Lasso them microdogies

My correspondent G continues to scour through the interwebs looking for Blobocopy. I tell 'er she should start 'er own effin' blog but she's too busy scouring the interwebs. She did though submit The Blob's one-and-only guest blog [cw: asthma] in 2019. The latest alert concerned the discovery of a novel source of potent antibiotics in a Canadian soil sample. This happens occasionally as in the discovery of Eleftheria terrae ten years ago or more to the point discovery of Teixobactin - a chemical from that novel microbe that kills pathogens like MRSA. Back in my 2015 report, I bet that Teixobactin would give its discoverers a Nobel gong within ten years. But they haven't even got a production schedule sorted [there are technical hurdles] let alone FDA approval. Science is Hard.

Gerry Wright [L,L] has been on this line of research for at least ten years but Manoj Jangra [L.R] only came to the lab as a post-doc a tuthree years ago. He is holding [yea! 3-D printers!] a model of their novel antibiotic. If you squint, the molecule looks like a lasso = lariat hence "lariocidin". Their discovery is important because lariocidin nobbles other bacteria in a novel way - by interfering with the bacterial ribosome and preventing protein synthesis. 

When bacteria become resistant to antibiotics, researchers tend to modify [add a bell, drop a whistle] the antibiotic chemically, so that the bacteria no longer recognise the cause of their own demise. But that tends to buy only a few years until the bacteria develop their own modification in the arms-race. It is hoped that, by presenting a completely new method of attack, the effective life of lariocidin (and its inevitable derivatives) will be longer. And lariocidin's structure is radically different from existing antibiotics, so that will pose an extra challenge for the target pathogens. On the safety-side, bacterial ribosomes are functionally equivalent [make proteins] but structurally different from mammalian ribosomes; so there is not going to be cross-toxicity to both pathogen and patient.

Seems that the soil sample from which the lariocidin-producing Paenibacillus was isolated came from the garden of one of the lab techs in Wright's lab at McMasters U. But that's the easy bit, it only needs a trowel. I assured G that her garden was full of bacteria killing each other but even the a silver plated trowel isn't going to get her a Nobel. Wright sensibly enlisted the help of a team from University of Illinois Chicago UIC, who provided complementary expertise.

Wright seems to have a thing about Paenibacillus: in 2016 he was scrabbling about in the bowels of the New Mexico earth to find an ecosystem uncontaminated by humans. There they uncovered Paenibacillus sp LC321whose genome held a number of potential target antibiotics. One of the nice threads in that tale is that Wright heard about these New Mexico caves by going to a lecture by Hazel Barton, an Akron U spelunking microbiologist.  Note to self: always go to lunchtime seminars! Like me at Aled Edwards' giving side-eye to same-old same-old research funding.

Microdogies? It's a Rawhide reference. Dogie: an orphan calf.

free pease

 Last year, just as Summer was fading, a mysterious donor flooded the local library with yellow-pack seeds. Unable to resist freebies, I snagged a packet of peas and a packet of spinach; and hoped I would remember doing so in the Spring. I did! On 11th March, I planted 9x peas in my handy everlasting set of 5cm ⌀ micro plant pots. In the same session I planted 9x black haricot beans own-self-saved from last year. Remarkably, I scored `100+100% germination and here they are on 26th March:

I think I'm probably a bit previous on this because we are a full 5 weeks from last possible frost (1st week in May hereabouts) and I can't leave them in those tiny pots that long and I really don't want to do an interim re-potting of t'buggers. I think I'll tek a chance on putting them in the ground inside the poly-tunnel this coming week. I also started another set of 9xpea + 9xbean on the 27th Mar as a backstop.

We are currently enjoying a bounteous flush of salad greens which have appeared from nowhere - or at least which re-appeared more-or-less where they were last year with no effort on my part. Rocket Eruca satica (really tasty unlike the watery stuff that's sold by Tescaldi), lettuce Lactuca saliva; mustard greens Brassica juncea; tarragon! Artemisia dracunculus (so good); wild garlic Allium triquetrum; mint Mentha spp. is impossible to kill and we have two varieties intermixed. When I'm home alone, I nip up and snip a sandwich full for lunch. Less often when anyone else is present because they will insist on rinsing the leaves and discarding any with holes - such a waste.
 

Allen the Ever-present

Hex and jiminy, it's so much easier to deal with someone else's clutter! Following the departure of Pat the Salt last October, we have undertaken to clear out The Shanty at his old gaff on the Waterford Coast. The Shanty is a 2m x 4m garden shed sold as a kit and spectacularly under-engineered. The floor and roof consisting of 10mm pressed fibre-board sheets, the former covered with roofing felt. Several years ago, the place next door was rented to a single-parent dad who worked as a chippy. We helped populate a veg garden to amuse his daughter; and he offered to fix the Shanty's sagging wind-swept roof. The installation of a new marine-ply roof cost more that the whole shed-kit, but it seemed good value if only for feeding the local-local economy. 

16 cu.m. can hold a lorra shite! It was arranged that a van-with-two-man would come on Tuesday last to whisk away anything we didn't want including a matching slightly furry matching sofa-and-chair set and the decidedly furry mattress off a day-bed. Triage was the day before.

We set off bright and early last Monday. And when I say bright, this was Met Eireann's forcast for the day: ⬤⬤⬤⬤⬤⬤⬤⬤⬤⬤⬤⬤.  But about five minutes into the trip The Beloved said "Dang, we'll need an Allen key to dismantle the day-bed, we should go back". I demurred, not least because with the ubiquity of Allen keys, I reckoned we could borrow one from the neighbours.

On arrival, we rolled up our sleeves, donned gloves, and set to. The first thing I picked up from the sagging Ikea shelves in the Shanty was a heavy Celebrations tin which rattled. Sure enough, in among the pot-pourri of screws, nails, hooks, spacers, scrapers and plugs, there were three Allen keys: one exactly the right size for that day-bed. 

It's a terrible thing the consumption of the planet's natural resources to make shoddy stuff that has a half-life measured in months rather than decades. We came away with a Yaris bootful  [~1 cu.m.] of stuff than can get a second life: including a brace of well-rusted club-hammers. Pat really believed in the club-hammer as a generic persuader. I concur and have several . . . when a Mummy hammer and Daddy hammer love each other very much etc. The haftless one [R above] weighs 12lb = 5½ kg which is too heavy for a) normal people b) normal handles.

yochi-yochi

That would be ヨチヨチ the tottering motion of, say, a toddler making their first steps. I guess it could be added to those tedious lists of words for which there is no equivalent in English: hiraeth and saudades , or indeed kokoro 心, looking at you. But I've been mining a deep lode of such words in Polly Barton's memoir Fifty Sounds (2019, Fitzcarraldo publ.).

Actually it's much more than a what I did in my summer hols memoir because Barton studied Philosophy at Cambridge and did a deep dive into the gnarly tortured thinking of Ludwig Wittgenstein on the nature of communication and language. Immediately after graduating she travelled to Japan as a TEFL assistante at a group of school in a remote area of that alien country. Alien to her and me and probably you too; even if you are really into manga and/or ramen.

