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. 

Pics for posterity

As we get older our [not your] adult children are getting increasingly cross about The Clutter. There are three in that F.1 [1st Filial generation] and the most direct said "Hey, get your shit together, why should I have to process it at the same time as my grief?". errrm, quite so.

All those books I bought in a pre-digital age were snatched from yard-sale oblivion because they were worth 50c to Future Me or Future Children: Historical atlases, Teach Yourself Swahili, forgotten classics by Peter Fleming, Pierre van Paassen, WW Jacobs.  None of these are available in the County Library but the information is [more easily] accessible on-line . . . somewhere. 15 years ago, I cd have been convinced to dump the lot. Less so now that a free infinite forever internet is less credible. But feckit, _I_ - nor any of mine - will not be learning Swahili [nor Romanian, nor Japanese] and I rarely re-read any books. I owe nothing to roaming bands clad in dog-skin and dodging zombies: they can find their own books.

The Beloved decided that This Summer was when the house must be painted. And we've had a very agreeable, interesting, pains-taking slappie more or less living with us for the last 3 weeks. He's moving through the house room-by-room and I am tasked to heft boxes and bags of Stuff out of his way. And then move them back when the paint has dried. It would be so handy if we lived on a farm with outbuildings: just move all the boxes to a shed - or even pay some young fit people to do the heavy lifting - and then move it back. Wait! we do live on a farm with outbuildings . . . but they are also up to eye-level with yet more shite.

So . . . the photographs. I graduated from Instamatic to a Canon semi-automatic 35mm SLR in 1983. I needed it for work during a brief foray into the genetics of pigeon Columba livia colour! Back in the 70s 80s 90s 00s there was a whole capitalist competitive industry selling, developing and printing 35mm colour film. It was sold in reels of 24 or 36 pictures and you didn't know how they looked until you'd left them with the chemist, or later sent the film off in a pre-paid envelope. It is the nature of the amateur world that the returning envelope [samples R] was wreathed in disappointment: so many fuzzy, poorly-composed, over-exposed pictures of The Trees, The Sky or The own-self Feet.  My first gripe is the design of the envelope! Unless you include the woman's cheek [top.L], only Fuji Film facilitates writing a Table of Contents on the outside of the packet. 

Between 1973 and 2013 we took, processed and stored thousands of photos; in hundreds of envelopes. They fill several 250mm x 350mm x 450mm archive file boxes. Roughly in total 0.25 cu.m or 250 litres of fire-hazard. It doesn't help that capitalism offered many many 2 for 1 deals, so each batch of photos came back as precise duplicates as well as the almost the same crap-pics

Each box is a day's work. I've been looking at each photo and triaging into a) duplicate b) terrible c) keep. Then adding an exec.summ to the outside of the envelope. If I'd just had a cuppa and a chocolate biscuit, I might add an explanation on the back of the picture "Uncle Jim, carpentry again, ~1984?". Because the next person to look through this box never knew Uncle Jim or the colour of our front door 1986-1990. So who is the chap [see L] talking earnestly to Pat the Salt at a family wedding in 1989? Nobody (living) knows! Or so I thought before I canvassed the thumbnail round The Beloved's sibs. Half a lifetime ago, Jody Mulcaire was a workmate and friend and now he is dead. If you want to reach out to old friends, like my ex-student Mike, do not delay!
For credit where due: Dau.II labelled some of the packets while she was 'resting' with us 2022-2023 - that was a great help last week.

Data from (Tuesday 11 Aug 26)'s box: a) dupe 1kg b) crud 1.5kg c) keep 8.25kg. That's ~25% which only needs to be moved one more time: for archaeologists from the Planet Zorg to discover in Cullenstown Landfill in 5026AD.

My mother, the last survivor of the previous generation came late to holiday and domestic snaps. My sister, daughter and I went through her 'Papers' after she died and dumped all the photos where we couldn't recognise anyone (there was nobody to ask who?).  But wait? 
Q. Isn't a set of pictures of Swan-Hellenic Cultural Cruises, Mediterranean, 1980s, useful for future sociologists? 
A. Not enough for us to care. 

Perspective notes: a) My pal Roy couldn't save a much better organized, more extensive, pictorial archive. b) only 7 out of 120+ of the plays of Sophocles have survived the ravages of 25 centuries of indifference.

