Books Away!

Decluttering much? We had the painter in for the whole of August. I had to shift boxes of photos out of his way . . . and then back again. I foolishly started doing triage on the photos when the painting was in train rather than at my leisure in the Spring. Better still would have been to do it in the Spring of 2006! Painter stoutly affirmed that he could paint round the book shelves IF I bought an extra roll of masking tape ANDIF I covered the spines. I can take a hint! I stripped the contents of three groaning wall-mounted own-self-make shelf units into boxes; and then unscrewed the shelves and schlepped them down to the woodshed [they are not kindling yet, mind]. Without shelf-clutter, the paint job was quicker and neater.

Only one of those book-shelves went back up. So I had ~8 linear metres of books in crates and boxes [BookBoxOne R]. The wonders of modern e-tech allowed me to take a photo of the spines, annotate any which were too scuffed to decipher and send the data to my adult childer for first dibs. I'm not dead yet, dibs didn't establish ownership, it just won a reprieve from Oxfam. We live in a modest ~100sq.m. dwelling but my kids live in teeny-tiny homes to it is fairy nuff to hold books here. We all agree that it is neither fair nor sensible to hold onto books that none of us will ever read [again]. Releasing a beloved book allows someone else to share the joy. I think our collective has done pretty well: ~50% of those 8 linear metres is destined for pastures new. Indeed some of it is already shipped.

It's a dilemma because my [exclusive, discerning] taste in books does not have much overlap with 'airport books', whodunnits, or crinoline romances. Oxfam, like any retailer, wants to shift stock not have it getting cobwebs on the shelf. This has been part of my long-time reluctance to let it go. The TCD Library booksale is the ideal showcase for my discards: it attracts the curious and peculiar readers. But currently, is not receiving donations. Dau.I cherry picked a couple of dozen titles and got €1 each from Chapters on Parnell St in Dublin. The handful that Chapters rejected were dumped on exchanged for two as-new photo-albums at a charity shop. I have a small box of nauty books [several ~100 years old] for a sea-faring pal. Tried to offload not-that-old genetics and evolution books on another reader; who said no-tnx. 

A little better luck with Freams Elements of Agriculture [1918, 10th edn] for which I got a "will gladly host it" from an former colleague, now an Aggi Prof in UCD. What's not to love about the cutting edge of plough coulters from a hundred years ago? When my moved onto the farrrm 30 years ago, the haggard was a litter of ancient horse drawn ploughs and related paraphernalia. The collection was magpied over by a 14 y.o. farmer-son who cannibalized them to get a couple of working machines which he entered into The Ploughing - the annual aggie showcase and jamboree. I think he won prizes, he certainly deserved "Best Follower in Grandfather's Footsteps" with a medal for "Persistent Can-Do! The last horse-plougher from our bus-stop village died in the 00s. Dang! but it will be hard to recreate his embodied expertise after the zombie apocalypse and all the €150,000 tractors in the valley are immovable clutter.

On the Sunday before Michaelmas, our neighbour La Torbellina de Tenerife came for tea with her brother who had been visiting for a few weeks and been in our yard or at our kitchen table several times. We presented him with a copy of de Baeza's Brighter Spanish, a parallel text phrase book from 1930, and Brown's Madeira and the Canary Islands; a practical and complete guide for the use of invalids and tourists with sixteen coloured maps and plans and numerous sectional and other diagrams (1910). Much hilarity ensued from the changes wrought on the vocabulary and business models of 100 years ago. I think those volumes will be happier out in the Atlantic.

 

Cultish Bossbabe

Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism (2021) Amanda Montell [R by Bigpurplehatguy] whom we've met "Wordslut" before. Like, most recently, other Blobs about words, their use and derivation, Cultish gets deep in the weeds of etymology. For Montell, 'cults' cover a wide spectrum towards extremes of malignant narcissism, Jonestown, Guyana and Reichsparteitag Nürnburg. Der Triumph des Kults is partly achieved by repeating a subset of the lexicon together. If you say something often enough it becomes, if not truth, at least the default. Thus, many objectively successful people believe in [their own] Meritocracy [prev Michael "Harvard Philosophy" Sandel]. In the pubs and clubs adjacent to Silicon Valley, it is a very easy flip to conclude that those at Grade 5 and below have failed through lack of merit and deserve their fate among the drones of late-stage capitalism.

I used to be quite smug about never being a member of anything "I was never a boy-scout". Then I signed up to MetaFilter . . . for the likes [✓] and the LoLs, like.  Dau.I maintains that The Blob is effectively a sub-site of MeFi.

Cultish is available on Borrowbox - I just returned it. It is read by actor Ann Marie Gideon, slow enough that you can crank up the speed to 1.25x and get through it in <10hrs without losing sense. 

Something said too much in specific contexts is a rough definition of jargon. The [over] use of specific words and phrases [evolution, clade, proteomics] is one way in which members can achieve solidarity. Montell introduced me to a new concept which also helps limit dissent [and smooth over cognitive dissonance] among the ranks: thought-terminating cliché TTC. This ante-dates Montell by about 50 years, and gets it's own entry in Wikipedia but it was new to me. Joan Didion characterised TTC as "It is a way of talking that tends to preclude further discussion, which may well be its intention."   If you can't achieve whatever goal in your fitness class, allowing the instructor to say "It's just karma, dude" allows t'bugger to let themself off their obligation of remediating your defects of fitness. Six-pack abs but lazy-arse upstairs!

One example of TTC "here we go again" gave me a little frisson of recognition. Our family devoted a year of our lives - and an elephantine carbon footprint - attending monthly meetings in Greystone to create the Home Education Network HEN. Gaaahd it was slow. One of our founders advised that we should devote the next N meetings, not to drafting a constitution or raising funds, but to sorting out our interpersonal relations through Consensus decision-making. The other professional Dad and I rolled our eyes and put a stop to that (nonsense). But we might well have been better off learning a different way of dealing with difference.

Difference? We could all do a little introspection on the theme of You are in a Cult whereas I am a member of a club. Too damned easy to dismiss The Other.

Harmless drudges

I was in Kilkenny's spanking new library filling in time before a visit to the dentist. It is, as all public libraries, richer in 400s "Language" than 500s "Science & Math". But I snagged (423.0922) The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary (2023) by Sarah Ogilvie. And I was rewarded in the snagging - it's great. 
The famous post-box [L cropped under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 from the work of Kaihsu Tai] outside 78 Banbury Road, Oxford where James Murray and 3000 others built the OED. We only know about the 3000 [!] because, in her last week as an Oxford lexicographer, Ogilvie opened a random box in the archive to reveal James Murray's address book. "It was one of those moments when things go into slow motion": as well it might for an archivist to discover The Archive.

She set out on an academic research project to track down and bring to life some of the ace, biased, crazy, dogged, eccentric contributors to the cause of describing the English language as it is used. OED has always been, thus, descriptivist rather than proscriptive = telling people to speak proper. It was an early example of crowd-sourcing. Biased? The English speaking world from America to Zanzibar was asked to read what they liked and thence choose illustrative usage quotes attached to words each reader thought needed that treatment. Thus, a District Officer in India might write 'slips' on khan, pagoda, puggaree, turban; while an ardent suffragette submitted emancipatress, womanist and hungerstruck. Or a doctor might abstract a lot of long words from an anatomy textbook and Editor Murray would feel obliged to include them even as they slipped from  normal usage. And if no wannabee amateur lexicographer turned up from Britain's African colonies? Then loan-words from Hausa and Swahili are invisible to the OED. The slips for Interesting contributors and editors have been shuffled and dealt by Ogilvie into 26 chapters from 'A for Archaeologist' to 'Z for Zealot'. 