Because of her earlier training in how to think, she didn't just try to confront and hopefully master the many examples of doing things different there. She came to appreciate and start to unpick how much of our monoglot anglophone 'lang & comms" is only partly to do with the words (which you can look up in your lexicon) but a lot to do with the gestures, pauses, emphasis and intonation. It is also an opportunity to confront the embedded certainties and warm-bath background of her native tongue: English spelinge much?

Intonation? A professor of linguistics in full flow during class announced that there is no known language in which two positives are used to indicate a negative. Voice from smart-arse at back of hall "Yeah, right!". I had something to say about phatic elements of communication back in 2019. These are all the establishing empathy and common ground that make up most of our daily interactions with other humans. All those comments about the weather, asking how d'ye do without expecting a reply - let alone a view of the stitches on the other person's hernia repair.

Barton spend 15 years in Japan learning the language, culture and customs before returning to Bristol to hang out her shingle as a translator from the Japanese of which she has a dozen books to her credit. A good translation is quite as much effort as the original book - more perhaps because the creative flow is hampered by the original author's plot line and sensibilities. Fifty Sounds is essentially 50 chapters each one riffing in a Japanese word or phrase, where she encountered it and what it made her think.

One short telling chapter is about moja-moja モジャモジャ - the adjective routinely applied to Barton's curly hair. Not the more common (loan-word?) kuru-kuru - that wouldn't do. A friend explained that her hair was beyond curly it was wild unruly electric like Struwwelpeter. The poor women's moja-moja hair [as R with a moja-moja sheep in the background] attracted A Lot of uninvited pawing and poking . . . and not only from curious pupils. This skin-crawling observation has the ring of truth because it's the frequent experience of Dau.I the Librarian who has the bestest biggest hair in the family. What is wrong with people's assessment of personal space that they feel licensed to touch other people whose work is inevitably public facing?

moja-moja? Young feller from The North comes back from college in The South raving about The Dubliners. Uncle who has seen them on the TV: "That Ronnie Drew and Luke Kelly, they look like a pair of sheep's arses." The prev jokes are the best jokes.

Beach off-limits

A lot can happen overnight, so I get out and about as soon as I've downed my first pot of tea. The key thing is to head-count the sheep: anything other than N = 15 it's Houston we have a problem.  It has happened that we have extras, as when two years ago our abutting neighbour bought in a handful of particularly jumpy sheep. But it's more likely for the count to come up short. Anything missing is dead OR has its head caught in a wire fence OR has gone on holiday. All of these are a pain in the arse. It is therefore a relief when, after repeated counts, the missing beast bursts out of the shrubbery; or is revealed cudding in plain sight exactly masked by a 'larger' sheep [not small but far away] in the foreground.

08:00 last Wednesday it was N = 14 again and I set off à la BoPeep. I say again because one of the sheep has been persistently AWOL over the Winter. She had a bad case of The Itch, lost chunks of fleece and looked quite wretched altogether. It was as if the poor creature had been sent to Coventry or the sheep equivalent of Leperstown. Despite expecting any day to discover her stiff with her legs in the air, she has survived two rounds of treatment and the worst of Winter. When she is away feeling mizz, she is often to be found in or around The Skunch. The Field Over The River is so called because beyond its Eastern edge the land falls abruptly 10m to the river stream which bounds our farm. This cliff tapers off along our field immediately N. Between this gentle slope and the cliff is a bosky dell or 'skunch'. There has always been a low wall parallel to the river in the Skunch and beyond it is a tiny beach covered in willow and shade-loving woodland plants. The kids used to have picnic-and-paddle down there when they were tots, but it's gotten jungly and briar-grown since the girls left home.

And that's where I found the errant sheep. In her earlier lonely sojourns she'd eaten her way through to wall and now was hopped over to the beach. Thence is but a short paddle to Wexford and the neighbour's meadow. Which would never do, so I hooshed her out of it, and spent the rest of the morning running a fence along the dwarf wall. Running a fence requires the assembly of a measured length of sheep-wire + stakes, pry-bar, shovel, staples, sledge-hammer, claw-hammer, pliers, secateurs, gloves, chain-saw + PPE. Then pushing a wheel-barrow full of kit 300m down-hill on a 1:10 slope. Down is easy, but you really don't want to push 40m = 20kg of off-cut sheep wire UP hill. 

We'll have to see what happens but the beach is now officially off-limits. ↑ indicating the two more-or-less vertical trees which book-end and support the wire. Dry-stone walls are the very devil for driving fence-posts unless they are tall enough and wide enough to have two faces back-filled with small stones and sod. Not the case here, so three (3) posts will have serve for the 11m run of fence.

Enniscorthy Co Kerry

I'm quite the fanboi for Colm Tóibín. I thought The Heather Blazing was the best history of this our Republic despite being fiction from beginning to end. I can't swear that I read his Brooklyn, but I saw the Saoirse Ronan vehicle of a film. Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself to earbook the sequel Long Island (2024) on Borrowbox. Maybe I'm lucky to have found a copy of last year's best seller available for download. Maybe Tóibín is now a drug on the market and nobody wants to read such stuff.

In Long Island, Eilis Lacey has married into a Brooklyn Italian clan which made good and made it ut to the 'burbs in Lindenhurst, Suffolk County, NY. For reasons, she leaves New York and returns home to Enniscorthy [R 1970] for the first time in 20 years. Her two teenage children have never been to visit that side of their family. Tóibín grew up in Enniscorthy and his presentation of small-town busybody snob and gossip is unsettling. As for the story, the unfolding tragedy hinges on a series of coincidences worthy of Dickens and deductive powers worth of Sherlock Holmes - so I guess it will take its place in The Canon. I reserve judgment on the moral and social failings of the cast of characters, but don't let that hold you back.

The audiobook is read by Jessie Buckley, award-winning actor from Kerry via Thurles. Buckley has a) unnecessarily, decided to render direct speech in different accents b) unaccountably, given up on the nuance of regional Irish accents to voice everyone from Enniscorthy as if they're from deepest Munster. A disconcerting cross between Martin's Life and Healy-Rae. And a lot of the proper names [Buncloddy, Curraghcloo, Clonrosh] are mangled because . . . who cares? 

~~≋~~

For the record, I've also knocked of a history of the British communications intelligence CommInt service GCHQ (2019) by Richard Aldrich. It runs to 19 hours of political and historical detail of phone-taps and radio-traffic capture. The stuff from the 1970s tinkled a distant bell because I lived in England then and read newspapers. But the more recent material was revelatory. Every email I've ever sent has been processed by GCHQ software, for example. That's the same GCHQ that put out a puzzle book for Christmas 2016

woodwork woodwonk

Did I mention there was a lot of wind-throw this Winter? I did! In broad terms, Storm Darragh laid trees flat from West to East, while Éowyn knocked them South to North:

Key: Crateagus monogyna sceagh, hawthorn Fraxinus excelsior fuinseog, ash; Sorbus aucuparia caorthann, rowan.

