skiing off a Beirut beach in the afternoon. On 13th April 1975 a random act of sectarian violence kicked off 15 years of Lebanese Civil War. 

In 1975, the population in Lebanon was ~2.5 million, over the next 15 years, +1 million fled and 150,000 were murdered by the neighbours. Same thing happened in Smyrna in 1922 [bloboprev]. Same thing (on a much smaller scale) occurred in 1882 Alexandria. In the background, and profiting from the disruption, were citizens and emporia of The Great Powers. Before the sht ht the fan, these three cities were kind of wonderful to inhabit - if you had a bit of money [a little hard currency could go a long way]; if you were a little bit gay [CP Cavafy R]; if you couldn't accept every word of your vicar, imam or patriarch. In Smyrna you could read a french newspaper, in an armenian café, eating greek pastries, while wearing a smart suit from your jewish tailor. Women could also sit in the same café sans hijab; a thing impossible even 10 km into the city's hinterland.

The Beloved's grandfather, some sort of Christian (Maronite?) left his crappy Lebanese valley orange grove with his brothers and migrated via Beirut and Alex to West Africa 100 years ago. His three daughters grew up in multicultural colonial West Africa in the 1940s. By 2000, they all finished up, for reasons, in Ireland. It was a wonder to watch them making houmous: bickering in English, French, Hausa about garlic and salt. Always too much food but so much kindness and welcome as well. Smyrna and Alexandria are now as boring, parochial and monoglot as the small town with the big cathedral where I went to school in the 1960s. Beirut is rebuilding itself from the rubble as the last bastion of The Levant - where cultures clash and get into bed with each other and synergies result.

The mountains labored and . . .

. . . brought forth 60g of poppy seed [parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus Quintus Horatius Flaccus aka Horace 65 BC - 8 BC]. Nit griping, really. No labour was expended in this. The poppies [of several different varieties] flourish in the corners of the polytunnel because the weeders [def'n'y not me!] have other things to do with their lives. Poppy Papaver rhoeas or Papaver sominiferum is an excellent example of a weed species - it is often the first in when ground is ploughed, bombed or otherwise disturbed. The seeds are light and prolific, so get widely dispersed. 

I sat down on the last evening in July with a soup bowl and a pair of scissors, topped the dry seed-heads and poured the black gold into a soup bowl [as R]. The biggest seed heads [think cherry] get processed first; because it's easier to justify giving up when the seed heads are the size of a raisin and yielding very little. There's sufficient wastage and clumsiness to ensure that some seed is broadcast locally to ensure that the poppy is ever with us. I've harvested poppyseed before: 2015 - 2024. 

Grow your own; make your own

Last year local libraries handed out packets of seed. I pre-planted the beans and peas in 4cm micropots to be germinated under the sofa. But I couldn't be dealing thus with spinach; so I cleared 1 sq.m. inside the polytunnel; lurried in a few buckets of compost; broadcast the spinach seed; and raked them in. In a couple of weeks, the weeds were back in numbers but the spinach came up as well; and I had to water c a r e f u l l y lest the wispy seedlings were carried away in the flood. Since then, for the whole of July and half of June that spinach has kept on giving [R below for one day's harvest]. [R above] is the too-small-to-pick abundance left for  another day. It's true, however, that I often hand-pick a sandwichful for lunch.

I never wash own-self-grown salad leaves because I know there is no coliform in that part of the garden; and who wants wet leaves in a sandwich?? In contrast there's been another national recall of contaminated produce: this time spinach (and rocket, mixed leaves). The only advantage of _buying_ fresh picked greens is that there's a chance they are packed in nitrogen which will (until opened) protect the product from spoilage much better than a bag in the salad drawer of my fridge.