Three of the top four contributors were banged up in Lunatic Asylums, while the 4th was an official in such an institution. One of them, William Douglas, submitted 150,000 slips over 22 years which works out at 2 slips an hour for two decades assuming a 60hr working week. Then again, he didn't have a day job. There were also 3 murderers 'on the books' only one of whom was convicted and in Broadmoor. 

Despite his protestations that all of English, [genital] warts and all, should be recorded in his OED, Murray baulked at including several common taboo words. Apart from the Obscene Publications Act of 1857, it was the 1890s: Victorian respectability was a powerful determinative force. In 1877, a bibliography of obscene literature was published by "Pisanus Fraxi" a clever-clogs pseudonym for compiler Henry Ashbee [it's an anagram of Fraxinus ash & Apis bee] who had accumulated the world's largest library of naughty books. He also submitted A Lot of slips from these works pour épater le bourgeois Murray and make him blush.

Ogilvie herself is recording a change in English usage: p.9 Where they lived, what they did with their lives, who they loved, the books they read. Bob: Surely that who should be whom? Scribens agrees: all the other grammar checkers, which are legion, don’t give a damn. I guess whom is on the way out. 
And "Harmless drudge"? That would be a lexicographer.

My PrecISSSS

It was a rather special weekend because The Boy, our firstborn Sun & Air, carved time from his busy working / parenting schedule to come on his ownio to visit his agéd parents. We didn't have a fatted calf about the places but I did buy some rasherses and sausinges and we had breakfast for lunch à trois on Sunday. Nothing like reddit/r/FryUp, mind! Either side of our Bunter Blowfest, we planted out 3 pot-bound exotic trees . . . for posterity, like. 

In normal chat and catchup, nobody is directing the convo and quite random things pop up. Turns out we've both been spending too much time on reddit/r/Ireland and had noticed a post about the International Space Station ISS making a pass across the Irish sky at 2100hrs. That was wrong in the detail by about an hour. so we missed the event. But, in any case The Event would have been a nothing-burger because it was 10/10th cloud cover. Being reddit, some wag offered "damn it if we had prep time we could have made a huge sign that reads: if you can read this please airdrop us some Taytos " The Boy was disappointed because he'd never knowingly seen the ISS. I have - 2018 and 2013: it's not rare like an eclipse. You just have to consult an almanac and hope for clear skies.

I took The Boy to the Dublin train at teatime on Monday. Later that evening, I checked the internet for Tonight's ISS show: 

Oooo, I had 40 minutes in hand. I also checked the sky which had a half moon and romantically scudding clouds. Just before 21:00 a faint satellite coursed across the sky in the same direction as the ISS was expected. But from my previous sightings, I was not fooled by this dullard. And then thar she blowes!

I coulda shoulda just watched with gob agape, because the ISS is bright and zippy; and rather wonderful even after all these years. But I pointed my device in the right direction and logged a tuthree snaps of The Event. Amazin' !! The crap-pic above doesn't capture the ghost-story clouds. I believe the other obvs star must be Altair = α-Aquilae while γ-Aql aka Tarazed is barely visible at 1 o'clock from Altair. ISS? would do again.

Isn't Alan clever?

The Vagabond and The Princess: Paddy Leigh Fermor in Romania (2017) by Alan Ogden

• Q. Can I walk?
• I can!
• Q. Have I walked?
• I have!
• Q. Have I gone on and On and ON about my walks?

But I am The Page to Wenceslas when compared to Laurie Lee, Eric Newby, Peter Fleming or Patrick Leigh Fermor and their earlier long-distance treks. I had indeed read all their walkie-books before I ever put one foot in front of the other.

Travel books are more, and better, than journals or diaries; because travel broadens the mind walking transforms the soul. The Buddhists of school of Plum Village practice walking meditation where they try [not tooo hard, mind] to become one with their breath . . . foot on the earth . . . other foot . . . breathe. But I'm not on that page. This here Page walks day after day until the blisters stop coming and peace settles on the shoulders. Fermor walked from Hoek van Holland to Constantinople in the mid-1930s, made friends, lost his cherry, encountered The Other and was never again at home in England. He kept a diary but lost it and relied on his memory to write up his journey 40 years afterwards. It is nostalgic, colourful, and exotic. It is not a journal but it does document a time and place which was swept into the dustbin of history by WWII and Yalta.

Aaaand 40 years after the publication of A Time of Gifts, a jobbing author with some knowledge of Romania (and the SOE in which Fermor served with success and panache during WWII) decided to write an in the footsteps of book about Fermor's Transylvanian adventures. Which could be wonderful and I got it out of the library on foot of being a Fermor Fanboi. There is some interesting info about the multi-lingual melting-pot aspects of Central Europe in the before times. I like the inclusive practice of using Romanian place-names but also tagging their Magyar and Deutsch identities, at least in the first instance. Thus Cluj (Hungarian: Kolozsvár, German: Klausenburg). We've encountered this before in Breßlau /Wrocław. But Author Ogden has a really annoying tendency to nit-pick about the failures of Fermor's memory:

Ogden 1 : Fermor 0!
on the prev page ' . . . slotted by embrasures, with a circular bastion at each corner'.  The bastions are not circular but polygonal and Paddy makes no mention of the prominent ravelins at each corner of the rectangular plan.
Ogden 2: Fermor 0!!
Fermor died in 2011 so he can't fight back. Slow triumphal hand-clap.

I learned a bit more about MittelEurop's ethnicities from the book but also from follow-ups on Wikipedia: 

• Székely maybe related to Attila's huns, they achieved a level of autonomy within the various empires into which they were subsumed and continued to speak a variety of Hungarian / Magyar. Ceded to Romania by the 1920 carve-up Treaty of Trianon, they were returned to Axis Hungary in WWII and then back to Romania. I have no idea whether they were sufficientlly endogamous to retain DNA distinction through 1,000 years in Transylvania surrounded by attractive Roma, Saxons and 
• Aromanians aka Vlachs are from further South into the Balkans but they speak a vulgar-Latin derived Eastern Romance Language not unlike the regular Romanian of Romania.
• Saxons are Germans, mainly from the low-countries encouraged East with various Ostsiedlung East-settlement schemes their lingo is like Luxembourgish. Saxony = Freistaat Sachsen is the Southernmost division of the DDR = East Germany. The Anglo-Saxons? they come from a non-contiguous part of Germania called Niedersachsen = Lower Saxony: a Land wedged up against the Northsea convenient for jumping to the first substantial island off the coast of NE Europe.

Diversity rocks! 

WOFFAL!

For months and months, I've had a book lurk unread in my Borrowbox reading list. Finally, a week ago, I brought 21st Century Yokel [2017] by Tom "never 'eard of 'im" Cox into play and it was a treat. He was born in the same year as Caitlin Moran [prev] and had a similar early career trajectory: working-class kid from Up North with a good ear and zeitgeist taste gets job as mainstream music journalist in London. They've branched out on different paths since then, but are both still writing and still lol funny. Tom Cox has a good dozen books out and about.

