Wexford Science Caffeine

1st October, International Coffee Day, prepare yourself

☕Who knew? Not me! Until the convener of the Wexford Science Café told us . . . and arranged for the nearest date [every third Tuesday of the month, folks] to look at the health science of coffee. He parceled out some analyses among three of the usual suspects. I was tasked to summarize the work of Peter Kistler, a cardiologist from Melbourne. Anne read a paper by Jennifer Temple, from Nutrition and Health, U.Buffalo NY. And Padraig took the interface between James Hoffmann, coffee podcaster and Tim Spector, a gut microbiome maven from UCL, UK. Links and refs at post-foot

☕I don't have direct skin in the game. At home, if I'm lucky I get a latte [L] on Saturday morning otherwise it is strictly tea; although I make it wee-k. Indeed I have ~4 "cups of tea" before breakfast every day but that's not builder's tea the colour of tomato soup; it is nearer to hot water over which a tea-bag has been passed. But coffee research uses "cup of coffee" in questionnaires and reports without ever defining how big "cup" is let alone how much caffeine lurks below the surface. This is adjacent to the famous Primo Levi tale in  which a scientific protocol required peculiarly specific 23 'drops' of a reagent. Turned out a historic typo had replaced 2-3 drops with 23.

☕But, from the evidence gathered and presented at WexSciCaf two weeks ago, coffee should really be promoted as a health-bev. And for A Lot of my section of YT presenters whore themselves out for goop-adjacent products I've underlined evidence, because YT is chocha-mocha with 🧲attractive🧲 assertions about the health bennies of woo. 

☕In many cases the benefits are not due to caffeine, because decaf is quite as beneficial. Coffee is a complex chemical cocktail [soluble fibre; quinic acid; chlorogenic acid; citrate; complex carbohydrates; diterpenes]. Also in several of the reliable studies, the effects are U-shaped: abstainers and over-indulgers [>4 cups a day] get sicker than moderate 2-3 cups a day. Documented coffee-bennee:

• 25% ↓↓ likelihood of heart attack 
• 6%  ↓↓ atrial fibrillation AF
• transitory ↑↑ in blood pressure in coffee noobs; 
• after 2 weeks zero effect
• 12% ↓↓ incidence of type-2 [late onset] diabetes
• 13% ↑↑ energy expenditure so ↓↓ obesity and metabolic syndrome 
• 20%  ↓↓ brain blood flow, so ↓↓ stroke incidence
• 11% ↓↓ in heart failure

☕Kistler's group in particular have trawled the peer-reviewed scientific literature to carry out a meta-analysis of coffee's effects. Meta-analysis will weight larger, longer, case-control studies over small reports with large HEADLINE effects which cannot be reproduced in larger samples, or in a different cohort.

☕One intriguing observation comes out of Spector's UCL microbiome research. The protocol is to invite volunteers to keep a food diary for an extended time and take periodic health check ups with questionnaires about mood, cognitive ability, BP, 'bloods' for circulating inflammatory markers and . . . fecal samples. Team Spector ran those 💩💩 sample and wrote up the results: Coffee consumption is associated with intestinal Lawsonibacter asaccharolyticus abundance and prevalence across multiple cohorts. Lawsonibacter is anaerobic and not a million evolutionary miles from Clostridium spp. [bloboprev] several of which are associated with serious adverse human health outcomes [C.diff, botulism]. Lawsonibacter loves coffee, all adults will have a little of this bug in their gut-soup but they grow gangbusters when you start to take coffee. One of the by-products of its metabolism is butyrate which is known as an essential immune modulator. 

☕ coffee is loaded with fibre. Most of us in the West subsist on a fibre-light diet. Denis "lymphoma" Burkitt was banging on the virtues of fibre for at least 40 years. I think his, and my, idea of "fibre" was all about oatmeal, wholemeal bread and mighty floaters in the t'ilet. But define fibre as complex chained carbs, beloved of good bacteria, and it turns out that 2-3 cups of coffee is supplying 20-30% of the fibre in our fibre depleted diet!

