Wetlands

Back when still part of the Ascendancy, I and others were at Morning Coffee [tea optional] in my department in Trinity College Dublin. My HoD, a leading light in the Protestant mafia started on about turning Achill Island, Co Mayo into a Jurassic wildlife park "re-introduce wolves Canis lupus and bears Ursos arctos - giant Irish deer Megaloceros giganteus were a hoof too far because they were all dead. "and what" someone asked, "would the plain people of Achill have to say about that?" Which put a stop to this fantastist's gallop.

We levered our arses off the sofa on Thursday night for film night in Visual Carlow. It was hosted by CCEN County Carlow Environmental Network and featured a very mixed bag of shorts about Wetlands - with a Q&A afterwards. The tickets were "Free" but there are significant opportunity costs [and petrol] to take 4 hours out of a winter evening to make a 90km round trip. The last 10m film was about the Drummin Bog Project DBP [prev] with local national school youngsters singing a song about bog myrtle and fraugháns. 

At the Q&A, one of the leaders of the DBP ruefully admitted that, 7 years in, it was only blow-ins, artists and poets who came for the open days of bog restoration. Local farmers, supposed beneficiaries of slowing water down in its rush from rain-sodden hills to the sea via the River Barrow, carry on regardless. Another Q&A contributor from the floor described a woeful breakdown in comms between management and inhabitants in Ballycroy Co Mayo where the National Parks and Wildlife Service NPWS have designated 150 sq.km as Páirc Náisiúnta Néifinne Fiáine Wild Nephin National Park [R as mapped - yours for €11 - by the redoubtable yomping cartographer Barry Dalby].  A vengeful Queen Medb (or person or persons unknown) set Nephin on fire last April destroying walkways and other access infra-structure. That's my second-hand take on what went down in Nephin. RTE prefers the passive tense [gorse started burning . . . "Public urged to act 'responsibly' after Mayo gorse fires"] rather than finger-pointing. 

If I was really local, rather than a blow-in 30 years a-squatting, one of my neighbours would have told me who fired our mountain last year. But the chances are good that such a finger would have pointed at The Wrong Neighbour, so I am happier not to know. My neighbours are just folk: some kind and some with blunted empathy and some damaged beyond repair.

I don't know any of the details but it's reading like Nephin was conceived over coffee in Dublin rather than in the pubs of Ballycroy. And not half enough of the budget was allocated to bringing people on board. It's not enough to lurry out subsidies and financial incentives. Indeed paying people to do right by the curlews crotach Numenius arquata and plovers feadóg bhuí Pluvialis apricaria  may be a counter-productive perverse incentive. Like the Israeli creche parents - if you pay people it becomes transactional and gets minimal [✓] response. If you can, by tale and example, induce even a minority to love their hares Lepus timidus [prev] and tormentil Potentilla erecta you won't need to pay anyone.

Vegemite

For being a Good cockroach in a previous life, I was rewarded with teaching a lab section for the Food & Fermentation Microbiology [F&F] course in the Biosciences BSc, The Institute had a policy that no course should rest entirely in a single Lecturer's portfolio. otoh The Union resolutely and repeatably stomped on the idea that such cross-dressing would enable flexibility of delivery in case of, say, a medical emergency. So it was hard to see the benefit. But I was really happy with the assignment because I learned a lot. The Real Microbiologist, who did the formal lectures and carried the other two lab sections, had worked for Guinness in that capacity in both Europe and Africa. He had a particular affection for LABs - lactic acid bacteria - without which no silage, no kimchi, no cheese, no yoghurt and really terrible wine.

That course gave structure to my interest in food engineering which has been a running theme in The Blob while I was still working at The Institute. I was quick to snag a promising Food.Eng earbook from Borrowbox last week Vegemite The True Story of the Man Who Invented an Australian Icon written and read by Jamie Callister (2023). Borrowbox is owned by Bolinda, the Australian audio and large print book publisher. I get to read some Oz-niche books.