Cox [as R on a Devon cliff] found the pace and prices of late 20thC London a bit much and went upstakes to the country, first in Norfolk and then to Devon. He reflects in one chapter about the richness and variety of landscape to be found in such a small island as "Great" Britain. It ranks 9th after Honshu, ahead of Ellesmere. The coast of Devon and Cornwall is all cliffs, storms and sandy bays [much like Costa na Déise] while East Anglia is is a pancake haunted by fogs, and getting eaten away through erosion [bloboprev].

Cox embraces the fractal nature of landscape, asserting that there is a life-times interest and engagement to be had in the square mile surrounding his home outside Totnes. Indeed any square-mile, if you live nearby and pay attention. It's like Louis Agassiz spending the Summer vacation working his way across his back yard. We don't need to go to Bali or Iguazu for The Amazing: head to the nearest hedgerow be small.

The interface between domestic and wild in Cox's world is his cats. He's written a tuthree whole books about them. One chapter of Yokel tells how one of his cats was savaged by an off-leash dog and needed two operations and days of veterinary care to survive. The [enormous] vet bills were mostly covered through a crowd-funder organised by his fan-base. "wollen sie ewig leben?", it's not for me to judge how folks spend their own money.

21stC Yokel was published by Unbound, a cunning publishing venture which laid off the risk by crowd-funding the books they accepted for publication. It worked extremely well for Cox, who had a) track record b) loyal and extensive fan base. And his next handful of books were published by the same venture. For other authors, not so much. Unbound went into administration in 2025, 14 years after launch, owing royalties to multiple dependent authors. One of the directors John "QI" Mitchinson [whom prev] acquired the assets of the bankruptcy to create Boundless. "Author Tom Cox, whose latest book Everything Will Swallow You was due to come out this Thursday, became suspicious after months of not having received payments he was owed." That's the thing with bankruptcy, incompetent or unlucky entrepreneurs get to cut their losses and walk away to start new ventures. Their suppliers, clients, customers just have to suck up the losses - counting themselves fortunate to get pennies in the pound of what they are owed. 

otoh!! Walter Scott's printing business went tits-up in 1825 owing £130,000. Scott undertook to write himself out of his debts and died doing it. But the creditors' investment was returned and we got Woodstock, The Fair Maid of Perth and Castle Dangerous.

Tom Cox has a Dad, Mick (not Michael) Cox whose antics make an excellent foil for some of the book's humor. His catch-phrase is “WATCH OUT FOR FUCKWITS AND LOONIES!" [WOFFAL] while his aphorisms, and peculiar certainties, are always delivered SHOUTING. Apparently, this ALL CAPS conceit was first used by John "Garp" Irving in A Prayer for Owen Meany [1989], which is the favorite book of Cox Sr. John Irving was making a lot of waves when we was living in New England in the early 1980s but I never got further than The World According to Garp [1978]. Owen Meany sounds like a rec to me and I've reserved a copy at the Library.

A Life in Pictures

Whoa! The damsons are in.  We have a single scraggy damson Prunus domestica tree on a ditch in the fields across the lane. Recently we make jam from the fruit. 03Sep24 picked 1.15kg; 07Sep25  picked 0.85kg. The shortfall was partly due to fruit-fall and bird-attack, I conclude that timing is important: the fruit are pucker-up sour in August but compost by mid-September. Blossoms appeared this May. On foot of a phone-call from Dau.II, I lugged the ladder across the lane on 04Sep26 and picked a record 2.5kg of fruit [top L]; discarding A Lot blighted by brown rot Monilinia fructigena. 

 In the Spring, our friend-and-neighbour La Torbellina delivered a tray of very miscellaneous tomato and squash seedlings; not more than two of any variety. I carefully trans-planted them all: outside and in the polytunnel in a hope for the best fashion. I also started a variety of beans. It's been one of those years when it hardly seems worth the effort; the beans came late and grew scraggy and had a very brief bearing season. I saved about 1kg, blanched and frozen for Christmas and ate the rest. The squash were also disappointing: two scrawny courgette (which are the only variety worth eating [fry in butter with black pepper and a sprink of salt]. And a handful of uglier larger squash of uncertain name. Including the monster [mid L] which shouts the sage advice: "never eat anything bigger than your head" . . . free to good home, lads.

Me, I take 'less perfick' beans which would be rejected by Bird's Eye (and most of my family) and cook t'buggers up in a cozido: fry chopped onion and/or other allium in olive oil [it's a Portuguese recipe]; cast thereto available chopped veggies (beans, toms, spuds, carrots, squash); tarragon if possible, parsley oregano thyme else; sliced chorizo if the vegetarians are off-site; a handful of lentils. Cook till cooked. Gob more olive oil into the bowl. Eat with bread. 

A month ago, I started doing triage on the 000s of 'snap-shots' dating from ~1975 to ~2025. The collection / hoard cannot be dignified by describing them as Photographs. Photographs are composed, appropriately lit and in-focus. I am aware that Robert Capa and Henri Cartier Bresson loosed off a roll of film to cover one event / shoot . . . and left almost all of them on the cutting-room floor. That is probably appropriate now with digital cameras. But when each roll of film cost ready money while development and printing more than doubled that cost, it seems a ruinous expense to secure a couple of, like, Photographs. The stack of duff snaps [bot L] is 25cm tall and weighs 3.4kg. Their next and final move is to the dump; I will no longer schlep them, unviewed, from home to home over several decades. I have spoke! It's pathetic really, I look at images from 40 years ago and cannot recall the name of several of the friends thus captured. How much harder will it be for The Daus who weren't even born when the snap was snopped?

How do we know that Babe Ruth existed?

I am a fan of Sean "Mindscape" Carroll. He's a respected theoretical physicist, who has a chair in Philosophy at Johns Hopkins U. For his Mindscape Podcast he cast his net wide and pokes the expertise of his guest: chemistry, ecology, fashion, immunology, mathematics, medicine, oenology, philosophy, as well as physics. After an hour and a bit, I feel a bit better informed if not actually cleverer. Because clever is not about knowing stuff [Babe Ruth was 53 when he died; the Capital of Hungary is Budapest; Brobdingnagians are Big] it's about being able to process stuff. I know a lot - to wit decades of success in Table Quizzes. But there are limited areas [the chicken genome, Portuguese cats] where I know stuff because I've made it my business, through observation and research, to find things out from first principles. For everything else, I rely on trusted sources: hoping, assuming, trusting that someone else has done the deep digging. Because, for certain sure, we can't reinvent the wheel for everything we are certain sure about.

I bet you're convinced that the Earth is round like a ball, as is the sun, moon and planets. But what is the evidence for this hypothesis? Could you marshal that evidence for a crowd of skeptical fans of Terry Pratchett? I wrote some years ago about being wrong-footed on my belief in evolution. Research biologists, even biochemists, accept the theory of evolution by natural selection as fact. But only 1-in-20 of their serried ranks could articulate the evidence for this belief. But many of those same people are prepared to be rude to, and about, people from Tennessee who reckon nature's wonderful diversity and complex interactions are the creation of The Deity.