Last week, on the gorgeous dry sometimes sunny days, I finished chopping and came to a natural state-of-stop on the processing of all the tree down. All the stumps have been cut back to where they get too thick and gnarly to split for firewood. And all the twiggy brash has been stripped of ivy [yum!] by the sheep and tucked back against the ditch. With the embarras de woody richesse , I don't have room to store all this kindling in the dry so it is designated habitat. 

I've learned quite a bit on the job about the physics [compression? do not cut! tension? cut!] of fallen timber. So I've only pinched my saw blade a handful of times. The biggest and gnarliest of the rown trees fell across the fence line with my neighbour above flattening the sheep-wire and snapping some fence posts. I looked at this, blenched, and have arranged for another neighbour to turn up with a [saw and a] backhoe to lift the several trunks [rowan / mountain ash tends to bush out, rather than have a single stem like real trees] out of it. I'll then re-fence the boundary.

Fence-posts? I have lots of them from Jim Davis and his Graigcullen sawmill. Jim supplied the cedar cladding for Young Bolivar's mighty  2016 woodshed. These are excellent 50mm x 50mm x 1.5m from oak Quercus robur which therefore have a lot of natural tannins against the microbes that will attack dead timber in contact with earth.  It's all very well to paint the sharp ends with creosote and I've done that already. But I decided the the remaining dozen stakes would be left to end-soak in creosote for an hour each to really suck it up. These posts have been sitting in the dry for a couple of years, so should be thirsty. It seemed best to do this serially, as it's hard to find a tall container that will take 5lt of gloop. You can see them [L] drying out after their ordeal.

Draiocht

Lá Fhéile Pádraig! Growing up in England, my brother and sister were 'musical' in the sense that they could hear something on the radio and pick out the melody on the family piano. Not me. For me making music was hard work and I lacked any sort of motivation or encouragement to put in the effort. My folks paid for piano lessons when I announced that I wanted to learn guitar like the Beatles. That was about the level of it. At 18 I left home and country, and baggage, to go to College in Dublin. One of the first things I did was buy a tin whistle and start listening to Trad. That was partly happenstance and party conscious choice. The bands of the 70s: Silly Wizard, Planxty, Horslips, The Bothy Band - I could hum along to that stuff with or without them. But life moved on, I didn't keep up with Trad as it developed through the turn of the century

At the birth of The Blob, The Gloaming rose up above my horizon, especially the urgent visceral sean nós [Saoirse] of Iarla Ó Lionáird [Is do thugas gean mo chroí go fíochmhar¹]. While listening, yet again, to a Gloaming set on YT, I fluttered down through the comments to find that Martin Hayes, Gloaming fiddler from East Clare, had published an interim autobiography Shared Notes: A Musical Journey (2021). I'll have that, I said, and asked Dau.I The Librarian to lift their copy off the shelf at Coolock when I was last in Dublin: that visit was for the stamps, like.

For me the book starts off on the wrong foot - along the back-roads of East Clare between Feakle and Tulla. Pretty much the last time we were there, to repatriate the ashes of my dear dead friend Kevin, it was so bleak as to be tragic. That's my baggage, not yours, though. Read on to see where Kevin's neighbour Martin Hayes finished up.

Exec Summ: Martin's father PJ played fiddle for the Tulla Céilí Band and Martin grew up in the company of older men who lived trad. The Chap tried and failed college and politics and commerce; tried drink and drugs and came through the other side; lived the undocumented diaspora in Chicago. All the while he put in the hours with his fiddle to find Truth in Music and shared the notes with increasingly large audiences including Presidents Obama and Higgins. Clare boy done good. Some points

• the rehearsal may be better than the performance b/c pressure
• the studio fails to capture the Draiocht - that evanescent, magic moment
• most jam sessions in the pub or kitchen fail to capture the moment
• to be There, Then, When, you have to be present at A Lot of sessions
• when the dove settles, you will know it
  
• find your true voice and be true to it
• nobody gains if you play what you think the audience expects to hear
  
• teaching can reveal a truth ignored or discounted

And finally a hats off tribute to mortality. Dennis Cahill, the Gloaming guitarist, and Martin's collaborator and co-performer for 30+ years was born, in Chicago, the day before me and he died 20 Jun 2022. The ♬ ♪ ♫ ♩ lives on.

¹To furiously give the affection of my heart

Rehab through work

For a whole mid-20thC generation, a month's bed-rest was prescribed after the terrifying near-death experience of acute uncomplicated myocardial infarction AMI. There was no very good evidence for this form of rehabilitation and several studies found that patients did better (psychologically, physically and psychosomatically) if they got up and started back to their before times regime. 

A few months ago James Rebanks [L], the articulate Cumbrian shepherd - bloboprev - was interviewed on Full Disclosure [1hr YT also free download at podbean] by James O'Brien. Rebanks was plugging his latest book A Place of Tides [2024]. The conceit is that Rebanks volunteers to travel to the furthest NW edge of Europe and help two elderly Norwegian ladies with the eiderdown harvest.

April Fool's Day: while spaghetti is not harvested from Italian trees, the down from eider ducks Somateria mollissima is gathered from nests after the chicks have fledged, carefully cleaned and sold for high-end duvets and jackets. The eider boom has a peculiarly intimate relationship with seafaring people. In the 19thC, better boats and better prices led to an extension in the North Atlantic fishery. The by-catch and fish guts returned to the sea were scarfed up by the eider ducks as being easier, more digestible, pickings than mussels and crabs.  And now we have taken every fish from the sea and replaced them with plastrash, the numbers of ducks is tumbling.

In the Spring these ducks have to come ashore to breed and the women of the community started building eider hotels near the shoreline. The accommodation was/is in two parts 1) artificial nests made from dried seaweed 2) a shelter built from stones, sod and driftwood to mitigate the wind and shed some of the rain. It was/is easier to separate the down from neat seaweed nests than from the any-old-shite which the ducks would use in the wild. It's a compromise for the ducks: they accept tenancy from their enormous terrifying landlord because the presence (and the .22 rifle) of the latter deters the mink Neogale vison, otters Lutra lutra and ravens Corvus corax which eat nesting ducks and their eggs

The younger of the two women started to help during the eider season when she was a) increasingly hacked-off with the up-sell demands of management after several decades working in the local bank b) in remission from breast cancer. The Elder, came earlier but at a similar age after finding that catering in the hubbub of an old folks home was no longer floating her boat. And Rebanks, locked into his family sheep farm man-and-boy, is also troubled by an existential crisis. As with recovery from AMI, there's no good to be had from moping about as damaged goods. Better to be kneeling in slick goose-shit, suffering a biting wind with intermittent showers, fixing a new door on a duck-house. 

It turns out that 'young' James [b. 1974] is not a total useless mouth out on Fjærøy [Feather Island]. He's been deftly wielding a sprong since ever he could walk because hay must be pitched. Pitching rotten, or shaping newly dried, seaweed is essentially the same; and farmers can do A Lot with a saw, a hammer and a mouthful o' nails. 

I'm not surprised that my request to borrow A Place of Tides from the library took 3 months to reach the top of the list: it's easy to read and just a little bit inspirational.

