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.

More hay, less speed

Thirty year ago, it were, when we were living in Dublin. Bright and early one Saturday morning, The Boy getting hammered on Thunderbird in a dip in the dunes at Portmarnock being at a pal's gaff overnight, we took a figairey to visit Souad & Pat the Salt on Costa na Déise. There was no M50 and no M9 back then, although the Naas Bypass 30km from Dublin opened in 1983. We took the scenic route, albeit called the N9:  Naas - Kilcullen - Moone - Castledermot - Carlow - Paulstown - Gowran - Dungarvan- Thomastown - Ballyhale - Mullinavat - Waterford - The Sweep - Kill - Tea! With clear roads and a following wind it usually took 3 hours: . Then, sometime after Kilcullen, the car started to peck and stutter. We pulled into Carlow, were given a diagnosis of air-in-the-fuel-line, and advised that we'd be fine if we kept to 80km/h rather than bouncing up and down like pop-corn poppin'. On Sunday evening, revived by the sea breeze and good food, we sedately returned to Dublin. It was busy enough with traffic, as loadsa 1st or 2nd generation Dubliners returned from helping with the {shearing | haying | muck-spreading} at their several home places across the country. Being compelled by mechanical necessity to keep the speed below 50mph = 80km/h, the return journey took us all of 3hours and 10 minutes. And Arrive Alive: which is always a win.

The Man aka The Nanny State has since last Friday 7th Feb 2025 curtailed Our Rights to drive like the clappers down any and every road in the country by setting a default 60km/h on Local roads - down from 80km/h. That is the meaning of the bend sinister with 5 lines sable on a ground argent [as L]. Huge Ballyhoo in Ballyhale! and across the country. The importance and, to an imperfect degree, the quality of Irish roads is designated by the initial letter: M motorway - N national - R regional - L local. Every highway and byway in the country is so designated - on a server in the National Roads Authority.

Less so in the hinterlands. Where a lesser road connects with a greater, the signage is present as at the start of the L4015 in Waterford. But at any subsequent forks in the road all bets are off. With SatNav and GPS and EirCodes, physically labelled road intersections on roads less travelled is a bit yesterday. Old timers still navigate from farm-gate to the creamery or into town for new wellies without any sort of road sign. The intention is to install the new bend sinister signs at the start of all L roads, so drivers know where they are . . . even if they have no idea where they are, like

Whatevs, so long as R roads still default to 80km/h, I don't think it will much affect journey times. If they get cranked down to 60, then we'll have to allow an extra 5 minutes to get to the railway station. That well-used [hey, free travel!!] journey offers two routes
1) directly over the hill [20.6km 24 min] or
2) 500m to the R702 and then into town [23km 26 min]
As route 1) is almost entirely L roads, it is likely to now take longer to accomplish at a mandatory 60km/h. But t.b.h. we gave up on that route after two actual tips and several NDEs: meeting boy racers coming round blind corners on two wheels or a handful of sheep burst out of a gap in the hedge. Option 2) 'main' road is winding, with potholes in the margins, but at least there is a line down the centre and enough room for a car and a 30-tonne dump truck to pass without clipping each other. 

That road with which we began our journey today used to be The Waterford Road and then The N9. Since they opened the M9 motorway, the N9 has been down-graded to the R448. Proper order too, it was a terrible road if you were in a hurry: with l o o n n g stretches where we were compelled to bumble along behind a mud-slinging tractor because the road was all twists and turns and blind gateways.

Footnote on etymology. I was always confused by more haste, less speed because in modern usage haste and speed are close synonyms.  But in Old English spēd meant success or luck, a meaning which still exists in Godspeed for bon voyage. Which makes the translation: take it handy or you may regret it.

Oh, it is a farmer's life

We were at our neighbour's 90th b.day party in the middle of January. Quite trad: the PP came to say mass and offer the sacrament. Two dozen, incl. PP, sat down to a long table with heaping plates of hot turkey&ham or salmon plus mash&roasters and mixed root veg. Followed by huge quarters of apple pie (or cheesecake for wimps) and then mugs of strong tea. I got talking to the oldest chap, now a father in his turn, from the family that bought the rest of 'our' farm in 1996. I complemented him on his two nieces, whom we see more often because the second son was doing most of the farming; the oldest having escaped to college and engineering. We were ould fellas on about the youth of today in surprisingly complementary terms. Those nieces were hard as nails, up for anything, alert, interested and beginning to be assets although neither has started primary school. Their cousins might do Scouts (on the weekend, like) learning about owls, but the nieces could be up to their knees in shite, facing down a skittish beast, any day of the week because that's what farmers do.

