Collateral damage

Now that I R retire and have cut down on The Blob, I have more time to read books. Like everyone I have my prefs [non-fiction, travel, biogs] but will read anything which comes recommended. And I am usually: I've started so I'll finish about it. And, of course, Borrowbox the Bringer of Earbooks has opened up whole extra vistas for absorbing information while off my sofa.

I grew up in another century where grown-up books tended to be walls of text but my offspring and their pals get through A Lot of graphic novels. They told me I should read Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton; but to be careful - it might be too much stress for me. Beaton grew up in Mabou, Nova Scotia on the east coast of Cape Breton: facing across the sea to PEI. Born in 1980, it seemed sensible to take on some debt to put herself through college. But when she popped out of the education mill with an Arts degree, she found that the parchment could not be parlayed into any sort of a job. And local service jobs didn't pay enough to leave home let alone pay off her student debt. One place which was booming with hardship-money employment was the Oil Sands of Alberta. It's about as remote and hostile as Uranium City, Sask. where my doctoring pal Mac took his family in the 80s. 

The economy of Cape Breton was built on coal and fishing and both these industries died a death, as in Newfoundland, at the end of the 20thC. So only the infrastructure [teachers, nurses, shop assistants, bus drivers] jobs were left. Accordingly young Kate followed neighbours and family to Fort McMurray, AL.

I liked this vignette of being forced to watch The Health & Safety video again. The primary purpose of which is so that Management show a fig-leaf of care for the survival of their Workers.:

I fainted dead away when I had to sit in the same room as the H&S video [I couldn't watch!] as part of my chain-saw handling and maintenance course in 1999. At about the same time, the Company PR department announced that 8,000,000 person-days had passed without a 'serious' accident. This was met with hoooots of derision by the work-force; who felt that the definition of 'serious' had been finagled to produce this positive statistic.

And the Ducks? They are a metaphor for the collateral damage meted out on workers in the pursuit of profit. A large flock of migrating ducks had chosen to rest on their journey on a fine looking lake - which turned out to be a toxic tailings pond. The response was not to stop using tailings ponds (that's an effective method for meeting legal /environmental requirements) but to stop ducks landing on the ponds (with scarecrows)  it's called fixin' the glitch. Same with fragile humans working under adverse conditions with frighteningly powerful machinery . . . make sure everyone sits through The Video. Blame for accidents can then be shifted to victim.

Likewise misogyny and sexual assault. Who did what to whom in bunkhouses? The Company treated that as a private matter  - beyond corporate control. Kate and her sister and their friends had a much more compassionate view of why men behaved like predatory shit heads when away from their families for months at a time and there was nothing to do but drink. They ask how their dear old Dad would turn out if economic necessity forced him to drive a dumper truck in N Alberta. It's a question we could all ask about ourselves when we rush to judgment about the actions of the dispossessed.

We must suppose that The Oil Sands worked out for Kate: she stuck at it for two years, thrifting away a portion of her pay and bonus until she'd cleared her debt to the state for getting an education. And her cartoons about the Hard Life developed into an income stream independent of coal and fishing. But not everyone is sufficiently focused to come out on top - spaffing each paycheck up the wall and owing their soul to the company store. There's got to be a better way which is more generally applicable.

Lost & phoned (part III)

I was on about how good my eyesight was and how not-so-good it is. Also how hard it can be to find 2 sq.m. of beige cow in 2,000,000 sq,m. [200 ha. = 480 acres] of brown dry heath. Of course it's a bit easier because a) there are 15 cows that hang out together b) they move about in a way quite distinctive from dry heather blowing in the wind.

Way way ago at the birth of The Blob, I lost me phone - it fell from my shirt pocket while changing a flat tire on the way to work. It took two days and 5 people to pass that parcel until it came back to me. The blessing (and curse) of living in a connected rural community! Five years ago, my all black smart-phone fell out of the same pocket when I stumbled into a gryke up on our 200 ha. of red hill. I knew it had happened within a couple of minutes but it still took 20 minutes for me and my neighbour M (of the cows) to find t'bugger down among the heather roots. Since then, I attached a bright yellow lanyard to the phone to make it more visible. 

Because things happen in threes [3s] if you have 12 years to play with, I lost my  yellow Nokia  at the end of September. I was up and out before breakfast, like the Good Shepherd, to count [N: 13 + 4 =17] the sheep. Unlike M's cows, our sheep disdain to herd together. The four new Charolais, for example, lambs are toooo refined to mix with our rag-tag flock of mongrels and will often be in a different field. And who thought it was a good idea to buy a black lamb which disappears in the shadows of any hedge, ditch, wall, dyke or copse ? I am requested&required to take my  Nokia   with me when out and about - lest I have an I R Old seizure. I did the outdoor man shepherd tasks and came home for tea and medals toast. Then I thought it would grand entirely to go for bracing yomp up t'hill and patted my pockets for the  Nokia . 

