What would Aristotle do?

hmmmm?  Suitable fare for Friday the 13th. 

Classics Professor Edith Hall was on BBC Start the Week in October talking with others about inheritance. Now me, I trained in genetics, but I found the fellow holding up ancient DNA for inspection was much less interesting than the novelist talking about [lies] truth and reconciliation in South Africa. But Prof Hall was compelling in her tales of serial atrocity-of-honour in the ancient Greek canon. The Blob has been uncomfortable in the Orestian slaughterhouse with Colm Tóibín in January.

I was so taken with Hall's talk on BBC, that I requested her Facing Down the Furies: suicide, the ancient Greeks and me (2024) [review] from the library. It's a page-turner, although I guess not everybody's cup of tea. The Furies Ἐρινύες were the agents of vengeance in the old days. Ensuring that disagreements, accidents and misunderstandings could never be resolved but rather amplified and polarized through reciprocal atrocity until the end of time. Like Hatfields vs McCoys or The Troubles hopped up on steroids. F i n a l l y in Ireland, after 100 years of mutual performative Othering, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael recently got into the Centrist bed together realising that they were identical twins separated at the birth of the Free State. It was ever thus since before Athens and Sparta took sides. Suicide of Ajax [R © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Licence].

Lots of commentators over the last 2.5 millennia have judged Ajax as 'selfish', because he failed to pay attention to what would happen to his partner and their infant son. That assessment is super-easy for those not directly involved. In 2019, I wrote about an angry rebuttal of such judgments. Compassion [for all the actors in the tragedy - on and off-stage] is a much more productive response.

When my father reached the age of 14 he was presented with a very limited set of options for how to spend the rest of his life. His family were middle class but poor and Protestant. It was inconceivable that he could have gone to university and become an academic historian - although that was his abiding interest for the next ~70 years. Options were much wider for his children 40 years later: not only was university fee-free, but grants were available to pay basic room and board for students. In Dublin in the 70s students, ex-officio, got medical cards! Even the well-heeled students with an allowance from the Bank of Mam&Dad. Edith Hall (b.1959) is a bit younger than me but she could have gone any which way when she was 14.

An inspiring teacher and financially supportive parents drew her into the world of Classical Greek Tragedies and she has been finding relevance in those ~30 more-or-less complete plays ever since. 

• What are the options for a not-a-doormat woman in a patriarchal society? 
• How do you live with murderous thoughts?
• What do you owe your parents?
• . . . your children?
• Is revenge best served cold?

As a teenager young Edith read all those tragedies and obvs went forward to read classics at college. It was tough, and life could be bleak, and she considered following a family tradition of making away with herself. Life can be so serious when you are 20. But in my case, Aristotle's case that suicide wrongs others, and so we do not have the right to kill ourselves, sustained my resolve to struggle on in my final year at university. Phew! I didn't entertain suicidal ideation at that age, but I did have serious doubts about the point of it all. If I'd had any sort of resolve at that time, I would have jacked in the book l'arning and gone to be a carpenter. I guess I'm glad I didn't? Academic life has been good to me, maybe good for me. In the end it was good enough to/for me: I worked  in The Groves on and off (mostly on) for 40 years, bought the farm and raised [with help from The Effective] three children.

Hall was named for her grandmother who killed herself in 1962, when young Edith was 3, Her mother Brenda, unhelpfully but hey, loaded a lot of her feelings of betrayal and abandonment on the young namesake: you're just like my mother etc. In the 1960s, you had to be genuinely sicko - and monied - to engage with a therapist. Merely having unresolved issues, trauma, PTSD? Just keep calm and carry on. Both my parents were actively in uniform through WWII: 'actively' meant having friends, boyfriends and shipmates killed and maimed. A glass splinter took out my maternal grandfather's eye during the Dover blitz. But it took 5 decades for the horror to ebb sufficiently for them to talk about what they had experienced.

Antigone is still performed with audiences on the edge of their seats & with hankies jammed in their mouths because it is still relevant 2,500 years after the story was first declaimed. People are still people and we should all work harder to cut the other fellow some slack.

Trades

It's me still on a shop-front and antient trades journey. From Sean Rotherry's The Shops of Ireland [recent] TSoI, I finally twigged why Shambles was the name of the street where butchers plied their bloody trade. It is short for Fleshamble, a derivation cognate with Fishamble Street [amble as in walk?] in  Dublin which famously witnessed the premier of Handel's Messiah in 1742. Back in the day, the slaughter and gore-letting was carried out in the street with the carcass then carried into the butcher's shop; for cuttjng into 'cuts'. It was expected that the rain (or the corporation, we pay our rates) would wash away the offal, although stray dogs and the very poor doubtless helped. In England they are 'butchers', in Ireland 'victuallers' [Southish] or fleshers [Northish]. You can still see these designations on shop-fronts, but I [ymmv!] don't know anyone who sends a child to "the victualler for a pound of sausages".  p.84 of TSoI features [here R] the picturesque revival style frontage of H. Hatton, on Kilree St in Bagenalstown. It's still a butchers, but Matt Dunne or Ó'duinn has pushed it up-market, so he's not only a búistéir but also an éischeadúnas = offy. You can buy local artisan jams, pickles and cookies && a bottle of wine as well as chicken bits in curry sauce. For the last several Decembers Ó'duinn has sold us an excellent ham from a known, caring, curing, farm in Fenagh, Co CW.

The Pub-Hardware-Grocery I'm most familiar with is O'Shea's of Borris. The second time we were in town [the first was at The Auction in 1996] we needed somewhere quiet to sit with two very small children. It was mid-morning, so the pub-part quiet. We ordered tea for two at the bar and went to sit round the corner in the 'lounge'. Mr O'Shea instanter came bustling out with newspaper and kindling to light the fire for the honoured guests. It was quixotic and scarcely economic given the timing but, like Luther, he could do no other. O'Shea's back then really did have wellies hanging from the ceiling and roof-nails shelved next to shampoo. It was the obvious place to take our Spanish TEFL wwoofer for the rugger in 2014. They still sell bread & buckets, tinned peas & tin pots, worm-drench & whiskey.

Growing up in England, we'd get prescriptions filled at the Chemist. Although the fully qualified man [back then mostly men] behind the counter was a Pharmacist with an MPharm. degree. In US usage the shop tends to be called a Drug Store or Pharmacy. In Ireland it's more likely Pharmacy. Although 'Medical Hall' is A Thing here. For example Price's Medical Hall [p.88 TSoI] on Clare St, Dublin 2 round the corner from the back gate of TCD. Which in turn is round the corner from Sweny's Pharmacy Lincoln Pl D2, where Leopold Bloom bought a cake of lemony soap and some lotion on 16th June 1904 = Bloomsday.