Footnotes, references 

• Temple 2017 The Safety of Ingested Caffeine: A Comprehensive Review
• Kistler 2018a Caffeine and Arrhythmias Time to Grind the Data
• Kistler 2018b Cardiovascular effects of caffeinated beverages
• Hoffmann and Spector Coffee's hidden health benefits [70min YT]
• Lawsonibacter, and also isolation

getting noticed

I came late to bloggin' - in Jan 2013 far more blogs were being abandoned than started. If I was keeping a diary, it would be safely unread in a drawer somewhere: putting meanderings on the internet is expecting someone anyone! else to read it. But I learned, before ever The Blob started, that those someones are much less interested / invested in what I have to say than I am. In  the early days, I used to check a) how many words I had typed up to throw out there b) how many pageviews PVs had resulted. I was jesting about my unlikely readers in Ukraine before Ukraine was on the mental map of pretty much anyone in Ireland.

For the longest time, I was sending out more words each day than there were PVs. But sometime recently, that has switched and teatime yesterday, The Blob 'achieved' 3 million PVs: 

while the Blob's word count is a tad over 2.5 million. Those PV stats have gotta be nonsense; or bots and scrapers, rather than real people with eyeballs and a thoughtful disposition. A few years ago, Metafilter alerted me to the ooh.directory of 'active' blogs created by Phil Gyford whom we've met before curating the Pepys Diary online. Gyford's bots are a bit slow [fair enough given that the internet is Large] but they do find Blobs a few hours after they are posted:

which noticed just before lunch yest at 13:00hrs, and that Blob was posted ~5 hours earlier, not 34 minutes. But still, ooh's sort of attention is going to have a much higher proportion of walking talking humans than 253958 somethings whom Blogger clocked as PVing The Blob in August. ooh is pretty good as a distillation of what's happenin' out there. Since Jan 2013 [birth of Blob] so much content has retreated behind paywalls or died for lack of interest or lack of funding that I'm having to talk to real people for social contact.

Today, for example, I am going on a tour of [some of] the Holy Wells of the county in a charabanc full of Heritage enthusiasts. Costs nothing, includes a free lunch, the rain is going to blow through before 10:00, what could possibly go wrong?

Cantor Dirac Erdös Fermi Graham Higgs

I am quite the fanboi for the YT channel Numberphile [Tony on Euler / Fermat] which has not-too-long pieces explaining quirky bits of the Mathoverse. One of the reg'lar contributors is Tony Padilla, Associate Director of the Nottingham Centre of Gravity, UK. He featured on Sean Carroll's Mindscapes podcast because of his 2022 book Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them: A Cosmic Quest from Zero to Infinity. I'm defo the fanboi for Mindscapes although I usually skip it when Carroll invites a fellow cosmologist to geek out on black holes and the end of time. Padilla is a bit different because although he knows as much as anyone alive today about gravity, he doesn't go at it with alienating gravitas . . . he's more chirpy and engaging. On the podcast, the book was mentioned, so I reserved a copy online for delivery at my branch library.  It takes forever for the inter-county library system to move a book "available" in Wicklow to "behind Clodagh's desk" in our library. Cripes, I could have walked to Wicklow and back several times in the lag-time.

Fantastic Numbers is as much fun as it can be when Graham's Number and TREE(3) are far too big to fit in my head. Indeed Padilla riffs on about how any attempt to internalize either of those very large numbers would result in  black hole head death  even if each memorized / read digit was smaller than the smallest small imaginable. Can't find time to struggle through 300 pages of higher math? There's a 5 point exec summary at NextBigIdeaClub.

Now here's the thing. How does me-the-punter rate such a book when so much of it is teetering on the edge of my comprehension? I mean, I might want a correct exec summary of Graham's number so I can wow my pals down the pub. In a similar position wrt dictionaries, I applied the Fodor' Guide test. This is the idea that, IF you find something sketchy in a part of the book about which you do have some knowledge, THEN you may need to crank up the crap-detector for the bits where you seek new information to cram into your head. Careful!  black hole head death  awaits those who overdo the knowledge acquisition schtick.

On p.280, there is some 'random' data to help show how Cantor proved that the infinite set of natural numbers  did not include all ordered [1st, 2nd, 3rd] numbers  . . . and so there was a larger infinity than, like, infinity. Well, I looked sideways at those 85 significant figures and asked "are they random? they don't look random; there are a lot of lucky-7s and only a single "1". Most people are lousy at writing a string of "random numbers": they shy away from including repeats, for a start. 9% of the numbers between 1 and 100 are dupes 11 22 33 44 etc. But there are no such cases in this gang of 84 pairs. 

