Agora U

The Provost, Fellows, Foundation Scholars and the other members of Board of The College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity of Queen Elizabeth near Dublin aka TCD, like other Institutions across the world, is should be having an existential crisis in response to "AI". But Institutions have the inertia of a super-tanker: they keep going in the same direction because change is just . so . hard for the [old embedded complacent] people who hold {power | purse | policy }in their hands. In my section of social media [<coff> Metafilter] you have to be super-tippitoes if you want to advocate positively for AI. At least partly, this is because "AI" is not one thing, but a range of tools created by a range of actors, only some of which are The Axis of Evil. But what do I know? AI has tsunamied over me (and you) so quickly, so recently, that I am reduced to slogans with as much discrimination [both senses] as "Four legs good, two legs bad".

In 2018, the Fellows of TCD elected immunologist Cliona O'Farrelly [my old boss] as first female Chair of Fellows. In 2021, they voted for Linda Doyle, an engineer, as the first female Provost in 400+ years. On 22Apr26, as part of her exit strategy, the outgoing Chair of Fellows organised a symposium of Two households Six pundits, both all alike in dignity, In fair Verona Dublin, where we lay our scene on "AI and the Idea of a University". I booked in because it seemed like a good opportunity for Me to find out how to spell AI and learn what my Alma Mater was going to do about it: not least because the first speaker, after the Chair, was The Provost.  

Prizes:

• Most obscure cited reference John Kelleher for Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (1979) by  Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar. 
• Also for best $10-word: semiotics - see Umberto Eco 
• Best timekeeper (by far) Camilla Persello, Secr of Scholars, also by far the youngest panelist 
• The Whitehead Prize for talking waaaay over the allotted time?  redacted .
• Fewest on-message bullet-points (3) The Provost:
• Are we good enough? - the antidote to smugness
• Dreadnought AI - it's here & not going away: engage challenge resist
• Truth is grey not black&white
• Most embedded in certainties (and not in a good way, although my bloboprev guts are with him generally) Fintan O'Toole
• Also for mentioning Tim "The are no Short-cuts" Robinson whom RIP
• Most empathic speaker Jennifer Edmond - wish I'd been a student of hers.
• Shortest on-message comment from the Floor Ken Mealy
• Most valiant effort (largely successful) to rein in his tendency to ramble: Ian Robertson [whom bloboprev]. 

Exec Summ [filtered through my jaundiced eye]: 
[I was far better at taking notes in 1976: in 2026 I found that an idea I was in the process of capturing on paper was slipping beyond my ken because the next idea was demanding my attention. Sorry if I've missed something important in the discourse. Doubtless within a few days I will be inventing whole paragraphs]  
In my day [1973-77], teaching at Trinity was very heavy on the Medieval model: The Professor / expert stands by a chalk-board and imparts his [almost always His] accumulated experience; know-nothing students write down the content with a pen, in a book. Weeks or months later, Prof sets and exam to see how well students have retained his imparted knowledge. Students with the most legible notes and most retentive memory are rewarded with high grades. The highest graded students become professors in their turn. Nobody taught us Pittman's short-hand

At the AI-fest, Camilla Persillo pointed out that group learning, where students bat ideas around together without faculty in the room, can be the most exciting and productive learning experiences during college days: it's the synergy innit. Several of the other contributors, incl Ken Mealy, made the point that Content is So Yesterday; nobody now needs to take notes to recall Scads of Stuff when they can look it up in two tics on their device. The trick is a) to remember how to question the source b) have a well-polished crap-detector to critically evaluate the 'answer'. If the curriculum and the exams require memorizing Avogadro's, Bernouilli's, Charles', Dalton's, Euler's, Faraday's . . . Laws then there is no time left to teach ascertainment bias, availability error, anchoring bias, authority deference and other cognitive fails.

But whoa! Only some 21stC students have the time for group study with peers. It's fine if you are a Foundation Scholar with free food and rooms in College, or if you live at home a short jog from the city centre because your family's generational wealth is a lovely red-brick in Rathmines. Not so much if your commute is 90+ minutes to Outer Boondocks and/or you have to slave in the local Spar convenience store several evenings a week to make rent and/or care for your beloved but demented Grandpa. Inequality [of resources and opportunity] is a systemic failing of our FF/FG society regardless of AI. But AI provides an option for the dispossessed to help them knock-off assignments which they have no time to address in a medieval collegiate manner. 

Another much worked point was the desirability of being uncomfortable with your data or ideas. The phrase used is meaningful friction . . . and b'god it involves Effort. Prof Robertson asserted that the cognitive work of [trad] learning increased myelination and connectivity of nerves in the same way as weight-training or running increased the # mitochondria in muscle cells. [Protestant?] work makes you fitter and cleverer. Using AI for cognitive-offloading, let alone cognitive-surrender is a disaster for your education: over-use of AI might make you stupider after college than before. Prof Edmond's experience is that the smarter students work effectively with AI to produce even better deliverables . . . but the weaker [tired, poor, huddled] kids turn in shoddy because they don't have the spoons to discriminate own-self-okay from superficially convincing AI-slop.

All agreed [everyone present being invested in The Idea of the University!] that Agora University was first-and-foremost the collective intellectual interactions of the people [provost, fellows, junior faculty, scholars, students, that janitor who nailed calculus problems] present on Campus. It was also recognised that (in addition to reviews, recordings, re-thinkings; patents, papers, plays; dissertations, discoveries and degrees) the deliverable is Citizens. The more engaged, ethical, thoughtful, kind, inclusive, resilient, the Better. 