In the days before the ubiquity of cars, let alone Tesco home delivery, there were a lot more shops, even in tiny communities. Take Bunmahon, down the Déise. On the East side of the street up until 2009 there was Grocery-Kennedy-Drapery. Drapery?? There are only about 200 residents. Although nobody was selling 'notions', stout underpants, or floral pinnies in 2009. Rather, an enterprising couple, relatives of the Draper, were selling croissants, buns and fancy coffee from one of the shop counters. By 2019 they had haemorrhaged enough money and "Kennedy's Tearooms" was literally shuttered. More recently, see Sept 2025, Orlaith Brady another confident entrepreneur has painted out the Kennedy era and was selling coffee, ices, sandwiches, treats as Gourmet House. Since September 2026 Celine Murphy has taken up the rolling pin and is trading as Cupán C. Parity of esteem shout out to Serenella, who makes coffee and baked goods at the Copper Coast Visitor Centre 400m further East.

In Ireland it's Main Street but in England often High Street. Up in Geordieland where we lived 1983-1990, the suffix 'Gate' was often used: from Norse gata whc in turn from Proto-Germanic *gatwǭ = street or road. And yes, 'gait' = manner of stepping, is etymologically from the same root. Gateshead is where the gata paused at the River Tyne. Westgate Road had a great second-hand bookshop. In York [Jorvik still in Danegeld]: Coppergate Gillygate, Goodramgate, Spurriergate, Whipmawhopmagate, Nottingham [Snotingaham] is similarly *gate blessed. 

To The Lighthouse

One of the themes in 20thC Irish theatre is the tragic finality of emigration - however everyone feels about Gar going off to Philadelphia, going he is; and it's unlikely he will ever return to Ballybeg. we had a frisson of a memory of this loss when The Boy set off for New Zealand aged 29¾. What if he fell for a Kiwi girl, and never came back? It would be an awfu' schlep to visit grandkids in Auckland.  It has turned out [don't ask me how] that, as a family, we're more proactive than "Home is where they have to take you in, when you have to go".  From clocking up '000s of air-miles working for Ryanair in his teens and 20s, The Boy has been, and continues to go, all over. But he comes back on the reg'lar and everyone is happy about that. His firstborn Gdau.I is now about the same age as he was when we quit foreign and came back to Ireland in 1990. 

This year, for the second time in a row, the two of them came from across the water to Dublin for the authentic Hallowe'en experience: bonfires, cos-play and crap candy; with tinnies for daddies. We made it happen that our nuclear fam were together for 24hrs from All Saints to All Souls. In April this year we went on a mighty, ~15km circular, up-hill down-dale yomp. Participants  ~70, ~50, ~30, ~10 y.o. Nobody died. 2nd November was the best of all possible autumn days: golden leaves, wispy clouds, just enough breeze to prevent over-heating under a bright sun. It was decided [note passive tense, I'm institutionalised, I go where I'm told] that we'd take a C1 bus to Sandymount and walk on out to the Poolbeg Light.

And it was so! 

Dau.II packed an Iron Rations lunch: 1 satsuma + 10g of chocolate each and off we went - the Three Four Muscatels. For me, forever 10, securing the top front seats of a double-decker bus is the best way to see any city. The C1 from Adamstown was jammed, but emptied like a bathtub at O'Connell's Bridge, so we got grandstand seats for the Dublin 2 to Dublin 4 stage of the journey. I flagged passing the back of the place where I had digs in 1973: but it was frankly Scarlett from my fellow voyageurs. There was a bit more interest eeeeuw when we passed the shrubberies into which I hucked my dinner ca. 2001. 

We also passed the seafront property where The Beloved rented a bedsit as a student in 1974. After spending first year of college in a six bed dorm run by Loreto nuns, she wanted to live a more poetic life. "I need a garret with sloping ceilings". In those days, you could manifest your ideals, because the gods peer down kindly on the young. By 1975, we were an item, and rented another sea-front garden-flat opposite the pier in Dun Laoghaire. Only financial traders or FAANG execs could afford the rents there nowadays. In this one way, life was better, fairer, more possible 50 years ago. 

This year, this month, three generations of us did walk out to the end of the pier [evidence above R]. A place I haven't been since 1974. Let me say that the water-treatment plant out there is enormously bigger than it was 50 years ago. This is just to say that my satsuma was orange and so sweet. It wouldn't be a port-walk if there was no shipping to scope. On cue, here [see L] comes the Vespertine a 195m long RoRo freighter owned by CLdN registered in Malta but shuttling back and forth between IE-DUB and GB-LIV. Compagnie Luxembourgeoise de Navigation = CLdN.

Another perfick day, I'm glad I spent it with y'all. Luckily, even at my advanced age, there is no quota on Perfick Days - everyone different, every one good. Perhaps these best days lean toward applying a few squirts of 3in1 to the knees, but still.

The Trader's Gate

One of the notable features of small towns = large villages in Ireland is how wide is the Main Street. Much wider and with more generous pavements = sidewalks than a few hundred people and/or the passing traffic seems to justify.  This is not to say that through-traffic is unimpeded. 

• Children don't walk to school through the fields anymore, so Mams-Jams are normal at the start and end of each school day. 
• And commute times are much quicker during mid-term breaks 
• Automobile autonomy can jam things up for everybody. _I_ am just nipping in to the pharmacy;  so those double yellow lines fade to invisibility
• There is a papal dispensation at Mass times (more often Saturday evening than Sunday now). Cars can then be abandonned anyhow anywhere near church

In the early 90s, when Motorways were a futuristic fantasy, it was proposed to construct a by-pass round the town of Leixlip 20km West of Dublin. All traffic between Dublin and Galway, Sligo and points on the way and in between had to crawl <cof> <cof> through Leixlip. The Chamber of Commerce was vehemently against the by-pass because they would lose the 'passing trade'.

 Our post-town, pop 700, is prettier and has better amenities than many towns of equivalent size. The demesne wall of Big House occupies one side of Main Street for about half its total length. The Laird has allowed a children's play-ground to be built on a generous enough strip of grass between that wall and the road. Otherwise, the buildings facing onto the street are a mix [half&half?] of artisan cottages and business premises. In some cases, the trader's family still lives above the shop. There are very few front-gardens, with the front door opening right on the pavement. The streetscape therefore conjures something like a series of fortresses glaring rebelliously across at the road at the 4m high walls of The Big House.

Nevertheless, traders gotta trade . . . something and they can't store beer-barrels, barbed-wire, cattle-nuts, gates, bales of sheep fleece, bread, jam, oats, nails out on the street. The bigger houses [the doctor, the parish priest, the bank-manager, the vet] needed somewhere to stable a carriage and a horse or two. Each business thus needed vehicular access to the rear. And each opening needed a gate to keep livestock, stray dogs, over-curious people on the street and not galumphing through the back-yard doing damage to the lawn (if any) and knocking things off or knocking them over.

On 28 October 26, I took The Beloved to the Dublin Train and paused on the way home to clock The Gates. There are about 20 of them along maybe 500m of Main Street.