I say another national recall of contaminated produce because we had one also involving Listeria just two weeks ago! That was at the value added end of the food chain in Ballymaguire Foods up in Lusk, Co Dublin/Fingal. If you've ever eaten a chilled 'ready meal' in Ireland [Aldi, Centra, Supervalu, Tesco] chances are it was made by Ballymaguire, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Hoey Family at Country Crest Ltd. The Hoeys used to grow and sell spuds but, like Keogh's Crisps, worked out they could do better by processing produce and now have 400 on the payroll. This recall list  gives some idea of the cross-contamination possibilities:

• Bolognese with Pancetta
• Chicken & Chorizo with Baby Potatoes
• Goose Fat Irish Potatoes
• Ham & Mushroom Tagliatelle
• Irish Angus Beef Meatballs with Pappardelle
• Mashed Turnip or potato [€6.50/kg "gluten free"]
• Potato Gratin
• Rainbow Root Vegetables
• Salmon Penne Pasta
• Three Cheese Cauliflower Bake
• Veggie Lasagne
• Wholemeal Pasta Bolognese

You can buy organic potatoes for less than €2/kg, so getting them mashed by strangers for your family is [€4.50!] costly . . . even without dicing with Listeria.

make your own? An earlier Me might have expressed amazement that adults in 21stC Ireland couldn't mash their own potatoes, let alone construct a basic chicken pie. Last year we went through a jag of buying and eating Aldi Deluxe Special fancy pot pies. They were tasty [food engineers know their onions] even if they had 30 different ingredients. Well obvs home-baked pies would likely max out at ~10 different ingredients, so convenience isn't about limiting the inventory in your pantry. My judgey gripe is imaging the cliché office worker unable to cook because they're exhausted from pounding the keyboard all day. Really? Not all office workers! but I reckon some of them would live longer and happier lives if they cared about food prep and did it well rather than shirking it as an invidious chore. 

I confessed this a tuthree days ago when I was having lunch with Cookie Dau.II. She invited me to check my privilege. There are far too many people living in B&B hotel rooms with no chopping board & only a microwave for cooking. And cohorts of elders living alone but not eligible for Meals-on-Wheels. And folk with the palsy or registered blind. I accept that, but I suspect there aren't enough such edge cases to justify a whole industry processing food for profit. The business model depends on healthy, fit, people who can afford the price of convenience and choose not to donate that discretionary income to people who cannot.

One result of eating a few dozen Aldi pot pies in 2024, is that I have a stack of those dinky aluminium foil dishes. For me it is the work of minutes to make a batch of short-crust pastry, enough for a week's worth of pies, say, Mo We Th. There is a good bit of Lebanese genes culture swilling about in the family: many of my rellies are unable to stop over-catering for The Unexpected Guest. There is always something to fill a pie in a left-overs tupperware tub in the fridge. The example [R] contained an interesting mix of brown lentils, green beans, red onion, beige garbanzos, with a smidge of diced chorizo.  It's probably more efficient to take a leaf out of Hoey Inc's playbook and assemble a batch of pies all at once - say a half dozen, not a half tonne. They'll keep a few days as >!Shazzam!< convenience in the fridge and much longer in our freezer rather than Aldi's. Pricewise, I'd guess the mark-up between my pie and Ballymaguire pie is about the same as for mashed potato. And any contamination from sloppy kitchen practice will just be asymptomatic family-own-self coliform. I wouldn't serve Uncle Dan from Canada one of my pies - his microbione is a different, susceptible, kettle of fish altogether.

I don't know any specific cases but it's Lombard Street to a china orange that some of 'my' Food and Ferm microbiology students from my working days in The Institute finished up doing QC for major food producers in Ireland. I reckon they're better at doing Gram--stains from production line samples now than when they were on my watch. 

Just a perfick day

♬ ♪ ♫ Lou Reed ♫ ♩ for background.

Back in the days when letters were sent & stamps were purchased, I visited A Lot of post-offices; from the GPO [Cúchullain! 1916!] on O'Connell Street to the sub-post office at the back of Greene's Bookshop round the corner from work in TCD. There was a marked difference in service culture among these several stamp-vendors. I developed a theory that sticking dingy sub-post offices at the back of a shop and a long way from natural light bred a service of sighs - surly tending to snappy and officious. Not all post offices!!

