Famous for fifteen minutes

. . . locally. Before we bought the farm in 1996, we'd been on a couple of site visits to see what it really looked like, because the auctioneer's description ticked all the boxes: old farmhouse [✓], outbuildings [✓], 16 acres [✓]. The first time, it was June, the previous incumbent had died the year before, the meadows were waist-high; the grass flecked with any number of wildflowers. We parked toddler Dau.I up against a tumbledown wooden gate for a breather and took a photo. That became Dau.I's gate and by extension the 1 acre field beyond became Gort na Dau.I. Over the next 30 years, that rich tapestry of biodiversity has been maintained . . . because we failed to follow standard agribio advice = kill all the dicots [2,4,-D], lurry on the nitrates and watch the perennial ryegrass Lolium perenne take over [this corner of] the world.

Agribio philosophy has recently made a 180° volte face over nitrates and ryegrass; requiring farmers to embrace weeds biodiversity and low impact N instead. Last year we were poster-farmers for traditional hay-meadow - showing our confused neighbours how to embrace their inner stichwort Stellaria graminea. This after two generations of being told that such weeds were a scourge to be extirpated. Our man in biodiversity was so taken with our hay-rattle Rhinanthus minor that he nominated us for the County Farming For Nature event as part of 2025's National Heritage Week; funded by National Parks and Wildlife Services (NPWS). 

Team Biodiversity returned earlier this Summer to craft a 5min video [from ~2 hrs of footage] about us, our foxgloves [as R], our stone walls, our ring-stone and our steading. That video [5min FB media] summing up 30 years of caring for the plan[e]t life, was given its first public airing in Myshall Community Centre  on Saturday 16 Aug 2025. Not only us: 3 other farms and their custodians - each with their own passion for the natural world - were shown off to a packed  meeting room. We also had an official photographer [and therefore!] two TDs, and six County Councilors: all to be looking for their face in a square of the local paper the following week. 

It was nice. The plain people of Myshall made tea and scones to greet; and sandwiches, tea and iced-dainties for lunch and did the wash-up afterwards. We got to hear how other farms were managing the transition to a bee-friendly landscape. And talk to some of the politicians including the resourceful youthful Dan Pender whom we met last Summer. Amazingly, this chap - he will go far! - remembered my name, where he met me and my connexion with TCD from a brief encounter 14 months earlier.

We also met an official someone who maintained that hay-rattle Rhinanthus minor is now sufficiently rare that there is a market for hay-rattle seed. Apparently there are machines which can selectively pluck the rattling seed heads from the meadow [timing is important]; thresh out the seed, bolt out the impurities, dry the seeds and pop them in packets for sale. Could be a nice little earner. This year, we intentionally gathered seed for the first time from our cowslip Primula veris corner of the yard.

But enough already. I hope that someone else (anyone else) goes forward to represent the County in the National showcase of FFN Farming for Nature. 

Up Sturra

The family were round the kitchen table for a few days in the middle of August. With 3 generations we seat eight. Everyone has their particular druthers [me: sofa, cuppa, flapjacks], but Dau.II had her sights on Blackstair / Sturra which fills our view-finder [as R] to the South of the farm. She [~30] persuaded by brother [~50] and father [~70] to keep company. As family we only needed one rucksack with 3 apples a bottle of water and a small slab of kindle mint cake. When something tall is literally in your face everyday, it takes somebody else's oomph to make a closer inspection.My mother spent her entire childhood in the shadow of Dover Castle. But she didn't go visit until her own children were bored and fractious one drizzly Dover afternoon.

The forecast was phew wot a scorcher, so we set off before 09:00hrs and <shame> drove the first 'boring' 1.5km along the metalled road. It's a fine, varied walk through Coonogue, Rathgeran & Knockymullgurry with maybe our left feet straying onto Bantry Commons on the Wexford side. We started off along a walled sunken  >2m< narrow lane canopied over with scrubby trees: noting a riot of sloes Prunus spinosa for gin later in the year. 