The correct tool for assessing whether bin counts are the same is the Chi.Sq or even χ² test. And I tallied up the count for each of the 10 different digits expecting ~10% of the total [8.5] for each each. Whoa! not even close. It is vanishingly unlikely [p < 0.0005] that these 5 decimals were randomly generated. I first concluded [because 2 + 2 = 22] that there was a coded message on p.280 of this book. Because the dataset is impoverished in 0 1 and 2 ((essential for a [01-26] = [A-Z])) we have 12,08 = L,H in one register and 23,24,08,06,08 = W,X,H,F,H in the other. So prolly no code here. Just some human pretending (not too well) to be a random number generator.

This is why it is important to run job applications through a spell-checker. If your letter shows that you are careless about such details when it is easy to be careful; it might make HR think that you'll be careless with the cash-register. That's a long old way from supersymmetry and the cosmological constant but has more impact on your health, happiness and employability.

Hare Raising

The Boy made a flying visit to Ireland ten days ago. He was busy-bee-busy but we did make time to walk up the hill as far as the mountain gate. That was rather less straining than walking 160km through Southern France whc was our June adventure. He also mentioned that he'd followed up one of my book-recs and almost bought a copy of Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton. The Running Hare:The Secret Life of Farmland by John Lewis-Stempel. Well, nope, the only thing in common between these two books is Hare. But, turning on a sixpence, I went to Borrowbox to find Raisin' available as both e-book and ear-book. By accident I downloaded both but sailed through the story mostly through head-phones, as I went about my Outdoor Man business.

Dalton was a senior policy wonk in London who had converted a barn down-country because that's what single people no kids do with their discretionary income. Then Coronarama found her lockdowned in her barn. A short time later, she was disturbed in her working from home by the din of a miscreant dog [Fenton Fenton FENTON! etc]. That same evening in the gloaming Dalton finds a neonatal leveret out in the open and elects to bring it inside rather than leave it for the fox. It was a snap decision which a) saved one hare b) wrought a huge change in Dalton's pandemic trajectory. It took about three years for her to come back to a hare-free existence.

Because that first orphan leveret was 'domesticated' to a bare minimum and allowed the run of the house, the enclosed yard, the wider garden and the great beyond. It wasn't until the wild cr'ature, now designated The Hare, returned to deliver a litter of three F1 leverets that Dalton discovered she had bottle fed a female. Because lifting the tail and inspecting down there seemed too instrusive and invasion on the leveret's right to privacy. A few months later, The Hare gave birth to two more offspr in Dalton's study! Who's invading privacy now??

It's much easier, and likely to succeed if an adult female hare is suckling neonatal leverets; starting from the immune boost of hare-colostrum. Hares, like some other lagomorphs, leave their progeny in a secure hiding place all day and return as darkness falls to gorge their infants in a single feeding session. Wannabee bottle feeders note that cows milk, while compositionally similar to human milk, is very different to that of lagomorphs - don't try that at home. 

All good fun, although the Dalton hares experiences their share of injury, sickness and death. I believe The Boy is going to try Raising Hare as a bedtime chapter book with his 9 y.o. Gdau.II although "I am aware I only have maybe a dozen books left before I stop reading to her" <snif>

 

Scarify

 It's a bit of a cliché that sailors get paid off at the end of a voyage and immediately go On The Town until the wages invisibly accumulated over months have been spaffed up the wall in various bars, barbers and  bordellos. My Dad was a sailor between the ages of 15 and 50. Although better paid and better educated than Peter Russett, Sam Small and Ginger Dick he nevertheless wasn't really safe to go shopping on his own when ashore. One Saturday, when he was home from sea and we were home from school, he returned with a wheeled gizmo for punching holes in the lawn to 'aerate the soil'. His teenage offspring gave him a good ribbing for his foolishness. But at least one of them derived simple-minded pleasure from racing up and down the grass pushing this machine in front of me making an agreeably clattery racket.

Years later, found out, like M. Jourdain and prose, that I had been scarifying the grass with a . . . scarifier. This all came flooding back to me because, for the third Autumn on the trot, our Traditional Hay Meadows have been scarified by wild animals. 