It wasn't there, so I cast about in the kitchen, on my desk, down the woodshed and behind my sofa cushions. The phone was ri♬gi♬g but not within earshot. Only 30 minutes had elapsed, so I had a pretty good idea of where I had been bo-peeping the sheep. Accordingly I re-traced my steps with my eyes sweeping arcs on the ground as I progressed. I paid particular attention to the boundary wall [L] where I had crossed from one field to another for a shortcut. For good measure I counted the sheep once more for luck.

When I got back to the house, the Beloved emerged from her own busy life and offered to call the phone while I checked the polytunnel and the woodshed agane! In my head I was making contingency plans for writing the phone off and changing my whole identity [the shame!] for an 083 number. But it was Sunday, so I could hardly implement any such protocol. Of all the people I know, I am the least attached to my phone, on which I get through about €30 of credit in a year and I did live for 30 years as a grown arsed adult managing without one entirely. But I'm not a luddite and do recognise there is a reason Germans call their cellphone a handy.  But, it was Sunday, I R retire, I canned the idea of going for a recreational yomp uphill and re-re-traced my morning sheepwalk.

When I scanned the boundary wall the first time, it was under the hypothesis that the phone had popped from a pocket when I scrabbled through the bushes and/or jumped down off the wall. The second time, (possibly because I had tested and rejected that hypothesis and approached the task with a clear hheart and open mind) I saw ◎◎ the  Nokia  in plain sight on the wall. Can you? it is two pixels wide [L].

And the scale of that problem? Compared to cows? The four fields where the sheep currently graze are 11 acres in total. That's 4½ hectares or 45,000 sq.m. The phone otoh is ~10cm x ~5cm or 1/200th of a sq.m. ratio 9,000,000 : 1. Finding a phone is only 9x harder than finding a single cow. Answer to Where's Wally Nokky below the fold.

Spot the diff

In WWII, my father was known as cat's eyes because of the acuity of his night vision while hunting enemy targets in his MTB. By his florid viz, he was aka Two Poached Eggs in a Bucket of Blood but that's another story.  I inherited this trait and up until my mid-40s my eyesight was really good - out on the hill, down the microscope, or star-gazing, all three. Things have slumped since then but I'm still withng the 'normal' range for my [venerable] age. My solid neighbour M has taken to running her cows on the mountain because she can and because free food. We were chatting in the yard the other day, and I asked what the head count was. I added that, if I was up the hill, and I saw her galloways, I'd text her a count and location, to save her an extra trip, like. The hill is 200 hectares (or 10x more if you include the unfenced contiguous uplands) and that's a lot of hide-and-seek territory without you have a pair of dogs, a quad-bike and/or a rather fancy drone.

I've re-started my May 2025 mountain-yomp regime again after the Summer: round trip up to The Fork and back; takes less than an hour if I'm not distracted . . . by counting cattle.

I walked straight past 'em on the way up: destination-driven is a terrible thing when there are 40 shades of brown and ditto green to delight and distract. On the way back downhome, otoh, with a different perspective and less baggage, I found M's cattle in the midst of Mackey's Walls which is one of their habitual haunts. So I stood up on a rock and counted them . . . 11, 12, 13. Two missing! Dang. So I stepped off the path into the soggy field, walked down to the County Border and found one more having a vacation in Wexford. hmmmm, I climbed up on the ditch and scanned the near terrain. Mackey's N wall seemed to be topped by a clump of beige but without my glasses I couldn't determine whether it was dead gorse, a dead fox or a peculiar stone. I resolved to bide-a-wee and a few seconds later a second clump of beige lifted up beside the other one: clearly a cow's head; so full count, job done and home for tea and medals. 