Jamie Callister is the grandson of Dr Cyril Callister (1893 -1949) an Australian chemist and food engineer who invented Vegemite in  the 1920s when supplies of Marmite [original and best] dwindled during and after WWI. Like soy sauce, Nattō, Surströmming, crubeens; Vegemite is an acquired taste. Dr Callister had spent much of WWI working in an enormous munitions factory at Gretna on the Scottish borrrder. A large part of his work was QC and process tech, to ensure that neither he nor any of the 16,000 other employees blew themselves to buggery through carelessness or system failure.

invented Vegemite was by no means a >!shazzam!< event. They had a target product in another edible non-meat black paste called Marmite. I know I was confused as a child between *mite and, say, Bovril which ultimately came from beef . . . and was a little more runny? Reducing a vat of beige spent yeast from brewing to something you could slather on toast . . . and eat, depended both on the initial product and the details of the process. A little more of this or a tad less of that and the result could be a sulphurous, curdled mess that not even the dogs would eat. Record keeping is key to reproducibility. And scaling up from test-tube and beaker to a car-sized vat is not obvious to all thinking people: surface-to-volume ratio is one aspect that needs to be calculated and thought about.

And after all the science, it took 15 years of marketing and long-game company belief before Vegemite was washing its face for the accountants. By which time another War was shipping thousands of ANZAC soldiers abroad.  One of those was Cyril's son, the author's Uncle Ian, who became a spitfire pilot and died in a tragic fog-of-war accident while taking off on a mission in New Guinea. He was only 21. The Wikipedia entry on this pity of war the pity war distilled looked a bit sparse "" Between 1919 and 1927 the Callisters had three children: Ian, Bill and Jean, who were "the original Vegemite kids". Drew is a great-great-grandson and loves his Vegemite. During World War II, Ian died"" so I added a Virtual War Memorial Australia link. I hope young Drew continues to get his Nine Words Of Fame for a while.

Turns out that Vegemite has achieved global hegemony is available in  Ireland, so we can do a custard: compare the product with Marmite. Celery surprised me.

Vegemite: Yeast Extract (from Yeast Grown on Barley and Wheat), Salt, Malt Extract (from Barley), Flavour Enhancer (Potassium Chloride), Colour (E 150c), Spice Extract (contains Celery), Niacin, Thiamin, Riboflavin, Folic Acid . €4.00 220g €18.18/kg. [no added cobalamin = vitamin B₁₂ because they tweaked the process to double the concentration in the final product]

Marmite: Yeast extract (contains BARLEY, WHEAT, OAT, RYE), salt, vegetable juice concentrate, vitamins (thiamin, riboflavin, niacin, vitamin B₁₂ and folic acid), natural flavouring (contains CELERY) €4.99 250g €19.96/kg 

PS next day: went for lunch with The Beloved at Mount Congreve and I asked what natural flavouring is added to both *mites? hint it's a vegetable. Celery she announced with the confidence of a vegetarian palate.

Blow out yer dead

Did I mention our polytunnel? I did 
For nearly 20 years, it has been central to our lives: drying laundry; growing beans, tomatoes, spinach; sawing, stacking and storing firewood; saving pot-plants from frost; eating lunch; entertaining children. No more than myself, the tunnel is a bit leaky in its old age, but is still much drier than outside.

And therein lies a problem: it never rains in the tunnel, so every drop of water has to be brought inside. I do as much of this hydraulic movement as possible by gravity or by siphon and the tunnel-faucet is the source of last resort. Usually [cw: Ireland!] the rain falls on the regular and when there is a ppt-pause we have 2½ tonnes of storage capacity to keep the plants alive. This winter, I've been working to bring water into the tunnel even if nothing much is growing - I think I'm storing most of the surplus deep in the soil - there being resistant to evaporation.

Crates and herring barrels, buckets and watering cans and Lots of 20mm pipe make up the infra-structure, which among other things stops the laundry getting covered by dust-storms. The Beloved emerged from hibernation in mid-Feb to put manners on veg-beds in anticipation of Spring sowing. She complained about A Smell emanating from either the once-pink storage crate or the watering cans. Mortified I was and went up to give the crate its annual scrub: (rain-water + sunlight = algal sludge). I then took the empty crate down to the nearest water supply - the 120lt herring barrels [in the middle distance R] - for a rinse. I filled the green watering can from one barrel and started to pour . . . but it blocked up after a few seconds. Sooo, as y'do, I put the spout to my lips and >!ptui!<. That was but a temporary fix and after three [3x] blow-back attempts I gave up on the watering can and sluiced out the crate with a bucket.

I then turned the watering can upside-down over the now empty bucket 
Q. to forensically investigate [cw: scientist!] what was causing the obstruction. 
A. A dead mouse, when long steeped in water, is soft enough && tough enough to exactly stopper the spout of a standard watering-can. I've been sucking and blowing on hoses and pipes [cw: siphon] all my life and have been 'surprised' often -- but killed = never.