[[Personal sidebar: I was entirely off-with-fairies during my last two years studenting at TCD. The most exciting thing that happened to Evolutionary Biology in the 1970s was Sociobiology and the genetic basis of altruism. I spent several days out in the library of The Other University because they had the academic journals in which this material was published. I read, and wrote a long-form review of, EO Wilson's 1975 book Sociobiology. I've written about my off-piste investigation of inbreeding and fertility in the Habsburgs. I was stoked! But I was also failed! when it came to the exams. With different teaching methods and more me-adjacent learning opportunities I coulda been a contender for the next professorial vacancy.]]

Potlatch

Last week, I confessed to failing to finish a couple of books. Since giving up YouTube in January, I have a lot more time for reading books. But sometimes just sitting is better than sitting and reading something unfulfilling. As the days get longer, I will read less and get out more - although with earbbooks multitasking me asks ¿Por qué no los dos? When the family came home this Easter, Dau.II was uncharacteristically nose deep in a book The Heart-Shaped Tin: Love, Loss and Kitchen Objects (2025),by Bee Wilson a foodie confessional ramble which nods at Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia (2006) by Elizabeth Gilbert. Dau.II was reading it because foodie. I finished reading it because stuff.

So much stuff!  in Bee's kitchen, her friends' kitchens, our kitchen. We've come a long way since Cooking in a Bedsitter when our entire batterie de cuisine fit easily in a single orange crate. Now there is so much rarely used kit that, when company comes, pots need a good un-dust & up-scrub before use. Which is kinda shameful when far too many people subsist on a batterie de cuisine not much more than the possessions of a hunter-gatherer in the Kalahari. 

But the accumulation of stuff is not entirely my fault: people will give us things & only occasionally for pure generosity of heart. When The Management at The Institute decided to mark my retirement with gifts, they made sure to engrave my name and The Institute's to indicate the continuity of my indenture. Six months later they doubled-down with another gift and I doubled-doown on my rant. You don't need to read that again here. In other cultures - Japan and the Pacific NorthWest - gifting has to be reciprocal. If the return gift is more valuable, the exchanges can result in damaging loss as a runaway spiral ensues.

Valuable? Stuff, gifts and sentiment offer a neat alternative dimension of value. One of my two favorite everyday mugs is 20+ years in my cupboard or, as rarely washed, on the table. It [L] was given me by a caminante when we got together to compare notes on the process of pilgrimage. My other favorite mug was a £1.99 gift to me by me from Tenby near Pembroke Ferryport signalling that my family originally came from Wales. I don't think we are housing stuff because it was gifted to us and passing it on (to Oxfam) seems wrong or disrespectful. But we have enough clutter material household goods that it is sometimes hard to find a rarely used but then useful bit of kit - the Spong mincer for marmalade for example,

But enough of me! You can't borrow me from the library, but you can put a reserve on Bee Wilson's ruminations and insights into the baggage that adheres to kitchen kit. Who knew that her sister is Emily "Iliad" Wilson [whom bloboprev] and their father is A.N.Wilson, the British public intellectual and their mother Katherine "Shagsper sonnets" Duncan-Jones? Small wonder that both girls ended up as [Arts Block] researchers and writers.

Sheepset

Yesterday, St Mark's Day, Dia do Revolução dos Cravos, 25 April, I was up betimes bustling from kitchen to sofa assembling the cast for First Pot of Tea when something Other caught the corner of my eye through the window. "Aurora" my scrabbling snap-mind delivered: we will try to make sense of the untoward. But I paused my bustle and went outside to ◎◎ it was a (murky) rainbow:

Oh-ho, I said, there is a pot of gold Up Sturra, we must look more carefully next time . . . and IF that rainbow is centred SE THEN the sun must be NW. And, out the kitchen window, it was:

That was 06:00hrs. 14½ hours later, 20:30 I was fossicking around giving a wrap to the day: battening hatches, counting sheep, watering the beans (very sad altogether so far this year) when I snapped this

Don't angst if you can't count 16 sheep, I did and N = 16 [✓] but I cropped the picture of some Ginnie-no-pals ewes off camera to right. Like the junior army officers in Lisbon 52 years ago, y'have to Carpe Diem.  We'll be a long time dead. Once more with jigsaw.

Gawping the peleton

In 2019, I [was] volunteered to marshal a local cycle rally.  I stood a road-junction a mile from home and separated the hard-chaws [110km and 140km] from the realistic recreational cyclists [50km and 80km]. I made my own sign, so that the choice was clear if I fainted dead away at the shock of seeing so many knotted calves and far too much lycra.  It started as a community solidarity initiative to raise a bit of money in memory of two young brothers who died in tragic circumstances in 2013.  The next 3 years' events were scrubbed because of CoViD and I was unavoidably elsewhere when thinks cranked up again in 2023.  But in 2024 and again in 2025, I was Colonel of the Cross where the L3001 leaves the R702 'main' road; and the shorter races turn for home.