At the top of the lane you should, and we did, ignore the broad 'dray road' heading East for Coonogue ridge. Instead veer right and pick up a much travelled footpath heading straight uphill and more or less due South. The path pushes upwards through the heather (Erica spp and Calluna vulgaris) and other species typical of dry heath. In other words: same as we have on our hill on the N side of the valley. After a while things flatten out into a pavement [called Móin na Gaoithe = Bog of the Wind] of worn granite and schisty slabs which make for dry footing and yompy progress. It was quite blowy when we were on the face of the hill but warm and dry. Dry esp. underfoot with what sphagnum was present bleached a delicate pale green. 

At the end of the pavement there is a little rocky cliff after which the way marches steadily uphill to the summit. We had been paced by three young[ish] chaps; passing them out as they rested and vice versa.  They turned out to hail originally from County Nepal. It was rather endearing therefore, when we compared notes at the Summit cairn, that they reckoned the view was a) extensive b) magnificent. All things are relative: Mount Leinster [800m], in context, looms over the landscape like Mt Everest [8,000m].

I liked it better 30 years ago when heights were still given in feet. Our hill, Knockroe, was about 1,000 feet further from the Earth's centre than our front gate, and Mt Leinster was another 1,000ft higher. 220m - 540m - 795m doesn't have quite the same ring.  

The first time we three yomped to the top of Blackstair was about 20 years ago. For several consecutive summers in the 00s, we hosted a Summer Camp for Dau.I, Dau.II and their pals. Their big brother usually came back from wherever he was roaming and our pal Lulu was the other adult in the room outdoors as well as being caterer-in-chief. As the kids got taller we stretched the expeditions further. The year when Dau.II was prolly ~10 they all made it to the top of Blackstair; which meant that none of the adults had the excuse to rest with the asthmatics, emblistered or exhausted. It stands to everyone involved that a few handfuls of sub-teens were separated from their parents and forced allowed to walk through I'm tired to the local top of the world. They washed A Lot of dishes too.

Wimmin in STEM

The Blob was born when  I started a new job in The "Not-a-University" Institute. It wasn't in the original programme of works, but I soon decided that my mission was to recruit and maintain more Women in Science. The Future of Ireland as a Technological Nation [FITNa polybloboprev] would be better served by including the 50% of the population who identified as women: different ways of seeing; different ways of interacting with peers; different lived experience . . . might bubble up a greater choice in the solution space. I started to write ~700 word Brief Lives of women [living and dead] in science & tech thinking that one of those tales might inspire one student to come aboard and stick it out and get qualified. There are more than 100 biogs there now.

At the end of July, the rest of the family made a site visit to the Coolock branch of Dublin City where Dau.I the Librarian is currently working. After the tour, I borrowed a Book - getting into the spirit of place, like: Female Innovators Who Changed Our World: How Women Shaped STEM (2022 €20!!) by Emma Shimizu. As it happens, I have a bit of a part-time unpaid gig writing 250 word book reviews for the Coolock Library newletter. So there was just a smidgen of pressure to pick a book that was available on the shelves at Coolock.   

Right off the bat, I asked how much overlap there was between Bob's list and Emma's. I'd already written about 8 of Emma's 45 chapters: Constance Tipper, Gerty Cori [R on 2011 stamp], Rachel Carson, Virginia Apgar, Rosalind Franklin, Stephanie Kwolek, Tu Youyou, Françoise Barré-Sinoussi. With another three who are indexed in Female Innovators but don't warrant their own chapter: Florence Nightingale, Grace Hopper, Hedy Lamarr. Nobody on Emma's list has any connexion with Ireland; whereas ~20% of Bob's wear the green jersey. 