Should all be pale green on the flat, darker in the hedges. In 2023 we blamed rutting deer. Although other people pointed the finger at rabbits and badgers. It is becoming clearer now that corvids [Corvus spp. crows etc.] are involved in the damage even if they are not the primum mobile. For sure, when I come round through a field gate to count sheep (as I do several times a day), it is common to disturb a great cawwwing flock from their depredations activity. The crows disperse to the field bounding trees and return to work 5 minutes after I disappear from sight. It looks like a third of the grass and forbs of each field have been scrorched up and turned into micro-hay. 

It's pretty clear now that the exposed earth has been secondarily treated by rabbits, who tend to turn over clods and turves rather than just scratch out the grass. On one level, it is a PITA because we've paid good money to have fields which sustain a flock of sheep. On the other hand, it is a vindication of the low input, organic, pesticide feed traditional hay meadow into which we have been leaning these last 25 years. There is something in the top-soil of our fields that acts as a honey-pot form crows (and presumably other bird species). None of the neighbouring properties have sustained similar damage.

There is no point in tearing my beard about this. I could:

• Install scarecrows
• Spend my retirement patrolling the fields during daylight hours
• Shoot the feckers
• Poison all users
• Get an active yappy-dog that walks quietly past the sheep but runs all shouty at birds
• and convince the sheep that they should ignore that dog

None of which are within my competence or inclinations. It's surely better, as we can afford the loss, to allow 'nature' to have her portion here. See light pollution earlier.

Wikipedona

 I've done it before and I did it again earlier this month

It's prolly true that I check Wikipedia every day. So every year about this time, possibly nagged to do so by the donee, I cough up €30. That's less than I spend on coffee each year [I really don't get out much]. There's plenty of bias and misogynistic 'missing data' in Wikipedia, but it's trying to get better on that front and is still not paywalled.

Light pollutes the world

I'm back on MetaFilter - I furloughed myself for the month of August  after it all got a little too intense. One of the Ozzie contributors posted a piece about how streetlights force birds to sing longer than they are designed for.

My pal Rene lives in a mill building on the River Barrow (Ireland's second longest river). The mill, long defunct, used to draw water from a modest tributary which could be crossed by a bridge where it debouched into the larger river. In the olde days eels Anguilla anguilla ran, even across the fields, on moonless nights. For a few years, Rene had a pet eel about the premises. Some years ago, the County decided to pop a street-light on the bridge to stop people pitching in while returning home from the pub. It was cheaper than making a balustrade on both sides of the bridge. 

The once abundant eels promptly stopped running up the tributary. It has been illegal to catch them since 2007. But nobody can prevent the relentless spread of street-lights. Oops, I see I have had my rant about this in 2019. But we can surely reflect again on the unintended consequences of serving the convenience and comfort of humanity while everyone and everything else just has to get out of the way.  Wot are we like?

Carlow fence ♩ ♬ ♫ ♪ ! is a local sight. So much granite in the county, and so much time in the old days. Long square-sectioned chunks of granite were split from mighty granite boulders to fashion as lintels for houses like ours. It was trendy, and efficient, to cut a v-notch in the top of each square pier and join each pier with a horizontal lintel turned 45°. They are kinda useless: never high enough to prevent stock passing over and, at knee-height, a trip-and-fall hazard for [drunken?] walkers.

P.N.G. at Fifty

On 16 September 1975, late in the decolonisation game, Papua New Guinea 🇵🇬 moved on from being a United Nations trust territory under Australian governance; whc since 1949. Fifty years of independence are being celebrated. PM James Marape has presided over a flag-raising. I know bog-all about New Guinea, so I was tickled that yesterday Wikipedia devoted the entirety of its Front Page Did you Know? column to things Papua . . .

• ... that different sounds drummed on the garamut can indicate the intended recipient?
• ... that Papua New Guinea, despite having only 11.7 million people, speaks more than 800 languages?
• ... that the Papua New Guinean government almost ran out of foreign exchange reserves during a financial crisis in 1994?
• ... that the cavefish Oxyeleotris caeca is found in surface waters during the wet season?
• ... that changes in land use and forestry turned Papua New Guinea's contribution to climate change from being a net carbon sink to a net emitter?
• ... that communities around the Sirinumu Dam lack reliable access to electricity and drinking water?
• ... that Nancy Sullivan and ten other activists were sued by the Papua New Guinean government as retribution for opposing the Pacific Marine Industrial Zone?
• ... that the Organic Law on the Integrity of Political Parties and Candidates was intended to stop "yo-yo politics"?
• ... that inland fisheries in Papua New Guinea are used by more than half of people living in the mountainous Highlands Region?
• ... that a bay in Papua New Guinea is Goodenough?