It was ideal cycling weather: grass frost at dawn then cloudy with sunny intervals. Cycling is miserable if either a) it rains a lot b) the sun raises the temperature so that you feel the sweat - and therefore need hydration and therefore need pee-stops. What is ideal cool and breezy for aerobic exercise can be uncomfortably chilly if you're just standing around. But I didn't need my jacket or my water-bottle in the event. I was happy out, with a couple of podcasts on my device to while away the intervals between bikes. 

I've always tried to be the infra-structure guy: making it possible for others to do wonderful things. I left the house to walk to my station at 09:55 and got home at 13:10: just in time to make me a cheese-toastie for lunch before I got all hangry and out of sorts.

Oh, and I heard the first cuckoo Cuculus canorus in the valley this year.  That was a pretty good day.

In the wrong place

The family were downhome over Easter and Dau.II took a proprietorial walk through the fields. She reported that the top corner of one of those fields was carpetted with a particular sort of dicot sprout with 2 elongated seed-leaves and a robust reddish stalk. WTF? she enquired. I investigated and admitted that I'd never noted such a phenomenon before. But I formed a hypothesis that the pair of sycamores Acer pseudoplatanus in the ditch just to the South must have had a mighty year for seed set, as had several sweet chestnuts Castanea sativa down in the adjacent woodland. And sho'nuff Dr Google confirmed that sycamore seedlings looked just like that.

That was all a nothing-burger until Dr Google threw up "sycamore seedling poisonous to horses" on the off-chance that was what I was really after. Equine atypical myopathy, aka atypical myoglobinuria when myoglobin is detected in the urine because muscle tissue is disintegrating. But you'd only [call in the vet to] look if your previously happy horse is stiff, reluctant to move, collapsed. Regardless of treatment, it is typical that 75% of affected horses will be dead with 2-3 days. The proximate cause is a toxin called Hypoglycin A HGA.

It is a known thing that horses have a rough-and-ready digestive system: shovelling its outcome is what gives teenage stable-hands such prodigious upper-body strength. Sheep are ruminants and their dietary carbs get a double hammering mediated by a sophisticated gut-flora. Nobody is flagging HGA toxicity for ruminants, so I suppose that some guild of their microbiome is digesting Hypoglycin A HGA before it is absorbed through the gut wall to start to digest the muscle-mass. No quarter given in evolution. [note added in press: the sheep were moved from the traditional hay-meadow to the sycamore-rich field 3 days ago, and nobody's died yet]

But, as I say, I've never seen so many sycamore sprouts and who knows of what digestive heroics our mixed bag of sheep are capable. The family had buggered off to the Gaeltacht within hours of alerting me to the sycamore nursery; I R retire; I finished my book; I chopped wood and hauled water; . . . dum de dum . . .; I went across the lane to pluck sycamore as prophylaxis against an unlikely but devastating event. At 71¾, I am no longer limber as a 7 y.o., so I can't pluck at a sustainable rate for a working day. The weather  was Irish-changeable sunny with showers and my shop-steward won't allow me to get rained on while bent double. After a few sessions over three days, I had a bucketful of sycamores untimely ripped from mother earth. How many?

Well mates, I wasn't not going to count them as I went but I did weigh the whole harvest on our kitchen scales = 25oz = 700g. And I did count off a random selection of single plants until they tipped ½oz = 15g that was N = 30. My math indicates that I have killed [25 x 2 x 30 =] 1,500 potential trees in a natural selection exercise. How potential? When Sean the Forester was thinning our little woodland in 2022, we discovered a substantial sycamore in the NE corner of the plot. That's about 75m due West [and thus downwind] of the two fecund sycamores mentioned above. In 2008 that corner of the plot was still pasture, so in 18 years one seedling similar to my Easter-holocaust now has a girth of 85cm or ⌀ = 27cm at chest height. The height of the tree can be estimated by measuring a) a distance from the foot and b) the angle from there to the top of the tree and looking up a table of Tan= opposite/adjacent. In this case ~12m tall. That a much better place for a sycamore tree than shedding seed into pasture.

In the wrong place? I did eventually agree to go off-site for a tuthree days with  the family when they touched base briefly after Connemara. But on the morning of departure, our RCD [residual current detector] tripped OFF  twice! again. There was no way I was going away for two days if the 'lectric was going to fail the deep-freeze: & for me to return to a puddle of rotting food.  They went off, and I did some diagnostics, and the RCD behaved itself for 24 hours. [I think it's the extension that runs to the polytunnel - but it requires some positive testing of this hypothesis when there is only me at home]. Anyway, I did agree to go South-for-beaches the following day. But while way, I twigged >!Shazzam!< that an unintended consequence of having the Fronius app to monitor the solar array, is that I can remotely check to see if our router/modem at home is still powered up. And if so, assume that freezers and dehumidifiers are also working.  Here's a re-assuring snap-shot of an overcast day at home from 80km away.

 

maggie and milly and molly and may

 . . . went down to the beach(to play one day) [ee] 
[premature posting error on Friday! here released on schedule with added value].

may couldn't lift a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone. 
Which is just as well because it [L]was an interstellar messenger from the Planet Zorg cooling off in a rock-pool at Benvoy along Costa na Déise. I mentioned that my family left me alone with my weighty blanket after Easter and headed W to The Coral Strand = Trá an Dóilín in the Connemara Gaeltacht. I can just about handle having six extra [beloved] bodies in my own house . . . disappearing my charging cables tidying things up. But wrenching myself off a familiar sofa and, in a foreign environment, fighting over the breakfast cereal with m'fam? That was a too much for my agéd frame. Not to mention making a boarding-house queue with my fellow guests for access to the bathroom. At home, rain-or-shine, day-or-night, there is always the compost heap. So they went off and I stayed home and everyone was happy.