How he lost Tuesday

Shortly after it was published, we were given a copy of "WONDERS: writings and drawings for the child in us all [1982]" eds Jonathan Cott and Mary Gimbel [prev]. It was a fat [600+pp] book with short works from a few dozen authors some, better known than others. Quality and appropriateness was patchy also, but the bits we liked we read and re-read until the poor book burst asunder. It's captured in the Internet Archive, if you can make that work for you. One of these favorite stories was How I Lost Tuesday by Evan S Connell. Connell died, in the fullness of his years, shortly after the Birth of the Blob but his words live on. 

The premise of HILT is that the narrator, as a grown up, decides to climb Longs Peak in Colorado; having summitted the mountain as a 12 y.o. kid. On the way up he encounters a teenager and they get into a race to the top without either saying "race you". They get to the top, the view is The Whole World, they have lunch, they hang out - more or less ignoring each other, then they yomp back downhill. Longs Peak is a 14er at 14, 256ft [although nobody starts from sea-level! - the car-park is at 9,400ft] and the hike from the car-park and back is ~30km. So it's a hard days hike. The narrator gets back to his hotel shagged out at 21:00hrs and falls into bed. When he wakes, he sees that it's lunchtime . . . but on ther wrong day. He's been asleep fro 39 hours. The End

Well imagine my feelings when my pal Tom from Colorado sent me a New Year card with this picture:

That's Tom [L] and his son Tommy [R] with a "helpful" 24px x 6px sign. Game On! Trained researcher me went full metal Sherlock with a magnifying glass and Wikipedia and deduced Quagmire . . . Quandary Peak 14,272' . Quandary is a few feet higher than Longs Peak but the topology is a bit easier but close enough [~100mi = 160km close]. Whatevs, I sent them my 3x jpgs version of How I lost Tuesday and Tom replied:

What a great story. This truly hits home because Long's Peak is the 14er I was originally going to hike with Tommy. We decided to start with one less difficult but it is still on our list to do, hopefully this summer. The main reason is that I feel it is taunting me. We look out our picture window to the beautiful mountain view of Long's Peak every day.:

The view from Ft Collins CO: Mt Meeker [L] Longs Peak [R]
 

Go on! Koan.

 Well, I dunno, which is better? - read a book about Pilgrimage . . . or up-stakes a go on Pilgrimage. My answer from July 2004 [R indicating The Way into the rising sun and across O Ponte do Burgo in Galicia]! I didn't intend to peregrinate, I just went for a walk with The Boy: and that only about 100km. Four days later, we rocked up to Santiago de Compostella . . . upon St James's Day. Big Party. Four days, even with Mass && a fiesta, is not enough for change to be wrought - except in the blister department. But two days later I plodded off to France on my own and arrived in that country 5½ weeks later & 12kg lighter. Something else happened along The Way: I became a Pilgrim. Or at least I became someone who wrote a book[let] about the Process of Pilgrimage. And made several posts about Santiago and related matter. And having got that off my chest, I have been okay to read [and review] books about it: ToCanterbury -  ToRome - ToJerusalem -

21 years after our last walking 'venture, in June 2025 The Boy and I had another bite at the cherry: clocking off 160km in France along the Via Podiensis, one of the filaments of the Camino de Santiago. At the same time, by coincidence, my pal Denécus was walking in the opposite direction along the Via Primitivo. 30 years ago, D and I had parallel jobs in the same Department and ate lunch together pretty much every M-F for a couple of years. He is not the only science friend to go for a Pilgrim.; but he was for sure on my list of likely candidates. Some of my best friends are scientists who are skeptical about everything except science which effectively makes science a Belief System as much as Shinto. Not D. For the first time since ~1995, we had lunch together just before Christmas and compared blisters notes on The Way and its fauna. Because D had his Compostelle [cert affirming his arrival in Santiago], I was able [cw: spoiler alert] to send him a copy of my book about PoP. And he presented me with a >3rd-hand copy of:

The Art of Pilgrimage: The Seeker's Guide to Making Travel Sacred (1998) by Phil Cousineau [who he]? I'm not sure it's good to start such a book with a list of prior pilgrims to make first timers feel inadequate: Abraham, Basho, Chaucer, Dante [St] Egeria . . . etc. But I guess that's not the market, which is rather a) those who've bin that done that or b) people who do their pilgrimage from the sofa through other men's flowers. One of the arrows in Cousineau's quiver is acting as a guide on Sacred Travel excursions, and no better man: because he's clocked hundreds of km finding himself all over the world, so c) seekers who might become clients. The ABCDE list above is part of the package; along with quips & quotes [so many quotes] from Augustine, Buddha, Chatwin, Thoreau, Watts . . . etc. Apart from wearing our expensive education on our sleeves, The Art and The Blob have this is common: the terrible quality of the pictures!