In August Carroll was chatting to his friend and colleague Stuart Firestein about how science lurches from blunder to error and drags the participants from ignorance to insight . . . and a well-cited paper, or tenure, or a Prize. At one point, the chat revealed that there is a [conspiracy] theory to the effect that there is no evidence that Babe Ruth even ever existed. This [un]hinges on the observation that there is only one moving image purporting to be Babe Ruth. There are loadsa copies in different contexts but it all boils down to this one movie clip. Given a) He died in 1948, decades after moving images became main-stream, b) His baseball stats are frankly incredible c) He is [therefore] probably the most well known baseball player who ever lived. The Theorists consequently experience a too-good-to-be-true meltdown of cognitive dissonance; which is resolved by concluding (and propagating) that Babe Ruth was a madey-uppy construct. Maybe as a conspiracy by Big Baseball to have an unattainable summit to inspire merely mortal players. Who knows with these crazies, huh? After all, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin never walked on the moon: the whole thing was staged at a studio in Houston.

Carroll and Firestein conclude that the adult response is not to cry "You're all kookaburra cray-cray" but "You know, it's an interesting question. How do we really know there was a Babe Ruth?" . . . "what do we take seriously? Who do we trust? What evidence do we have? How do we judge it?". Now more than ever we need to have a focused crap-detector when AI-bots can hallucinate, and then publish, plausible sounding facts that jest ain't true. 

Getting shirtings

We were at a funeral last Sat: the penultimate survivor of the previous generation. I feel myself getting hustled penguin-like to the edge of the ice-flow and the leopard-seal of death in the cold cold waters below. I try to brush up nicely for weddings and funerals and someone complemented me on the jacket. Dau.I overheard and noted that, at a previous family gathering, my mother had expressed amazement to have born and bred two such different sons: "Take your Uncle J., when he runs out shirts because he's too busy to get to the laundry, he drops by Marks&Sparks and buys six more shirts. Your father on the other hand, robbed all your grandfather's shirts when he died, and I don't think he's bought another shirt since"

It's true that I looted about 2 dozen of my father's office shirts after the funeral; and a very serviceable dark woollen overcoat - ideal for sleety Winter funerals; and a handful of dark 'service' ties - Royal Engineers, HMS Dolphin Torpedo School. The shirts presented me tidy for the last 20 years of my working life in academia. A few years ago, post-pandemic, after retirement,we were doing The Big Shop in Tesco. Their Winter stock was on sale and I bought a serviceable 100% cotton flannel shirt in what passes for Royal Stewart Tartan in the Bangladeshi garment trade. My father's shirts were worn-through at the collar or stained by hand-to-mouth food accidents. My new shirt cost 1 cappuccino or 2 at the most and has become my GoTo outdoor work-shirt. I've been looking for similar, in a desultory fashion, in charity shops, ever since. But WTF capitalism when you can buy 5 pairs of socks for less than a cup of coffee?

On 3rd September Aldi advertised 100% cotton tartan workshirts. It was great good timing because I was due to collect our latest Brazilian tradie from Bunclody at 09:00hrs and Bunclody has an Aldi. But the shirt-cupboard was bare when I got to Aldi - one pallet of middle-aisle merch hadn't arrived. When I got home I realised I could put my TFI rural bus routes project into practice. 11:35 in Kiltealy >>> 12:10 New Ross . . . 12:40 New Ross >>> 13:15 Kiltealy. By then it was 11:15, so I had to drive the 3.5km to catch the Southbound bus.

Imagine my delight when my journey intersected with the fortnightly 30 minute Kiltealy stop by the Wexford Mobile Library van: there were two books-for-return on the back-seat of the car. The 359 bus arrived on time (empty of passengers). GoogleMaps says it takes 12 mins to walk from the NR Bus Stop to NR Aldi but I did it in 9 (passing Lidl on the other side of the street). Bought two shirts against a working Winter and legged it back to catch the bus home. Proof of principle [✓] half-an-hour would be plenty time to do the messages at Supervalu && the adjacent Polski Sklep && the Pharmacy on Main St && find an ATM to pay for it all. That's pretty damned good infra-structural support for rural Ireland in the 21stC. You could sign up for 3½ hours in New Ross. But I don't think I could.

I do, So, buy my own shirts. 

Joined up tarmac

For reasons explained in the second half of this post, I entered a rabbit-hole about Irish roads and their numbers. Before there were any Motorways in the Republic, there were T for Trunk roads and L for Link roads [as R from my father's AA Road Book of Ireland] and a spider's web of bohereens and back-roads which were known and used only by local inhabitants, so didn't deserve a number. T and L roads were renamed and renumbered in 1977 as N for National roads. Nobody used these numbers! The main road from Dublin to Waterford, Cork & Limerick was the Naas Road. After Naas [30km from Dublin] you had to memorize the list of towns and villages along the way: Kilcullen, Castledermott, Carlow, Leighlinbridge, Paulstown [L for Waterford, R for Kilkenny], Gowran, Dungarvan [not that one, the smaller one], Thomastown, Ballyhale, Mullinavat, Waterford!

The British system radiates from London and goes clockwise A1 Edinburgh A2 Dover A3 Portsmouth A4 Cardiff A5 Holyhead A6 Carlisle. Splitting the country into zones. A10 to Cambridge, A11 Norwich, A12 Lowestoft A13 Southend etc. A7,8,9 do a similar job in Scotland.

N primary routes  N roads in  Ireland go from Dublin anti-clockwise N1 Belfast N2 Derry N3 Cavan N4 Sligo N5 Westport N6 Galway N7 Limerick N8 Cork N9 Waterford N10 Kilkenny N11 Wexford. N12-N26 are other Primary routes not radiating from Dublin. N17 by the SawDoctors; N25 The great Southern Trunk Rosslare to Cork etc. N50 aka M50 is the Dublin Ring-road and N40 the Cork Bypass.

N secondary routes from N51 [Devlin CoWH to Drogheda CoLH] up to N87 [Belturbet CoCN for 30km to the N.I. borrrder]  stitch up the gaps in the network.

R regional routes are designated to fill the gaps between the gaps. They are labelled Rxxx, and the numbers are sort of regional. They also radiate anti-clockwise round Dublin R1xx in the NE to R7xx hereabouts in the Sunny SE: we can see the R702 from our haggard. Some R roads are re-designated from previous N Primary routes which have been superseded by Motorways and can be wide & straight with generous hard-shoulders. R8xx and R9xx are exclusively short, urban, and designed to help tourists get out of town. 

Local Roads are tiered in three classes and numbered accordingly either Lxxxx or Lxxxxx and the same number may duplicated by different county engineers
L-primary are numbered L1000 to L4999 and should be at least 4m wide
L-secondary are L5000 to L 8999 and may be less than 4m wide somewhere along them
L-tertiary are L10001 to L89999 - Wikipedia says that the first four digits indicate from which N R or L road these tertiary routes originate. But that's not true unless there's some quaint code involved: local tertiary lane / driveway L20185 junctions with the R702 not the L2018 [it's about 500m from my sofa]. It's been a while since I posted about L4015 being in Waterford not LAOIS.

The story continues into anecdote:

In my engagement with the Barrow Bus, I hope I didn't sound too shrill and all somebody is wrong on the internet. I am especially glad that I didn't pass on a "helpful" [ie passive aggressive] note about the location of the Sculloge Gap Car Park: "Not R702 x L3001 but rather R702 x L 7049" because a) I was wrong in reckoning that B.B. thought L3001 was the bus-stop location b) I was wrong in believing that L7049 intersected with the R702. Although you can see why I and google-maps might think that:

The ↙ indicates where that supposed intersection occurred. I was left the bus at that place, after Paul-the-Driver had kindly and helpfully dropped me there and not where [R702 x L3001] he found me. I had a touch of cognitive dissonance when I saw the Wexford CoCo sign for "L6153" where I fully expected "L7049".  