When I reported in to M, she replied that she'd worked out how her cattle were escaping off the mountain and wending their way back toward the home-place . . . where they are filling the roadway from ditch to ditch with 'evidence'. It is fun to imagine our many recreational walkers avoiding the obstacles picking their way on tippy-toes. According to M part of the mountain wall had collapsed to the West of Shannon's Knock. Accordingly the next time I was aYompin' I turned left at the mountain gate to see how much work it would be to repair the wall. There are four (4) strands of barbed wire on ancient posts above the wall and some of this has come loose. But the rough, rolly, rocks had slumped and shed to make a gap beneath the wire which would be no-trouble-at-all to a sheep - and probably negotiable by a determined cow. BEFORE:

I had gloves, I had time, and set about counter-acting the forces of gravity and time. When I'd exhausted the supply of easily accessible / liftable rocks, I dusted off my gloves and walked away. AFTER

It's like one of those spot-the-difference puzzles which used to appear in "the funnies" of newspapers when we were children: tiny, barely perceptible changes. I might come back later to pick stones up from the other side of the wall. But the heat is off because I was at The Wrong Hole in the wall. The cattle-passing hole is further down and clearly built to accept a gate:

Standard practice nowadays is to throw a Euro-pallet into these exit-gaps and tie it off with baler twine, so my 'skills' at dry-stone wall repair are probably redundant. 

Triage Sudan

Not having had my fill of Maskalyk, I snuck into the local branch [part-time] of the library and borrowed his first book Six Months in Sudan A Young Doctor in a War-torn Village [2009].  In 2007, he went to Abyei at the border between Sudan and South Sudan as a volunteer with Médecins sans Frontières MSF. Like me, at the birth of The Blob, he elected to blog about the transition between clean sheets and sheet ice in Toronto to the squalor and red dust of Africa. The book excerpts from that blog and riffs on its themes in a more considered, grammatical, less immediate manner.

Every day and every dollar, MSF lives the dilemma of "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day vs teach a man to fish and he feeds himself for life". By setting up a mission in some remote place trampled by all four horsemen, they allow the local government to bail out of their responsibility to/for the local people. 

In one example incident, the family of a sick child from a distant village gather, beg, hock, and spend all their resources to deliver her to the MSF hospital; and arrive ten minutes too late to save her. They now have nothing, less than nothing and ask if that idle land-cruiser could be used to carry their beloved tiny corpse to a pace for burial. MSF, fearing the thin end of an infinite wedge, refuse this charity. Their mission = Médecin, and they have to be strict in their delimitation of what they are prepared to do. But it is Maskalyk, fresh from futile chest compressions on the girl, who must be the mouth and face of "Policy". It is demoralizing and probably makes people wake up screaming years later . . .
"you want to drive every patient where they want to go . . .drip all of the blood into this patient bleeding in front of you even though it means there might be none for the next ten, but today you have it, and today is his lucky day and tomorrow you will worry about tomorrow. but we don't, we are measured, and careful. it is what tomorrow's patients expect of us and the tomorrows stretch towards forever, and today is nearly done". 

Whatever about Sudan, same thing happens in Irish ICUs. IF an old chap like me rocks up to ER = accident&emergency ANDIF he's really unwell ANDIF there's a bed in ICU THEN he'll be admitted. And once he's installed he'll stay until one of 
a) d.d. discharged dead 
b) a bed be found in palliative
c) miraculous recovery and return home, possibly via a regular ward bed in the hospital.

If 20 minutes later, my pal V, aged 35, father of four, gets poured out of an ambulance shattered after a head-on car crash . . . he's out of luck. The best the system will do it expedite him to another ICU bed in a different part of the country. As it happens, there was a bed for V that night, and an orthopedic surgeon got back into scrubs and spent the next eight hours in theatre deciding which broken long-bone to fix next. V died twice in ICU in the following 12 hours but eventually made a good recovery. Good enough to go back to work to support his family.

Holy holy holy

There is a Holy Well Project afoot. I was part of this venture one recent Saturday. It didn't seem to have much lasting effect on my mental state (or immortal soul); but I applaud the idea that such shrines have a place in community. Even if that place is secularized to fit the needs of 21stC Ireland.

One element of the project is to go visit some of the 42 Holy Wells in the county, make a little video & say a little prayer poem. 

• Overview, introduction 
• St Andrew, Dunleckney 
• St Bridget, Myshall 
• Our Lady, Clonagoose, Borris  
• St Fortune / Fortchern, Killoughternan
• St Lazerian, Lorum (not to be confused with St Lazerian Old Leighlin) 
• These are hosted by the County Library YT Service, where more such clips may appear. 

The key reference article is The Holy Wells of County Carlow (1933) by Edward O'Toole.

As we're talking about heritage, it is with some sadness we report the death of Manchán Magan, gaeilgeoir, broadcaster, prolific writer and Master of Woo. I am a bit of a fan. His republican antecedents are dynastically impeccable - Grannie. As a spoiler, I wrote down all (and more) of his Thirty-two Words for Field when that book came out in 2021. He was interviewed on RTE, essentially from a hospital bed, just a couple of weeks ago when it became known that his prostate cancer had metastasized all over. Still and all, three weeks notice is a bit tight for setting the affairs in order. His latest book Ninety-Nine Words for Rain (and One for Sun) is available at Kennys and in the library but there are 2x reservations as there are copies in the system.