p.128 ""Section V. The Labyrinth. We know all too well that few journeys are linear and predictable. Instead they swerve and turn, twist and double back, until we don't know if we're coming or going."". This is bollix not my experience. I've just made a there [going] and back [coming] trip to the cobbler without swerve. I go to Dublin on the train: linear and predictable. I walk up the hill to Cross-on-Fork: linear and predictable. I fly to France: linear and predictable. Maybe the prime benefit of Pilgrimage is that, by teetering on the edge of comfort, thee is a rare opportunity to swerve and turn, twist and double back. and come up with a different Way of Seeing. Cousineau does come to a similar conclusion- but sometimes he trips over his own rhetoric while getting there.

Midway through the book, Huston Smith, one of Cousineau's gurus and writer of the Foreword, lists 4 requirements for pilgrimage

• single purpose
• undistracted
• ordeal hardship penance
• offerings

Though missing some of these criteria, the boundaries for Pilgrimage are deemed to include fans having emotional upwellings at Gracelands or the tombs of Jim Morrison or Jack Kerouac.  Despite the Guide in the title, this is not a text-book to Nirvana, it's more a Pilgrim's Miscellany and some of the tales and quotes are sure to resonate with some readers. Your faves probably differ from mine. Cousineau tries not to be prescriptive about the travel habits [sketching, journaling] which worked for him. 

But to have my final sentence echo the rhetoric in the first, Pilgrimage is something you do on your feet not with your feet up with a book. Verdict: worth reading but not worth buying to read.

The Turning Tide

[big If] I'd wanted to get famous for Bloggin' a) I shoulda started 10 years earlier b) been less scatter-gun. My sense is that successful [as in still posting after the blog-trend drained away and Twitter, Insta, Tiktok took over the comms-space] blogs are focused on Politics or Quakers or Real Ale or Sacramento. I gave up YT at Epiphany which has freed A Lot more time to read books. This is why The Blob is a bit thick with book-reviews. Funny that, because my second post ever laid out my theory and practice of writing book reviews. Incl.:" I also tried to add 'a little bit more': a comment, a digression or synthesis that gave the review some substance in itself rather than just being a wart . . . on the face of the book [reviewed]." After read some recent books, I couldn't come up with 'a little bit more' so - no review.

The Beloved goes to libraries to browse the available stock. In mid Jan she snagged me The Turning Tide: a biography of the Irish Sea [2023] by Jon "Birder" Gower, a Cymro with wide interests and a CV full of TV programmes, books, and other publications. Since he was a chap, Gower has been an enthusiastic ornithologist, and a third of the glossy illustrations feature . . . birbs. That's fine, I did a mort of travel in my 30s in pursuit of . . . domestic cats. I would never have learned Portuguese, or become a connoisseur of meat-loaf, or seen the Petitcodiac tidal bore without having cats as an excuse to leave town.

One of the walk-on parts in this biography is R.S Thomas, the Welsh vicar-poet who ever so politely told me that my teenage poetry without much merit. I accepted that judgment and burned the lot . . . because I lacked the discipline (and conviction) to leave almost all of it on the cutting-room floor and rework what was left into something worth keeping. Gower was taken under RST's wing as teenager unable [adverse weather] to start a Summer working in a bird sanctuary on Bardsey = Ynys Ennli [whc prev] a Welsh Isle-of-Magic due East of Arklow. Despite an age gap of ~50 years, they had a shared passion for Wales and poetry and birds and made each other laugh. That same summer on 1976 I was a) a little older b) also away from home working in Nederland, discovering what mattered, and getting to appreciate that hard work can be its own reward. 

Elsewhere in the biography, Gower cites with approval Kerri ní Dochartaigh [bloboprev] and her Thin Places; Andrew Doherty [bloboprev] and his Tides and Tales; Norman Davies [bloboprev] and his Isles; Tim Dee [bloboprev] and The Running Sky.  . . . and that's just the Ds! Richard Barrington [bloboprev] and his geo-statistical analysis of birds striking lighthouses gets most of a Chapter. I feel we have quite a lot of common ground here, although nobody would call me a birder.