Everyone who essays these brief biogs of STEM women comes with baggage if not an explicit agenda. I, for obvious chauvinistic, want-of-imagination, reasons push the Irish connexion. Emma edges towards the dispossessed and non-whites who have played a blinder with life's crappy hand of cards. This makes interesting reading for me because so many of them are never 'eard of 'er. But perhaps that's not the best call for a 15 y.o. girl teetering between science and 'business' or modern dance. That youngster won't have heard of anyone, so may be better influenced by someone who is an 'achievable' role model - a bit more like herself . . . The Blob has loads of white Irish examples! Please please, we don't need to hear the Marie Curie story again (and again), even 15 y.o.s in unacademic catchment areas have heard of Team Curie.

Cruella de Cork

I rarely browse in the library because I think that I want to read non-fiction, especially science; but the overwhelming majority of library books are novels. Most pubic libraries are especially thin on the Dewey Decimal 500s (Natural Science and Mathematics). However, we were in the library while awaiting a train, and I noticed the recent acquisitions shelf. I'll have that, I said, when I saw Missing Persons or, My Grandmother's Secrets [2024] by Clair Wills. I also snagged No More Tears [bloboview] to get ahead of the reservation queue.

Wills [R] is about my age. Her mother escaped from a 30 acre farm in West Cork in the 1950s and emigrated to England where she worked as a psychiatric nurse in South London. Some of her uncles joined McAlpine's Fusiliers to dig drains and pour concrete in post-WWII Britain.  Like me, every year through her English childhood, Wills and her family went 'home' to Ireland. One difference was that my family were 'shy breeders' so that cousins to hang out with were sparse: only a diminishing store of elderly female relatives who died one after the other as we grew up. In the 1960s a whole lot of history [from last week to last generation] was not in front of the children. And much of this material was known-but-not-spoken.

Not murder like in the Case of the Stradbally Postman [whc prev] but othering and exclusion of those who kicked over the traces and got with child. There is a hint of rite-of-passage here, when girls turn ~13 they are inducted into the secrets of those who know. Boys of any age get none of that. And if you're probably gay, like one of the uncles? Not much hope or happiness there. Wills' theory is that attitudes to unwed pregnancies [and the gays] changed for the worse as ALL aspects of social welfare were handed off to The Church in the late 19thC. Before then a) there was nowhere to escape b) communities were kinder and less judgmental. The stranglehold on public morality eased off in the 1970s, although hideous cruelty continued until the end of the 20thC to be habitually meted out on the weak by deeply unhappy spiteful wearers-of-the-cloth. Unmarried mother's allowance (1973) enabled single parents, with some difficulty,  to raise children at home rather than in A Home. “The mother of a friend of mine, now in her eighties, who worked for the local county council before she was married, found herself - more than once – filing the admission papers of girls she’d seen at dances a few weeks before”. I didn't have to be like that, and maybe in isolated rural Newfoundland it wasn't.

In a recent interview [60m YT] about the book Clair Wills was asked whether it was 'history' or 'memoir'. A distinction mainly important for those who are shelving or publicizing it. It is, clearly, both. And she is self-aware enough to acknowledge that, because we all mis-remember difficult things, there might be some fiction in the mix. Talking of fiction: further reading in similar issues in West Wexford with Claire Keegan's Small Things Like These [2021 bloboview]. Further reading on the life and early death of Clair Wills Uncles in I could read the sky [1997] by Timothy O'Grady (words) and Steve Pyke (pics) [bloboview]. Mebbe it's time to re-read  Saints, scholars, and schizophrenics : mental illness in rural Ireland [1979] by Nancy Scheper-Hughes. 

If, like so many Irish families [like mine], yours has mother-and-baby homes looming unspoken in the wings, this book may be too close to the bone. There are several Clair Wills readings, excepts, interviews, reviews on YT and the wider 'net to give you a taster without the full challenging meal.

40 stabs

One of the cognitive dissonances of moving to Ireland as a young adult with a vocabulary formed growing up in England was the existence of linguistic false friends. Prev: slim & dapper; or tête & tapfer & ewe.  In England a ditch was always something dug [concave], although it was obvs cognate with dyke = dijk the convex things which preserve Nederland from washing away with the tide. I'm a fan of The Sheep Game, a YT channel following Cammy "shepherd" Wilson in Ayrshire. A couple of weeks ago, they were fencing a rented field using sheep-wire supported by "stabs". Which from the context was the same as a stake or fence-post.  Which is a too-long intro to today's stakes today.