Not everyone wishes . . . to spend the majority of their life dressed in the kind of clothes designed to be hosed down. But those who do tend to be assets. That quote is from Field Work: What Land Does to People & What People Do to Land by Bella Bathurst; my latest dead-tree book. It is excellent. The first chapter describes her riding shotgun with The Fallen Animal Guy; who is licensed to haul away stock which have the misfortune to die before getting lurried to the abattoir and added to the food-chain. We have the equivalent here. Years ago, a friend from USA was visiting with his son. By coincidence we had a dead sheep in a wheelbarrow awaiting removal. Friend thought this was an excellent teaching moment for his city-boy teenager. When the ramp of the dump-truck came down there was a rolling waft of mammal guts from an enormous cow with legs pointing every which way. Our visitors took a step back and half raised their arms in futile defense. A teaching moment indeed . . . Bathurst's chapter is like that in sp♠des.

The rest of the book explores other aspects of the darker side of British farming. But it is also a rolling tribute to families who rise to the challenge of wresting a living from the land and the hoops [financial, ethical, bureaucratic, inter-personal] they must negotiate to do what they love - rain or shine, hail or heat-stroke, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year, 70 years a lifetime. My second [that's 2/2] graduate student was a farmer from East Galway. Not a farmer's son, although he was that too, but a farmer and contractor in his own right although only 22. He'd put himself through college getting paid €€€s for driving machines during silage season and any time something big needed to be moved somewhere else. I guess he learned to reverse a tractor-and-trailer though a narrow gateway years before he was legally entitled to do that.  A tractor is essentially the same [because the design-of-things makes it intuitive] as a back-hoe - dumper-truck, - forklift - combine-harvester . . . and it's a transferable skill.

Perhaps more significantly, when you're at the end of the far-acre and your mower stops going it's not so easy to call for expert help and the help can't come till after the weekend and the hay must be knocked because a front is barrelling in from the Atlantic. Farmers don't give up then, they scratch the head, roll up the sleeves, find the lump-hammer in the toolbox and see if it can't be fixed, or bodged enough to finish this task before dark. Bathurst sums it up: [son of the soil] works at a recruitment agency in London who only employs people from an agricultural background. The thing about farmers, he says, is that they’re adaptable – the human multitools of the professional world. ‘You get someone off a farm and they can fix a car, fix a plug, fix a boiler, put their hand in a ewe and pull a lamb out – they’re so practically based that . . . they’re like twice three times better.  I feel the same about anyone [chapeaux! The Boy] who has successfully finished a degree at The Open University. Except that farmers have all the gumption, drive, stoicism and can-do of OU students and have a Masters in Vice-grips.

Harry's Gate

No, not Harry's Game; read on.  In March 1996, after six years a-lookin' we bought an old farm-house (with 7 hectares and some outbuildings) halfway up a hill in the Irish Midlands. It required A Lot of work: the 1941 vintage house had no plumbing (inside or out); the electric was rudimentary; half the front-door was missing; and there was a long-ignored hole in the roof. The Beloved was the contractor - sourcing well-borers, plumbers, sparkies, central heating ppl able for underfloor heating, tilers, builders, carpenters . . . who all came in series or parallel as required. It took a year of unremitting effort, by-passing obstacles great and small; incl. driving the lads to keep working till 6pm rather than gawping at Comet Hale-Bopp. Don't imagine I did much on site - I was usually in town

We threw a party for everyone and their families on the Sunday of St. Patrick's weekend 1997 and woke up in our own new beds, in our own new bedrooms, in our own new home. We had exhausted all our treasure and stamina and had still only made the farm-house habitable. But it was enough core infrastructure to start raising two small girls, a few sheep and some chickens; and living the good life. It took ten (10) years to get our mojo back for building.  In 2007 a couple of craftsman builders Harry and James coursed over our horizon and were tasked to put a slated roof on the most solid of the derelict sheds. They were only in roofing for the money: James was an architectural heritage bloke: all lime-mortar and details; while Harry was an artist in metalwork who would have stopped in his forge if there was any market for his craft. They were a bit on the blow-in side, like ourselves, and I remember a few hilarious lunches when they came up to the kitchen for soup and cold-cuts.