But they came back to the Sunny South East less than a week later and continued their live-like-there-is-no-tomo fun along the Waterford Coast. There is free-will, but in a sense they rolled their Ould Fella up in a bit of carpet, strapped him to the roof of the car and took him to Tramore. 

The timing was ungood because, a week before Waterford has been named the top destination in Ireland by Condé Nast Traveller, in a list of the must-see places to visit in Ireland. In particular they cite Trá na mBo so it will be even less of a Secret Beach than it has been since they added steps down the cliff and signage to get more footfall. I couldn't go: I was all tied up [nnggg nnnGG] with building works: being required to hold one end of a piece of timber and pass nails and screws to The Boy. But Dau.I took her niblings to Trá na mBo [you may call it cow-strand, if you live in England]. Together they made the rite of passage [woooooo] up the rocks and through the hole in the cliff to The Secret Secret Beach beyond. Which is important because Gdau.II is ten years old now - almost too old for Secrets.

I'm glad they didn't ask me for an opinion; because several years ago, I stopped making that micro-journey when it was clear that several tons of roof had collapsed since I last went to visit. But nobody died [Phew!] last week and they disturbed a seal, Phoca vitulina probably, who had hauled out at high tide. Seal probably thought "Fakkin' Condé Nast, I've been sunning myself here, minding my own business, for years - and now it's ruined by human yahoos".

One of the new additions at the car-park nearest to Trá na mBo is a box made of pallets and painted pink&blue with a scrap of fishing net atop to slow down the gulls. It says [in a rather spare, enigmatic ee cummings way - appropriate to a beach where one may encounter poets who are fluent in Spanish - and if you don't meet a poet you'll have to spout forth something yourself - do not mumble, the seals defo don't like mumblers.]

Tidy Towns
Beach Box
Swap & Share
Lost & Found 

Wedgies

Old Ray, the batchelor farmer who lived all his adult life in our home before we blew into the valley, got a little weak on maintenance in his latter years. The gutters got carried away in a storm and not replaced. When the house was built in 1941, the 'parlour' was constructed with a suspended ventilated timber floor. But in one corner water had penetrated the wall and rotted out a section of the floor-boards. We could see the join between original 1941 boards and the replacement. And some of the replacement floor-boards had themselves been assaulted by water and rotted in their turn. Sod that we decided and a) ordered new gutters chutes and down-spouts b) ripped out the timber floor brought the sub-floor to grade with rubble c) installed under-floor heating pipes throughout the ground floor and d) covered that with s sand-and-cement screed.

But the parlour floor undulated like drumlin country which was obvs unsuitable for our desired final finish in cork tiles for toddler comfort. I decided to fix this myself and bought a bag of levelling compound. How difficult could it be to follow directions on the packet and move things forw over the weekend while the contractor's team was home resting? A: quite difficult for an absolute beginner. The following week, the contractor's plasterer came with another bag of levelling compound, ignored the printed directions and made a much runnier solution which more or less spread itself. Hats off to experts!

But one corner of the floor was still a few mm out of true which only mattered when we wanted our handy light-weight Ikea 600x600 'coffee' table in that corner. Unless the legs were turned and positioned just-so, you could be guaranteed to spill your tea. For several years we solved this problem with a mop. Then Dau.II left home to live in Cork. One time we were visiting and Dau.II asked me to make a wedge for the bathroom door whose default position was closed. This was clearly not for the best, because the bathroom was entirely internal [no windows] and needed air-circulation against the damp. By providence, there was a builder's dumpster on the quay opposite their appt; & I'd given her a householder's tool-kit when she left home. I seized the feeble little saw from the tool-kit and sawed a suitable wedge off a bit of scrap timber in the dumpster. A few weeks later, Dau.II called to say "More wedges are needed!". Her pals from the HomEd house-share had been to visit and seen the utility of wedges to hold doors open.

I don't know how long it took me to make the connexion, but eventually I mobilized a Generalized Theory of Wedges GTW and cut a half-sized wedge to stop the Ikea coffee-table from canting about like a ship at sea. One residual problem was that a small beige wooden wedge was often hidden in plain sight against a beige cork floor. My solution was to paint stripes on one side of the table-wedge and write WEDGE on the other [as L at top]. 

We had a family full-house over Easter but when they left for 5 days in the Gaeltacht, I could not find the wedge. Two days later, I found it . . . in the kindling. But not before I addressed a supply-chain bottle-neck and made three more. I like the Dennis the Wedgace livery and am thinking, why not make a wedge-a-day set? as a wedge-hedge against uncertain memory - if it's Dennis it must be Tuesday etc. And hands up who knew that the Irish for TheWedge is AnDing?

It's okay to stop

I plugged away at Independent People all 225,000 words of it, but not because there was anything attractive about the central patriarch. Perhaps it was insights about the transition from poverty and backwardness to prosperity during a boom. Or a sense of gratitude that, compared to Iceland, our our climate in Ireland is so much more benign for sheep. But I doubt I'll switch to reading fiction for edutainment anytime soon. 

Evidence for this is that I have quietly put aside two novels recently with the thought that sitting on the sofa gazing at the ceiling might be a better use of my remaining days than reading something that fails to nourish. 