The 1915 vintage Post Office, with its classical facade just up from the river in Bagenalstown was worth the visit: a little cramped but with big windows and many nice architectural details. The Beloved claims she sometimes drove straight through Borris PO [crabby postmaster] to send a parcel from B'town. These premises were shuttered many years ago and the PO moved to the back of a petrol station at the very edge of town. The Old PO grew increasingly forlorn and shabby. Last year, it was reborn as The Old Post Office Café. "Welcome to The Old Post Office, a café with a stamp of history." (ark ark)

We knew nothing about this until Dau.II announced that she was incommming for a couple of days midweek. Driving between Aldi and the Library before the train arrived we noticed a new paint job and the menu-board on the pavement. There was a scheduled 0900-1300 power-cut back home and we intended to take Dau.II-the-Foodie off for lunch; why not check out the new place? And it was so. Turns out there is an enormous hall down some stairs behind the old PO counter. Apparently, this was also the telephone exchange for the whole of County Carlow. The Art Deco door is still in place and the new owners salvaged  the 1970s vintage [complete with Dymo labels] plywood post-sorting pigeon-holes [R]: Presentation Convent; M.Connolly & Son; Meat Packers; District Hospital; Corries Cross; Newtown . . .now used for misc condiments.

Unlike some members of the party, I had eaten breakfast before leaving home and at 11.30 it was a long way from lunch; so I ordered a scone and flat-white. The others went full-metal brunch. A hockey-puck is only 3in across: my scone was ⌀ 50% bigger . . . a leetle dry but comes-with two butter pats, whipped cream and strawberry jam. The brunches arrived in enormous soup bowls with close to a kilo of spuds, egg, tomato, black-pudding etc. over beds of wilted spinach. Had to deep-six thoughts of starvlings in Gaza. 

We got up burping and waddled back to the car. Next destination Altamont Gardens which we had intended for lunch. We went for a walk there [OPW free in! parking all-day €2] instead. All the way down to the R. Slaney through the formal arboretum, past the duck&lily pond and back again. It's lovely and there is a café and shrub-shop. 

We were heading for Altamont because it was adjacent to Malone Fruit Farm on the N80. Dau.II was determined to make a batch of strawberry jam. I checked their webpage to see if they had strawbs for sale and they did . . . at a very reasonable €6/kg frozen. When we rocked up, it transpired that their webpage was frozen in time (Copyright © 2013 Malone Fruit Farm): frozen fruit was actually €13/kg!!  This makes it barely economic: 5 pots of jam for €15 ingredients [fruit, sugar, lemon] not including labour. But Dau.II's position is that, in contrast to all other varieties, shop-made strawberry jam and home-made are noticeably different in quality.

Anyway, when we eventually got home, power had been restored and we were ready for a nice cup of tea.

Woodstack

Did I mention we had the Tree Service in? I did. The last time we paid a professional arborist was in 2022 - and I still have one neat under-cover stack of 120-150cm logs from that venture. Up until then, we more-or-less relied on fallen branches to chop and send up the chimney. The negative thing about using random branches for firewood is that it is random - full of forks and twists and knots that make processing difficult. It's not really about the cost of chainsaw gas rather than buying coal from the creamery. It's not about costing my time either: firewood heats you twice - once in the chopping; once in the stove. And I don't need a gym subscription to develop my upper body with my splitting maul. But splitting awkward logs is a hazard - let me show you my shin scars. Indeed I tog up with the same PPE (boots, chaps, visor) for splitting wood as for firing up the chainsaw.

I had The B'ys from Glavey consolidate most of the ash-wood in a hape at the bottom of the haggard on the 7th July. They dumped a substantial pile of wood-chip next door. I've been processing the wood since that time. At not more than an hour or a tankful of chainsaw gas a day. Not every day: if it's wet I have indoor work - bloggin', baking, plongisme. Or tunnel work: watering and picking the beans and liberating butterflies. By the time I filled and capped off the stack shown above, I had ⅝ths [5ft x 4ft x 8ft] of a cord of ash wood against Winter 2027. That's just over 2 stere = 2 cu.m. for not-USA people.