When the slating was done, we had pity on young Harry and commissioned him to make two steel arty "pedestrian" gates to keep dogs and sheep out of the garden while allowing easy human access [it's all in the hanging and the hinges]. I had recently returned from Santiago and the design referenced the concha de peregrino. A very few of the hikers up our lane have caught the reference and talked about their own camino. Here is Harry's top gate between the two granite pillars that I made a bit more vertical to frame (and hang) the steel.

Now, I ask you: does it look like a gate? Despite the the sunburst / scallop design, it still looks like a gate, yes? rather than a bedstead . . . or a toilet?? 

but one walker last week was bamboozled enough, by a trick of the light or an optical illusion, to squat in the lee of the gatepost for a piddle. Fine, fair enough, but also thought it was fine fair enough to leave her tinkle tissue for me to pick up and contribute to our compost heap. They say that Chinese peasant farmers with holdings abutting the road would install a closet with a bucket in the hope of securing some humanure as free fertilizer. But we're not in Kansas China anymore! It's not the first time I've had to clean up after the entitled.

Seville Savvy

I have written records of our marmalade making adventures going back to 2002. I must have made it before then because when, we lived in England 1983-1990 a lorra jam was made from a lorra different sorts of fruit. What couldn't be boiled up with sugar and sealed [jam] was warmed up with sugar and yeast and bottled [plonk some mildly radio-active]. But around 2002, I got alongside a canny method for fool-proofing marmalade. This involves separating 

• process "pectin release" [simmer oranges for 3 hours in enough water to cover] from 
• process "combine pectin, acid and sugar to make jam that sets" [bring orange gloop (less seeds and pith) PLUS 2x as much sugar PLUS coarse chopped skins to a roiling boiling and keep it there for 10-15 minutes].

Looking back on my early marmalade notes shows that we've made considerable changes to the protocol mostly in the line of simplify simplify.[that would be Thoreau]. Now we've got the right kit and the lived experience and the notes to reliably knock off a year's supply of marmalade from nothing more than oranges, sugar, water and time [maybe seven hours elapsed time from a standing start, of which half is actually working]. The other solid is that we have a reliable "3 generation" team: BobTheSeville, Dau.II and the latter's odd-mother who have known and liked each other for 30 years.

We haven't made marmalade since Jan 2023. Our Seville supplier from 2 years ago has retired and I had to scrabble for another. Top-tip: make sure your dentist and your fruiterer are much younger than you are. Shout out for Bolger's Fariview of Waterford: serving the SouthEast retail and wholesale for 75 years!  Although it was late in the marmalade season, Bolger's sourced me a 12kg flat of Sevilles, to be collected on the morrow, for €25. The next Saturday, Lá Fhéile Bríde, I was alone in the house and started on processing 24/93rds of the oranges as a first batch . . . to see if I still had the touch. 7 hours later, result! [L] showing that I could still do it. Note also ◎ the latest bit of kit - a 2kg quartz boulder to keep the wafer-thin lid down on the stainless steel saucepan in which I now do the 1st 3-hour boil. Seville oranges float, hot Sevilles positively bob and the pan is Full. A weighted lid really minimizes water-loss and a steamy kitchen. Cast iron 7.5lt Cousance? so yesterday! And so damnably heavy.

Cost: it is remarkable how well oranges have held their value over the last 20 years: between 2005 and 2015 a crate of Sevilles cost €20±€2. Now it's about €25±€2. Sugar otoh has gone vertical: up 50% from 2021 to 2023. For this batch 

• Materials. Sugar €6.80, oranges €6.45, water €0.00. 
• Labour: 1 hour prep. 2 hours process. 3 x €MinWage = €38.10 
• Total €51.35 or €2.85 per jar
• cf: Fruitfield Old Time Irish Coarse Cut Marmalade 454G €3.29 
• If you ignore labour it’s €0.80 a jar
• cf: cheapest Stockwell & Co Orange Marmalade 454G €0.49

Team Seville assembled on Lá Fhéile Blaise the Monday following Lá Fhéile Bríde which has been a public holiday since 2023. I sprang out of bed at 06:30 so that Process Pectin for Batch II 2025 could start at 07:00 and the hard work could start after breakfast at 10:00. As soon as the the Pectin Process Pan PPP was empty, I started off batch III for after lunch.