The clue is in the Wexford CoCo. Because it turns out that L and R roads, their naming, signage and maintenance are solely under the control of the local authority. And they do not speak to each other. Citizen Andrew McCarthy at OpenStreetMap has culled and made available all the Co Carlow road ID data. While Citizen pjna at OpenStreetMap has done the same for a chunk of the Co Wexford inventory. Thus [the road of whc we treat . . .]

L-6153-1

NULL

Kiltealy

NULL

170m

is all that appears for the road-fragment in question. NULL start;  NULL end; no checked-by. Whereas on the Carlow side we have [TMI!?]

Southern

L-7049-0

Three roads at the bounds of Crannagh and Rathanna

via Knockroe

CoWexford bounds at Sculloge Bridge

width 5m

length 3,140m

100%

AndrewMcCarthy

The naming of L-roads is not quite arbtitrary but there is much leeway. How hard would it be to have Roads Wexford talk to Roads Carlow and use the same label for this same road?? Too late now, of course, there is the sunk cost of the metal sign and the label "L-6153" spread who knows where in who knows what media and documents. For further confusion, there are other L-6153s in Cavan and Limerick! Gotta say, by contrast, that the Irish County Library Service put aside their internecine bitchin' to embrace uniform catalogue, searching and loan-software, zero overdue fines, PLUS the ability to return books to any library in the country. 

PS. The following Sunday, Barrow Bus had internalized the data because I met the bus at "my" Sculloge Gap Car Park and tootled along very familiar by-roads to Graiguenamanagh. I doubt anyone else will take advantage of thus correcting the location of one boondock bus-stop.

Stormnamen 2026/27

1st of September each year since 2015 [2021  -- 2022 -- 2023 -- 2024 -- 2025] Met Éireann [RTE], Met Office UK [BBC] and Koninklijk Nederlands Meteorologisch Instituut [KNMI] go handen over de oceaan to name the coming Winter's storms together. Makes sense: we all get largely the same weather; although KNMI might feel the need to name an event [I dunno: Siberian blizzard?] which doesn't merit even a yellow warning for us. But that storm is [✓] off the list. And we recognise that no man island is an island and we'll retain the same names for, say, the tail-end of American hurricanes. Last year, for example, we interpolated Tempestade Claudia which rushed up from Iberia. In all we got through Amy (Oct), Claudia (Nov ES/PT), Bram (Dec), Chandra (Jan), Dave (Apr).

That short stack is typical. In Sept 2023, I maintained that there was no way we were going to get as far as Storm Jocelyn [Bell-Burnell]. But !bzzzt! wrong: we were hammered by Isha and Jocelyn back-to-back in mid-Jan 2024.  So this year's list:

Austen [Nagle 1903-1984], Boelo, Chloe, Dano, Evelyn [Murphy], Finn, Gwendolyn, Heather, Ivy, Jade, Kilian [Rohan 1916-1999] Laoise, Miriam [Lyons] Nicola, Olaf, Phelim, Ruban, Shaun, Theo, Vesna and Wende. Some of the green jersey's are named after famous Irish meteorologists, the others are submitted for consideration by we-the-public. The Brits nominated Shaun the Sheep. Watch out for Stormy McStormface any year soon. On NL side Gwendolyn is named after a girl whose mother threatened that KNMI would name a storm after her if she didn't tidy her room. She's grown up now, and presumably her rooms are within-the-normal-range tidy.

Let's hope that, like last Winter, we are spared tree-fellers in Darragh [Dec 2024] and Éowyn [Jan 2025] - we have plenty of fire-wood in stack, thank you very much Boreas. Then again last Winter was soooo wet we had to move the post-box to the bottom of the lane. The Anglo-Celt has a thoughtful essay on the storm-naming.

Biffer

I was in "Ireland's Greyest town" New Ross last Thursday, shopping in Aldi. To get there, I had to walk past (on the other side of the street)  LiDL  

To be clear. I have for more than 10 years characterized my disdain for Boxing in the person of Katie Taylor, but I am not blaming Ireland's star boxer whom I consider a victim as well as a biffer. The Promoters are the bad boys in this, seconded by Punters. Boxing is different from prize-fighting only qualitatively: we have not come a long way since Kilmaine's Own Gentleman Jim Corbett. The business is better regulated and aficianados are shocked, shocked I tell you if one 334 of the participants dies or sustains a cerebral haemorrhage. But it's still a sorry tawdry spectacle of two human beings waling into each other, with fists, for money, while other people pay-to-view. Four questions:

• They shoot horses don't they ?
• They do 
• How do you spell contact sport encephalopathy ?
• CSE 
• What is the Irish for shame ?
• náire as in Nach bhfuil náire ort?
• Will you join me in boycotting  LiDL  for supporting the 18thC ? 

Brimful

Three weeks ago, I was obsessing about the rain [lack of] and how disconcertingly crisp was the yard after a no-rain July. The rain gods delivered a steady drizzle on the 3rd August and then buggered off back to the tropics. On 27th August we were part of a yellow rainfall-with-thunder warning. I took The Beloved to the Dublin train, acquired some groceries, and got back home by 10:00am. Just as the heavens opened. It's not Winter, so I instanter stripped down to shorts [no, not me undies USAians] and a T-shirt, seized my biggest azada, and spent 30 minutes beefing up the berms which divert water from the surface of the lane into the parallel drain. It rained steady for the next 4 hours, at the end of which 37mm of rain had fallen. That's an inch and half or about 5% of the annual average rainfall in East Ireland.  Over the 10:00 to 10:00 24 hours about 44mm fell. And we are forecast for more rain in reasonable amounts over the next week, 

By skipping about between my various pumps, siphons and containers, we are now back to full capacity:

• 2200 lt - 2x 1tonne IBC 
• 200 lt - 1 large herring barrel
• 330 lt - 3x med herring barrels
• 240 lt - 1 blue stable-barrow [R bot]
• 100 lt - 1 orange movers packing crate [R top]
• 100 lt - misc 20lt buckets
• 3 tonnes total 

In June I was delighted to score some as-new bright orange food grade buckets with snap lids [R top]. Hill-walking friends-and-neighbours came by to harvest some hay-rattle Rhinanthus minor seed to put brakes on the grass in their lawn. We had a great time, thrashing the standing plants into buckets until we had a few hundred grams of mostly hay-rattle seed. Bonus: misc other wildflowers. I expressed admiration for the buckets they had brought for this purpose and two days later six as-new buckets appeared over the gate into our yard. Mick was quietly pleased to be presenting orange buckets to the local Prod. But I am colour-blind in these matters: and not all protestants sport a sash.

Give me your poor

M'correspondent G sent me a link from the Kilkenny People about a free bus to the mountains running on Sundays this Summer. The new bus service is a cunning plan from Kilkenny Leader, whose CEO Declan Rice offered  “the great outdoors in rural Ireland almost always requires people to have a private car.” errm quite so, although you could pile 5 people into a taxi and call yourselves the Boomtown Rats Bag'town Ramblers. I live in the mountains served by this bus service and say "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free". Our mountain commonage is 200 hectares in extent, we could certainly disperse a 30-strong busload of TiredPoorHuddled across the heather so that they could not see / hear each other . . . but could see / hear skylarks.