Relief of Sheep

I went to school in England. I doubt if The Easter Rising was even mentioned but the various Acts of Parliament concerning the establishment of the Church of England in the 1500s - that was considered important. And some of the Protestant martyrs were considered romantic / stoic / StiffUpperLipped: Be of good cheer Mr Ridley and play the man not the ball etc. We were sufficiently even-handed to acknowledge that lots of Catholics also went up in flames. But in the superficial, sound-byte teaching of history, the impact of religious flip-flopping upon everyday farming folk was a closed book.

Not any more! It was suggested that I read The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village (2001) by Eamon Duffy. For skool-history regnal dates context "catholics" vs "protestants" . . .

• Henry VIII Fid.Def. 1509 - 1534 [25½ yrs] 
• ie before Act of Supremacy declaring KH8 to be head of the [local] church
• Henry VIII Ch.Eng 1534 - 1547 [12 yrs]
• Edward VI 1547 - 1553 [6½ yrs] 
• d. age 15
• Mary I 1553 - 1559 [6½ yrs]
• Elizabeth 1559 -  1603 [40+ yrs]

It's quite hard to do historical research in the County of Devon, because the Public Records in Exeter were blitzed to buggery in WWII. But, like the (7/123) surviving plays of Sophocles, by chance some documents from the 1500s survived. One of them was uniquely, garrulously,  comprehensive and exactly book-ended the whole period of religious reformation in England. The churchwarden's accounts for the village /hamlet of Morebath were scrupulous written up 1520 - 1574 in the spidery scrawl of the parish priest Christopher Trychay:

Local Government, and finance, was in the hands of several elected Wardens at the beginning of this period but the vicar was literate and so kept the minutes of annual reports of income and outgoings: "Ys for the gefth of Thomas at Tymwell the wyche was  vj^s & viij^d [6/8d = ⅓ of £1] hyt was be stowyd yn payntyng of the sylyng a bowt the hye crosse parte of hyt and the rest of hyt schall come in a banner dicit very shortly sperat". It sounds like English (with a scattering of Latin) but not as we now write it.

The wealth of the parish was vested in the parish flock which were parcelled out, in ones and twos, to run with the flocks of parishioners. It was bad when one of these sheep pegged out, but not a total loss if the fleece could be recovered from the corpse. The parish bumbled along: raising funds by throwing "ales" = parties and then employing craftsmen to re-lead the church roof; make new vestments and altar-cloths; contribute to the repair of bridges.

But the finances were increasingly pinched [both senses] by the demands of central government to a) finance foreign wars b) cement (or undo) the trappings of a reformed church. The Protestants had a thing against altars and required their de-blinging and even dismantling; and the parish then had to provide a table from which to serve communion. Each parish was also required to buy an official Book of Common Prayer [whc prev], English language bible and the Paraphrases on the New Testament by Erasmus. You may be sure that someone made a fortune from the supply of these expensive articles but nobody from Morebath. When Catholicism was restored under Queen Mary, it was tables away, rebuild the stone altar, and refurnish it with chalice, pyx, paten and thurible . . . and Carry on Catholic.

Then there were the ornery taxes of secular life: like the 1549 Relief of Sheep [3^d per ewe in fields, 1^d for those on the moorland commons] followed by the Relief of Cloth [8^d per lb on finished woollen cloth]. The image this conjures is of a Highwayman holding up people at pistol-point "I shall relieve you of that purse of ducats, my good Sir, and cast thereto the lady's ear-rings". 

Those years in the mid-1500s thus midwifed, not only the Church of England, but also the modern centralized state - taking goods or money from citizens while giving them only indirect control of how the money was spent. All very modern, so.

Red feet by red hill

I am given to understand that one of the first steps on a new building site is for the apprentice carpenter to make a saw horse. Making the tea, frying eggs on a shovel over a brazier, wa/ondering from pillar to post in search of a glass hammer; all that comes later. A carpenter's saw-horse is a multi-tasker: just the right height for sawing a 4x2 to length; an extra two feet of height when slabbing up a ceiling; the only safe place to leave your tape-measure; a seat for the tea-breaks. 

The common-or-garden saw-horse is a different beast. No place for a cup of tea (neither for cup nor arse); no horizontal surfaces; precarious to stand on. But 'tis a great asset for sawing logs - either longer / fatter pieces with a chain-saw (saves the back) or final product with a bow-saw (saves the planet). I've made a number of these over the years: because they don't last forever being made from off-cuts and tend to get left out in the rain. In February, my elder saw-horse started to be real shaky . . . and I noticed a matching pair of short red cedar Thuja plicata planks left over from the 2016 wood-shed project; and the 2023 planter project. I usually have a fund of endless 50x50mm oak Quercus robur fence-posts: endless because the pointy bit has rotted out. Nothing going to waste, the elder saw-horse was reduced to sticks [R] for going up  the chimney.

The result of the 2021 saw-horse project is still giving great service despite the top bars being nicked and notched all along from over-active chain-saw. I learned a good bit on that job and was happy that this years offcuts are 10cm shorter that 2021s - a saw-horse needs to be long enough . . . any longer is just extra weight and awkwardness when the it's being moved around. I also used up some surplus red fence preservative leaving the bottom ends of the saw-fetlocks soaking in the gloop overnight. That might just slow down the inevitable foot-rot. Oh, how I wish that I could drill a 12mm hole straight through two 50x50mm timbers rather than at a crazy angle. But the 12mm threaded stock went through the wonky hole anyway. Chekkittout below - the dinky red feet cosa rua that may be viewed at Kncokroe Cnoc Rua the red hill. Also the well-used weathered older brother / template in the background

Now we are back to two saw-horses - one for each wood-shed. Win!

Tribute philatelic

 An Post was celebrating 2025 International Women's Day [8th March] a couple of days early by launching a couple of stamps featuring Irish Women in STEM. In 2023, they recognised Political women, in 2024 it was sportistas. This year scientists, and why not? But the question was - whom should the apparatchiks of the postal service choose, leaving so many worthy names on the cutting room floor? And how do they decide?? Pick two [2] out of two dozen is not going to be "fair".

Anyway; A couple of weeks ago, I was RSVP-invited to a An Post Event at The Point on the edge of Dublin's docklands. They had arranged for Jess Kelly, tech correspondent for Newstalk FM, to innerview Aoife McLysaght about her journey from school to getting her face on a National postage stamp! As did, in parallel, Jocelyn Bell Burnell [whom prev] The conversazione was similar in look&feel and take-home to one I attended last month in Wexford. Many scientists, men and women, give a hat-tip to the science teacher in their secondary school. But are not invited to drill down into the skills or attributes of that early sensei of science.

One important element of that relationship is telling the younger person that they are smart and capable and could for sure leap tall buildings. And those encouraging, validating, statements are too often rarely heard when growing up. I knew Aoife before she was famous. And it seems that I was one of the people who distinguished between ignorance and stupidity. When you're young, you may know nothing, but nevertheless have an aptitude for finding stuff out. Teaching at its best is about framing questions that spark curiosity rather than transmitting the ideas of others. At some stage in a scientific career you stop taking notes about Hooke's Law and start formulating your own rules about how the world ticks. A good mentor says: you can do this.