PNG is about the size of California or Turkey but its people speak ~840 (very) different languages [20m YT]. So Tok Pisin is one of the official languages and first language of maybe 10% which makes it, for them, a creole and no longer a pidgin. On a visit in 2012, Charles Windsor used a translator [but not that translator] to introduce himself as namba wan pikinini bilong Misis Kwin.

They eat a lot of taro Colocasia esculenta. But beware, you need to process the raw material properly because the roots are loaded with calcium oxalate. This salt crystalizes out in the plant cells as needle sharp raphides [as R] designed to rip at the oesophagus of herbivores to give them a piss-off-and-eat-something-else message. That's all for domestic consumption. For export, there is Au Co Cu Ni and oil&gas.

Fifty years on, poor old PNG has a terrible record for diversity and inclusion, police corruption, infant mortality, disability rights, misogyny.  We could take a bit more interest and then international pressure might make it better for their dispossessed?

Maskalyk in Ethiop

Reading Life on the Ground Floor: Letters from the Edge of Emergency Medicine (2017) by James Maskalyk. It flips, somewhat clunkily, between his work as a Toronto ER physician and volunteering at Black Lion Hospital in Addis Ababa. Working in dangerously uncomfortable adverse conditions in the Third World is not everyone's cuppa. See prev adrenajunkies David Nott or Stan Brock.

Maskalyk also pops in reflections while minding his recently widowed  grandfather at the old trapper's cabin in Alberta. On the last day of one care cycle there, Jim does triage on The Meds. As a doctor, he knows about NNT [number needed to treat, whc prev on statins - Ringer's - prostates] aspirin for heart-attack: 2/100 users benefit. BP meds 1/100 benefit. At least aspirin is cheap-as-chips. The old man is in his 90s, for the last 20 years, at least, each hospital consultant has added a drug (or two) which they believe will 'work'. Patient, GP and family stick with them in case there is a benefit they, unexpert, might miss. Or, esp if nobody is paying, the drugs accumulate in a drawer unconsumed . . . because they have adverse side-effects. The list spools bigger regardless - never gets shorter.

Pat the Salt, my aged FiL, has gone to his rest nearly a year now. He was rarely sick and never went to the doctor until he went, reluctantly [resistance is useless] for a check-up in his mid-80s. They found he had high blood-pressure. At peak he was on 10 different meds and supplements each day. Active intervention by his adult children prised him off two from the list. Jim's grandpa has a qualified advocate and they go into visit the GP together to simplify the drug list. Then the grandson sets off for the trauma of strangers in Addis . . . where there are, to the nearest whole number, 0 drugs available for each waiting patient. So much unfairness.

The book - I like this touch - is sliced into an alphabetical list of chapters: A is for Airways; B is for Breathing; C is for Circulation; D is for Drugs . . . Flow . . . Hurt . . . Kind . . . Love etc, etc. I suspect that this conceit contributes to the reader's feeling of clunk: O for blood group scrapes enough copy to warrant a chapter by wrenching material from elsewhere in the story. According to the catalogue, Maskalyk's other book about medicine at the edge Six Months in Sudan (2009) was sitting on a shelf in our local rural part-time library. Last Tuesday, being in town with a burst wheel-barrow tyre, I used My Open Library [we were inducted a couple of years ago] to self-serve it for me. 

How to draw the flag of the PRC

We were across the water at a family event in mid-August and my team arrived first at the lunch location. While I was lollygagging on the shingle beach pretending to be a mermaid, Dau.I the Librarian upstakes to view the visitor centre . . . which had a binful of 2nd-hand books. I've resolved to stop buying any more books, but thought her acquisition of Handbook on People's China [The foreign Languages Press, Peking, 1957] was cool enough, and data-rich enough, to borrow. If you're quick, you can snag your own copy from Kennys - €4.99, a snip! A snap-shot of the state of that nation, coming to the end of its First Five Year Plan, when I was still in diapers, it serves as a benchmark for how much has changed. There are 2⅓ times more people living there for starters. In Ireland there is 'only' 1.8x difference in the population of the Republic over the same time frame.

