Mały świat

Like his grandfather and gt grandfather before him, The Boy is a restless soul. Wanderitis skipped a generation with BobTheSofatist. The Boy's second job after leaving school was with the infant Ryanair: slinging bags, batting in planes, driving the t'ilet truck. One of the perks was heavily subsidized travel on Ryanair and affiliate Airlines. He made several trips to Aotearoa on company discount and spent a year there on a young person's working visa in '05 and '06. While working in Christchurch he got to be pals with everyone a young Dub called Simon and they've been friends now for 20 years. The second weekend in October, Simon and The Boy and a couple of other now Daaads were on their annual Boy's Ownly escape . . . in Katowice, Galicia., PL.

Simon mentioned that a [collateral?] ancestor of his was famous for 15 minutes all time as the first automobile fatality. Checks in Wikipedia revealed that Mary Ward, aka Lady Bangor, the deceased, was a well regarded scientist, cousin of scientists and collaborator with scientists. The Boy expressed amazement that she wasn't mustered in The Blob's list of [Irish] Women in Science. That's the thing (to the nearest whole number in any average month) nobody in my family reads The Blob. But they almost always complain about the [lack of] content or point out typos harrrumph!

The account of the fatal auto-accident is quite explicit on the cause and nature of the injuries but vague and elliptical about who was at the tiller (this was 1869! before the idea of a steering wheel had gelled.  It looks likely that either 15 y.o. Charles "Turbinia" Parsons or his 19 y.o. brother Richard took a corner in Parsonstown =  Birr too quickly and pitched their cousin Mary out of the steam-car and ran her over. Written up in The Atlantic.

Those Parsons boys and their passengers had set off on the fatal jaunt from their home Birr Castle where their oldest brother Lawrence Parsons, 4th Earl of Rosse, was Fear an Tí. About 140 years later at a moderately fancy opera-adjacent event in Wexford, I met Brendan Parson the 7th Earl of Rosse. The Earl was charming and affable and on being introduced to me mentioned "I think one of your chaps married one of our chaps back in the 18thC". I knew this to be true in about that much detail but took the trouble to look up the deets later. It's a reasonable supposition because my grandfather Wilfred the Harbourmaster had grown up as the youngest son in a Big House about 12km due S of Birr Castle. Turns out that "Our" Alice had married Lawrence the 2nd Earl in 1797, and their son William the 3rd built the Leviathan telescope in 1845, which was the largest such implement in the World for the next two generations. I advised The Boy to fess up  Powiedz Simonowi, że jest ci przykro. Which is about as silly as Justin Trudeau or Tony Blair performatively apologising for oppressing The Gays.

Mały świat = Small world