The rest of the heap [I guess as much again] is now saw-cut to length and just needs to be split and stacked. And that's before I start in on the Scots pine which is heaped elsewhere . . . 2 days later:

There's no point in breaking your heart, your wrist or your axe reducing logs / lumps of Ash with too many branches. The fibres run every which way and don't yield to tonking with a splitting maul.  It's good to rise to a challenge - and you can sometimes make progress by turning or up-ending a log, But often not and dead ash will become habitat for something soon enough.
 

Connexions

A hosepipe ban has been implemented this last weekend until 16 Sep 25 in Tipperary, Waterford, Wexford and Cork. Proper order! The idea of using chlorinated drinking water to wash your car is repugnant to the planet - it's not great for the lawn microbes either. I've said it before and I'll say it again: get yourself a water-butt and attach it to the guttering.

 Not having mains water is fine / great. The water is 'free' and untreated with chlorine and one pal drives from miles away to fill up a 50 lt beer-barrel for drinking and brewing. But a power cut leaves us without water - for drinking, cooking, flushing, washing. Since we had the pump replaced last year, we've had sediment issues and I've had to clean more grit out of the filter in the last 15 months than in the previous 15 years. Indeed the first thing I had to do when I returned from France in June was to clean the water filter 3 times in 2 days: it was completely blocked.

Generally we do not water the veggies from the bore-hole.  The plants outside have to tek their chances. The beans, tomatoes and greens inside the polytunnel get most of what falls on p-tunnel plastic and gets diverted to various reservoirs. Over the years we have upgraded and replaced our stock of water containers and currently have 3x 120lt blue herring barrels; 1x 220lt ditto; 2x 1,000lt IBC; many 20lt mineral-lick buckets. At full capacity we have about 3 tonnes of water for irrigation. That would be plenty if Irish weather delivered the 1,000mm of average annual rainfall as 3mm every third day, preferably at night. But it is never thus.

Like in 2023 and 2018, we have had weeks without rain since the beginning of May and towards the end of June, I had exhausted all the reservoirs and was reduced to using a hosepipe from the bore-hole to keep my beans and tomatoes from shrivelling up and blowing away in the wind. I anxiously checked the weather forecast and tracked the MetÉireann rainfall radar as storms swept across part of the country. Not our part, however! Each belt of rain seemed to sweep her skirts away from our hill as if it deserved not a drop. Then on Sat 19th July it started a desultory drizz and A Lot more rain was promised overnight.

I have long had a system where the interior 1 tonne IBC replenishes one of two adjacent 120 lt herring barrels. It's set so that if we get A Lot of rain, the system overflows into the garden part of tunnel delivering some water adjacent to crops. It seemed a waste if we reached overflow levels in one of the pair of herring barrels and the other one still had storage capacity.  How would it be, I wondered, if I could connect the two barrels with a siphon so their water level rose in sync? And it was so [above R]; and the Lord saw that it was Efficient. The huge horseshoe of black pipe is about twice as long as it needs to be, but with siphons that does not impinge on function. It did rain in the night, I had watered the garden beds copiously the evening before but we still finished up with full capacity when the rain stopped about breakfast time on Sunday 20th July. Win!  It never rains but it pours and rained steady All the next night - it's hard to know whither to divert the water with everything in the p.tunnel so well soaked.

Joint ill

I have been quite the fanboi for Cammy Wilson's YT channel The Sheep Game [though not so much as to get the  merch! [R]. He loves his sheep; their care and maintenance. But it is super hard to make a living in farming without you already own the ground on which the stock graze. Wilson's cunning plan was to keep a video camera always on as he went about his day and then spend hours after-hours editing the footage and posting it to YouTube.