The frontispiece is a colour inlay showing the red [#EE1C25] with yellow [#FFFF00] stars of the flag of the PRC 🇨🇳 and the next page gives a template in case a) you speak English b) you're a fan c) you're a teeny bit obsessive about getting the details correct. The basic shape is a 3:2 rectangle and the five stars can be positioned by gridding the canton into 150 [15:10] squares as [L].  No, no, not Canton, the city: that's 广州市aka Guangzhou, China's 4th largest metro and home to 3x as many folks are RoIreland. I've beat myself up for never knowingly heard of Tianjin which houses even more people.

What else don't we know about China in the late 1950s? The legislature is/was the National People's Congress but it only met once a year and Executive function was carried out by the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress chaired by Liu Shao-chi. I bet you've never heard of him and not merely because he was purged in the Cultural Revolution - "renegade, traitor and scab" etc. No consolation that his memory was rehabilitated 12 years after his death.  Another member of The Standing Committee was . . . drum-roll . . . the Dalai Lama. That was 2 years before the Bodhisattva of Compassion fled Tibet and sought asylum in India. 

Lesser organs of government include the Ministries of Internal Affairs, External affairs, National Defense, Public Security, Justice, Supervision, Finance, Food, Commerce, Geology, Machine Building, Coal, Chemicals, Timber, Textiles, Railways, Labour, Education, Agriculture. Each of which had its own named Minister and some Vice-Ministers

Another revelation was that in 1957, the PRC was generating a proud but puny 16 TWh  = 1.6 x 10^10 kWh of electricity. In 2022, the Republic of Ireland used 3.4 TWh x 10^10 kWh [source] or 2x what China was consuming 70 years ago. That Irish data amounts to about 7,000 kWh of electricity per person.

  Which is consonant with Caislean Bob's annual domestic consumption of about 10,000 kWh a year split between 2 permanent residents. The excess [7kWh - 5kWh = 2kWh] must be all the server farms and data-centres to which the government whores us out. Me, I use my share of the electricity to get through 50,000 pots of tea - at about 5 pots an hour 24/7.  Obvs, since the Three Gorges Dam [whc prev] came on across stream in 2012 there is more electricity [95±20 TWh of electricity per year on average] to distribute across the PRC.

Right at the end of the book, my arithmetic heart beat a little faster at seeing a section III Conversion Tables on weights and measures. In 1957, in PRC

• a Chinese foot 尺 Chih is defined at 3 to the S.I. metre.
• for longer lengths, use 里 Li at 2 to the km 
• areas? use 亩 Mou at ⅔ of 1000 sq.m. or ~7 ares = 0.07 hectares
• liquid measure? the 升 Sheng is defined as = 1 litre
• weight? 斤 Chin = 500g  aka Catty [wch bloboprev - last 2 paras]
• for bigger lumps resort to 石 Picul or Tam = 50kg or 100 Catty

There, I'm glad we've sorted that out. And ahem <cof> <cof>: Other Chinas 🇹🇼 are available.

Mental Elf

Someone in Coolock branch library decided to condemn as "Worn Out" Joanna Cannon's 2019 book Breaking & Mending: A junior doctor’s stories of compassion & burnout. A local contact snagged it from the discard box and sent it down country to us. Its publication was subsidized by The Wellcome Collection in London, which also hosts an excerpt of the book if you can't find a copy in the library, like.

Cannon left school at 15 but went back to school and then medical school in her 30s because she wanted to work wit people, especially people troubled in their heads. 

I've set out my stall on how the HSE/NHS treat Mental Health as a poor relation. It's easier to get €millions for Cerebral Palsy or €50,000 for a kidney transplant, than to get sorted for bipolar or OCD. Breaking & Mending is clean and compelling reading but it ain't a textbook and Cannon no longer practices medicine, so some assertions and suggestions are allowed. One is that good mental health depends upon being part of a listening, caring, community. Another is that we are all at different positions on multiple spectra. An effective [listening, caring] community makes allowances for outliers [in whatever direction they outlie]. I never thought I'd say this, but maybe the bullying and slaggin' and compulsory gym of school is better for mental health than slopping about in the shallow warm dopamine soup of TikTok in your exclusive bedroom.