By the time we'd enjarred Batch III we were all kinda knackered: but were revived by tea, toast and . . . marmalade. Over the weekend we created 18 + 18 + 23 [some kinda a small - we ran out of jam-jars] pots which should see us through the year. We still have [rotate your stock!] 5 pots of vintage 2023 to eat first. 

I froze the last 20 oranges after first scrubbing them down with a 4:1 solution of white vinegar against the surface fungi.

ill thrift

Farm animals are subject to all sorts of conditions & diseases with exotic names: bloat, braxy, fluke, hoose, scour. These can be congenital or infectious or some sort of trace-element deficiency. It can be difficult of diagnosis: the symptoms of too-much selenium overlap with those of too-little. Once they've got a reliable diagnosis, farrrmers want to knock it on the head in a way that is timely, effective and cheap.

Thyroxine is essential for growth and metabolic health in humans and livestock and also incorporates iodine. Just a little I goes a long way, but if your soil is deficient, iodine won't appear in the fodder and something must be done. Likewise with vitamin B12 and cobalt. Lambs which get along fine, and meet their weight markers while on their mother's milk, sometimes fail to thrive after weaning. This is known as ill-thrift or [cobalt]-pine, and becomes a known thing on some farms because,

 like our selenium deficiency, there isn't enough cobalt in that soil. It then becomes an addition on the long list of ThingsToDo to prepare the product for market. The treatment is known, readily available and the cost-benefit is clear: "Oral cobalt supplementation costs less than 1 penny per 25 kg lamb. Production losses from poor growth and delays to marketing may cost £10-£15 per lamb." But it's a time-eating pain to bring the lambs in every month and given them the cobalt or vitB12 that they need.

Well, it turns out that some varieties of willow Salix spp. are hyper-accumulators of cobalt and lambs have a taste for the stuff. It also grows fast, especially in the wet soils that are suitable for sheep . . . because barley or spuds or mangolds or cattle aren't an option. A trial in NE England sponsored by The Oglesby Charitable Trust, has been investigating the effects of feeding willow to lambs. 

It's interesting that lambs are avid for willow; because our sheep feel the same about ivy Hedera helix. When we had snow followed by 5 days of sub-zero temps two weeks ago, we were a bit caught with our pants down. We had only one 25kg bag of mmmm good sheep muesli but that's like dessert and not enough to sustain 15 sheep indefinitely. We also had a big round bale of hay but about half of each armful gets trampled into the snow and/or shat upon. Accordingly I coursed about the property looking for the biggest, greenest, nearest sources of ivy and dragged them up to the top field where the sheep where sheltering in place. It's not clear if ewes love ivy because if supplies a dietary deficiency or because it is green and available in the winter.

Back when I was still active in science I spent a few years facilitating an enthusiastic young scientist towards his eventual PhD in Lithium Sudies. One of the sub-projects which got published was an investigation of whether different species of plant preferentially extract lithium from the soil. It turns out that they do:

The local garden centre was selling seeds for oilseed rape Brassica napus; cabbage Brassica oleracea; sunflower Helianthus annuus; tomato Solanum lycopersicum and bittercress Cardamine hirsuta. The Effective planted them out, dobbed the soil with lithium and measured the concentration of that element in the leaves and stems. Figure 2, shown above, suggests that some species, like bittercress, suck it up goodo while others, like tomato, won't have anything to do with the stuff. Crap-detector: you shd be suspect of any paper where none of the authors and none of the editors noticed a typo H. annuus and also that the publishers MDPI are flagged as predatory: they will publish any-old-shite so long as someone pays the page-charges. So a pinch of lithium salt here although the observation can be easily replicated. 

And it is known that some species, like the daisy-adjacent Berkheya coddii, can hoover nickel and cobalt out of the soil. This can be an elegant way of remediating old industrial sites or mine tailings.