HarperNorth the publisher intrudes a list of 38 [!] staff and contributors who made the book a reality. Lord knows what all these folk did because HarperNorth didn't think it was worth paying anyone to create an Index - which would have materially enhanced the utility of this rich and nourishing Smörgåsbord of a book. If no index at least a list: Anglesey, Baginbun, corncrake [Crex crex], dockers, Eddystone, ferries, guano, herring [Clupea harengus], Isambard K Brunel, Jonathan Swift, Kerno, lighthouses, Manxies [Puffinus puffinus], Nigeria, Ostdeutschland, pirates, QE.I, rats [Rattus norvegicus or R. rattus] Strongbow, thrift [Armeria maritima], U-boats, Vikings, Waterford, Yola, Zostera.

"One of the most dangerous things is when someone says they know the sea. You can never be comfortable on it. The sea has its own mind and you can be caught out in seconds." Mali Parry Jones RNLI volunteer

Like vocal fry-up talk

Got me through another fab'lous linguistic earbook:  Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language Hardcover [illustrated 2019] by Amanda Montell [buy]. Maybe books about language, in contrast to books about maps or oil-paintings, are okay about losing the illustrations: because they can win on the phonics. I've had my gripes about the quality of pronunciation on some ear-books in the past. But here voice-actor [and B.A. Harvard Linguistics] Laurence Bouvard is excellent.

cw: This book full four lttr word: Word Slut girl NORM Patr Arch . . . lads.

Sometime in 2o2o, I signed up with MetaFilter after lurking there since before the Birth of Blob. I joined so that I could join in the robust to-fro in the comments. Very early on, I inadvertently rose someone's hackles and got called out. It was shocking to realise they <sob> don't like me, but a) it was a lesson that not everyone will like each one of my opinions b) I was thereafter more cautious about shooting from the lip. 

That sorry anecdote is relevant to current Blob . . .
In response to to a post about a multi-author scientific paper I had said something like "these lads would be more credible if they got their stats right" and Hackles asked " . . . and how do you know all the authors are male?". Now I could have got all fighty and answered "because all their first names code Male" or "in my culture "lads" is a sex-neutral or sex-irrelevant generic collective noun for, like, people". But I wisely buttoned my comeback because I twigged that a de-rail inquisition about how come, Bob, in your culture "lads" is accepted as a collective even if all members are women was going to leave me with a red face and be massive fail as a representative of my culture. Because it is hard to imagine, let alone recall, a case where a female-coded term would be used for a collective including some of both [or indeed all] sexes: "hey girls, who's for skulling pints tonight" . . . I don't think so!

Montell's book is full of that sort of thing. Getting on a righteous charger to do battle with the systemic sexism which runs through, even under-pins, our language. Weak, diminutive, submissive, hedging, terms get attached to women. In the 13thC "gyrle" was any child or small-small creature; but over the next 200 years 'girl' became inappropriate for rough-tough boys and also extended its range to encompass any unmarried young women; and later sweetheart. And while we're about it, be careful whom you address as Sweetie.

There is a whole chapter on vocal-fry, up-talk and hedging. These speech patterns are only noticed when mobilised by women, and hoo-boy does it rile up the blokes who notice. The thing about language is that we use it every day, and some every day normal words are used heedless of their meaning or etymology. We may consider some people are gormless, but nobody in standard English nowadays has pots of gaum [canny understanding] about them.

NORM, Non-mobile older rural male
SOFA, Sedentary ould fella anthropoid 

Ringstone with Rowan

The Ringstone looking well after 5000 years. Picture from 09:40 11Sep24. The time-of-day is important because oblique sunshine picks out the work of human hands to best effect. 2024 was particularly good for the fruiting of rowan = mountain-ash = Sorbus aucuparia so adds a bit of extra colour to the composition.

More than a passing glance? This picture as a jigsaw. https://jigex.com/XC874. I am quite the fan of Jigsaw Explorer. It takes me about 20 minutes to complete a 100 pc [default size - other piece-counts are available] puzzle. Which I justify as giving my spatial awareness neurons a bit of a gallop:lest they waste away, like. When I started, the task might take +30 minutes.

A while back I added this picture to Wikimedia Commons, when they had a drive for pictures of local heritage.