Poppyseed

This summer is really coming on for The End Of Days. No rain at all for July, then a good bit of persistent drizzle on 3rd August but we're back to desertification for the 10 days since then. There is a hose-pipe ban for those who on the mains, but I believe it should apply to us for ther same reasons. If we lived in burbia, and water failed to come out of the taps, a national emergency would be declared and government water-bowsers would appear at the end of the street so that we could drink and b'il the spuds even if the jacks wouldn't flush. If our bore-hole runs dry The Man isn't going to send out a rescue swat team.

And . . . the well ran dry last Sunday! For he first time in 30 years. Because The Outdoor Man was watering the sheep and forgot to turn off the tap. I've done left outdoor tap running before but never so that the rising main in the kitchen dried up. Big red face, and the water came back after abut 20 minutes, but it shows how close to the edge we might be. The well is 30m deep with ⌀ 100mm. Therefore, standing volume (π.r².len) = 230lt = ¼ tonne = 2x bathfuls. Although, even as we pump water out, it is usually cascading in through rock-fissures from the ground water. So flushing for a tinkle, or running a bath, or filling the kettle or all three together, is on demand sustainable. But not if the well is already only half full and there's a drought on.

In other news, the green beans are bearing - a good handful every day for the last week. They are yum, but that's not really enough to make freezing for Xmas sensible. The very misc tomatoes are just starting to bear fruit. Yesterday at lunch, we shared the first from var = blue pear which is black on top and red away from the petiole [see at foot]. It ugly but quite sweet and not very exciting.

I decided to harvest all the poppy seed. In the pic above left, it looks like something has severed the seed-head of maybe half the plants. I don't mind sharing my poppy-seed with field mice Apodemus sylvaticus but I'm not going to hand it all to them. Accordingly, in batches, I cut off the top ~10cm of stalk and shook them into a large white soup bowl as in previous years. It is usually necessary to snip of the top of the seed-case  with scissors. Took me about an hour and yielded 150g of seed. That costs about €2 at Tesco - why do I bother?? It is organic & local, I guess.

 

Epoch-eclipse

 In 1999, I was the Irish Node [director and sole-employee] of a European academic quango. We had an AGM in one venue or another, and for 1999 some bright spark suggested that the German node at  Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum (DKFZ) in Heidelberg should host it. Because the Great European Total Solar eclipse was due to sweep over the continent on 11 August 1999. So, for immediately after the AGM, a charabanc was chartered to take the delegates to a castle 120km South of Heidelberg and drinks were laid on in the Schloßhof. For reasons which I've long forgotten, I couldn't go. When my pals arrived at the castle, it was cloudy, but some of them caught a glimpse of totality through a cloud-break . . . and some were in the dungeons looking for more, and more robust, canapés.

Meanwhile back at Caislean Bob, The Beloved seized Dau.I and Dau.II, bundled them into the car and drove into our post-town. She had heard that someone was sharing his welder's helmet with his local community and the girls (aged 6 and nearly 4) got a geek at a once-in-a-lifetime partial solar eclipse. Like this year, in 1999 the path of totality skirted the island of Ireland. I was left at home. But after a while I found a large cardboard box and made a pin-hole camera like it was 1899. Crude and lo-tech as it was I spent an hour or so looking at a projected image of the sun getting slowly nibbled into a crescent.

Fast forward 27 years and 1 day. Yesterday evening, it was again eclipse time in Europe - actually also a yellow heatwave warning where we live; and unlikely to be overcast. They were giving a max of ~95% disc-coverage at ~19:10. 

At 15:00hrs on Der Tag, I thought I'd better do something - other than finding an internet webcam with erudite voice-over.  I scared up a tallish, toughish, newish cardboard box, taped over all the corners and punched a 2mm hole in the base, which cast a perfick 6mm ⌀ disk at the other end and a fuzzier bigger splot on the ground. A lawn-chair provided just the right angle (with some tolerance) for projecting when I set up the observatory but the sun was sinking fast towards the tree-line in the yard when disk-eating started at just after 18:00hrs. But I was able to move my contraption to a far corner of the yard and happily clocked the diminution of sun-size over the next 70 minutes, taking pictures every so often. I also had fresh lemons in case the event triggered a zombie puckerlips.