Tír gan gaeilgeoirí, tír gan anam

 

 

Les Phares de Chansons et de Contes

A few years ago, I was wrong! I know, hard to believe, but I asserted in a book review that Le Tour de Cordouan featured as Gorodish's hideaway in the [super; cool] film Diva [wch prev]. Everbode kno that it is rather Le Phare de Gatteville [R wikicommons] in Normandie located just North of the D-Day beaches; but 380km = 5-6 hours by car from Paris. 

Three weeks ago, it was flagged on Metafilter that Bressay Lighthouse in Shetland is available for sale by Savilles.: a snip at £350,000 for 1 tower + 3 houses 7 beds 3 baths 3 sitting rooms. It is also about 5-6 hours [by plane and ferry] from Paris. Ah well, it's not going to happen for me in this lifetime. 

In the MeFi comments there was link to another lighthouse which fulfilled someone's dream. The light on Graves Shoal/Ledge is on the seaward edge of Boston Harbor about equidistant from Hull, Boston, Nahant and Winthrop. The shoals, which are about 40,000 tide-washed sq.m. [call it I acre] in extent had been ceded to the Federal Govt in 1903  by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for so long as the property was used as a “light and fog signal station.” It was bought from the Feds in 2013 by Boston resident David Waller for his own quixotic reasons. in 2019, the Town of Hull decided to asesss Graves Ledge for property tax. Mr Waller appealed and after much to-fro the Massachusetts Land Court decided Hull had no locus standi in the matter. This scrap of seaweed and seabird-shit covered 'land' is thus maybe the only unincorporated part of the Commonwealth. Check out the 50 pp PDF judgment if you like pedantic detail, mappes and historical research.

In 1990, we sold up in England and returned to Ireland "to give The Boy [then 14] a sense of cultural identity" and "to buy an old farm with 10 acres and outbuildings". I had secured a retraining fellowship and was pushing the frontiers of science in TCD. The cunning plan was to contact auctioneers down-country with our specs and go visit suitable properties at the weekends. The first place we got serious about was The North Light at Duncannon looking out over Waterford Harbour. That link is to a post by Pete "The Lights" Goulding on my pal Russ's TidesAndTales blog which gives an illustrated history of that piece of paradise. In 1990-1991 we found that, for £35K Irish, we had our pick of old farmhouses with 5-12 acres of scrubby fields with or without sheds. It was a buyers market at the end of then 80s recession and we were fussy.

The Duncannon light came with maybe half an acre [0.2 ha] of terraced 'gardens' at the end of a long bohereen. It was cosy. We rocked up to the auction with a ceiling of £35,000 and a counter cheque for 10% of that, then substantial, amount. For context we had sold our 4 bed 150sq.m. terraced house in Newcastle upon Tyne for £53,000. I got to throw my cap into the bidding twice but it blew through £35K and finally went from more than £100,000 to a couple of Dublin professionals as a second home. More details and pics at the NHBS National Heritage Buildings Service.

It took us five years and two more children to finally off-load our money on Irish property. But that wait bought us 16 acres as well as the farm and out-buildings. Despite reading and re-reading John Seymours' Self-sufficiency and Kains' Five Acres and Independence, we never worked out how we might make a living on and about the farrrm. And that aspect would have been even less likely at Duncannon Light.

Well well well-being

In the midst of Coronarama our county employed a Heritage Officer with a background in archaeology but very wide interests in culture, our place in Nature, our built environment, our beliefs and baggage. One definition of Heritage being: that which is a) valued  /valuable worth preserving and b) come down to us from the past. Go Eoin! He's been out to see our Ringstone several times despite it being right at the very edge of his bailiwick. His latest project builds on the fact that there are[who knew?] ~46 Holy Wells in the county - which is only 900 sq.km. in extent - so everyone is a short walk from the waters of balm.

Holy Wells? My jam! Ten years ago, I was 'supervising' a project at The Institute which was measuring Lithium in the groundwater. The Effective, Dr Lithium as he became, read the literature and came across the work of John Cade using lithium carbonate to control the devastating symptoms of bipolar and other mental disorders. In addition to obtaining and analysing several hundred water samples from domestic bore-holes, the Effective stopped whenever he passed a Holy Well and ran those samples through his analytical engine. Sorry folks, but we have waters of balm but not waters for balmy: the data is noisy, but there is no significant association between elevated Lithium [to soothe the troubled minds of bachelor farmers?!] and the location of Holy Wells: cf, - Saints, scholars, and schizophrenics : mental illness in rural Ireland [1979] by Nancy Scheper-Hughes. 