01 and 02:

03 and 04 

05 and 07

08 & 09

10 and 11

12 and 13

14 and 15 

16 and 17

18 and 19

20  and 21

There's one missing: the Gate to The Big House:

The Blob is notoriously picture-bandwidth averse, but the inventory above has burst through my pixel quota for the year . . . but it's still pretty crappy quality. Even a good snap-shot fails to do justice to the doors of perception and imagination. Each one is worth a perusal pause: 

• the material of each door and the quality of the paint job
• the voussured arches 
• the presence (or absence) of a wicket gate in the fabric of the big gate
• Mrs Doohickey must needs slip out to the pub for a pint of porter . . . for the cake, like
• the stone sheds or mighty hay-barns in back
• the clutter visible, 
• the glorious golden trees 
• the number of undertakers 
• the officiousness of the No Parking signs 

We should all take a minute (or ten) each and every day to really pay attention to the world around us. So much quirky detail deserves a moment as we hurry by to somewhere else.

walking the walk

Why would read a book about the Camino de Santiago when  you can go it yourself GIY? Why keep a dog and bark yourself? Why start a Blob with rhetorical questions? I was that desperate for e-reading and earbooking material on Borrowbox that I downloaded To Walk the Way - One Pilgrim's Camino (2026) by Mike Timms. I did not take it because Timms is a retired Director of the Centre for Disability Studies at University College Dublin and lives in Bray Co Wicklow. But there were nevertheless a few parallels between his experience and mine along Le Chemin de St Jacques.

Without that common background, To Walk the Way might read like a log-book or journal - which I have recently claimed to be intrinsically poor reading. So you have two (2) glasses on wine in Burgos? Mike, nobody cares, nobody is counting. ditto roncadores = snorers; ditto wrong turnings; ditto blisters; these things exist, they are inevitable to the process of pilgrimage. Readers didn't ask, so don't tell. What can be interesting is the interaction when two pilgrims come together, and get beyond the quotidian Bom dia; ¿Cómo va con los pies?; Avez-vous besoin d'eau? Then you may surprise yourself with kindness or find a richness & generosity of spirit in The Other. Maybe I'm talking bollix about the dross: after all,  a painter covers the canvas with a beige undercoat so that the interesting bits stand out.

Tis myself: July 2004 Fisterra

Timms touches on the exhausting effort required to follow a conversation in a language in which you lack fluency. One of my proudest moment was having a life-the-universe-and-everything talk in french with a monglot francophone - sacked out in the shade of a ruined wall while waiting for the refugio to open. One backstory anecdote Timms shared was from his time helping the Czechs prepare for joining the EU. His working life was all about Diversity, Disability and inclusion and at one venue he started chatting to a profoundly deaf Czech in some institute. ISL is different from the Czech equivalent but he could communicate better by hand than in the school-learnt English of his Czech academic oppos. A revelation for them, less so for him because he'd done the work to learn ISL. 

And here's a nice definition / differentiation from the Timms playbook:

• integration: you have to change if you want to play with us
• inclusion: we have to change to enable you to play with us 

It is obvious which is more difficult to implement.

Another element which had the ring of truth is accepting that extra-ordinary things happen on pilgrimage: water is manifest, or juicy apples appear instead; the hat which was lost is returned two days later; you do find the oomph to climb the last hill of the day; someone is kind when you're feeling crap; you can eat respounchous Dioscorea communis. Timms knows and I know that there is no explanation for miracles but weird collisions happen anyway. When you throw yourself on the mercy of strangers; (or when you give them your last Nurofen) then Thin Places crack open and the world blurfs into the mystic . . . cue van Morrison.

If you have walked the long, you may get tinkles or tingles from this bloke's tale of Camino. If you haven't been, then go. I make no apology for being a camino-bore:

It is an ancient peregrine,
And he stoppeth one of three.
'By thy trimmed grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?'  

A. Because you look like you're lost, preciousss

streetscape

For while in the 00s, I shared the rental of a house in Marino, D3. I was only up in Dublin for 2 nights a week and I could have endured 5 hours a day on the bus commuting from home. But two younger workers at the coal-face of science made me an offer I couldn't refuse on the bed-nights. I also enrolled in drumming workshops in the evening after work. Tuesday "Djembe, dance and body-percussion" with Sinead "sensei" O'Brien; Wednesday "MaSamba" with Simeon Smith. When I got 'home' at 21°°hrs, I was ready for bed. But the lads insisted that we repair to Gaffney's Bar in Fairview and skull pints. I was shattered when I finally got HOME; and couldn't look alcohol in the face . . . until next Tuesday.

In the 1930s, Gaffney's was in  the same place and a little further along Fairview Strand was  "Daly Bros. shop in Fairview Dublin", G. & T. Crampton Photographs, UCD Digital Library. Those premises are now Four Star Pizza; the facade is significantly less 'handsome"; and the range of 'provisions' is markedly reduced as well. If you're curious about bygone shopfronts, Tipperary Studies Digital Archive has several hundred. Many of them are staged with the proprietor and staff standing in their aprons on the pavement outside. God be with the days you could buy biscuits by the pound from a big tin box at the grocer.

Dunno about you, but _I_ am curious about shop-fronts this week because I followed up on the works of Sean Rothery: last met walking the GR5. Rothery walked for exercise and adventure but before retirement he taught Architecture at DIT. That's why he lugged a sketch-book on his walk; it's what architects of a certain vintage did.

In 1978, Rothery was inspired to research and write The Shops of Ireland (with drawings by the author). It was midwifed into existence by student projects in 1975 as part of European Architectural Heritage Year. I like that idea very much: the Custom House and the GPO are the Grand parts of the built environment but if they get gutted by fire, ordinary life continues. If The Righteous set fire to Daly's then the plain people of Fairview and Marino won't know where to get their tea.

 Architecture is a lot like book-binding. The main point being to clag together structural elements so the product stands-up & is fit for purpose . . . but if you can make those elements look well, then why not add a bit of bling? And, hey, there are spandrels on some shop-fronts: those which have fancy round-top windows. If you live in Ireland, you could with advantage get this book out of the library. It will change the way you go shopping: maybe be less of a rush about it? Maybe look up and around and wonder at how human ingenuity makes urban life possible.

Splut

They say that, in medieval times, there was a rather intense rivalry between the ports of Waterford (on the R.Suir) and New Ross (just downstream from the confluence of the Rs Nore and Barrow). I don't know nuttin' about medieval trade except that transport by water was considerably more efficient [in terms of, say, ton-mile-days] than by land.  And if that's true it must have been a case of ¿porque no los dos? I mean if the final destination is Carlow, Kilkenny, or Kildare then New Ross is  the best place to tranship to a barge and off upstream. For Clonmel, Cahir or Carrick, Waterford is your only man.

Howsoever, Waterford won that trade war long long ago and became a City. And New Ross declined despite several interventions to prop-up the economy [see Albatros Fertlizer] and is now a local market-town. On Friday 23Oct26, The Beloved and The Blob scheduled separate meetings in New Ross. Carbon-foot-Bonus for sharing the 80km round-trip. I went to the fancy hotel for my meeting and we agreed to meet in the forenoon at the Dunbrody Visitor's Centre. Herself: "It has a great clattery café upstairs which is hanging out over the water, you'll love it, I'll treat you to a flat-white".