But next time I'll think outside the box and get under some leafy trees, like Dau.II who, at 19:15, captured the crescent sun stuttered all over a wall as the light penetrated the canopy through multiple pinholes:

curloo-oo shall be saved?

We last met Róisín Normanly BC Before Coronarama when she scooped and classified some 000s of beetles out of ponds as an undergraduate. She is nearly the youngest of The Blob's Women in Science list. No shame in transitory beetlemania; at a similar age 200 years earlier, Charles Darwin was an avid beetle collector, famously popping one in his mouth when a greater Coleopteran prize presented. Of course, Darwin's scientific interests broadened out over the next 50 years . . . 20 of them getting down and dirty with barnacles.

At the turn of the century, I shared a house with two long-haired botanists and a long haired cat. The kitchen and bathroom were 'blokey' and the sofa furry but it was warm, dry and watching Match of The Day [The Ref is blind, I tell you, Blind!] could be good fun. I am happy for the younger fellow that he has been working as an environmental consultant for the last 2+ decades: currently looking at the impact of grazing on saltmarshes. If you point science at the natural world, it is possible to achieve trade-offs between diversity and profit to a win-win-win.

As Darwin went full metal barnacle, Normanly graduated [1st class hons!] from beetles to birds. For her MSc in Wageningen NL [been there, me], she GPS-tracked lapwings Vanellus vanellus) to determine the extent of range and interactions. But she also surveyed the invertebrates because that's what lapwings eat

Normanly is a RSPB nature conservation officer across the border in N.Ireland. At the end of April, she found & electric-fenced off a curlew (Numenius arquata) nest on an upland heath. Curlews are 'near threatened' on the IUCN Red List; so it's hard to find nests. A week later 175 ha of that heathland went on fire but [with some help from 85 firefighters] she was able to snatch 4 eggs from the nest, although the electric fence-posts had melted to blobs. [Note to self: always carry a lunchbox and spare socks]. Those eggs have now hatched [R from RTE video] and will be released into the wild later this Summer. RSPB Press Release.

The calculus: 4 curlews saved! The more abundant ground-nesting meadow pipits (Anthus pratensis) and skylarks (Alauda arvensis), not to mention legions of beetles and butterflies . . . not so much. 

Making money

“Mr. Micawber was waiting for me within the gate, and we went up to his room (top story but one), and cried very much. He solemnly conjured me, I remember, to take warning by his fate; and to observe that if a man had £20 a-year for his income, and spent £19 19/6, he would be happy, but that if he spent £20 1/- he would be miserable. After which he borrowed a shilling of me for porter, gave me a written order on Mrs. Micawber for the amount, and put away his pocket-handkerchief, and cheered up. ” 

We had a farrrm in Afrika bought a farmlet in the Irish Midlands in 1996. We were able to do this because a) Boomers b) we'd sold an Edwardian row-house in England which more-or-less covered the price.  We set the fields at conacre for a tuthree years while we found a) our feet, b) plumbers, chippies, sparkies and roofers c) grew two girls from nappies to more-or-less continence. Then we fell out with our conacerer (and knew thereby that we'd arrived in the community) and had to rustle up some sheep to eat the grass.

But a sustainable number of sheep over 365 days can't eat the beneficence of Summer, so we've had to cut hay / haylage / silage to deal with the surplus each year. From standing grass to hay requires a reaper, a tedder, & a baler; silage needs, in addition, a wrapper. Even if we owned a tractor, all these additional bits of kit would have to be bought [insane expense] or borrowed. Borrowed when everyone else in the parish wanted to use the same machinery for the same purpose. Then we had to sell the surplus fodder. Every year has been a problem to get all the ducks in a row and fall on our knees for suitable weather. Last year, for example,  one of the contractors knocked two granite gate-pillars out of true and never stopped to say sorry; let alone make good the damage. 

This year, at short notice, for the first time, we contracted to harvest wildflower seed from the Traditional Hay Meadows THM which make up about 80% of our pasture. A dinky Hege plot-harvester [as above] made a few passes but most of the seed harvest was with a brush-harvester which cuts nothing. Rather it runs across the top of the grass [height set by eye and experience] beating the tops with a cylindrical bog-brush and collecting this thrash into sacks. Periodically, they empty the bags onto tarpaulin sheets to let the insects and arachnids escape. 