At the An Post Event, on Mardi Gras, they secured some time from busy Minister James Lawless T.D., Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science and Linda Doyle, the Provost of TCD. It can get quite tiresome how parochial these leaders of the ship of state can be. Minister Lawless wanted to own Kathleen Lonsdale [bloboprev] because she was born in his constituency. Lonsdale died 5 years before the future Minister was born, so there's a dollop of hubris in claiming her for his bailiwick. And The Provost seems to imply that the two Stampees would have been at nothing without the imprimatur of her college. “Aoife, who holds the Chair of Evolutionary Genetics in Trinity, and Jocelyn, who is an Honorary Fellow in Trinity, have already stamped their mark in their research areas. It is fitting that they are now honoured in this way." It is just so much nonsense: Aoife and Jocelyn have made their own luck and would have done just fine regardless of what college they were associated with. It's not all about the environment, it's [also] about the intrinsic quality: resilience, smarts, openness, creativity. If Aoife hadn't worked for me in the Summer of 1996, she might not have spent the next 30 year staring at genome sequences - but rather making sense of some other aspect of the natural world.

Lawless and Doyle are, in a sense, both Prof McLysaght's bosses; because she is currently double jobbing as a) Professor of Evolutionary Genetics in Trinity College b) Government Science Advisor. Me, I'm only here for the merch [eight (8) stamps, a first day cover and two post-cards]:

 

Foul brood

Was I talking about spending a life-time culturing Paenibacillus spp.? I was. It is common enough in science. You pick a final year undergraduate project at random or because you have crush on one of the post-grads and you spend the next 40 years working out minuter details of what your supervisor was interested in . . . who got there because their supervisor was. But really Paenibacillus? never 'eard of it. I used to teach microbiology at The Institute but that doesn't mean I knew anything about it!

So I looked it up. Paeni- means almost and bacillus means little stick. They are distantly related to old Blob pals like Bacillus and Lactobacillus. Perhaps the most common example with in the genus is Paenibacillus larvae the causative agent of American foul-brood a fatal infestation of honeycomb. But there is also Paenibacillus vortex which grows in such striking patterns [L] on a Petri dish. Other Paenibacillus strains are valued for the anti-microbial properties and also for making industrially useful enzymes. 

But back to foul-brood, which can pop up pretty much anywhere in the world to the despair of bee-keepers. But no surprises when it turns out that there is a lot of diversity within the species Paenibacillus larvae some more damaging than others. One of the key diagnostic signatures are variations among their ERIC sequences. Whoa! that's a rabbit hole because ERICs were discovered by my then boss Paul Sharp just about the time I started working for him in the early 90s. It's also a bit odd to continue using ERIC for species which are not even in the same Kingdom as Enterobacteria.

Bacterial genomes, in contrast to ours, have only small stretches of non-coding DNA between the genes which get translated into protein. The phrase "DNA makes [RNA and RNA makes] protein and protein make everything else" has a lot of explanatory power. All enzymes, transporters, channels,  essential for everyday life are all proteins. Enterobacterial repetitive intergenic consensus (ERIC) is a ~127bp sequence which is found between genes in multiple copies in a lot of 'enterics' include E. coli and Salmonella - here's fragment of the ERIC consensus sequence clipped from the 1991 paper:

note the funny arrows on top of the sequence - they indicate the palindromes where CTTAC - pairs anti-parallel with - GTAAG to form a stable double helix structure. There are too many ERICs around, and the palindromes are too long for this to be a noisy coincidence; and molecular biologists have spent the last 25 years trying to figure out their function. It took Paul a couple of sessions in the pub to come up with ERIC as a memorable, expressive and mildly amusing acronym.

Around about then for Paul's birthday for a jape, I commissioned The Brother of the Beloved BTB, a graphic designer, to make The Boss a pack of business cards. This was before the WWW but after e-mails, so we included name, addr, eddr, phone and fax - and round the edge the 127 As Ts Cs and Gs of the newly discovered ERIC sequence. I thought that was a clever in-joke that might jump-start a geeky conversation about mutual progress at the frontier of sequence analysis. He thought it / I was weird.

Washout

We've been living 300m from the county road up a rough 1in10 bohereen for nearly 30 years. The year we moved in 1997, a large part of the surface was washed down to the bottom of the hill by a Summer rainstorm. It didn't help that the clatter of small fields above us had been converted into a single sloped 3½ hectare meadow pointing directly at the lane. In Feb 2010, exactly the same thing happened because a lot of snow thawed in a rush at night. It was only through the power of prayer that we didn't suffer a third washout in 2018.

In 2022, if was fixed that 100 tonnes of top-dress roadstone was delivered by the County Council  and spread u the lane by a meitheal of local farmers so that a procession of strangers could walk to the top of our hill. Imagine the shame if someone tripped over a loose stone. It looked pretty spiffing tbh but uncompacted was a bit of trudge for walkers. As we worked away spreading the gravel, I said to anyone who would listen [that would be N = 0] that it was pointless to put this down without sorting out the drainage first. That's three years ago, and we've had plenty rain since then, not to mention a succession of named Storms and the gravel was shaking down nicely as tractors and 4x4s went up and down.

In the wee hours of the morning Friday 21st Feb 2025 we had a yellow rain and wind warning. I didn't pay much attention after Darragh and Éowyn romped through in their big girl pants. But at first light the drain was still roaring full of water and I shucked myself into my rain-drain gear including chest-high Aldi waders [as R] to clear any log jams below us. The reason why we washed out in 2010 was because a couple of twigs got caught at the top end of a 30cm culvert and other material built up until the water had to spill up and out into the lane.  That's where I was caught by Pete the Post. He had a fine line in dry irony: "where are the neighbours, so . . . is it my back is out or my shovel is broke??". I replied that I was really the only one with skin in the game: the lane would have to get real bucketty before it stopped a tractor or a flock of sheep.

Having reassured myself about the downside, I trudged uphill to see where the water was (still) coming from and make a start on stemming the flow. Above us the water damage [example L] was much worse . . . because I've gone to some trouble to engineer dams and sumps to divert water from the road surface to the parallel drain. The worst part of the roadway would be a challenge to any car - and it's the worst part which is the gatekeeper. After many hours of nighttime rainfall it was bolt-stable-door-after-horse-fled futile, but nevertheless I cut some sods from the margin and dumped them upside down across a low patch in one of the ridges across the road where a positive river was spilling from the mountain. That worked to turn the flow to one side and so served as a diagnostic for where to do something more effective later.

The drain had sorted the gravel out in patches where it was a little deeper than average. And I spent a good part of Friday afternoon, in the drain excavating these tailings for a more useful purpose than going further downhill to block things or eventually finish up in Waterford Harbour. That was mildly satisfying as a whole-torso workout. And I filled a few crates with gravel that I could not sensibly spread immediately. Dry gravel has a density a little over 1.5x water. Guesstimating the volume suggests I've captured 150kg of this material for future use rather than immediate waste.