My meeting went well, despite me gabbing a deal too much. I repaired, with some bounce to my step, to claim my coffee. Unfortunately, the tide was out and the view out the window was foregrounded with slobby mud the colour of duck-shit [iykyk]. It is sort of surprising that, despite being 25km North of the actual sea at, say Ballhack, the River Barrow is tidal ~4m rise and fall twice a day at New Ross. Indeed, there are still visible tides [1½m to 2½m] at St Mullins a further 15km upstream It is no coincidence that the Barrow Navigation and its towpath starts at St Mullins. 

But look at the sun, the O'Hanrahan bridge across the broad reach of the River Barrow, the Disney-experience Dunbrody! Note to self: stop glooming at the mud, look up and smell the sun. Over coffee, we reflected on how deep the mud might be. Fortunately we were behind a plate-glass window or I would have been tempted to hoik my empty coffee cup over the edge just to hear the Splut! Mud? Projectiles? Crocodiles!

For part of the Summer of 1977, we lived in New Ross with Pat the Salt and his younger children. He was engaged in some building work just upstream from the then new O'Hanrahan bridge [which was opened in 1967]. You can still see the abutments of the earlier bridge which we used to cross every Easter holiday through the 60s driving between Wexford and Waterford visiting agéd relatives. The older bridge was even more decrepit than my rellies. The speed limit was 5mph and there were 55gallon steel drums as chicanes in the roadway to keep the traffic inching across. Impressionable me reckoned that if 10 cars, or two trucks, stopped in the middle then the roadway would sigh and dump itself into the murky river below. Michael O'Hanrahan was New Ross's contribution to 1916 Easter Rising being 2/o/c of the Jacobs Biscuit Factory garrison. He was executed on 04 May 1916 along with Joseph Plunkett, William Pearse & Edward Daly.

Imperfect

I've been on a P.J. Kavanagh jag recently. Paradoxically first reading a more recent memoir (Finding Connections 1990) which focused on the old dead; and now his first book (The Perfect Stranger a memoir of love and survival 1966) about a tragic young death. The death of young people is normally tragic, dying in the fullness of his years less so. The ever young [Sally 24] and the finished up old [PJ 84]are buried in the same grave, same churchyard [R] in Westwell, Oxforshire [photo Tom Robinson wikimedia commons]

The Perfect Stranger apparently found it difficult to find a publisher. It's partly because PJK is not as good a writer as he thinks he is: some of his run-on sentences baffle me and I'm a native speaker. As a poet, he claims a pretty good internal critic, but if the lines cross this bar then the poem is Good, and several examples finish up in this memoir. I'm not judging - I skip embedded lyrics because they are a detour or paraphrase. This self-satisfaction extends to other areas of his life. Recently, Dau.II accused me of weaponized incompetence when I said that such-a-thing was outside my wheelhouse. Blokes are allowed A Lot of this even in these modern times: can't cook, can't do laundry, can't make a bed (it's only a duvet, wot's to make??), can't clean a toilet. Thus when PJK is called up for National Service, he can't march, he can't make his bed, can't master army book-learning. When, through privilege, he lands an entry-level job in early television it was "by this time I more or less agreed with the general tacit assumption of my uselessness" because infrastructural grunt work is beneath him.

In a 1991 Foreword to a reprint of The Perfect Stranger, he is irked because 25 years of librarians and booksellers have classified it as autobiography rather than the memoir of love and survival which it seems to the author. But FFS, the love interest doesn't walk on stage until the final quarter of the book: the first ¾ is solid autobiog fodder: cruelty at school, continental adventures, getting shot in Korea, being employed [he is apparently too useless for it to be called work] on the stage, in telly, in publishing. 

In 1989, I retired (again!) from working in a British University and looked for other work. One of my ventures was to apply for/to the British Council  - a UK govt quango that shows the flag abroad through culture and things intellectual / educational. I passed the first round of the hiring process well enough to be invited to interview in the London head office. It never went further for me [who knows? wrong tie, looked stupid, sounded stupid, went to college in Dublin?]. In 1958, it went much better for PJK and his shining new, not to say numinous, wife Sally. He was deemed appointable and they were posted to Indonesia; which everyone agreed was the shittiest, most dangerous station on the British Council register. 

There, like Pat the Salt at about the same time, they kicked over the traces of colonial exclusivity and talked to their staff, respected their students and trenchered down the local food. It was going to be wonderful and then ". . . at four o'clock in the morning, midsummer's day, Sally Died"

The End 

Austen, Boelo: double whammy

Storm season starts 1st September  [you have to start somewhere] but the first named storm "Austen" slugged in from the Atlantic last Th/Fr night NullSchoolWind windspeed snapshot 20:00 22Oct26 [L]. At Caislean Blob, it has been standard policy at least this year, maybe a bit longer, to heed MetÉireann's weather warnings and park the car in the next county, if the deluge is scheduled for overnight. I've been banned [you're too decrepit for that nonsense you blitherin' old ninny] from nipping out of the house at 02:00 with a head torch and mattock "I'm awa' off to see to the drains". 

I did clean the drains of this year's brambles, but in advance, in daylight, indeed in the sunshine. It's part of adulting in the country that y'have to do this every year. It's a chore. But a single bramble is like steel wire, and can snag a water-impelled twig; which may catch another twig with leaves; which holds back a trundling rock long enough that a clot of dead sycamore leaves forms a dam . . . and rushing water blurfs out onto the gravel of the lane and two hours later the lane has been delivered as heap onto the county road. I also beefed up the berms which run diagonally across the lane surface: slowing down any running water and delivering it into the drain .

If the lane gets washed away as it did in July 1997 and Jan 2010 at least we'll have a vehicle on the outside for shopping or hunting around for a JCB and 40 tonnes of 804 gravel. Parking in the next county? That is formally correct but rhetorically over-dramatic. My neighbour farms the other side of the river (which marks the county borrrder) and I park in a corner of his yard. Sometimes scones are exchanged. Tea-time Thursday I drove down our lane [300m], along the county road [500m], up his lane [300m] and tucked the car in  against a [solid] wall. But I walked home parallel to the county road by completing the rectangle crossing his fields, the river and our fields. It's much shorter and much more hello trees hello sky than dodging 18-wheelers and shit-spattered tractors on the road.

Storm Austen duly came and duly went, and there was no more rainfall that any other front. The following morning, as soon as it was light to see by [and I'd consumed a quart of hot tea] I went to retrieve the car. I wore m'wellies because stream crossing. 16 hrs previously the stream was 15cm deep and 75cm across now it was grey with crud, 2m wide and of indeterminate depth. But there was a stable looking rock awash in the middle of the current and I boldly used that as a hopping stone to reach the far side. I did not fall on my arse and fill m'boots as I did at the same place in 2023. Win! Friday turned out fine: lots of sun to clock up some solar-kWh; some of which baked 800g of brown soda bread. And the Polish Stove-guy [artisans of '26 prev] came back for coffee to refix the seal round the door of our new wood-burning stove. 

Storm Austen grazed the South coast of Ireland. Storm Boelo, 36 hours later, debladdered itself mainly on the North and West coasts but the whole country got stormy rain all day. A day for huddling next to the toasty stove . . . !?! . . . the stove was out of action Saturday because the sealant needed 24 hours to set. Fall-back plan: huddling under a weighty-blanket with a hot-water bottle. With occasional forays outside to count sheep and look sternly at the drains.  Amazing skyscape on Sat/Sun night: not quite full moonlit mackerel skies with stars, planets in the holes. And Sunday morning started gusty but sunny & all sheep reported in with the requisite number of legs. Come on Storm Chloe we're ready.