 Having enjoyed Sean Bean as Sharpe adventures on YouTube, not least the Over the hills and far away  theme tune, I decided to give Bernard Cornwell's books a try. It seemed sensible to start at the chronological beginning rather than in publication order. That has two advantages 1) Cornwell had presumably found his beat by the 15th book he wrote b) there is no back-story to be revealed. So Sharpe's Tiger (1997) it was: set in and around the Siege of Seringapatam in 1799 India [Commem Medal L]. The series appears to be available as ear-books on Borrowbox. The storyline of the whole series is the growth and development of a young tearaway who takes the King's shilling and rises to greatness through a series of daring [and improbable] adventures. The message is that, despite a rigid class system 200+ years ago, smart and courageous people could win through. There is a pantomime villain and some dopey, venal, lazy officer-toffs who can be manipulated to do Sharpe down. But we know that Sharpe survives [because 25 books about his later life], so his recurrent jeopardy just gets to feel manipulative set-pieces to spin each tale out to 350 pages. I balked at the casual killing off of another "nice guy" by the villain about 40% through and returned the book to the library for someone else to enjoy.

I'm in general more of a fan for things Portuguese than things Icelandic, so when I was informed that António Lobo Antunes had died, I opened the library catalogue to see if any of his books were available in Ireland. There were! An English translation of his Explicação dos Pássaros (1981) was on the shelf in Carraroe, Co Galway. I got 30 pages in before "The distinction between fact and fiction, between past, present and future, blur in Antunes brilliant narration" [Publishers Weekly] left me only confused, rather than inspired or interested. Pity because the book is set in the era of Portugal's Carnation Revolution in which I have an abiding interest. Rather cool was that the family-except-me had 5 days Carraroe just after Easter and were able to return the book to its home library much quicker than it shuffling about the country in a plastic box. Of course Dau.I the Librarian made it a busman's holiday and dropped in to talk Dewey Decimal cataloging and backed-up toilets with the Galway librarians.

It's okay to throw some back in the water. There are thousands of new [non-fiction] books published each year. Not to mention enough back-catalogue on library shelves to last a life time; or at east waht's left of mine.

Family Yomp to Black Church

Don't Label! Everyone is on their own journey, getting surprised by joy and finding out what matters. After me, the least sporty person in the family is was Dau.II. Then she moved to Dublin and took up walking; getting to see the city step by step at 4km/hr. Last Spring, when I was in training for our GR65 walk into the French interior, she came home for the weekend and came up the hill to keep me company . . . and then insisted we carry on another 1000m Along and 150m ↑↑↑Up to Stoolyen, the S facing shoulder of Mt Leinster.  Later that Summer, when all 3 generations of the family were back together, Dau.II set her sights on Sturra: a 3km hike requiring 500m of elevation. It would be churlish to let her go alone, so The Boy and The Patriarch went with. So glad I went! 

MetÉireann has gotten really good about predicting the weather. Just, maybe, a slight tendency to big up incomming storms with yellow and orange warnings, which turn out to be mere asthmatic wheezes. Therefore, when The Clan gathered home on Good Friday 2026, we had a choice of Sa Su Mo to launch up a hill together. Easter Sunday dawned sunny-but-windy in the aftermath of "Storm Dave" breezed through the day before.  Pilot Dau.II decided that we would walk to "The Black Church", a turf-cutters lodge at the Moats of Craan, along an Easterly spur of MtLeinster. It's near the beginning of the annual Blackstairs Challenge. 

Accordingly, after brunch a 3 generation party aged 10 to 70, departed for a 5 hour, 9 mile, 1700ft elevation circular yomp up the hill behind the house. It's all too easy to slip into a choco-coma on Easter Sunday afternoon, but Dau.II will walk and will dragoon accept company.  Gdau.II, with the shortest legs, was given a bailout option when we briefly touched the [Wexford] county road but stoutly turned it down and pegged along after her older rellies. We encountered a farming couple taking the tea-time air along that road and they asked "Where did you leave your car?" to which we chorused "We have no car, we walked from Home" and explained where Home was. I think they were impressed [maybe only by 10y.o. Dau.II?] because farmers tend to go by quad-bike nowadays. When we got back we sat down to an Easter dinner that couldn't be beat centering on paschal lamb and [most important] roast potatoes. Vegetarian options available.

Eeee it were great, a perfick day! The weather gave us the merest shake of sleety snow and only for a few minutes, otherwise sunny, breezy with scudding clouds. X marks the destination as seen from near the summit of Mt Leinster:

 

Men behaving badly

. . . and then what?

I've been quite the fanboi for Rory Stewart, not least because of our shared fancy for long-distant walks.  I've read a handful of his books and also listened to hours and hours of his two-hander podcast The Rest is Politics. The other hand on that podcast is Alastair Campbell, known in some quarters as Tony Blair's Liar-in-Chief. I've read a few of his books too. The LiC label is applied primarily because Campbell enabled the British Prime Minister to help destroy Iraq in an absurd-in-hindsight hunt for WMD - weapons of mass destruction. The 'Second Gulf War', starting in 2003, resulted in 4,800 deaths for Coalition forces: +90% of them US troops. That butcher-bill more than doubled the US casualties as a result of 9/11. And of course that is discounting uncountable numbers of Iraqi dead: estimates for which vary between 100,000 and 600,000.