Tares

The Running Hare [reviewed prev] is all about a quixotic project to see if a farmer can grow wheat in 21stC England without killing everything that isn't Triticum aestivum. Everything dead includes all the worms which aerate the soil and all the microbes which release minerals and micro-nutrients from the subsoil. The standard practice is to spray 2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid aka 2,4-D when green starts to show after sowing - that will kill all the dicots and make the whole field monochrome - you can't eat poppy Papaver rhoeas, speedwell Veronica persica, cornflower Centaurea cyanus, mayweed Anthemis arvensis, corn marigold Glebionis segetum; Scarlet Pimpernel Anagallis arvensis, cleavers Galium aparine, or  colt's foot Tussilago farfara . . . so caedite eos kill them all.

Another [not-a-dicot] weed in among cereals is/was darnel Lolium temulentum, a close relative of Lolium perenne [prev] which is the current King of Pasture Grass. In olden days, darnel was a persistent pest because it was very difficult to clean its seed from the results of last year's harvest. Looks like wheat, quacks like wheat etc. especially before the seed-head appears but after it could be hoed out as an unwelcome interloper. When the seed corn was broadcast the next Spring, darnel was inevitably included in the mix and would compete for some part of the field's fertility. But it was not just a passive consumer of nutrients because Neotyphodium spp., endophytic fungi commensal with darnel produce lolines, a variety of hallucinogenic toxins. These natural chemicals are good for darnel because they incapacitate several insects which like to consume grasses. 

But lolines also incapacitate humans who ingest too much of the stuff as they loll about seeing things and behaving as if drunk [on ethanol]. Too much loline has been known to be fatal. But seeing visions and being in an altered state of mind has a long tradition of being embraced rather than avoided . . . at least for some people [priests, shamans] at some times [Saturday night, when you're coming up blank for tomorrow's homily]. Sid Thomas from Aberystwith U published an interesting tribute to Lolium temulentum and that plant's place in history. 

• Those tares, which featured in the bible? That's Lolium temulentum. 
• The Danes who were sprouting like cockle amongst the wheat before the early ethnic cleansing of the St Brice's Day Massacre? They were metaphorical Lolium temulentum. 

and now, in its turn, darnel has been condemned to the dustbin of history at least in the developed world.  The relentless, indefatigable drive for wheat monocultures has put darnel on the red list of endangered species because it only really knows how to thrive in wheat fields where every year provides a bare-field head-start. In other weedy communities - road-verges, for example - darnel just doesn't have to chops to compete. You'll have to look long and hard to find darnel in Ireland nowadays.

Sublime [ob]scene

 When we first ever moved into the Blackstairs, I was bumbling along in a neighbour's car and we came round a corner to be presented with a most spectacular view of that range of hills dizzying up from the checkerboard of fields and hedges and tapering away to the southern horizon.
"That's a most spectacular view", I said.
"Where?", he said.
"Well, everywhere!".
I don't think he understood what The Blethering Incomer  - TBI - was going on about. Nevertheless, it still is spectacular in its own understated not-the-Andes way.

Surely it's worth preserving a view so affecting? And doing so at all scales in the fractal landscape. Not only thinking hard about the costs as well at the utility of wind-turbines and electricity pylons but also paying attention to the details of what is perched in the hedgerows:
Dunnocks Prunella modularis [✓]
Sandwich wrappers Slobbo vulgaris [χ]

The weekend of 22nd Feb 2025 was designated the ~20th memorial An Taisce Trash Pick. We've been doing this every Spring, with some of the neighbours, since our kids were tall enough to not fit in a trash bag. We established a territory along the 1km stretch of the [60km/h!] local road between "The Monument" and "The Wall" - both sides. Because both sides, it's nicer and more efficient to walk the walk with some else. Saturday was gorgeous: sun-shiny, crisp, fresh. t.b.h the road margins were quite clean and the secluded car-park at The Monument surprisingly clean. Maybe Broken Windows Theory is working? 

I find it's easier to do the work without getting judgemental, let alone going mental, about it. When we finished, I sent an ironic comment to our local participants
"Best in show?? One flimsy brimful bag of used nappies".
Someone else responded with a suggestion about what punishment shd be meted out on the nappy perps [parents, I guess, not the incontinent infant]. But I demur: Once upon a time, the local authority collected everyone's trash as a public good. Then some bright spark decided that the process would be more efficient if put out to tender and Private Enterprises could compete to get the best value for the community. Competition worked well for making paperclips so cheap you could throw them away. The effect has been to have 3 competing trash collections running on the same streets in Tramore where one did the job before. And left all kinds of marginalised folk deciding that they couldn't afford both nappies and €600/yr to dispose of them.

As well as paying for the dump fees, An Taisce provides a stipend for tea and cookies in the village hall. I guess so we can all get together and congratulate ourselves for not being the kind of person who would fire a Lucozade bottle out of a car-window. After tea and chat, we went round the back of the hall to photo-op The Heap:

In case you're concerned, I c a r e f u l l y transferred 'my' nappies into a fit-for-purpose robust black bin bag, whc I have ◎ed. I turned my back on the trash, and there was the view which Michael Way thought made it worth the 50km trip from Wexford to teach drama to kids in the lee of Mt Leinster:

You cannot meaningfully have the spectacular view without cleaning up the foreground.

Not all men, science edition

International Day of Women and Girls in Science, is A Thing. This year it was marked [but not by Blob] on 11 February 2025. Wexford Science Café came to the party exactly a week too late . . . because we're on the 3rd Tuesday of the month, not the second. I posted about IDWGS on the correct day [Darwinday - 1] in 2018. WxScCa organized their event by having Amy Hassett a just-starting scientist (chatting with / interviewing) Mary Kelly a just-finishing one. They were about the same age as Dau.II and me, so there was a bit of one generation passing the chalice to the next. Gotta say it started off same-old, same-old with statistics about which areas of science had the most appallingly unequal sex-ratio in the 21stC - geology apparently. Of course we all agreed this was A Bad Thing and that things were getting better than 1925; but nobody in the room had a coherent strategy for how to chip away at the patriarchal monolith. It's pretty clear that having an inspiring female science teacher or auntie makes a difference . . . but quotas don't.

Older scientist has interviewed A Lot of people during her career. Her sense is that blokes present themselves as confident even if they are collywobbling inside; whereas women are more diffident and tend to qualify their abilities with a touch of realism. Interview committees [in my experience on both sides of the table] are cobbled together from available bodies and are kinda crap at sorting wheat from chaff: unwilling to puncture specious confidence or draw out shy competence. So Mr Know-it-Some gets ranked #1.