Ploddy

To my great surprise, then and now, I walked 700km [aged 35], then 800km [aged 50], then 160 km [aged 70] through Europe. The last walk, with The Boy, was crammed into a few Blobs. That middle walk to & from Santiago was transformative: I even wrote a book(let) about the transformation. I never imagined that my detail-filled journal-of-journey would be of the slightest interest to anyone, even me, except as une aide mémoire. 

Sean Rothery (1928 - 2014) was an academic architect from Dublin, who retired from UCD in 1994 and took himself off for a long walk in Europe to clear some cobwebs and stretch his legs while he still had the use of his knees. More ambitious than me, he started like Patrick Leigh Fermor from Hoek van Holland and walked to the Mediterranean along the GR5. He was already a published author, having written books on vernacular architecture Everyday Buildings of Ireland (1976), The Shops of Ireland (1978) [looks interesting, I've reserved a copy in the library]. He was encouraged to write a book about his trek which was published as A Long Walk South. An Irishman's Trek on the GR5. (2001). It was re-released in 2014 both as paper and an e-book.  Over a short week in mid-October, I stomped along in his footsteps from the mists and polders of the North Sea to his plunge into the Med at Nice.

I found it very difficult to publish my analysis of the process of Pilgrimage in 2004, 2005, 2006. It was too short for one thing. Collins Press of Cork, otoh, undertook to publish Rothery's book in 2001 at least partly because it was of normal book length. It only achieved this threshold because it's bloated with quotidian detail. I got blisters. . . I met this bloke . . . I stopped for a beer . . . there was a surly waiter . . . it rained . . . it cleared . . . it poured . . . there were butterflies . . . I lost the way . . . I met this couple from [insert place] . . . we ate dinner together . . . more injuries . . . the bed was lumpy . . . the refuge had a snorer . . . Mont Blanc! . . . another 'revolting' slab of pork-fat for dinner . . . I hate ski-resorts. This is just the unavoidable infrastructure of distance walking - it's not going anywhere.

That being said, Rothery has an eye for vernacular French architecture and upland landscape. He prefers to stop and capture a scene in his sketchbook [another addition to the 1994-weight back-pack] rather than snapping a pic and moving on: " The intense blues of [Cezanne's] pictures; cerulean, prussian and ultramarine, could be sensed in the distant views, while the wonderfully overlapping greens; viridian, olive and sap suffused the foreground. The approaching autumn tinted some of the flat planes of the Provence landscape from light siena to dark umber."  [colour-prevs: flowers; flags; fonts]

What is interesting is how things have changed since 1994, or indeed 2004 when I walked the GR65 from Santiago. Rothery rocks up to the Tourist Information guichet to sort his in-advance accommodation. The Boy did all this for us last year on his smart phone. Rothery is lugging maps and guide-books rather than getting a location fix with GPS and satellite maps. Cash-points exist in 1994 but he pays a premium to convert punts to francs. He makes arrangements to meet up "see you in two days at the first bar in Vadoncourt" because only Richard Branson has a cell-phone.

And some things hadn't changed in 80 years. Parts of the GR5 teeter through the static killing fields of WWI. The upland wilderness disfigured with rusting barbed wire and warnings not to leave the marked way.    

Also interesting for me is that Rothery was great pals with Frank Winder [prev] when they were both young rock climbers ca. 1950. Winder taught me Biochemistry 25 years later and was still active as emeritus prof 25 years after that when I found myself in the same academic department. I liked him because a) he always remembered my name b) he had a wide-range of interests and miscellaneous domains of true expertise.

Exec.Summ. A Long Walk South reads true: so much matches my experience. But being true doesn't make it interesting: walking is not a spectator sport, you have to do it yourself, or better by yourself.

Descendant of kings

I had a great idea in my early days at The Institute, which finished up creating a Dr Kavanagh, PhD, while generating some quite noisy [ie useless] data about Lithium in the groundwater. There are so many Kavanaghs hereabouts [like Powers down the Déise, and Burkes in Galway] that nicknames are given [Butt Kavanaghs; Bonesetter Kavanaghs] which adhere to descendants long after the actual short-arse or healer is dead. 

I forget the inducement, but, in September, I reserved a bunch of books at the Library by poet, journalist and novelist PJ Kavanagh. The first to arrive was Finding Connections (1990). The conceit is that this Kavanagh was born, lived  and worked (1931 - 2015) in England, wore tweed jackets and spoke with a middle-class southern English accent but had a distinctively Irish surname. He goes on a road trip to try making a connexion with his Irish Catholic ancestors starting in Co Carlow and then shipping off after their trail through Tasmania = van Diemen's Land and New Zealand. Along the way he meets several genealogists (amateur and professional) but enough vaguely interesting people to fill out the book to 200 pages. I was stuck off-site for the weekend with no internet and the one book, so I plugged away through a blizzard of dead Kavanaghs, Cullens and Pauls. 

Turns out two of my collateral relatives, brothers, left King's County [with a pot of gold] for New Zealand in the same decade (1860s) as Patrick Kavanagh. One went on to the USA, one stayed and started a family from which eventually popped my Cousin Trevor. Lookit: the three biggest islands of the archipelago were named New Ulster, New Munster and New Leinster.

PJK's memoir only came together in the last couple of chapters, so I'm glad I didn't fling it aside [borrrrring] somewhere between Auckland and Wellington. In this wrap up he mentions a line by Henry Mayhew (1812 - 1887), from his mighty research tome  London Labour and the London Poor (1851): "The Irish are unusually clear about their origins". But PJK is quite skeptical about whether any evidence or actual history sticks to this clarity. As illustration, he quotes from correspondence between his Uncle Paul and his father Eddie = Ted. Paul writes that, ~100 years previously, Cardinal Cullen, a collateral relation, funded the elopement of PJK's Gt.Grandmother and even married the besotted couple in Dublin before they upstakes for the Antipodes. But documentary records show that the youngsters were a) really married in Carlow b) while Father Cullen was for sure in Rome that year. Which was yonks before he returned to be Archbishop, Cardinal and Primate-of-all-Ireland. "How did he, barrister, editor, student of racing form, pass on this hearsay as truth when a glance at a reference book would have shown him it was impossible?".

We do this all the time. We bumble through life and shit happens. Our brains work overtime to make sense of these buffets and come up with a compelling narrative which is internally consistent. The idea that life is series of uncontrollable random assaults is too hard to bear. And we also chop and dice the memories so that we come out kinder, cleverer and more in control than we actually were at the time. "The present can be looked at and interpreted with more confidence than the past, it is under your nose" (PJK, Finding Connections Ch.19). Massaging the story?? see also recent Word of Mouth podcast in which Michael Rosen and Jamie Tehrani talk about how Fairy Tales evolve and diversify over space and time. Tehrani Bloboprev on the phylogeny of Little Red Riding Hood.