From March to April 2003, it took The Coalition 26 days to topple the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein. At the end of September 2003, aged 30, British diplomat Rory Stewart rocked up in Al-Amarah as Deputy Governor of the province of Maysān overseeing the security, welfare and development of ~1 million people. The consensus is that the government of Saddam Hussein was a corrupt kleptocracy. Many might have gone along with a plan to replace him with something 'better'. Bush and Blair didn't have anything 'better' beyond general platitudes like democracy, equality, the rule of law, honesty, welfare, market forces.

Deposing the dictator, sacking his dependents and apparatchiks and dismantling the army left a power and security vacuum which was quickly filled by entrepreneurs who seized assets for their own use or to sell for profit. And, like, fair dues: if you're the first through the front door as the Ba'ath-appointed mayor flees out the back why not take the mayor's new desktop computer? It looks like a victimless crime. Same for the police-chief's Mercedes . . . and that nice carpet . . . and an AK-47 might be handy. What is a mighty collective pain in the arse otoh is when entrepreneurs target electricity transmission cables for their value as scrap copper. The easiest way to access abundant copper wire is to push over the [steel] pylons. So one gang's loot !bonanza! requires 20x the investment by the community to restore service. 

You might expect that kind of shittiness in a war-zone. But other shits are available. When UK citizen and laundry consultant Gary Teeley was kidnapped in Apr'04, it was part of Stewart's brief to secure his release. Hours and hours of dickering on the phone with multiple parties to apply pressure in the right spot was difficult enough when all the Iraqis they called claimed more power and influence for themselves than was perhaps strictly true. The local Coalition troops were Italian (a minor partner in the country as a whole); in the midst of these delicate and protracted negotiations, the Italians decided to assault the HQ of one of the political parties "looking for arms". After a week of [mis]communication, Mr Teeley was delivered to Stewart's office, smelling rank but apparently unharmed. Stewart sent him by ambulance to the Italian military hospital to be formally checked over. Consequence: all the immediate global press coverage showed the Italian General welcoming Teeley back from the edge of the abyss. Within a week, it was reported that the [British] SAS had masterminded the rescue . . . using borrowed Italian uniforms. Success has many friends, but failure is an orphan

Rory Stewart was required to be a cog in the machine of a provisional government tasked to disburse (honestly & accountably) b/millions of USDs to restore water-treatment plants, cratered roads, RPGed schools, other aspects community infrastructure which are invisible to, but taken for granted by, us. The Iraqis were conflicted by their hatred and contempt of an alien invasive horde vs the !ka-ching! chance of free cash for pet projects. The US & UK developed a fantasy that after smashing to pieces a functioning [if violent & corrupt] polity, they could replace it with now for something completely different [whc turned out - surprise - to be a sort of idealized version of their best selves] and walk away feeling smug in the accolades of 'success'.

If capitalist democrats maintain that democratic capitalism is the summit of human achievement then excuse me for calling out narcissist delusion. It's like Charles I of England & Scotland claiming the divine right of kings. One of the nicest things about Stewart's book is that he admits that in hindsight he was wrong about the pragmatic effect of some of his political certainties. Can't read the book? At least read this interview.

And whoa-shoa, it hasn't escaped my notice that, even as you read, another US President is seriously contemplating the invasion of another Middle-Eastern Islamic state. What could possibly go wrong?

Grumpy the Cobbler

I mentioned earlier that I was no longer in the market for Hi-Tec brand walking boots. Corporate HQ must have shifted production to a different sweated-labour facility possibly in a different East Asian country. OR Finance showed that 3c a shoe could be added to the bottom line if the glue recipe was altered. Whatever the explanation, after a decade of believing in the quality of the brand, I had two pairs of shoes on the trot (2016 and 2024) fall apart on me. In 2016, I salvaged the laces to tie up tomatoes in the garden and landfilled the boots. 

But I only had ~20 days [over 500 days] of use from 2024 pair, when I noticed that the sole was separating from the upper at the toe. The agéd shoe-mender on my way to The Institute closed during Coronarama, so I phoned the cobbler in another town in the next county.
"The toe of my boot is separating from the upper, can you fix and how long might it take?"
"If you drop 'em in today, I can do it in an hour"

But when I rocked up to the shop, he ripped back half the sole and said "This is not the toe separating from the upper, this will require a lot more work, I'll have to rip off the whole sole, clean out all this grass and mud, dry them out, re-glue the sole. The glue will smear on the upper so it won't look great. I can't do it today. It will cost €35. Your call." He wasn't going to help on the money vs utility math, whc fair enough. Nor was he going to bother with an opinion on brands except to say that to get good quality boots you need to spend at least €200 the pair. The tenor of his tone was that I was a complete gull to buy the sort of boots that sat between us on the counter. But I agreed to pay €35 and he agreed to fix.

There was more confrontation on the matter of when I would collect and pay for the boots. Next Tuesday wouldn't do. He had a pair of shoes in back that had been "next Tuesday"ing since before Christmas. I didn't get down on both knees but I did genuflect & swear on my mother's bones that I would return at 11:00 next Tuesday . . . with cash. Which I did, because protestants, even boot-gull protestants, can be punctual even if parking can be a nightmare. 