Because no cut, there was still a bunch of hay to knock, ted, bale and cart away. We found another, more local, more careful contractor after last year's pillar-tonker who charged so much an acre to knock and turn and so much a bale to, like, bale. In 1998, after a long hot summer, the first haying on our watch yielded 105 4ft = 1200mm round bales from 12 acres = 5 hectares. It has been an unsteady decline ever since. We are so averse to pelleted nitrogen that the nutrient balance is quite out of kilter. All that biomass going offsite to feed someone else's cattle in a sweaty tuberculous shed in Winter is not getting replaced. 

In 2026 we sold 21 round hay bales to our neighbour across the river at €23 each = €480. Whoohee! But it cost €450 to contract out the process of harvest.  If Farmer Micawber's calculus applies, we are happy! The details are commercially sensitive but the price we got for the wildflower seeds was wildly absurdly greater than €30 nett for the hay. That's part of why you the consumer have to pay €5 to €15 for a 1oz = 30g packet of Irish Wildflower Seeds. But it's like milk, the farmer (who owns the cows, takes the risk and does all the work, starting every day at 05:00hrs) gets 35c/lt, and you&me pay TescAldidl €1.20 for the same thing. The creamery, the tetrapac plant, the Aldi shelf-stacker, and the truckers delivering product from hither to yon all take their cut.

Bottom line: Wildflowers? Would go again!  

Sloppin' Bob

We have a polytunnel. At 17m x 9m its footprint is quite a bit bigger than the 2-floor area of our house. At one time we had a straggly grapevine trained up a trellis inside the tunnel. A friend, who knows a thing or two about wine came to view the tunnel when it was new and the plastic was clear and clean. I asked him: if were were to propagate our vine and have a 17m run of plants suitably pruned and fed and cared for, how much wine might we get in a good year? Oh, he replied,  a bottle a day with a following wind. We contrived to kill our little vine shortly thereafter. But for nearly 20 years, we've had on-again off-again success with green beans and tomatoes and courgettes. And a mighty triffid of a rosemary bush.

We do have a garden-tap in one corner which ultimately comes from our domestic 30m deep borehole but I'd rather use rainwater which falls on the plastic and gets guttered into various receptacles. Years ago, I bought 50m of perforated pipe with the intention of subterranean drip-feeding our ~10m long 'middle bed' where we most often grow the beans. But a different know-it-some pal assured me that such a project would be futile unless the pipe was perfectly level, Otherwise the water would just pool at the lowest point and everything else would be Sahara. So I'm still slopping out water into the bottomless buckets into which the various veg are planted. 

It rained on Saturday 27th June 2026 and I used that to top off all our water containers, down to the pair of 10lt plastic watering cans. Circled L is our Outside IBC, which is 2m higher than the plant roots it serves and the 2-wheeled stable barrow whc can double-job to hold ~250lt water. At this full capacity, we have a reservoir of close to 3 tonnes. That sounds like a lot, it is a lot. One tonne is about what I need for drinking in a year. But IF we have 3 dozen bucket-beds for veg ANDIF they get ~3 lt every time they're watered THEN 1 tonne will only last 10 days. 

But this year, it didn't rain again until a 25 minute Summer downpour at tea-time on Weds 29th July; and again more sustained on Mon 3rd August.  By 29th July we had more-or-less drained our reserves and I was tap-topping up the big-blue wheel barrow with cool clear well water. And leaving it to get to 'room-temperature' for 24 hours. That 29/07 shower delivered at least 120lt of water. The steady drizzle on the afternoon of 03/08 has put 500 litres into the Outside IBC and as much again has been captured in other containers.

But we've had most un-Irish multi-week rain-free spells in the Summers of 2018, 2023, 2025 and now 2026. The Beloved says I'm too old to be heaving buckets of water about. But I demur: I'm not about to pay ready money at a gym to get a similar workout.

I don't keep good records of when it rains, because it's Ireland. But I do notice when the weather goes all Ancient Mariner [With throats unslaked, with black lips baked / We could nor laugh nor wail/ Through utter drought all dumb we stood . . .] and the grass turns crisp and yellow. We are close enough that daily rainfall records from Alan O'Reilly at CarlowWeather are a pretty good aide memoire for past rainfall

Beard stokes food

Back in my YouTube days [ie before I went cold YTurkey  in Jan 2026], I went on a sub-jag watching, with fascinated horror, Adam "Beard Meats Food" Moran engaged in gluttonous food challenges usually against the clock. Restaurant will account it positive publicity to offer food for free IF the punter clears their enormous platter. 5kg of coleslaw, a 40oz steak with chips and trimmings, a gumboot full of fried clams. It is gross on many levels but Moran is affable and funny and the variety of challenge options keeps the channel going: 6+million subscribers & 2+billion views is apparently enough to give up the day job [wikipedia, I cannot obvs link to YT].