I've been gunning for a job in a formal interview only twice in my science career: for my first job and my last. The first time, I was shortlisted one of three for the post of sub-assistant lecturer in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1983. We three spent the whole day together being shown around, lunched, giving job seminars in turn. At the end of a long day we were sent to wait in one room while the committee made their deliberations across the hall. The other chap was getting antsy because, with luck and a following wind, he might just make a convenient train home; rather than kicking his heels for several hours after dark in a strange town. When the Head of Department burst open the door and beckoned to me to follow him, I demurred. Wouldn't they much rather take Other Chap first so he could get through and catch his train? Nope! They wanted me, and now . . . because my sketchy creds were deemed #1. Only if (on reflection and taking account of one day's lived experience on that campus) I refused the job offer would they move on to the next best candidate. I really was green when I was Dau.II's age. But here I be a few months later:

Almost exactly 30 years later, I was shorted listed for my final job at The Institute [which event spawned The Blob]. Again, I didn't play any cards because I didn't even know what cards to play. Someone asked why I wanted the job. Instead of outlining why I was the bee's knees and the cat's whiskers, I confessed that I didn't want it much but if they looked at my CV, they might decide that I could be a useful member of their team. If they didn't, I was happy-out that something else would turn up. After decades of nepotism and fixing, HR at The Institute was trying to codify the hiring process into a series of check-boxes and attribute scores that would objectively rise the cream to the top. I guess it didn't matter what I said, so long as I was clocking [5] on most of the several desirable qualities.

 Despite trying valiantly to shoot myself in the foot, I was offered, and took, both of those jobs . . . and that made all the difference. It wasn't that I lacked blokey confidence; it was just that my ambition genes were shot off in the war.

Meanwhile back at Wexford IDWGS 2025, Younger Scientist made an interesting point: whatever about hiring and promoting more women in Science, could we not just/also hire more different personality types. Earlier it had been suggested that some women had developed successful science careers by behaving like success men: ambitious, focused, selfish, single. Well, heck, we don't need anymore of those personality types - they make everyone else miserable! Caitlin Moran maintains that if you only hire/promote a limited range of people / types then your enterprise finishes up stupider, less agile, less creative, less profitable . . . and less fun!

72 words for hare

Richard Feynman made a big ToDo about the names of birbs being irrelevant: the birbs don't giveadamn: they care more about the right song, the right food, the right number of eggs-per-clutch. But Feynman is not quite right because the labels we apply to the things in the world help us get on the same page of understanding how things tick. I've riffed on what do you call a dandelion? by abstracting a list from Geoffrey Grigson's wonderful compendium An Englishman's Flora. When gifts must be given, it's safe in our home to present naturist natural history books. That's how The Running Hare:The Secret Life of Farmland by John Lewis-Stempel appeared in the house sometime last year. JLS is a farmer-writer from the Welsh Marches in Herefordshire, and he's not above shooting and eating grey squirrels Sciurus carolinensis. [as R] Mais revenons-nous à nos lièvres Lepus timidus! Early on in the book there is a mention of the medieval poem called The Names of the Hare, which include

þe hare, þe scotart,
þe bigge, þe bouchart,
þe scotewine, be skikart,
þe turpin, þe tirart,
þe wei-betere, þe ballart,
þe gobidich, þe soillart,
þe wimount, þe babbart,
þe stele-awai, þe momelart,
þe cuele-I-met, þe babbart,
þe scot, þe deubert,
þe gras-bitere, þe goibert,
þe late-at-hom, þe swikebert,
and so on and on

Abstracted from þis manuscript which is more than half footnotes¹. For updated here's Ben Whishaw reading Seamus Heaney's version of the litany. Or for a guitar-driven gallop. The take-home seems to be that it's okay not to like hares very much . . . except after they have been slow-braised with onions carrots bay-leaves and whatever you're having yourself. And on inventory, it's always nice to have an excuse to read Henry Reed's 1942 anti-war poem Naming of Parts "The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers: They call it easing the Spring."

 JLS, for his part, loves hares and wants to give them a bit of a sanctuary, if only for a two year tenancy on a peculiar property, part of which he gives over to nature as a spray-free traditional wheat field with all the weeds wildflowers that entails. Its a quixotic endeavour but also a proof of concept showing that wheat can be grown, harvested, threshed and fed to animals - and peeps - without involving Bayer or Monsanto. As well as the wildflowers, the wheatfield becomes a haven for birds, badgers, foxes, toads and . . . hares. All of which the author observes from his Landrover or from the lee of a hedge. Towards the end of the book he asserts:

I have seen hares by moonglow,
and I've gazed into the heavens.
I've felt the true peace of the World.

And good for him!

¹Proceedings of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, Literary and Historical Section 3.6 (1935).

Flying trampoline

I casually mentioned our storm destroyed trampoline in a piece about wind-throw and firewood. But I didn't go into detail. Like everyone and their dog, we bought a trampoline in the 00s when Dau.I and Dau.II were tweens. It seemed like fun and it came with more safety features than some which were sold in an unregulated market. The upright poles were sheathed in foam tubes and supported a child-proof safety net. The tubular-steel circular frame and the steel springs were covered by foam-filled water-proof mats. We also implemented a strict [boo-hoo no fun] policy of one bouncing body at a time. At the same time, on a different trampoline,  one of the neffies lost half a front tooth . . . embedded in the skull of a pal who was bouncing up as neffie was coming down.  A year earlier a niece had bounced off a trampoline and sustained a compound fracture in her arm. And my then boss's neighbour's boy had broken his neck and died having launched at his trampoline from the roof of the garden shed. Anyway, here it is, in its heyday with three tweens for scale:

What could possibly go wrong??  Well nothing even close to those harrowing accidents. One morning I got up and glanced into the haggard then stopped a rubbed my eyes because the trampoline wasn't there as usual at the bottom of the haggard. It's not like you could miss it!  I rounded the corner of the shed and saw it, all bend out of shape, at the Top of the haggard. During the night, which had been windy but not Storm Force, the trampoline took off like a flying squirrel and sailed 40m up a 1:10 slope until it whacked a pine tree. 10m further West, it would have taken the lid off our 16ft touring caravan = spare bedroom. 

I was a Navy brat, I knew about windage [The force of the wind on a stationary object]. I had therefore weighted down the tubular steel base of the apparatus with eight [8] 4in = 100mm solid concrete blocks. Which everbode kno is 8 x 22.5 = 180kg. But that's pffft nothing when the surface of the trampoline [not including the contribution of the safety netting] is 20 sq.m. and the wind is, say, 60km/h. We had that trampoline for several years, and the winds had been much stronger than The Last Night of the Trampoline. The key factors must have been a) the direction of the wind funnelling through the screen of trees to the South b) something something resonance: where the precise speed of wind bounced the whole disc off its blocks and set it off uphill.  

Don't do this at home kids! Forget trampoline tether kits. Only go trampolining somewhere you can sue the owner's ass if something goes wrong. But even then the compo really won't cover the damage.

Treemageddon

In early December were endured Storm Darragh which brought down 1 rowan Sorbus aucuparia; 2 sceagh Crataegus monogyna and and large ½ ash Fraxinus excelsior. Oddly, the night before the storm, another rowan, which had been leaning uphill forever, quietly sank to the ground as if exhausted. When Éowyn blasted through 7 weeks later it was a much bigger event nationally but we only lost one (1) more rowan. Inconveniently that was 320m from the woodshed: as far as you can get and still be on the farrrm. More importantly, it was 25m downhill; which makes an uphill struggle with a loaded wheelbarrow.  Rowan is about the least useful tree we have. It is beloved by ivy Hedera helix; it tend to branch copiously from near the base; it tends to have standing dead branches; the bark of these branches stays on and stays wet which tends to rot out the timber. Even if you can get the timber out of the wet (by shucking off the skin and covering it against the rain) it may still be punky before it's ready as firewood.