It took a while before the distant bell tinkled by that short piece in the KK People overcame my residual tinnitus and I remembered that I'd been 'involved' with the birth of this worthy endeavour. Around Christmas time 2024, I had some to-fro with a couple of young Effectives from SETU = South East Technological University, including a Zoom-call. They were working on a "Mobility Strategy for Lower River Barrow & Blackstairs Mountains Visitor Region" aka was it feasible to criss-cross this "here be dragons" backwater with bus stops or rentable bicycle stands to link the market towns along its periphery. In 2022, I had researched & written a Heritage Report bigging up the history, ecology and free-breathingness of the self-same Visitor Region. So I had something to contribute. I'm old and forgetful, so my sharing report, opinions, contacts & IP with this project had long since flushed out of my memory-palace and down the streams of times past. Then G reminded me. So harrrumph, it might have been courteous to keep a tally of all the voluntariat contributions to the project and drop them a line to say the Buses are running and thanks for your help. Even if you believed that it was all your own work.

Anyway moan off! It looks like I can catch a [free] bus at Sunday lunchtime from a car-park I can see from The Ringstone, pootle into town, buy a newspaper, skull a pint, and be back on the bus home half an hour later. Other permutations, involving more pints, are surely possible. Last Sunday, they were giving thundery downpours in the afternoon, so I resolved to catch the bus going South to the buzzing metropolis of Graiguenamanagh. Dep Car-Park 1110 arr Graigue 1130 and return 45 mins later. When he got there, the cupboard was bare: because Barrow Bus doesn't know where is the Car Park. I therefore missed that bus and reverted to Plan A: North to Borris. I made an informed guess about where B.B. thought the Stop was, was wrong, but flagged down the bus as it left the mountains for civilization. I shared the bus into Borris with two elderly ladies from St Mullins, who were going for Coffee in Goresbridge (and why not?). 

I used to boast-moan, that our gaff couldn't be further from a regular bus stop [20km East or 25km West] and still be in the populous province of Leinster. I also used to rant at the precarity and unjoined-upness of Irish buses. But in the last tuthree years TFI - Transport For Ireland has really pushed the bus out. There are now five No.359 buses each way between Enniscorthy and New Ross via our mountainy hinterland. Whoa! and, like, woot! They have just installed a bus-shelter [R, as yet unvandalized] at the Dead Centre [note graves in background] of Kiltealy. I fully intend to walk 40mins down the mountain to the nearest stop - for the craic like. 

Or for utility:

• 🚶Shanks mare Home 0720 Kiltealy 0800 
• 🚌359 Kiltealy 0805 New Ross 0840
• 🚌340 New Ross 0920 Waterford 0940
• 🚌360 Waterford 0943 Tramore 1005 

They would still have croissants for sale at The Seagull Bakery in Tramore! I could afford one from the pot of gold saved by not driving 70km in my Yaris. And delighted to report that JJKavanagh buses covering Dublin-Déise have, after 40 years of capitalism red-in-tooth-and-claw, out-competed the state sponsored Bus Éireann to close down its parallel Rte 4.

Going to the dogs

In March this year, I wrote about failing to track and borrow the only copy on the books of a title in the Irish public library system. I mildly moaned about this to Dau.I the Librarian: books are effective fungible, one is as good as another for my edutainment. It turns out that her current role is Acquisitions, Non-Fiction and she responded brightly "thanks for the suggestion, I think We the Library could acquire a couple of copies". And it was so, and she reserved one for me to borrow, and on 13 Aug I was messaged:

• The following item(s) are being held for you until the date shown below. Title: Winterdance:the fine madness of Alaskan dog-racing Author: Paulsen, Gary

Well, Winterdance (note: not Riverdance auf Nuremburg) is a stitch and deserves to be read much more widely by a dog-loving nation. And yet, because of Der Triumph des Neuen, this 30 year old publication had been remaindered  and culled to make room for 313 copies of The impossible fortune : a Thursday Murder Club mystery (2025) then latest by Richard Osman. And 251 copies of Prize-winning The Adversary by Michael Crummey.

Winterdance is the tale of conjuring up a team of sled dogs [Typhoon Cookie Yogi Max Storm Steven Bill Devil Murphy Ortho BigMac Raven Byron - other people's dogs, other people's names] with the intention of running the 1850km Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race [whc Bloboprev] in 1983.

About 20 years ago 7 y.o. Dau.II wanted a dog so badly that she spent lots of time as a dog - gruffling, fawning, crawling about on all fours and eating weetabix off the kitchen floor. This annoying behavious did  manifest her desire [R.ashers] in short order. Paulsen reckoned along similar lines. I had to sleep in the kennel, I had to be with the dogs all the time, learn from them all the time, know them all the time. More than sleep [there], I had to be in the kennel all the time. I had to, in some way, become a dog. Without that 100% commitment, his future as a (-40°F = -40°C) sled-runner was going to be bleak indeed and could get him and his dogs killed.

Spoiler: Paulsen finished the Iditarod with all 15 of his starting dogs, nowhere near the prize money but well along in his transition to become a dog. Whiffs like a dog, pulls like a dog, eats sketchy like a dog. I recommended it to Dau.II who has lately been on a Reading Running jag: Feet in the Clouds, -- Tarahumara, -- Zatopek. What's not to love about endurance, adversity, sunrise from the top of the world . . . with pups? Winterdance is not didactic, it's not a diary, it's a distillation of a process. It is funny hilarious. There are now three copies in the Library.

My analysis of the process of pilgrimage [Santiago etc etc] concludes that internal transformation can occur at walking pace (indeed on crutches) if there is intention, if expectation of failure is dumped, if you go a little bit more. Pilgrimage is something you do on your feet not with your feet up with a book. I have seen with mine own eyes: Dau.II is running.

O Dia dos artesãos

'Twas on a Friday morning
The painter made a start
With undercoats and overcoats he painted every part
Every nook and every cranny
But I found when he was gone
He'd painted over the gas tap and I couldn't turn it on! 

Flanders & Swann 

We do be living on the farrrm thirty years. In 1996, the farmhouse was in neglected, but not ruinous condition: hole in the front door, hole in the roof, missing gutters, no running water. After our neighbours John & Michael sunk a bore-hole to 30m, and famous Paddy Butler submersed a pump, we (by which I mean She) sourced a plumber to capture the upwelling for taps and radiators. The plumber was not local, and nor were we, but nobody told him about the acid groundwater, so he fitted everything out with [industry standard] copper pipe. The copper hot-water cylinder failed within two years; about the same time as the pressure cylinder at the well-head. The pipes to the bathroom lasted a bit longer and were eventually replaced by qualpex plastic . . . but not before serially compromising the kitchen ceiling below.

For reasons, The Beloved decided that 2026 was when we would future-proof the house. She canvassed her network for a house-painter, electrician, plumber, stove-guy. Because our network leans Woo, most of the new Tradies ran eccentric hours and work-practice. Since 27 April, it's been a Napoleonic 100 Days campaign of disruption. It may be, should be, standard practice to supply tea at tea-breaks and who can offer tea without biscuits or brack? Hereabouts, in echoes from pre-1970 haying meitheals, contractors working all day get a full meat&potatoes dinner at lunchtime. In 2026, we found ourselves sitting to dinner [no fish!] at 8pm being regaled with stories about Communist Poland or tea and sandwiches [no crusts!] at 6pm hearing about chai and cricket among Calcutta's dispossessed. Not to mention exchanging cakes for flapjacks with a New Irish family in the next county.