When I lived and worked in Dublin in the 1990s, I came to believe that people who worked in sub-Post Offices projected pissed-off pretty much all the time; which I found strange in someone who had chosen a public-facing profession. I developed a theory that, because subPOs were often hidden away at the back of other premises, the lack of natural daylight for the whole working day turned employees gruff&surly: they'd been full of spring flowers and sunshine earlier in their lives. "my" shoe-mender's premises have the same cave-vibe as the back of Greene's Bookshop on Clare Street D2 where I used to buy stamps 30 years ago.

But there's no such excuse for the mower guy, whom I supported for several years. Every . effing . time I brought him a lawn-mower or chain-saw needing fixed, his expert eye would instantly find something that showed I was a massive abuser of lawn-mowers and should not be trusted with kitchen scissors, let alone power tools. This went from being insightful and informative to wearingly predictable to a serious pain in the neck. It never seemed to dawn on him that, if I could maintain mowers, I wouldn't be troubling him with fistfuls of folding money every time we met.

I now go to Tom the Sawyer of Ballyteigelea. He's an interesting fellow who was born to be a farmer and that is indeed his day&night job; but Tom gets far more joy and fulfillment from tinkering with engines to make them Go. I have huge affection & respect for people who invent the self that are they are happiest to be. Tom can drop clues about chain-saw care and maintenance without making me feel an inadequate rube.

Seeing the wood for the cheese

When we were young and foolish and [therefore?] had a 2y.o. at foot, we all lived together in a single room, sharing a bathroom with several other inhabitants of bedsit land. There was probably a 2kW electric fire but sticks were free and I'd go out after dark for fallen branches to burn in the fireplace. This despite having zero rights of estover in Dublin 4. The something for nothing [ and devil take the beetles] thriftiness of picking sticks appealed to me.

A few years ago, I encountered a woman on our lane walking her dog but carrying a large gnarly ash branch which, she said, had fallen from one of the trees [waves one arm vaguely behind her] and she was taking it home for the fire. I felt such a rush of empathy that I forebore to tell her that the branch had fallen from my ash-tree into my lane and, but for her, I might well have picked it up myself. I saw here quite a lot after that because she was renting a converted byre about 1 km West along our valley. Let us call her Geal. About the same time, we acquired another new neighbour, Ford, who moved into the little wooden house at the bottom of the lane. And lo! Ford also came with a dog and soon enough the two canines were besties-on-the-block. I'm not sentimental and defo not a doggy person, but it was touching to see these two middle-aged dogs romping around like arthritic puppies plainly delighted with each other.

In December 2024, Storm Darragh blasted through, and we lost a few trees. But neighbour Ford woke up to a garden catastrophe. Two adjacent grossly overgrown Leylandia Cupressocyparis leylandii had been batted out of his Western hedge and carried away an enormous Eucalyptus. The latter came to rest across his driveway requiring bushwacking skills of those needing access to the house. It took much of 2025 and a mort o'money [and a lot of neighbourly labour] to reclaim the garden.Through the year, a certain amount of the smaller timber was sawn up and taken away by Geal. 

Then, in the back end of 2025, Ford heard that the owners wanted to sell his home of 2½ years. That's the way in Ireland: the Constitution privileges property over welfare. But the new year brought better news: Ford having been approved and on the wait-list for council housing in the adjacent county for nine (9!) years, heard that his number had come up and he'd be able to collect keys to his new gaff at the end of February. I was bereft because, although we had nothing in common, I really like Ford. But I was also delirah, because he was getting a home with better insulation, fewer crashable trees and much closer to his family.

But the change of address put the skids on saving the wind-thrown sticks and passing them up the chimneys of people in Ford's network. A few weeks ago, I offered Ford my labour until the tank ran dry on my chainsaw. It turns out that, if the chain is sharp, a surprisingly large heap of firewood can be generated in ~1 hour:

So much, indeed, that Ford's suburban sister complained her allotmen wouldn't all fit in her fuel store. Geal, who has a proper rural sized wood-shed, was so happy with her heap that she sent me a selection of fine cheese [with a couple of avocados for scale!]:

That was nice, and timely, because I love cheese and it was Caisleán na Cáise for the Clan when they came home for Easter. But the potlatch [mutual exchange of extravagant gifts] was set to continue. On Fig Tuesday evening Ford knocked on our door to ask three (3) favours: 

1. His fridge being shipped, could he borrow a corner of our freezer until he followed  it in a few days time?
2. Could I take him & a last load of household gubbins to the new place sometime over Easter weekend ?
3. Could I give Geal another tankful of gas and reduce another cache of branches to logs ?

A: Yes I said Yes I will Yes. And furthermore I would help load Geal's car and shuttle loads to her woodshed until the wave of firewood ebbed to mere sawdust and grass. And that was its own reward because we nattered about the weather (and the neighbours) as we made the short journey back & forth.

Boot Bonus

 In 2004, I walked from Portugal to France wearing the pair of boots which I happened to have on the go at the time. The brand was Hi-Tec and they pounded away for me for 8 weeks and 900km. In  contrast to Imelda Marcos, I don't have a lot of shoes. For the next 12 years, I was a Hi-Tec loyalist but the last pair of four crapped out on me in ~2016 . . . much sooner than 'expected'. I got far better mileage from a pair of Lidl walking boots that cost €22.95. Though, in fairness, these weren't my hill-walking years and the Lidl-boots did most work between my office and the bio lab at The Institute. At the time Dau.II started to drink the Columbia Coolaid

In the backend of 2024, Dau.II informed us that Rambler's Way [the Nort'side, 1981 era, family-run, outdoorsy shop] was having a going-out-of-business sale. She had already splashed out on two (2) pairs, heavily discounted, of her preferred Columbia runners. I went up on condition that she held my hand because I am the world's worst shopper. In less than an hour, we came away with two pairs of boots for her Old Man: one black&red Hi-Tec with added ankle support plus one grey&gray Columbia [Peer-pressure = ON!] with slightly lower cut. I use my new Columbia boots all the time, except for going up the hill when I'd sometimes give the Hi-Tec an outing. 

