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]:

 

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.