A while back he teamed up with his neighbour Iona Murrray to make studio-based footage for a podcast called Fed By Farmers. They are periodically amazed that 15,000 people will subscribe to get josh and banter with regular updates about farming in Ayrshire. In many of the episodes Cammy and Iona interview someone else in the trade [auctioneers, bankers!, contractors, dairyists, entrepreneurs, farmers, shearers, vets] , to discuss some aspect of modern farming. Michael Goldie for example, was recently on about his losses from Schmallenberg a midge-borne teratogenic virus whc Bloboprev. It is similar in effect to Zika whc Bloboprev along with other flaviviruses.

Not all farmers can master a GoPro as well as Cammy so they have tried other ways of turning an honest penny and keep the farm.  Rebecca and Duncan McEwan, for example started a side-gig growing pumpkins for Hallowe'en which has grown to a Huge seasonal 🎃nt🎃rpris🎃 - parking! - coffee! - swimming pool!?! These people are clearly not gumboots-in-the-dung traditionalists. Possibly because they've given swathes of their acreage over to 🎃 they do all their lambing in sheds. There are advantages: you don't have to course over the ground from dawn to dusk looking for ewes needing obstetric attention. But cramming several field's worth of sheep into a barn is a recipe for the spread of infectious disease. Such as:

Joint-ill is caused by Streptococcus dysgalactiae [etymology = the string o' berries that messes the milk . . . from its propensity to cause mastitis in cows]. In sheep, particularly fresh lambs, the bacteria can cause infectious arthritis. Back in the day, Streptococcal infections were the original case-study for the roll out of penicillin which was really effective against those pathogens. But for the last 60 years, farmers have squandered this treasure by using penicillin as a growth promoter in chickens and not completing the prescribed time-course for treatment. So antibiotic resistance is now a thing. The related Streptococcus pyogenes can cause rheumatic fever and damage heart vales in humans.

Watery mouth. Never 'eard of it. This is another bacterial infection, often caused by rampant growth of Escherichia coli in the neonatal gut. Skittery shits can easily spread into the next pen.

The McEwans believe that bleaching the shed to within an inch of its life before lambing season is not necessarily the most effective way to prevent infection in the flock. They have bought into the ideas of Aled Rhys Davies that an ecosystem of good bacteria will be able to put manners on the pathogens. Davies recommends misting the shed, not with chlorine, but with probiotics. And a proprietary good-bacteria impregnated shed-bedding to improve a) bacterial load b) the smell. They can also mist the undercarriage of dairy cows with good bacteria after milking. Davies has the multi-product company - Pruex Ltd - for the purpose. He was bedding down on a Wexford Dairy farrrm in January. 

You don't need this if you're lambing outside where Strep and Coliform are so busy fighting their corner to survive that they haven't time to infect lambs which have just been born in the lee of a hedge. Other players - Mr Fox, Our Lady of Blizzard and Lord Carrion of Crow - wait in the wings instead.

Knock knock Fraxinus

What a difference a storm makes? When we embraced country-living ~30 years ago, we were largely at variance with our new neighbours as to priorities. We loved that the field-boundaries were full of scrubby trees and bushes. Dau.I and Dau.II named one arboreal section of the walls "Fairy Village" and used to hang from the branches waiting for fairy sandwiches and fairy tea. In 30 years, girls can grow from toddlers to taxable assets for the economy & modest trees can grow to sky-scrapers. We've never lacked for firewood because, in stormy weather ash sheds top-hamper but rarely up-roots.