More paint is needed! The latest tradie to be living with us is slapping emulsion on the interior walls - one room at a time. It is hugely disruptive because although our home is modest at 1,000sq,ft = 90sq.m the amount of clutter is Mighty. books do furnish a room More books than I care to count is okay: IF they are stacked on shelves up against a wall THEN they are effective sound and thermal insulation. But boxing t'feckers up and moving them is a royal PITA. Note to self: do serious triage on the library [and the photo collection] before mobilizing the tradesmen. Yesterday we drove to Waterford for another 10 lt of fancy paint. 

It wasn't a total blow to the carbon foot print because a) we filled the car with The Recycling and b) two fruit-boxes of de-cluttering [one of books and one of nonsense] for Oxfam; c) & d) we fulfilled two health-adjacent appointments for The Beloved. I was required as chauffeur-paramedico after the treatments; and to heft the clutter. She promised to buy me lunch. I said I'd make a sandwich and bring me own. But between appts, there we were at noon getting seated in Hook & Ladder. Lunch menu didn't start until 12:30 so, despite preferring a ham'n'cheese toastie, I ordered a second breakfast. Begob & begut! It was like a Beard Meats Food eating challenge or reg'lar breakfast at The Pig & Whistle Diner in Brighton MA ca. 1982. But nothing that a Kobayashi shake won't settle, or running down a tuthree sheep. Also I was brought up to polish my plate, and so

Burp! From the Menu FARMER’S FAIR  2 Sausages, 2 bacon, 1 black & 1 white pudding, ½ tomato, mushrooms, rosemary potatoes, 1 fried egg, 4 x ½ toast 4 butter pats 1a,c,d,2,5,14 €13.95 (1a. wheat, 1c. barley, 1d. oats, 2. Crustaceans, 5. Eggs, 14. Sulphites). WTF crustaceans? Maybe Pill-bugs Armadillidium vulgare in the black pudding?

Lick it off a stone, didn't

I was at this gaahden  paahty in England with a mission. Actually, of course, I went for free booze and sausage rolls but I found myself getting all Ancient Mariner "long grey beard and glittering eye, now wherefore stopp'st thou me" etc. on the poor wedding (anniversary) guests. I had to explain to anybody who couldn't escape [wheelchair, dodgy hip, emphysema, whatever] just how brilliant my pal the hostess was. My formative experience of this multitalentedness was in the world of molecular biology, which has a technical language quite opaque to outsiders, so it was Work to make sense. Two glasses of fizz didn't help.

Anyway, I button-holed a misfortunate 30-something niece, and gave it socks on the auntie-propaganda front. Not least because Mark ch.6 v.4. When I slowed down a bit, we fell to talking about how it was, as a Greek woman, living and working in middle England. It was okay, so long as you didn't let the niggling casual racism get under your skin. "And how is it in Ireland?", she asked. I wasn't going to trot out some tired old platitudes about Ireland of the welcomes; nor did I feel qualified to quantify how prevalent was the setting fire to direct provision centres.

Accordingly I replied brightly that my 30-something daughters and all their friends were a) colour-blind b) embracing the entire range of the LGBTQ+ spectrum c) giving me some optimism about the future of Ireland as a multi-cultural h[e]aven. Their collective watchword seems to be "you do you, knock yourself out, none of my business". The Niece raised a quizzical eyebrow and said that my children didn't develop their inclusive sensibilities without any input from their parent[s]. "No No", I replied, "it's not just my daughters; it's their entire cohort, their entire generation, they are all kind, tolerant and forgiving, I delight in their company".

"Yer, yer", said the Niece, "but you can't escape all responsibility, I blame the parents". We had agreed earlier that her Aunt had a finely tuned crap-detector. So her clincher was "You must be a good person, you wouldn't be my Aunt's friend else." And that was the Last Word on the matter.