Well 'ard

As part of my very expensive education, I spent most Thursday afternoons playing at soldiers in the CCF = Combined Cadet Force. It was fashionable to be disaffected and cynical about these activities and so it was largely a waste of my time. My older brother otoh joined the naval wing of the CCF and got in some sailing and knots&splices; although he/we were getting that anyway at home. The Brother also practiced to become a crack shot and won a medal for target shooting at Bisley. I'd like to say that I was a dedicated and principled peacenik but I wasn't - I just wanted to be let drift on alone. I was born 10 years and 10 days after the D-day and we played at being Spitfires [budda budda budda] and Messerschmidts, in the same way as kids-today do Call of Duty. Cleaning, carrying and firing a rifle was irrelevant as a life-skill. 

That-all notwithstanding, I seem to read a lot of military books! The latest was The Pilgrim, written and read by Colin Maclachlan. I don't intend to read the other three of these hard-chaw memoir clones.  I've had some success with browsing the Recently Published section of Borrowbox's ear-book library.  With exquisite good timing luck, I've been able to snag something before everyone else realises it's available. Take The Pilgrim: I borrowed it on 21 Jan, read its 5½ hours in 5½ days, and returned it asap; it is now not available until the middle of August! Maybe there are a bunch of young lads who want a reality check from killing terr'ists on their computers. 

Young Colin grew up in a broken home in Scotland, alternately ignored or thumped by his mother and step-dad. She took him by the ear to the recruiting office as soon as he turned 16 and left him to the tender mercies of the army. That was a bargain - he got less physical abuse in barracks than at home. As a self-sufficient, smart and competitive chap, he did very well. Not many of this peers had the skills or aptitude for book-learning, so young Colin was able to ace the tests as well as make his own bed and look neat and tidy. At 23 he was the youngest person to pass through the gruelling selection process for the elite special forces SAS 22 regiment. Outside of work, he has current partner, an ex, 3 kids, a couple of much younger sisters and good mates all over.  

Since at least the days of the Cardwell [1870] and Childers [1881] army reforms, recruitment and retention has been a perennial problem for the British [and most other] armed forces. 2025 saw applications to the Irish Defense Forces up one third [⅓] compared to the previous years. But loads of the applicants were rejected and more quit before training completed: that is a management failure [or check hazing below?]. In today's army, there is a concern that soldiering is all boredom and blanco and not for the Youth of Today: all hopped up on their violent computer games. Foreign travel is no inducement for kids who can fly to Lanzarote for what they get from the dole. It's a huge dilemma for Western democracies: there are definitely external threats to our cosy capitalist hegemony. Contrary to the fantasies of keyboard warriors, warfare has not reached drone vs drone exclusivity: all operated from bedrooms bunkers. The community needs some fit, equipped, trained [young] people to protect the old and weak and the infrastructure of the state or its allies, in extremely adverse conditions. So, the community needs to incentivize those who take one for the team. 

Soldiers are no longer inter-changeable, expendable standers-in-line who have been de-sensitized to follow orders, even at the risk of their own lives, even if they seem batshit, even when given by a known shit-head. Modern equipment requires skill to operate and maintain and that requires training. Some of those skills are transferrable to civilian life. Part of the package has to be a GI bill for those who have served time: the community must pick up the tab for college or collage or apprenticeships after military service. Meanwhile, we need to pay soldiers respectable = respectful wages and feed them really well. Also, increments to encourage promotion and taking more responsibility. And no more hazing: that doesn't mean making military training a soft touch; it's not for wimps or shirkers but bullying is dis-respectful and . . . counter-productive. And here's a novelty - what about some respect, relationships and courtesy training RRCT that might help recruiting and retaining dates, partners, spouses for really great sex.

As part of Bob's recruiting drive, here are the requirements for joining the Irish Defense forces.  

The girl who read while walking

My pal Djerzi urged me to read Milkman by Anna Burns . . . as well as Memoir by John McGahern. After Memoir , I duly read Milkman: despite getting weak with a sense of dread about 100 / 350 pages in. Wot next:  Matrix? Memoir, Milkman, Mountolive? Mudbound? .

The narrator is MiddleSister, younger than FirstSister SecondSister and ThirdSister; but older than three WeeSisters who are creepily & engagingly knowing and precocious at 6, 7 and 8. There are three brothers in the sibship, at least one already dead from The Political Problems. The book is fiction but it is true that Anna Burns grew up in the Ardoyne, a Nationalist ghetto in North Belfast. Burns adopts peculiar euphemisms or alternative reality to distance her tale a bit from the primitive, repressed, sectarian reality that were her lived experience in the late 70s. Renouncers [of the State] and Defenders [of the state] live "on the other side of the road" from each other and have long ago stopped talking. But they are over there to be demonized by parents and paramilitaries as dangerous boogie-men. The archaic coded formal language and designations in Milkman conjure up Old Order Amish if not The Handmaid's Tale: handles like SecondSister, FirstBrotherInLaw, MaybeBoyfriend emphasise that nobody is an individual but each is defined by their relationships. This web of relationships form the community. Endogamy is as normal as it might be in a remote village in Uttar Pradesh with no cars but surrounded by wild beasts.