The key thing for drying wood is to a) increase the water-shedding surface area by cutting to lengths and splitting b) persuading the breeze to whisk past sucking out the moisture c) keeping the rain off. In that order, i.m.o. The design of the wall of the woodshed was hit-and-miss vertical cedar planks with staggered gaps which (in theory) allow breeze and discourage rain. In processing the fallen rowan trees, I started filling one bay of the woodshed [4ft wide] with logs and billets ~35cm long. When I had stacked two ranks of these logs 1200mm W by 2000mm H [that's about half a cord for Nordamericanos] I figured that the wind-whistling was getting diminishing returns. Resolved therefore to give what I had stacked a few months of unimpeded drying and start another pile elsewhere.

What you see [L], is cannibalized parts of our storm destroyed trampoline, formed into 2 squares of tubes braced 30cm apart and oriented N-S -- at right angles to the prevailing wind. The N side of the square [to the R] is tied up against an old apple tree. It's not a permanent solution, and I'm hoping it won't collapse before I decide it's time to move the semi dried logs into the woodshed. And let me say that, since picture was taken, I have at least doubled the quantity of logs on the rack.

I thought I was working through the wind-throw of Darragh in quite good time, I R not 30 anymore, so I am not getting all macho about Outdoor Work. One tank of gas in the chain saw will see me through a happy hour of chop-chop with a bit of pully-hauly to see what I'm doing. Then it's 🛑 stop.

But walking through the fields to the most distant fallen rowan, I clocked that 3 more downed rowan trees [all with too much ivy and so too much windage]. It's a bit disheartening because rowan is kinda useless [as explained above] but I can't let them lie where they are: collapsed over fences and occluding the grass from sheep. I think we've have more trees down in the last ten weeks than in the previous ten years. And we can't blame ash-dieback.

 

Boys at sea

From my beachcombing days, I've written extensively about buoys on shore. This is something completely different. When the family came home for Christmas, it was decided [plebiscite] that we'd sit in a row on the sofa and watch Master & Commander again. Part of this was to induct a 3rd generation into what-the-family-knows . . . about bowsprits and halyards. Most of us know Withnail & I by heart of course he's the fucking farmer etc. not to mention Kenneth Branagh doing Crispin Crispian. If you haven't watched, M&C is the 2 hour distillation of a multi-year friendship between the Jack Aubrey, Captain of a Napoleonic era British man-o'-war, and his supernumerary surgeon-naturalist Stephen Maturin. Distillation because Patrick O'Brien developed the relationship over 20 volumes and 7,000 pages of text.

Their friendship is based on complementary virtues, epitomized by Aubrey playing the fiddle to Maturin's the cello. They tick a few boxes on the multiple intelligence score sheet: Maturin more cerebral; Aubrey better with people. But the bottom line is that the Captain always makes the final call "subject to the exigencies of the service" etc. etc. There is a fundamental imbalance in power between the two parties. That's partly because, as my Ship's Captain father always maintained, with great power aboard goes great responsibility; especially in adverse conditions. 

Last week, on a whim, I started re-reading, after a gap of 50 years, The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monsarrat. It's another love story: between Captain Ericson and Lieutenant "Number One" Lockhart [more or less Monsarrat] set in another brutal [mid 20thC] war at sea. Because they are British their respect and mutual admiration is super-undemonstrative. Here again, the buck stops with the Captain and that drives a power inequity into the relationship. The film, starring Jack Hawkins and Donald Sinden, like M&C compresses and elides a long book into 2 hours. Which makes it altogether too exciting. The book by being so long better captures the idea that War is long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of terror.  

The Cruel Sea, the book, is about 25% too long. After their first ship is sunk, halfway through the war, the structure of the book changes from a begin-middle-end narrative into a hotch-potch of vignettes and scraps which takes the book up to May 1945 and VE day.

Like a tonne of blocks

Actually, not like a tonne of blocks but a tonne of blocks: all 44 of them. Ten years ago, when I used to teach remedial math, I set some students a task to calculate the volume of a bale of 44 x 4in-solid concrete blocks. The data were given in mm [because that's how blocks are reported at builders' merchants] (100mm x 215mm x 450mm) -- and requested&required an answer in cu.m. [because that seems an appropriate metric for something that fills a small farm-trailer]. Few of the answers were correct and some of them were hilariously wrong. hilarious? I was careful not to laugh at students who'd just ground through the appalling Leaving Cert math curriculum which teaches by fixes and tricks and rote learning while Not developing a feeling for numbers and their relative size. I was otoh delighted to share the results of my speculation about why 44?? which hinged on the density of concrete [2⅓x the density of water] and that 44 blocks weighed exactly 1 tonne.

Well, I don't teach no more because I R retire. otoh, although there is no money in it, I try to do some work every day: use it or lose it. If I did no exercise, my limbs would atrophy and visitors would find me a mere skittle prone upon the sofa. It is also obvs that I'm not 25 anymore: when I was fit for 8 or 10 hours of pully-hauly a day and ready for more the day following. I am contracted to run the chain-saw for the full of one tank of gas . . . and then stop and clean up. Dangerous, dopey, things happen when I'm using a chainsaw at the best of times; there's extra hazard in there if I'm tired or fussed or under time pressure. 

Last week, we had two brilliant back-to-back dry sunny days and I knew I'd regret failing to make progress on the outdoor chores. As a change from working my upper bod with the chainsaw, I decided that I would salvage and move a bale of concrete blocks [result! L]. Those blocks formed the perimeter of a raised veg.bed in the top garden, which was assembled in Apr 2o2o nearly 5 years ago One edge of which you can see ◎ in the pic.  Much earlier, before Dau.II had left home, the two of us had created a few raised beds inside and outside the polytunnel. They were constructed by a) levelling out the ground, b) laying out sides of horizontal 4in-solids c) surmounted by overlapping vertical 4in-solids d) the blocks fixed in place with a 4:1 sand:cement mix.

Block beds were a fabulous improvement on beds made of {timber | election-posters | pallets} and the same for compost bins. But y'have to be confident that the bed/bin is going to useful where it is built for twenty years. In Apr 2o2o, I had no such confidence; I didn't have someone to help; but I did have a lorra blocks. Accordingly I made a lazy-bed by piling 3 layers of horizontal blocks atop each other and filling the basin with compost and top-soil. Now we're going solar, and the panels are scheduled to be installed where that 'temporary' bed was located. 

It took me more than one hour but less than two to salvage the tonne-o-blocks and stack them out of the way of Team Solar when they arrive for their site works -- soon we hope. For reasons, it didn't happen last year, despite me filling a valise with folding money and shaking it enticingly at solar contractors across the sunny south east. The trend nowadays is to pay money to a 'gym' to lift weights to develop abs or pecs or upper body strength. Whatever the solar costs, I know I'm ahead by doing weight-training for free at home rather in a gym in town.