Last Monday was scheduled to be O Dia dos Artesãos [The Day of the Tradies: Sparks + Séan-the-tree + Slappie Mike] and The Beloved was called away to the Déise at short notice.  It's always alright on the night, but I find dealing with people and their hydration is stressful, so I requested Tuesday as O Dia do Cobertor Ponderado [Duvet-day = Day of the Weighty Blanket]. When the Electrician rescheduled for Wednesday, my stress drained a bit but spread a bit and it rather became A Semana dos Artesãos. WTF the Portuguese? Another recent addition to our lives is from Brasil and my Portuguese is better than her English, so Thursdays involves a different sort Bom dia, obrigado of interpersonal stress.

Our new plumber [the sixth!] was called because of an external leak which he diagnosed and stopped in a couple of hours. Predictably, he did the usual thing of looking at the work of previous plumbers, shaking his head ruefully and saying there was Much better way to do that. There are A Lot of T-junctions in the plumbing array in the shed because it's complicated with gauges, pumps and, like, junctions [picture at the link]. These junctions are connected by short lengths of copper pipe, but copper is a disaster waiting to happen if the water is pH5 (acid). Installing the Stop revealed [see L below] a wafer-thin corroded fragment of copper pipe. I guess we are beyond the half-life of copper in acid and we'll have to replace all the pipework if we want central heating this Winter. Not for me, mind, I just bundle up in sweaters if it's colder than 15°C. As an indication of The End Times, you should know that scrap copper is worth $6,600/tonne = €6/kg. That'd almost double the price $3.60/kg at the birth of The Blob [prev].

Gallivanting malarkey

Colm O'Regan grew up on a farm but went to school in Cork City where he had to endure slaggin' about wellies and silage from wannabee urban corner-boys. But he was quick on his feet and on the uptake, so didn't let his head get flushed down the t'ilet by the bigger lads. We was always alert to words, how they are spoke and went viral on Twitter with @irishmammies. I've snagged his most recent published e-book: Gallivanting With Words: How the Irish Speak English (2025) although would be grand altogether to absorb it parallel-text as an earbook. But you can hear him innerviewed by Oliver "RTE" Callan on RTE [L]. Heard on the Luas [p158/468] “will wanayiz gerrup and leave the old man sit dow-en”, for example, really needs both the audio and the transcript. At the mo' only his book Climate Worrier is on borrowbox audio.

I have to say that I really enjoyed this book: he's not afraid to use tech-linguistic terms and has not been superficial in his research but is laugh-out-loud funny on the reg'lar.  Gallivanting is a standard, if old-fashioned, English word but in Ireland is only used to 'give out' when someone has been having too much of it. Malarkey sounds like a Hiberno-English word but actually isn't and wordies can't even agree on the etymology.

Technical terms, is it? How about words for the state of being intoxicated? balubas - banjaxed - banjoed - blootered fluthered - hammered - in a hape - langers - locked - mawldy - ossified -paralytic - polluted - scuttered - stocious -well on. I've gone alphabetical, O'Regan put more effort into the task and sorted them in order of inebriation. He clearly has more experience in these matters

In 2017, The Blob went briefly viral over the etymology of Lack Déise-speak for girl-friend. I concluded that a Russian origin was probably Бoллiж with a borrowing from Shelta, the argot of travellers, being much more likely. O'Regan concludes [p171/468]: lackeen (‘girl’) comes from cailín by back-slang. It may also derive from shelta, mind you. Back-slang? That's central to verlan, the Parisian argot of the streets. There femme becomes meuf. New-to-me [p.173/468]: in Shelta buffer means Other or Outsider cf gaijin = goyim = gentile. Me, I've been using the self-descriptor "Old Buffer" here and on my LinkedIn page. 

O'Regan is in the Irish Examiner every Friday. His HomePage - somebody should really float him a Wikipedia page.

fn on Oliver Callan. He came over my horizon in the 00s with a weekly dose of satire on the wireless called Callan's Kicks. It was described by The Sunday Independent as "the best comedy show the national broadcaster has ever produced".  I thought it was woeful: Callan doing silly voices sounding like politicians and celebs is not satire the way Spitting Image was satire. I had to leave the kitchen when he came on; or grin and bear it on the car radio. More recently, he's got a life as a radio journalist in his own voice, taking the reins of the morning Pat Kenny Show from Ryan "lightweight overpaid" Tubridy and he's really good: articulate, sharp, interested.

Dai the sponger

A good part of my failure to cull the too many books we own is the thought that some forgotten classic will go straight to pulp if I donate it to a charity shop. But it is too much effort to find the only other person in the country (world) who is on the same page in the long tail of printed books which are not Danielle Steel or Harry Potter. It is surely true that some Best Sellers of the 1930s or indeed the 1980s are unavailable in the 2026 library because fashions change.

But I'm the boy for giving The Forgotten of Yest time and attention. When the folks at Faber & Faber [read recent] were raving about, and publishing, Anathemata and other works of David "never 'eard of 'im"  Jones, then I scanned the library catalog to see what was available. There are two copies [Cork and Meath] of his WWI prose-poem In Parenthesis. But I reckoned it was fairer to  myself, and DJ, if I read rather a biography like David Jones : engraver, soldier, painter, poet (2017) by Thomas Dilworth [for whc long expository review] . . . and it was so. 

DJ must have had a charismatic glow because the middle part of his life was like that of eccentric mathematician Paul Erdős who, for decades, lived out of a suitcase. He'd turn up at the door of a fellow math wonk to stay and wouldn't go until he was good and ready. And had knocked off a handful of amazing scientific papers with his host as co-author. Which would give the host immortal fame with an  Erdős number of 1. Jones spent longer in the WWI trenches of Flanders [as L] than Wilfred Owen [prev], Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden or anyone else who left a literary or artistic legacy from that holocaust. And it left him with a bundle of PTSD including anxiety, depression and agoraphobia. He'd come to dinner, drink a lot, be offered a bed for the night, wake up 'shook' and stay for a week. The conversation, mostly with the man of the house, was wide-ranging and entrancing; the extra chores, entirely by the women of the house, were just . . . chores.

Being catered for re-enforced a learned helplessness which his friends, patrons and relations would rush to accommodate. He got [fn p225] £4.10s weekly from Helen Sutherland; £2 weekly from Tom Burns; and random gifts: £2 from his father, £13 from Prudence Pelham; £40 from Ralph Harari. The cooking, sewing, ironing, catering & cleaning are barely acknowledged, let alone accounted for, by Dilworth the author of the biography. And he has an annoying habit of setting the record straight by enumerating the errors of previous biographers.

But I think I can agree with his hypothesis that DJ's psychiatrist greatly diminished the poet-artist's creativity and productivity through over-medication [ft p314-315] Benzedrine, phenobarbitone, phenobarbital, lithium, Nembutal, Parnate (side effects anx, insom, drowsi), Drinamyl (amphetamine + phenobarb), Nardil, Trofanil, Diazepam were all prescribed over the years, several in steadily increasing doses. In the biter-bit spirit of setting the record straight I'll point out that phenobarbitone and phenobarbital are synonyms and Drinamyl is a potent mix of amphetamine and amylbarbitone  and has long been discontinued. They say that UK PM Anthony Eden's judgment was impaired by prescription Drinamyl to precipitate the Sue\z crisis of 1956. DJ was a pal of Clarissa "PM's wife" Eden, sending her gifts of his books and art-works and was invited to tea at 10 Downing Street. Maybe the chaps shared purple hearts over the iced-dainties (provided by the staff).