The fact that the narrator is dating Maybe-Boyfriend from another Renouncer ghetto is viewed with suspicion when there are so many suitable boys round the corner.  But she has already weirded out her community and set in train a firestorm of rumour, fantasies and lies because of her habit of reading while walking [it's often 19thC classic fiction, incl Walter Scott R]. In real life, our Dau.I the Librarian did this from the age of six into adulthood but nobody in Renouncer circles would dream of doing so. It's basic self-preservation: while reading, your situational awareness is damped to nil. In a world riven by car-bombs [whc prev], razzias [whc prev] and sit-in-judgmental nut-jobs from your own side: dreaminess can be fatal. 

At one point two of the older girls try to warn their wee sisters about a family member who is known [but not acknowledged - that would make life too easy] to be a bit pervy " . . . if he tries to lure you in on the pretext of anything - science, art, literature, linguistics, social anthropology, mathematics, politics, chemistry, the intestinal tract, unusual euphemisms, double-entry book-keeping, the three divisions of the psyche, the Hebrew alphabet, Russian nihilism, Asian cattle, twelfth-century Chinese porcelain, Japanese unit . . . [don't be fooled and try not to stay in the same room]". If this seems a rather broadly eclectic catalogue of wee sisters' interests, note that Narrator reads bedtime stories to them from Hardy, Kafka and Conrad. In a way the Wee Sisters are a metaphor of hope for a different future: despite having grown up under the same strictures and all under the age of 10, they are free-thinkers and curious about the world beyond their own ensiloed people.

As in McGahern's childhood, a generation earlier and South of the border, gender=sex and their binary lives and tasks are rigidly coded. Boys don't cook, unless they're gay; girls have to take it on the chin, fist-style; women may be the sole-bread-winners but none of the men at home will hoover through. Everyone drinks though, which doesn't help in matters like respect & dignity . . . nor a balanced budget. Men are In Charge, as they think, until they transgress into the domain of women. Then a delegation of outraged Lysistratas will soon tell them to fuck right off and go back to playing with their guns and tonka toys put them right. It sure is hard to Other your own Mother.

Spoiler: some of the Principals find their true selves and true love in the end. But so much collateral damage along the way.

Mission Custard-possible

In the run up to Christmas, I was tasked to "Get custard, Dunne's Own will do", so I did; indeed I bought 2 cartons because who's counting?. Turns out we didn't need custard over Christmas but pies were made in January and soon enough both cartons had been consumed. As old people with better than average discretionary income, we don't have to behave like impoverished students anymore: when the choice was either a Christmas tree or one bottle of Ruffino chianti. This last Christmas, in a crowded and getting crowdeder Dunne's stores, I snagged 2x Dunne's Own TetraPak Custard which was piled high-and-deep beside the dairy section. With better quality control, less stress, and 20/20 hindsight, I would obvs have bought Dunne’s Sweet and Creamy Fresh Custard [as R] instead . . . at 6x the price but what the heck it's Christmas. Here's the price + ingredient data comparison:

Ingredient	Bird’s Tetra	Dunne’s Tetra	Dunne’s Fresh
Such much?	€6.00/kg	€1.00/kg	€6.00/kg
Milk, skimmed	✓	✓ Reconstit	✓ Irish
Buttermilk	✓	✓ Reconstit
Cream			✓ Irish 10%
Sugar	✓	✓	✓
Water		✓	✓
Starch	✓ Modified	✓ Mod maize	✓ Mod maize
Palm oil	✓	✓
Milk Powder	Whey	✓	✓
Flavoring	✓	Natural	Vanilla
Guar Gum			✓
Rapeseed Oil			✓
Carotenes	✓	✓	✓
		Paprika	Exhaust. GVB

Apart from the price, Bird's and Dunne's tetrapak custards look very similar. Dunne's save transport costs at some stage by shipping in powdered milk and buttermilk and reconstituting it with factory-local water.They also bling up the carotene colour with a few drops of paprika extract. Dunne's Fresh otoh go patriotic with Irish skimmed milk and a good jolt of Irish cream (rather than by-product bulker buttermilk). And none of that furrin [and ecologically disastrous] palm oil. Although the rapeseed oil is not Irish there is less of it than in Tetrapak Palmland. I guess the guar gum [a stabiliser found in ice-cream and other processed foods] compensates for rapeseed oil's food-engineering deficiencies. And it's also got "Exhausted Ground Vanilla Beans" which sounds a bit like roadkill.