The last 20 years, we have been sold a bill of goods by the gods of FAANG [whc polyprevs] - everyone gets their own customized glove-fit echo-chamber. We no longer go out to the cinema and roar together in a waft of shared pheromones. Netflix distributes movies now. Lockdown kept kids from classrooms - but sucked into their customized devices. As social apes, we [most of us, that is, it being a spectrum] are not designed for being alone-with-a-phone. Maybe that's why youngsters go off the rails|: further from the average on the Axis of anxiety, self-harm, OCD, suicideation, depression, paranoia. Back in the day, the unhinged were recognised and accommodated in the community even as they were teased and bullied.

As if one person's story at the coalface of mental health were not enough, I Borrowboxed Will you Read this Please as an earbook. It is editted by Joanna Cannon and chapters a dozen tales told to a dozen British writers. There was a recruitment process, soliciting "mental health service users" to come forward to tell their stories. The "finalists" [there is a reality TV vibe here] were chosen to illuminate the variety of lives which generally go under our collective radar. Normal (2.3 kids, reasonably happy, car in the drive, holidays planned) families go about their normal lives oblivious of the handwashing or gender dysphoria next door. If you have gambling or bipolar or self-harm in your family that is quite enough without embracing the troubles of Others. But we really should a) care b) allocate resources to the Cinderella of the health services.

For the earbook, a dozen different reading voices have been recruited to the project. One nice conceit is that the income / royalties [if any!] are split 50:50 between each troubled person and the tale bearer.

2 tonnes an hour

The biggest asset Chez Blob is our 17m x 9m polytunnel. It has a lot more utility that our most expensive asset - the 9m x 4m array of solar panels which we had installed in April just S & downhill of the tunnel. The tunnel is where we dry the laundered wearables; where we grow spinach & beans & tomatoes & squash & tarragon; where I can touch up a chain-saw and store kindling. The only draw-back is that it never rains in the tunnel and even that is only a problem w.r.t. to the veggies.

But it for sure rains on the plastic of the tunnel and from the beginning there have been gutters along each of the long sides which capture rain-water and deliver it to containers varying in size from 20 lt to 1,000 lt. If you add them all up we have the capacity to store nearly 3 tonnes of water [obsessive details and itemisation] which may then be eked out each evening to where the thirsty plants require it. I've said before that, in an ideal world, our average annual rainfall [~1,000mm] was delivered in increments of 10mm every third night through the year. In rose-tinted memory, it was like that in Olde Ireland but now we can expect to go for weeks without any rain at all and did so in 2018, 2023 and now again in 2025.

It was terrible dry for long stretches of the Spring this year and in July, I was reduced to using well-water to irrigate the veggies. I hate doing this because, since we changed the submersible pump in April 2024, prolonged running of taps drags silt up from the bottom of the well, and I have to clean the filter. On the w/e of 19/20 July we were served a dump of rain which topped everything up again. Then nothing for 5½ weeks and I was slopping an algal soup out every evening as the barrels steadily ran dry.

We were promised the scut end of Hurricane Erin on Tuesday 26 August - without the wind but with the hope of some rain. I cleaned the gutters, checked the hoses, mustered the buckets in anticipation. Wednesday, I was woken in the dawning twilight by the drum of rain on the roof and went up to make sure The System was working. It was wonderful and not before time. For two pins I would have [frighten the horses alert!] stripped off and danced in the deluge.

It looks like we caught about 2 cu.m. = tonnes of rainwater between dawn and breakfast. Which is consonant with the fact that we had about 18mm of rain that morning and the gutters run full length and capture close to all the rain that hits the plastic - 17m x 9m x 0.018m =  ~2.75 cu.m. As mentioned we had another wet front slob through on the morning of 03Sep25, so we are now brimful at a time when we don't need it . . . but the soil microbiota in the polytunnel is having a fiesta.

Danny Boy

At 11 am 3rd September 1939, a Sunday, my mother and grandmother decamped briefly to shelter under the massive scullery table when they heard on the wireless that war had been declared. When nothing happened after 10 minutes, they somewhat sheepishly emerged and continued to prepare Sunday lunch for the men of the house. Meanwhile, somewhere in the Med, my father was making sure 'his' MTB, and its crew of 10, were ship-shape and Bristol fashion. He was a month short of his 22nd birthday. Just 10 weeks later, that Little Ship sank in a storm 20km W of the Northern tip of Sardinia [map]; as he was attempting to repatriate the Effectives to Blighty via French inland waterways. When I turned 22, I was studenting in Dublin and would no more have signed up to serve than I would have been training to be a ballet-dancer, surgeon or vicar - all of which had been stated career aspirations of younger-me. It was the 70s, long hair, loons and Bob Dylan for me; rather than drills, discipline and spit-and-polish.