Eoin would like evidence that Holy Wells do good for the well-being of the plain people of the County. What say renting a bus, filling it half full of old people [who are used to free travel!], and visiting a couple of accessible Holy Wells? And further, giving the crumblies a free lunch and asking them to assess their feelings of bliss before and after visiting each sacred place. Hold me back, dear reader, that is how I spent the last Saturday in September: watching the soggy countryside through the rain-spattered windows of a charabanc.

Setting off through the tail-end of a rainy front which passed over Ireland that Saturday morning, first we travelled South to St Lazerian's Well in Old Leighlin at the base of the Castlecomer plateau. The well is in a little dell on the edge of the village where the road takes a savage turn. It was not the safest place to park while disembarking a couple of dozen frail elders. But, heck, the L3037 is a minor road going from Smallsville to Unimportant so there wasn't a lot of honking traffic. The steps down to the well were also lethal slippy for the unsure-of-foot. But nobody died and no hips were broken. Perhaps because of the mediation of the many prayers uttered beside the Holy Hawthorn which is within the enclosure of the well:

The rain had blown through by the time we'd had a) a historical timeline / explanation on St Lazerian's well b) a reading by Caroline Busher from one of her YA books c) a reading by Clifton Redmond of a poem inspired by St Lazerian, St Moling and Eó Ruis one of the five sacred trees of Olde Ireland. I hope that these creatives were on the payroll, rather than will work for food like the rest of us. Free travel [✓] free lunch [✓] but the payback was several questionnaires on how our souls were feeling Before vs After each stop. Gotta say that my answers about happiness, engagement, anxiety did not alter one jot through the day. But I had a pretty good day without experiencing changed, changed utterly a terrible beauty is born. 

At lunch [in the Tinryland Community Hub - excellent home baking] we Olds fell to discussing recipes, virtues and thriftiness of bread&butter pudding. For the 30-something at our table it was like she'd just stepped out of the Tardis into 1943. I was also able to get out my phone and, between cakes, show my neighbour a picture of our neolithic art work. Gotta say that the lunch was better and more interesting than, although superficially identical to, the lunch we got in Myshall in August.

After lunch, it was back to work . . . into the bus and on to Cranavane [sunny spring pics] just off the N80 near Kildavin.  

Never 'eard of it, me; let alone gone to visit before. It's a very short detour from our route to Altamont Gardens, which we do go to on the reg'lar. I'll be sure to bring people back to Crann a Bhán even though the eponymous white tree was felled a few years ago before it fell on someone. St Finnian's Cranavane is a different vibe to St Lazerian's - more naturalistic [mowed grass, daffodils in season] and with less fetish. Kindly, because they surely didn't have to, a handful of the Cranavane care-and-maintenance team were there to greet us and show us their treasures. This absolutely made a difference: to get the insider details of how it all works and what it takes to make available a contemplative space for all. It's obvious to all, for example, that folks throw coins into the elongated pond in front of the Well. But without hearing it from the horse's mouth, I wouldn't know about the local custom of dunking coffins in that water on the way to the burial ground up the road.

The Carers were at pains to acknowledge that the avenue to the enclosure and the rath itself were the private property of a local farmer, whose father had been at the forefront of the "re-discovery" of St Finnian's a generation ago. I was little bit mortified when my lunching neighbour spoke up at that point with "and we should recognise that man Bob over there, another discoverer of Ireland's heritage, who a) was able to recognise the work of human hand on a tumbled old stone b) makes access across his fields easier than a lot of farmers would". I had to get me phone out and show another handful of people what he was talking about.

As The Guardian of the Ringstone in another part of the county my line is "According to the Land Registry, we own the fields but we don't own the heritage - that's part of the commonwealth or maybe better the common weal". Heck and jiminy, if, as Thoreau maintained, The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation then it behooves us Haves to share a little of our fortune with the Have-nots. 

CwCoCo Heritage is organizing a parallel jaunt 
data-gathering field trip this coming Saturday, 
there may be tickets still ask: 
carlowholywells@gmail.com

Further? There are some Carlow County Library YT explanatory clips assoc with the Holy Well Project. 

Title pun explanatory footnote: The Beloved's late lamented Uncle Henri had a much told funny tale which hinged an important English visitor to N. Nigeria being hilariously mistranslated into Hausa. 
I go further →→→ "kafin na kai ga uban kowa" ie. I visit your male parent
Well well well →→→ "rijiya rijiya rijiya" ie. borehole borehole borehole
By this I about doubled my Hausa vocab. 

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.