Title is a reference to the joke about "no, you want Jones the Spy at #37" which hinges on the paucity of Welsh surnames. Our current house-painter asked if the biog here discussed was about Davy "The Monkees" Jones, of whom he'd been a fan in his youth. errrm, No.

Taking the log for a walk

Not last Winter, the one before, we took a slap and a buffet from sequential named storms. Darragh [Dec'24] felled a bunch of trees to the East while Éowyn [Jan'25] laid them out S⇒N. I developed some upper body strength sawing the wood to log-length; then splitting and stacking it for Winter fuuuel. That also involved serially filling a wheelbarrow and pushing logs to stack-site, often uphill. Foolish and/or rich people of my acquaintance pay several hundred dollars a year to get a similar workout in a gym.

Éowyn was particularly awkward for downing three lumpy trunks of a rowan Sorbus aucuparia across a sunken lane and into the edge of my neighbour's field.  The fence was crushed but the gap was still stockproof, so fixing wasn't urgent. I couldn't deal with it myself because the footing was 2½m = 8ft below the cuts I needed to make. But I asked our tree-and-hedge cutting neighbour to come and quote me for lifting the trunks up&out onto our field edge where I could safely cut them up. He came, said he could do it for €100 and then didn't: I stopped nagging after three reminders. By which time the ground was too soggy to take heavy machinery.

Last July we had a six-pack of fit young chaps from Glavey Tree Service come and fell out the 4 ash Fraxinus excelsior trees which were most likely to do damage because badly affected by ash-dieback disease. The contract stated reducing branches to 2m lengths and mulching anything smaller than ⌀ = wrist. But it was the hottest day of the year and they rock-borked the chains on both their biggest saws so we were left with a) #4 1.2m x ⌀ 750mm lumps from the biggest tree and b) #2 6½m forked trunks ⌀ 600mm tapering to ⌀ 20mm.

Turns out that Séan the Mow and Sean the Wall-builder are a) the same person b) in possession of JCB 537 Loadall teleporter. He offered to come and do all the heavy log-lifting IF they were left in lengths. It being far more efficient to move one big thing than a clatter of small things whc would need bags. And it was so:

eeee but I do love an expert, who has acquired and internalized a useful skill . . . that I haven't had the time (or capacity) to master. The two long tapering ash trunks had been felled into our 0.4 hectare mini-woodland. From the lane all you could see was was the butts barely poking out over the wall. As a first step, we attached a loop of 20 tonne chain to the first butt and dragged it out across and into the lane. Next a bight of chain was looped round the log at the centre of gravity. Séan's first guess at the CoG was 8-10cm off: so he let down the boom and I shifted the chain. "There," he said, "lay a hand on the far end to stop it swinging and we'll carry it up to your log-pile". And it was so. We took the other log for an identical walk 20 mins later. Séan was once a roofer and spent his working life barracking his workmates to get a steel I-beam roof-truss perfectly balanced while it is still on the ground. It takes 5 minutes to do it right - and saves A Lot of grief aligning multiple bolt-holes in two girders Up There where it's windy, slick with rain, and a long way down. 

Faber & Faber

It takes a village to launch an author!

Over the last 20+ years, I've been making enough marmalade to satisfy a rapacious family and have an inexhaustible supply of 'makes and acceptable gift' for friends, relations and random visitors. The modal response from the latter group is a) thank you very much that was excellent and b) you should go into business selling it. Errm, No! Spending a couple of days squeeezing pectin from pulp and getting spattered by boiling marmalade is my wheelhouse. Standing in the drizzle at a farmer's market for €4 a pot, not so much. When you buy marmalade in Tesco, it is the work of dozens of human hands:  glass-blowers, lid-stampers, fruit-pickers, sugar-refiners, bottlers, boxers, truck-drivers, shelf-stackers. And a pyramid of gangers, QC, marketeers, designers, managers all the way up to Gerry Murphy, the Tesco Chair.

Same in publishing. There are far more authors than there are financially secure authors, and far more writers than there are [published] authors. After writing 500-800 word chunks for the internet since 1996, I've clocked up 2.5 million coherent words. It's never going to become a 60,000 word book, between covers, on  a shelf, because I am essentially a butterfly without the bottle to decide which 98% of it to leave on the cutting room floor. That ruthless copy-editing is part of the work that publishers do.

I'm currently reading Faber & Faber the untold story (2021) by Toby "3rd Gen" Faber. Their Spring 1930 Catalog offered James Joyce's Ulysses by Stuart Gilbert. At the time Ulysses itself was banned in the UK " . . . Even therefore if the original were published in England, Mr Gilbert's exposition would be valuable. As things stand it is invaluable". f&f did, eventually, pull enough teeth from James Joyce to publish Finnegan's Wake in 1939. Another coup was publishing Laurence Durrell's amazing Alexandria Quartet, which I must get round to re-reading as part of my 2026 Leventine book-fest. Also his Bitter Lemons.

C.P. "Two Cultures" Snow and Gerald Durrell [egotistical younger brother of Laurence] were discovered and launched by f&f but left for green[back]er pastures after their initial promotion and best-seller success. There was a certain amount of wounded hauteur at Faber at this lack of loyalty from these authors but their shift tracked the arrival of Literary Agents as go-betweens in the publishing world. There is no reason why a writer would have the toolkit to drive a hard bargain to turn their fruit of their labour into shoes for their own children. No more than a scientist should be able to manage a $million grant or competently HR a team of 10 effectives. Agents get a bigger slice of the pie (and their 10% on top) for authors but that slice deprives secretaries, copy-editors, typographers, designers, cover artists of their Christmas bonus or indeed their jobs; as publishers are forced to trim their sails. Read the acknowledgments of any recent book to see how many people are involved in the process. Yes, even ebooks and earbooks need work between the author's typescript and your eyes/ears.

Despite being written as a scrap-book of letters, memos and minutes gleaned from the archives with minimal narrative links, Toby Faber's book comes through as a gripping yarn. IF you can skate over the pervasive background of entitlement and snobbery. Having been refused an extension of their overdraft by the manager of their NatWest branch, one of Team Faber had lunch with fellow Old Boy NatWest Chairman to re-open the vaults.

T.S. Eliot, f&f Director, on potential new hire (and TSE's eventual replacement / successor) Charles Montieth: I am inclined to take seriously John S[parrow]'s remark that C.M. has flair rather than taste . . . C.M. is, no doubt, a plebian; but on the basis of one interview it would not occur to me to call him 'common'; and (which is the most important), I would be surprised to hear anyone designate him as 'vulgar'. Gah! This Pleb had a double-first from Oxford, was a wounded WWII veteran (Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers), and [like Geoffrey 'Founder' Faber], a Fellow of All Soul's Oxford [DIB for deets]. He went on to scoop for Faber: Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Tom Paulin, Samuel Beckett and John McGahern [and that's just the Irish]. 2x Heaney's and 2x McGahern's in my pic above L where also Spufford.

TS Eliot didn't win his 1948 Nobel Prize [“for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry”] for Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939) but the latter made him (and Faber) fabulously wealthy after Andrew Lloyd Webber conjured his musical Cats from those children's poems. Indeed f&f would have gone bust in the 1980s without the Cats royalty cheques.