A full [N=13] coven of my family gathered in Dorset in the middle of August, to scatter me mother's ashes in the sea near where she'd agreed to marry Sir the Old Man. As usual before travelling, I scoured Borrowbox for something, anything, to read on the road. I was ambivalent about an army memoir, but it was more up my street than James Acaster or Barbara Kingsolver. That's how I got to read Double Crossed: A Code of Honour, A Complete Betrayal by Brian Wood MC. 

Living in a parliamentary democracy, we get to vote every few years and hand over the command of the ship of state to a bunch of Effectives Operatives - people who can fund-raise and glad-hand and make deals without being necessarily competent to make difficult decisions. The data on which those decisions are made are gathered by professionals, paid for by the state. Whatever you think about the US-British invasion of Iraq, the uniformed employees of the state were obliged [and trained] to carry out the task on the ground. On 14 May 2004, Brian Wood was ordered out of his armored personnel carrier APC [as L] to engage the Iraqi militia who had just ambushed the Brits. Against 10:1 odds, 23 y.o. Wood and his squaddies won The Battle of Danny Boy and he was awarded the Military Cross. 7m YT exec summary.

But those events occurred 65 years after 1939 and the relationship between The Public and The Armed Services had changed significantly. Since Nuremberg, it was no longer possible to play that "only obeying orders" card: every soldier was expected to be squeaky clean ethically and morally when their mates had just been killed and maimed and incoming is still flying. Politicians, who had committed the British army to the sorry, shabby, ruinously expensive [£8,000,000,000 there or thereabouts] Iraq venture, chose to take the high moral ground by establishing a commission of inquiry into the ethical behaviour of the PBI (poor bloody infantry) hazarding their very lives on the ground at Danny Boy. Brian Wood was required to attend the Al-Sweady Public Inquiry and remember in detail who had done what to whom ten years earlier. The thing that most concerned him was that The Man would take away his medal. The Inquiry was also ruinously expensive [but only £25,000,000 not billions] almost all of it funnelled to lawyers, who had never handled an AK-47 let alone been shot at by one.

Fun facts; small world dept.  Jason Beer the principal lawyer for the Inquiry was the same as the Jason Beer [quips] who was i/c the legal team for the Horizon Post Office Inquiry 7 years later [whc bloboprev]. On the telly, beloved-by-Brits, actor Toby Jones played Phil Shiner - the venal lawyer for the innocent Iraqi farmers killed, captured and brutalized at Danny Boy . . . AND . . .  Mr Bates, the Sub-postmaster who wouldn't be bullied.

Today we have naming of Storms

Today 2 days ago . . . Met Éireann, UK Met Office and KNMI Koninklijk Nederlands Meteorologisch Instituut have been in bed together as a storm naming co-op. Since 2017, France, Spain or Portugal are in another consortium, upon whc Belgium and Luxembourg are coat-tailing. This allows for warnings about floods and gales in Tarragona or Toulouse when things are comparatively benign in Tullamore. The last named storm which affected Ireland in the 2024-2025 season was Floris on 5th August and he was a lot less windy than tree-felling Darragh or Éowyn ( a record 184km/h at Mace Head Co Galway on 24Jan25). 

Hurricane Erin was a) nothing to do with the NL/IE/UK list b) a bit of a damp squib when she passed NW of Donegal later in August.

On 1st September, the tabula is raza and we get a new set of names to crank through: Amy, Bram, Chandra, Dave, Eddie, Fionnuala, Gerard, Hannah, Isla, Janna, Kasia, Lilith, Marty, Nico, Oscar, Patrick, Ruby, Stevie, Tadhg, Violet, Wubbo. Met Éireann is responsible for choosing those in green. Take it from me, there won't be any Storm Steve or Storm Wubbo this cycle! There just aren't enough name-worthy storms in any year.

More weather newses: after a long droughty Spring and Summer we have had two rainy fronts come in from The Atlantic - one passing through even at the moment of launch - which has refilled all our containers. Full report on 08Sep25.

Naming of parts (easing the spring) 

Car Ha Ha Ha Hire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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