I am also a big fan of Jim Davis, who owns the sawmill on the Carlow-Laois border in Graiguecullen. He supplied the western reg cedar planks that face our amazing [2016] woodshed.  Those cedar planks keep on giving - to make the [2023] tree-house in the woodlot for example.  I was last in the Davis saw-yard almost exactly three years ago when I bought 40 of his best oak 50mm x 50mm x 1.5m fence posts. Actually, he only had 35 oak stakes ready-pointed, so I took 5 larch ditto. Oak lasts longer in the ground because of they are full of tannins (oak-bark was a source, in tanneries, for making leather last forever). But it can be hard to drive a fence staple [nail, screw] into an oak stake . . . and impossible to get it out.  Steel screws will shear off at the head rather than ease out from between oak fibres. I waggishly called my previous stab saga Ever Last Post . . . because of the longevity, like.

Now, three years on, it's a bit more like Last Ever Posts. Indeed I was joshing Jim Davis to that effect when I back again in his yard: 

• Bob: "I hope this lot will see me out"
• Jim: "Why? how old are you?"
• Bob: "Just turned 71" 
• Jim: "Well, I'm 77 and, as you see, still sawing wood" 

Maybe he's right. You're not dead, till you're dead. Pat the Salt was still cutting his half-acre with a push-mower when he was 85. Although I think he stopped that mullarkey when he turned 86 and Dau.II and I took up the reins in 2012 - partly to get some daytime TV in, after the mowing, though. Whatevs, last week I went to Graiguecullen for to collect another 40 stabs. This time the proportion was reversed: almost all the stakes were larch with a handful of (significantly heavier) oak. Why 40? Because @€2.50 each I pay €100. They come rough-sawn so I spent a 'happy' couple of hours the following day shaving off the rip-splinters to make handling and creosote absorption easier. 

Then it was getting into my most threadbare LIDL work-pants and my sheep-dip tee-shirt (which lives permanently outside in a shed) to apply pseudo-sote - because old-fashioned, carcinogen-heavy, petrochemical by-product creosote can no longer be sold in Ireland. As before, I used a 90mm external ⌀ heavy-duty plastic tube, originally the centre of a roll of silage-wrap,  I found that the internal ⌀ of a tub of E45 paraffin cream is also 90mm and made a waterproof seal to the bottom of the silage-wrap tube. We haven't bought E45 since the last of our kids became continent, but the tubs have been convenient containers for screws, fence-staples etc. Dunking fence posts sure beats painting them, even if as here, I put each post through two immersions of creo-dunk.

Talc calc

 I don't think I killed my mother. But . . .

When I was 10, 11, 12, at the end of March each year we'd ask our mother what she wanted for her birthday. Her unwavering reply was "Oh, I don't know; Talc de Coty or covered coat-hangers". Both of which were A Thing for middle-aged, middle-class women in the 1960s. The first time small me went on a birthday mission on my ownio, I went to Boot's the Chemist determined to buy a tin as [R]. But noted that Boot's Own Generic Talcum Powder was half the price for 3x the quantity. What had my mother been thinking? She'd been allowing herself to be bilked for all those years! My mother, recognising a teaching moment, explained that sometimes less is more. Well I took that on board as an example of life's diverse ways of thinking. And found it difficult to reconcile with the fact that A Lot of  eye-wateringly expensive talcum powder finished up on the bathroom floor.

I've just romped through No More Tears: the dark secrets of Johnson & Johnson (2025) by Gardiner Harris. This is a long-form scatter-gun volume of investigative reporting listing the manifold times when J&J pursued profit in their marketing of cosmetics, drugs and medical devices . . . let the customers fall [dead] where they may. 