Another nice object lesson is that Paul and Ted were supported in the education by their at-last-affluent Kiwi father. One was destined for the Law, the other Medicine. But in their youth both boys booted their respective careers through heedlessness and lack of commitment. Nevertheless they went on to be stellar in other professions [Paul: legal journalist & editor; Ted: comedy writer]. This is why my advice to young people about going to college is: don't sweat it. At 17 you are such a n00b that you don't know what 'Medicine' or 'Law' actually entails. Your capacity for happiness is an internal matter, not predicated on what course you choose and/or finish. 

St Willibrord

Last week-or-so, I mentioned that the Polish Ambassador to Ireland had been cutting a ribbon in Glenties Co Donegal. It was on account of a) the commemoree was born in what's now Poland b) for the second half of 2026, during Ireland's Presidency of the EU, each Irish County has been paired with one of the members states of the EU 

But wait and, like, whoa! are there not 26 counties but 27 members of the EU. That was my gotcha and I had to download the two lists and cross reference to see which EU state had been [frisson - diplomatic incident] excluded from the pairings? Ans: duh Ireland IE is not paired with any one county, but with all. I felt a bit like Newton [arguably the smartest man of his generation] cutting a half-pint-sized kitten door beside the cat-flap in his study after his moggie delivered a litter.

Then on Friday 9th Oct, I was at a cultural event in our wee post-town which was opened by one of our County Councillors. Afterwards, I buttonholed him to ask which country was pared with his/our County. Luxembourg he replied without looking at  his notes. Blimey, why Luxembourg?, I responded, and who decides the divvy-up?. It seems it is because St Willibrord [who he?] a) is Patron Saint of the Grand Duchy b) had been born in Northumberland but trained in Carlow and died at Echternach, LU. All good fun; I really hope taxpayers money sends missions of  county officials to the far ends of Europe to spread their wings and learn about other ways of doing.

You may remember my happy-out pairings of all Ukrainian Oblasts with Irish Counties back in 2013. There were only 24 oblasts and one Autonomous Region, so I had an ingenious fudge to match 26 counties to oblasts. The following year the Autonomous Region (=Crimea) was annexed by Russia and I couldn't make the twinning work any more. None of this held me back from pairing 6 civil regions in Belarus and Nor'n Ireland.

Out in the Community

Last Friday for the first time in + a year, we went into our post-town for the Friday artisanal market: it is small but perfickly formed: Peter the veg;  Cormac the cheese; scones, pies & cakes; fresh fish. We came away with a cheese selection; spuds and fractal brocolli. Food fit for comp'ny - a bit too expensive for everyday. Then we repaired across the street to the pub-undertaker for coffee and viennoiserie from Seamus the Plúr, who was previously up the way when Fərmεntary was a thing. The Blob has been there before. We also met our friends & neighbours: the poet, the film-buff, the physiotherapist, the conceptual artist, the herbalist, the pilgrim. Three of these contacts flagged up the fact that there was a Talk "Bringing Rock Art in the The Cold" by Muiris O'Suilleabháin Emeritus Prof at UCD that very evening in the boutique hotel at the top of the street.

Since 2019, 9th October has been designated 
European Day of Rock Art! 
Who knew?! 

Ans: Not many, not enough.

We spent too long nattering over buns and coffee, because we had a different Agri meeting an hour+ away northern edge of the county. Rushed home, collected wellies, to stand in a shed being told about worms, silage, hoose, drench, scour, mineral-lick, selenium. Turned around, went home, had a quick cup of tea before I went back to town for The Talk, alone . . . The Beloved had run out of spoons for social interactions.

Not many, not enough? The County Heritage Office had laid on tea & sangers, and set out seats for 100 people but only 30 turned up. on European Day of Rock Art! that's missing a trick. All the more sandwiches for me. Early arrive also provided a chance to see the results [L] of an earlier Rock Initiative where local Artists Jules Michael and Máiréad Holohan had a session with 6th Class in the local National School. Dr. Seimi Ó Murchú also shared his deep knowledge of the landscape.

Emeritus Prof's talk ran on a theme of Rock Art across Europe (well at least Sardinia, Brittany, Galicia, Ireland) and seemed to make a big deal differentiating Rock Art from Megalithic Art: something something passage tombs something something orthostats something something steatite. before coming to the conclusion that the distinction was fuzzy. I may have missed something because I dozed off [free sandwich overload coma]. More accurately Emeritus Prof ran on and on and on finally closing out at 100 minutes.

The talk was fine actually, covered some ground, had excellent pictures of Rock Art from all over and talked about late neolithic, early bronze age long-distance trading (deer antler artifacts, serpentine and steatite beads). He floated some hypotheses (geological, ethological) about why Rock Art is here rather than there. Mentioned some of the tech.kit which is now available to pick sites to precision dig.

I met yet more friends and neighbours: the stone sculptor [of course], several hill-walkers and the adverb guy from Fáilte Isteach. I'd actually missed going to Fáilte Isteach the previous night despite my best intentions. I'd remembered at tea-time, then I was called to solve a software problem, which put a delay the count-down; then I had to see to the sheep before full dark; and water what's left of the veg; and so I found myself chopping wood in the gloaming when I should have been driving into town in a clean shirt. Next week! for sure!!

Why not be a cladist

Title is the title of a (1978) paper by Leigh van Valen one of the late great maverick evolutionary theorists of the late 20thC. I am happy to bring this back into discourse and Hats Off to University of Oslo Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis (CEES) for archiving the journal Evolutionary Theory. It was agreeably clattered out on a manual fixed-width-font typewriter with blank spaces left to paste in pictures and diagrams and presumably, like our own contemporaneous Carnivore Genetics Newsletter, taken to a print shop as camera-ready copy. You can still see the staple holes from when one copy was disassembled and scanned to PDF. Fig 1b [R] from Why Not Be a Cladist.

Q. So wtf is a cladist? 
A. One who trudges in the footsteps of Willi Hennig to accept Cladistics aka phylogenetic systematics as a useful [true?] explanation of biological diversity which so intrigues those who pay attention to the natural world. In the 1980s, cladistics was really annoying to traditional classifiers, taxonomists and namers-of-parts because it forced them to reconsider their certainties. Hennig and the Cladists [great name for a rock band] wanted to bring Evolution's "descent with modification" front and centre.  A Clade was / is all the descendant members of a single branch of the tree of life. In particular cladists frowned on paraphyletic groupings: those which shared some [superficial?] similarities. Or relicts ["waste-baskets"] of taxa which had been 'left behind' when some of their number underwent an adaptive radiation into endless forms most beautiful.