The going-out-of-business sale has been chuntering on for nearly100 weeks now: rumours periodically  sweeping the streets about an imminent end. The last weekend in March, we were invited to a significant-zero b.day hop and I got to bunk with the girls. On Saturday AM, we strode out for some retail therapy between Smithfield and the ILAC centre, looking for: cheese, flowers, tomato seeds, Georgian flat-bread, hot-cross buns and . . . boots.

We go back in Rambler's Way 18 months after my first trip. For reasons, I'm only looking for Columbia boots same as before. They've run out of my [median bloke] size of preferred boot, but they do have the same model in black&black. While we're faffing around at the till, Dau.I points at a €4 webbing haversack and asks what webbing is. Mis-hearing, I turn to the young chap serving and ask 
"Would you throw in the bag for the price of the boots?"
"For sure, we usually throw in a pair of €10 socks, if anyone asks, but if you want the bag, you got it"
But that's okay, I have socks, so many socks; enough to see me out. But I haven't had a webbing haversack since I was in college 50 years ago.

Many years ago, I went shopping with my father in the small market town in England nearest to where he lived in retirement. Among other things, he needed to buy a new toaster. There wasn't A Lot of choice in the white-goods shop, so he picked one and took it to the till with "What kind of a discount can you give me for this? I am morto entirely. The spotty youth, not having been trained in the souks of the Middle East, was confused and went to ask the manager. A while later, he returned with "My boss says we can knock off 5%". And the deal is done. 5% of a toaster is much less than a cup of coffee, and it didn't seem worth the trouble to me. But I never asked him WTF at the time. He fell down the stairs and died the following year, so I'll never know if asking for inappropriate discounts was evidence that he was slipping into dementia. We'll have to see how it pans out for me.

 

M is for murder

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; etc.

Saw H is for Hawk (2014) by Helen Macdonald on a library shelf and snagged it, despite having a handful of books on the go. Maybe just as well because it is tagged with multiple reserves: doubtless a consequence of the 2025 Claire Foy film of the book. My reading this continues a human goes for wild theme on The Blob: hares - baby hares - shit on yer head magpie.

[a sparrowhawk Accipiter nisus] "looks the hugest, most impressive piece of wildness you've ever seen, like someone's tipped a snow leopard into your kitchen and you find it eating the cat". But A.nisus is a sparrow compared to goshawks Astur gentilis which happily scarf down sparrowhawks as a starter. Macdonald gets themselves a goshawk[R attrib at End] as solace after their beloved Dad dies. It is bad luck to name your raptor something appropriately vaulting like Cutwind or Scythe, so Macdonald dials M for Murder Mabel as a banal, old-fashioned maiden-auntie name. There is a rich literature in the Art of Falconry but the most accessible for a child of the 70s is The Goshawk (1951) by T.H. White. But shout out to Kes by Ken Loach (1969) for a working-class perspective.

I read The Goshawk as a teenager, after Mistress Masham's Repose (1946)  but before the chunkier Once and Future King. My memory of The Goshawk is of a battle of wills between man and beast centred on sleep-deprivation. We now know that sleep-deprivation is a more effective form of torture than the bastinado, electrodes or pliers. I read the 'manning' of Gos as adjacent to 'breaking' horses or 'training' a dog with a rolled up newspaper: something that other people did to animals. I was never about to assert my dominance on/over a sentient being [altho I was heartlessly cruel to insects as a child] - it was hard enough training / reining myself to fit in. Macdonald also read The Goshawk but was inspired to walk the falconers path as a young person and acquired enough competence to teach others; and a network of hawking friends.

H is for Hawk is a griefwalker's journey but also a critical evaluation of T.H White as a person [they fuck you up your mum and dad and their proxies in boarding school] and as an austringer [barely competent, would not be licensed]. But hey, where I live anyone is allowed to be a parent, altho 'we' require higher standards for would-be adoptees. Falconry is a minority sport and, for the greatest good, we should require a dog-owning test before a falcon-training test. In Maine, I learn, falconers are tested and licenced. In contrast to TH White, Macdonald comes across as much better at not visiting their baggage on the poor bloody hawk. The end result is that, whereas White lost his bird in the woods, Mabel will fly off after pheasants and rabbits . . . and come back to Macdonald's fist. This success is aided by making the human self small and reading the bird. Gets crotchety when tired, perky when prey present; tendency to hangry. Read her wrong and you might get a dig . . . from 4 sharp talons.

cw: Whatever your position on cruelty in the process of taming / training animals, spare a thought for the rabbits, pheasants and passerines which get terminated by Mabel. Eaten alive, they be; unless the falconer interferes with an efficient cervical dislocation. 

Picture credit: "Goshawk" by Andy Morffew is licensed under CC BY 2.0. via OpenVerse.org