A bit of consultation since Storm Éowyn focused attention on four mighty ash Fraxinus excelsior on the edge of the lane leading up to our yard . . . and beyond to the moors and mountains behind our house. That lane is a bit of a walker's motorway: it would mortifyin' if a visitor got tonked on the head by a falling branch. Also at risk [litigation alert!] was the abutting neighbour's shiny new sheds which are almost under the canopy of the nearest big tree. We were informed that it would take two days to bring down a tree-and-a-half and that would require the rent and delivery of some height-for-hire like a spider-lift. It would take longer still and be more expensive to do it old-style with ropes carabiners spurs and flip-line.  
Get back to us with a price and a scheduled time we said
I will certainly do that he said
the silence surged softly backward however

But into the breach rode Eoin Glavey of the Déise. Called us up with an hour's notice on his way home from another job. 
Could he come by for a scoping visit?
He could, and he did. I unburdened myself of all our arborial anxieties. He nodded and took notes. At the kitchen table, we put the various jobs in priority order: 

1. the tree-and-a-half by the lane
2. a Scots Pinus sylvestris which was shading the new solar PV array
3. a forest of mostly ash which was looming over the power and telephon lines
4. the biggest, ash-dieback deadest, twa corbiest, ash tree on the property: leaning out over the field of our other farming neighbour
5. a long horizontal Scots Pinus sylvestris branch which the kids used to swing from but was now a) an accident waiting to happen b) shading a shrubbery of blueberry and lavender.

 While I was hiking in France, Glavey Tree Experts sent us a quote: they'd do the whole list in one day and, if €acceptable, get back to us with a date. That date was Friday 7th July 2025 - be ready for an 08:30 start. You know you're getting old when policemen tree-surgeons look young. I made a slab of flapjacks. Six young chaps sprang out of three vehicles [one hauling a brash-chipper] more-or less at 08:30. There were more saws than sawyers:

But that's appropriate. Tree-climbers&limbers need something [one] handy. Fallers will require a much larger saw both energy-wise and bar-length. In between, everyone needs to be able to handle a saw even if the 'pprentice will spend most of the time hauling brash to the chipper and sweeping up the leaves and twigs afterwards. And then there are saws on poles with which much of the thinning round utility wires was carried out. Poles the length of which only your anti-grav fever dreams can imagine. Some of Team Glavey were down the lane climbing and limbing:

One of the four adjacent ash trees was in much better shape than the others and we had agreed that it could be reprieved. That allowed the tree-monkey to set a safety rope high up on a solid branch and from that purchase swing about reducing the top-hamper from the other three condemned trees in turn. Meanwhile back in the haggard, the other climber was determinedly getting on top of the solar-panel occluding Scots pine:

I had promised my neighbour-above that the tree on our shared ditch would be down by tea-time and there would be nothing left but saw-dust. In the event not even sawdust because the 'pprentice used the leaf-blower to such good effect.  

One of the lads was a civil engineering student a week into his summer vacation job: a lot of book-learning there but here meeting tension and compression for the first time in real life. It was heartening how everyone looked out for each other and took a little longer on the job to let the newbies push their envelope. I've spent every subsequent day reducing wood-piles to logs; splitting the logs to billets; and stacking the sticks against Winter 2027. Taking it handy!: I can haul brash about with the best of them; and saw logs and split 'em but I can't / won't do it on the clock and I won't / can't do it for 4 hours on the trot . . . with 4 hours after lunch.

Knocked

When we moved down country in 1996, we secured the services of a pair of well-drilling brothers who lived not 2 km from us. They came and scoped the contract and said that [no way not in a million years] they couldn't get their rig into the yard through the original pair of wrought-iron gates. They were wide enough but the turn was too tight. That put Project Borehole back a couple of weeks until John-the-Digger, the well-drillers' brother-in-law, found us one JCB-day in his busy schedule. John opened up a swooping new entrance at the bottom of the yard across which we hung a 14ft = 4.25m gate. So far so good 20thC. Our borehole bottomed out at 113ft = 35m and has been doing well, with some maintenance, since. 