• Clades are fractal: Family Hominidae [Gorilla, Homo, Pan, Pongo] is a clade; Order Primates is a clade; Class Mammalia is a clade.
• When I was in school, one of the standard, agreed, mammalian orders was "Insectivora" which included small, scurrying, nocturnal mammals that ate insects. Mammals arose in the Jurassic 225mya as small, scurrying, nocturnal mammals that ate insects and managed to avoid getting stepped upon by dinosaurs. When the dinosaurs were Offed, mammals radiated spectacularly into the vacant niches and beyond. Those left behind doing the same-old same-old were not a clade because that would exclude co-descendant aardvarks, bats, camels, dogs, elephants.
• Order Artiodactyla [antelopes, bovines, camels, deer, llamas, pigs] ain't a clade either . . . unless you include whales and dolphins [Dan, Des, Prev]
• Class Reptilia [absolutely standard when I was in school] isn't a clade unless Class Aves [birbs] and Class Mammalia are included.
• Fish aren't a clade either because we-the-mammals [and sundry other non-fish] are descended from fish; but don't have scales and swim-bladders.

That ⬤ last bullet has attracted the most attention. Notably from the competitive-clever-clogs podcast No Such Thing as a Fish. For the past 12 years, the undoubtedly smart and articulate QI Elves have been riffing on the Interesting bits-n-bobs which a) they've uncovered in their extensive reading but which b) aren't Quite Interesting enough to make the to-be-broadcast cut. It's madly popular. 30 minutes of it [ever] is plenty.

A more valuable [profound? subtle?] take on the Fish idea is the love-story in Why Fish Don't Exist (2020) by Lulu Miller. Miller grew up in a Double Prof [♀ arts ♂ science] home in Newton, suburban Boston. Her father cut her no slack growing up: no tooth fairy; no Santa there. Instead a rather nihilistic assertion that Lulu [and the Dad, and we all] was a fleck of spittle destined to evaporate to nothingness through the heedless grinding of physical entropy. She took that message on board and tried to top herself [pills] as a teen. Thanks, Dad!

A bit later she came across a man, born in 1851, who seemed to have fought against the powers of darkness and chaos to shine an enduring light on the way the world was ordered. David Starr Jordan suffered desperate loss: his beloved older brother [typhus], his first wife [pneumonia] his 9 y.o. daughter [scarlatina] his life's work [twice: once by fire and once in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906]. Jordan concentrated on recording the diversity of fish which he collected, considered, labelled and catalogued in  quantity: Maybe 20% of all the species of fish known to science were described by Jordan and his students. Oh, and he was the founding President of Stanford University.

Miller spent the next few years in the archives "as I flipped though thousands of pages, remnants of David’s skin entering my nostrils." reading books, pamphlets, diaries and papers by and about David Starr Jordan, his science and shenanigans. Somewhere along her journey of biographical discovery, Miller was introduced to Cladistics and uses this, anachronistically, to add the non-existence of "Fish" to the list of Jordan's losses. Her own journey of self-discovery, not without hardship and loss, comes out right in the end with less of the existential angst and more of the wife and two kids.

What I also admire, in the polarized, judgmental, self-righteous times in which we live, is that Miller considers Jordan warts-and-all. He made way above average contributions to science despite taking many tonks from an uncaring Universe; he is an Icon of Grit.