Another late entry in the custard stakes [I'm not going to rejig my table!] is Avonmore Luxury Fresh Custard - which apparently we did eat at Christmas. It is yet more pricey at €7.00/kg and doesn't have guar-gum or palm oil: (Milk; Cream (34%); Water; Sugar; Skim Milk Powder; Modified Maize Starch; Natural Colour (Mixed Carotene); Flavouring; Vanilla Beans). Gotta say that sounds worth the 18% €xtra in the fresh custard stake.

But heaven-a-mercy how hard can it be to, like, make custard from a carton of last-forever* Bird's custard powder? For starters it has waaay fewer ingredients: Maize starch; Salt; Colour (Annatto = Norbixin); Flavouring. If you follow the instructions (heat 2 tbsp of powder, ditto sugar and a pint of milk) it comes in at ~€1.60/kg: more expensive than Dunne's Tetrapak at €1.00 but much cheaper than branded or fancy custard. Still cheaper if you're think you're on minimum wage in your own kitchen and add the 5-10 minutes extra prep [mix mix stir stir heat heat] time. [* for some definitions of forever: I made up a generous double portion of Bird-dust-cust from a container marked Mar 2023 - it was fine]

Purists can make 'custard' using corn-flour at €2.60/kg rather than custard powder at €8.10/kg but that will only bring down the cost to ~€1.30/kg for an off-white sweet paste the consistency of custard but the wrong colour and no vanilla notes.

It's been a while, but I've done many prev of these food engineering ingredient comparisons - Mince Pies -  Cakes - Pot pies - Powdered milk - Pizza - Tarte au Chocolat - Sausages - Sou'wester cake - Spice burger.

Arrangement in Grey and Gray

We have tried adulting, accommodation division, before. Last time [late Nov 2024] it was left to me to book a room in a hotel, I assumed there would be a bath-tub and was disappointed. Hotels are so eye-watering expensive that y'have to squeeeze them for value. And soaking in a hot bath is one way to Win. 

In mid-Jan we were short-noticed [as always by such events] by a funeral in Dublin. It turned out that the Talbot Hotel Stillorgan runs a Sunday special "dinner bed and breakfast for two @ €190". We could have done it cheaper: getting up in the dark, driving 160km, the last part of which would be in the rush-hour, finding somewhere to park. But we chose to adult it with Talbot. That meant driving up country on a sunny(ish) Sunday afternoon "hello trees, hello sky." The funeral mass was an 8 minute walk from the hotel, so we solved the parking problem also.

I wasn't going to get caught w/o tub a second time and was re-assured to see a🛁emoji in the small print of the Sunday Special. Gotta say that the corridors upstairs have a First Person Shooter vibe. The only coloured objects were a pair of fire extinguishers where the corridor jinks L and then abruptly R and then again left L. I noted that the extinguishers were of two different shapes/sizes. Do I feel any confidence that I would know how to operate either? I do not! I did notice quite a lot of small print but reading the instructions when things are hotting up seems too little too late. I guess the answer is run like buggery leave the premises as smartly as possible without promoting panic.

We dropped our bags, shook out our funereal duds, and repaired downstairs for our "free" dinner. Which was fine. We tipped based on the full value of the meal, not just the extras [dhrink!] for which we paid the servor. Then I drew my bath:

Which was A Task, equivalent to making a strange rental car Go. At home we have a bath with a plug, on a chain, and a hot tap and a cold tap. A child of seven can manage it. This child of seven-ty was Baffled @ Talbot. Clearly the silver disc at the bottom of the bath was the plug . . . but how to open /close the orifice? Wearing my BigBoy ManOfTheWolrd pants I recognised the top disk as a hot&cold mixer tap. _Eventually_ without calling Reception [✓]; but not without pulling the front of it clean off in my hand [χ] - ooops; I worked out that the middle disk was both the water inlet AND the plug-cover opener [quarter turn anti-clockwise does the trick]. Very stressy, I needed a long hot bath after my exertions. If you are wearing your Antonioni's BlowUp pants you'll see me reflected in the tap disk.

Title a reference to Whistler's Mother. Also: gray is darker than grey [prev].