Over the following ~30 years, we've had to trick about with our new-no-more farm entrance to accommodate the ever bigger Tonka toys of various contractors: No, please don't send that gravel in a truck with a 40ft = 12m wheel-base. We have a vigorous stand of cherry laurel Prunus laurocerasus just south of the gate which grows Up and then droops down under the weight of foliage - very annoying because there's nothing big enough to prop a ladder up against to trim t'buggers. The traditional hay meadow is ready to cut any time after the end of June, which would require access for mowers, tedders, balers and tractor-trailers stacked two high with bales. On 3rd July, I bit the bullet and knocked [felled out] the gate-overhanging laurels at their base [as above R]. This gave the boys and their toys [same crew as last year + pics!] a clean sweep when they came along 10 days later to 'knock' [technical term] the hay and take it off site.

Unfortunately, one of the contractors [nobody owned up, let alone apologized, let alone undertook to make good] knocked the granite gate pillar at the entrance to the hay-meadow. When I went out to check that all the bales had been removed, I found the pillar all-ahoo and leaning out into the gateway. This is ungood because, at the best of times, the gap is 12ft less 2in and these modern machines are 12ft less 6in wide. The smart way to true up the gate pillar is to reculer pour mieux sauter hoik it out entirely; dig a new hole and reset. If I had a tractor with a front-loader at my disposal, that's what I would do.

But I don't, so I gathered up m'tools - a big iron bar, a small ditto, secateurs, trowel . . . table-spoon - and cleaned out the dirt behind the pillar down to about 25cm. Secateurs to cut back the roots. Before starting The Dig, I had to c a r e f u l l y remove the loose stones piled up against the ditch and fallen from the wall - all of which the granite pillar had been supporting. Remove one stone and two more will become loose etc. When I was bored scooping out the dirt, I leaned my arse against the pillar and it shifted to almost upright. I got on my knees again and gave it another round of scraping and scooping; and another dunt with my soft-hammer. Eventually - Good enough! I found and hammered home some wedge-shaped shale rocks to stop the pillar canting forward again and job done.

Last man fishing

Michael Crummey, who he, just recently won a huge literary prize. I thought I'd get ahead of the pack to reserve something from his back-catalogue in the Library. That would be Sweetland, about the closing of the Newfoundland outports. So many communities dotted around the coast, each having existed for two or three hundred years catching and salting fish, planting spuds and cabbage, trying to win some hay to overwinter a cow. In the 20thC amenities and aspirations came in - district nurse, electricity, tinned peaches, all served and serviced by regular ferries to the few proper towns. The Canadian government wanted to allow all citizens opportunity and welfare. Then bean-counters became ascendant and supporting remote hamlets was exposed as crazy economics. Thousands of CAN$ running empty ferries from point to point where half the homes were boarded up. All the outport Effectives working Fintech in Toronto or the oil-sands of Alberta, raising family in the warm and dry, and not even coming home for Christmas. I wrote about the economic conundrum last year.

Moses Sweetland lives in the village of Chance Cove on the island of Sweetland off the South coast of Newfoundland. An ancestor might have been first footer on the island but Moses is the last of that name. It's a village rather than a hamlet because there's sort of shop and a sort of barber and a sort of museum and a church with a sort of minister. The government stopped the cod fishery 30 years before the main thread of the story - and there are very few ways of making a living on shore. Accordingly folks leave as soon as they're old enough to vote (sometimes earlier) for work and partners in St.John's, or go West to continental Canada. But there is also plenty of native nookie and the results of these liaisons are accepted even if marital non-paternity is known or suspected.

It's not much of a spoiler to acknowledge that Moses is one of the last, and then The Last, hold-out against taking the government bounty and leaving Sweetland for good. The departers can't / don't take everything to leave vacant possession because nobody is going to occupy the ancestral home ever again. There are, therefore agreeable echoes of The Day of the Triffids as the remainers snag anything remotely useful or edible from the people-free dwellings. It is acknowledged, given the brutal Winter weather, that unmaintained empty buildings are going to be reduced to sticks within a few years.

Moses alone remains: embracing a quixotic exercise in survival. . . like a man sentenced to hauling beach stones up the face of the Mackerel Cliffs. You'll read your own messages but this is fiction that can offer clues about what it is to be human and how to live with the cards neighbours you're dealt. I'm returning the book to the library; it's all yours.