He was also a born-again evangelical eugenicist who campaigned far and wide, long and hard, to rid the world of people whom he and his white middle-class certainists deemed unfit. Miller makes a coherent case that this sort of thing is not only cruel and unjust, but also self-defeating in a Darwinian sense. We have no idea which people are going to be most useful during a proper-hard pandemic; or the zombie apocalypse; or an invasion from the Planet Zorg. It is vanishingly unlikely to be Stanford Admin, Multinational CEOs or mid-range financial traders. People are multi-faceted! People can be repellent in their habits and beliefs and still do good science, make great art, write like an angel.

~~~~~~~ 

PS. I finished the book, I was uplifted. I went back to my usual restless scanning of the internet. And whoa I found myself reading a series of essays about "Born Free & Equal" on the Scotus blog, by a Republican-leaning Law Professor. One essay is on Buck vs Bell which made it to the US Supreme Court in 1927 when eugenics was Hot. Carrie Buck was sterilized because some folk claimed she was 'feebleminded' and 'promiscuous' and . . . therefore her future children would be a threat to society. In 1927 SCJ Oliver Wendell Holmes famously quipped "Three generations of imbeciles are enough" before sealing her fate withn abdominal surgery. In 2026, Professor Calabresi counterquipped "Three generations of Holmes Lectures [at Harvard Law School] are enough." Yes yes very quippy and also very black &  white  unsubtle and Cancel Culture: unlike Lulu Miller. See also Skinner v Oklahoma for how eugenics reasoning will come for you next. Martin Niemöller: Zuerst kamen sie für die Kommunisten und ich sprach nicht . . . etc.

The day before, I'd been harking to a Mindscape Podcast [MultiPrev] in which poor Sean Carroll felt obliged again to hash out Free & Equal Free Will with Greg Caruso. [Free Will bloboprevs] For current purposes, you don't need to listen to 80 mins of clever philosophical jousting. Just click on the transcript and CTRL-F for 'felon' or '0:44:58.2 GC' to see how Punisher legislators and "three strikes and out" can force a man into a life-sentence for crimes that don't seem to be liable to cause wide-spread societal collapse . . . a bit of shop-lifting.

Apocalypse Ready

We live in interesting times. Not 'interesting' as in Ukraine, Venezuela, Yemen; but things could go sloppy quickly if [insert emergency here]. The Government of Ireland has just 

• thought through the list of things that could go wrong;
• done a risk assessment [seriousness of adverse situation x likelihood of it happening]
• decided how much infrastructure will remain
• made a list of citizen actions
• hired a design team [cute hat R]
• printed 500,000 copies 
• send one out to every home in the audience 

Don't have an Eircode? live in Ukraine? Your copy of the booklet here.

My sister lived for some years on Erraid, an island off an island (Mull) off the West coast of Scotland, as part of an intentional community affiliated with Findhorn. Erraid is owned by an increasingly extended family, all 200 ha. having been bought ca.1950 by two brothers from Nederland. It was their investment against an imagined Tanks rolling over the bridges of the Elbe emergency. It's 500km from Mühlhausen to Rotterdam: 2-3 days for a tank brigade. The brothers imagined that there would be a few days of sabre rattling when Albert Heijn was still open for hagel and transport infrastructure was in place. It's a schlepp. When we visited in 1996 we got a lift to DUB airport; flew to Prestwick; train to Glasgow; bus across the city; train to Oban; ferry to Craignure; bus to Fionnphort; open boat to Erraid . . . it took all day. But once there, it's pretty robust: well water, long-drop toilets; wood-burning stoves; flour in dustbins; spuds in the garden; fish in the sea.

In 2002, The Government of Ireland got super-specific in their emergency imagination and sent us all a packet of Iodine tablets. Which had zero utility against storms, floods, lines down, car bombs, plane crashes, coronarama ebolarama, cyber attacks. In 2026 the Govt advice is so non-specific as to be vague. I guess they didn't want to frighten the horses by doom-scrolling scenarios as I have just done.

The Government is i n c h i n g towards the integration of infrastructure. One page [/20] of the current advice is to write down five (5) 'Important EirCodes and five (5) 'Important contacts'. One other page "Emergency Ready Tip #5" advises Save a photo of your checklist on your phone. Which assumes electricity to charge the Device. Electricity? The Man expects us to know, note and/or remember our Meter Point Reference Number = MPRN. This is an 11-digit number!! When do they plan to dump all MPRNs and replace them with Eircodes - only 7 characters - which we have all internalized as we did our telephone number when there were only landlines. Prev Rant on the numerology of identity. Prev Skep on the actual utility of Eircodes. I've put the boot in on Eircodes but that train has gone: after 11 years it has some embedded utility - just more integration needed.

Exec.Summ: the checklist from the Be Emergency Ready booklet. Take home: emergencies can be managed but you'll need drinking water 3lt per person per day. In Apr 2024 I endured 10 days without tap water. Drinking rainwater like De Lord intended; and washing in a bucket.

My left boot

Four or five years ago, m'sister was visiting from England and we went to Red Mills for some mmmm good sheep-muesli and a bucket. I was between Lidl-special gumboots, and Sis mocked my cheapskatery until I purchased some top-range Bekina (Belgian) Wellingtons . . . because I was no longer an impoverished student and what else - go faster car [χ] cruise holiday [χ] silk undies] [χ] - was I going to spend my money on?

A couple of months later I was trimming back the hedge we planted in the 00s along the boundary with Toxic Neighbour. Happy out! Because I was not only winning a long, 3m wide strip of meadow for sheep food; but also saving a bunch of wrist-thick hazel Corylus avelanna and blackthorn Prunus spinosa branches. Walking sticks, shillelaghs, firewood, as you ask. For the pieces-of-twig-too-small-keep [see also string], I pushed the brash back into the hedge - for habitat. Regrettably, I channelled my inner kick-boxer and used my boots rather than a pitch fork for this task. Next time I used my spanking new wellies out in the rain, I came back with a sopping left sock. Duh genius had punctured the rubber with at least one blackthorn. I did try using those boots when it was dry, rotating them with cheaper, skiddier, crappier boots when wet out. Then last year, we seized an empty domestic bin opportunity and cleared out a bunch of beat-up, worn-out footware to create space in my tool-shed. From that holocaust, I salvaged a single water-proof left gumboot and I've been hirpling about the place like that. I'd rather look ridiculous than have wet socks, wouldn't you?

But that left boot, while hydrologically sound, is a tad too small and requires a hand to pull t'bugger on. Which is awkward if I'm running out the door with hands full of tools and devices. I was in Red Mills again last week to buy more sheep muesli [it's the season when they deserve a bit of dessert on a grass meal] and another molassed mineral lick bucket for micronutrients. I think it's really more like candy [molasses] for them, but I don't begrudge. And, while there, I stumped up for another pair of the same boot: as [L] flanked by the current mismatched pair. I'm going to leave the shop-tags on for while to remind me that these boots are made for walking not kicking brash or sawing wood.

I had a similar experience ~15 years ago when I bought a pair of Lidl middle-aisle walking boots. I used them while digging over the garden and destroyed them in about 2 weeks of footing a spade. The next pair served me about 6 years going to work with occasional yomps up the hill. Even €100 boots [HiTek looking at you!] can be kinda crappy. Update: €35 of repair work by Grumpty the Cobbler started to fail only 8 weeks later. Luckily I have two pairs of Columbia brand walking boots which are holding up well.:

English as she is spoke

At the very end of last year, we were exchanging books in the Local Local Library LLL [see L]. The same building hosts a Community Hub meeting room outside of which there was a scrappy timetable indicating which aspects of 'community' were hubbing in town. I wasn't pushed about cross-stitch Wedneesday but was interested in the local chapter of Fáilte Isteach: which is a community project involving predominantly older volunteers welcoming migrants through conversational English classes. I am told it started in Co Meath but has now spread nationwide. I sent them an e-mail:

Dear Fáilte Isteach,
I'm retired from teaching science in The Institute and wondered if Conversational English needs another body on the fluent side of the table in the LLL?
Regardless, I think you're doing a fine thing for the community.
Bob 

275 days later, I got a reply ". . . Sorry, I haven't logged into this email address in quite a while! But Yes we are always glad of an extra person to assist, particularly as winter evenings approach". And two evenings later, I shovelled down some dinner, and arrived at LLL on the dot [protestant!] of 19°°hrs. There was one old chap there, whom I know slightly, and eventually two Ukrainian women rocked up for 'class'. They were, apparently, part of a rolling group of 8 or 10 refugees who are regulars matched with 4 or 5 'natives.

I guess there has to be some structure to 'conversation class'; there was for the couple of years of Conversational Portuguese I did in the 1980s before we left England. Our mentor then was a qualified evening-class instructor and we read some newspapers, did a bit of rôle-play [you be the pharmacist, I'll start talking about blisters], a tiny bit of grammar, and some colloquialisms.  But we'd all reached a basic level [some of us very basic] level of fluency. It was good fun and we came to like each other's company.

I was a little taken aback when xerox sheets were handed out with the suggestion "Tonight we'll do adverbs". It was like, on a Buddhist retreat in a meditation session, we were invited to relax the pancreas. There is a word in Russian наречие [nareecheh] and Ukrainian прислівник [presuinik?]. I am the tail-end of the generations who learned 'grammar' in English class at school in the 1960s. But really no anglophone under the age of, say, 55 could tell you the difference between adverbs & adjectives / conjunctions & prepositions although they use words in both categories every day in normal speech and writing. I've forgotten pretty much all the formal grammar I learnt in school 60 years ago but I still speak and write grammatical English. And I'm happy to tell long-dead Mr Evers my English teacher that split infinitives are fine if it sounds okay - caring about not splitting them is a silly pedantic hang-over from Latin where all infinitives are a single unsplittable word. 

Anyway, Adverbs. Not all adverbs end in -ly, although at lot of the are formed from adjectives by adding that suffix: To boldly go where people split infinitives.  There are a whole clatter of common adverbs of place which qualify / describe where such a thing happens. We had a useful discussion on synonyms and 'nearonyms' without using the word synonym under = below; indoors = inside = within. All can be used when buildings are the container; but you can't be indoors a dustbin or a cupboard.

Then there are adverbs of time / frequency. Given the real basic level of last Thursday's learners, I forebore to suggest an exercise in ordering a bunch of similar adverbs of time. Great idea though to nail the nuance of language and I'd bet that there would be disagreement among native English speakers.  Go on: order this list from most to least frequent: always -- eventually -- infrequently -- never -- often -- rarely -- regularly -- seldom -- sometimes -- usually.

Later on Conversation example sheets were handed out. Talking about tire- and oil-changes with the mechanic in a garage fell a bit flat <pfffff!> because neither of our Ukrainian guests could drive. "Talking to the pharmacist" was quite a bit better because one of the women had served 40 years as a nurse in the radiology department of a Ukrainian Fever Hospital. We had an engaged if vocab-inhibited discussion about X-rays, antibiotics and tomography. The word for vitamin is the same вітамін, who knew? I thought it would be OTT to share my hilarious anecdote about how colon dwukropek got confused in Polish/English translation when I was teaching Human Physiology.

That was a week ago. Tomorrow evening, Fáilte Isteach is having open house again [as usual]. I intend to go; hoping for a rollicking good time with the Present Continuous [not!].