Because J&J is the world's biggest MegaPharma Corp, and they shifted A Lot  of product, the [dead] count laid at their door is, according to Harris (un)comfortably in excess of 100,000, or even 1,000,000 people. Their anti-psychotic offering Risperdal was doled out  to kids with ADHD and to troublesome old dears in nursing homes. To sell more units they suborned psychiatrists, GPs and matrons with 'consultancies', dinners, jaunts to Florida and biros . . . so many branded biros. They also buried any reports of adverse reactions. I've written [too much] about Eli Lilly's rival medication Zyprexa aka Olanzapine.

But perhaps the longest running J&J saga concerned their iconic baby powder the existence of which stoked much of the positive feelings Joe and Josie Public had towards J&J. Talc is a form of magnesium silicate Mg₃(Si₂O₅)₂(OH)₂. It is the softest mineral on the Mohs scale and is dug out of the ground from mines in Vermont and Italy and many other places. Asbestos is another form of magnesium silicate Mg₃(Si₂O₅)(OH)₄. It is an almost inevitable contaminant of talc, some mining locations being worse than others. Long after baby powder became sn essential part of This American Life evidence of the association between asbestos exposure cancer became overwhelming. Folk started testing for the stuff in likely and unlikely places and found it everywhere. J&J's made some effort to mitigate asbestos in their premier baby product but couldn't eliminate the last ppms . . . so STOUTLY asserted that baby powder had no significant asbestos and continued to manufacture talc-based baby powder even after rivals reformulated to cornstarch. the J&J C-suite doubled down on their denials. That change in corporate culture soon spread through every division of the conglomerate: nothing to see here . . . this biro is filled with $100 bills . . . that senator needs a corporate campaign donation . . . christmas bonus for everyone who exceeds their sales targets.

It is certainly likely that the industrial talcum powder which I gave my mother in 1965 had more asbestos than the fancy stuff. But a) she probably dumped it b) she lived to 99¾ c) she never had ovarian cancer. So I can probably damp my conscience on matricide-by-talc.

Footnote on the workings of libraries. Several years ago, all the public libraries of Ireland adopted a common catalogue and reservation system. 'tis brilliant: you can, from your sofa, browse away and wait for the call when the book you desire arrives at the nearest convenient branch. I ordered No More Tears a few months ago and watched my reservation number crawl up the list. It's published this year, involves scandal, there's plenty other folks who want to read it but haven't €20 available for a single read or shelf-space for another hardback. 

Image my surprise to when I was, for the first time this year, in Bagenalstown Library before meeting Dau.II off the train . . . and saw 'my' book on the recent accessions shelf opposite the counter. That's a bit unfair, I said to the librarian when I checked it out, but I could check it out and I did. Then again, each County Library system is still an autonomous unit with its own budget and priorities. Our county had decided to buy 1 copy of that book, so it seems right that local patrons should have first dibs on borrowing it. When it goes back tomorrow, it can get in the queue and get shipped to Sligo.

By the seaside

Been reading, me. Weighty tomes - one metaphorically heavy; the other 480pp 0.35kg = Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean (2011) by Philip Mansel [Guardian].

In reviewing Michael Crummey's Sweetland,  I touched up on a rather inclusive and open acceptance of the diversity of sex and its practice in rural 20thC Newfoundland . . . plenty of native nookie and the results of these liaisons are accepted even if marital non-paternity is known or suspected. I rather enjoyed his description of the end of days in a Newfoundland Outport and noted that another of his works was borrowboxable as e-book. The Innocents (2019) develops the story of a microscopic maritime community  in 19thC Newfoundland. Two subadult children are left alone after their newborn baby sister, their mother and then father are all carried off within a few weeks of each other. The kids have learned some aspects of living and making a living [salt cod, furs] in super-adverse conditions: the ice piles up in their remote cove each winter; they plant root vegetables and forage berries in the Fall; they eat fish in abundance.  

The perennial problem in such edge communities is spreading out the calories and vit-C so that they are available 12 months a year instead of 12 weeks. For the orphaned childer, this necessity is met by the twice yearly visit of the same trading schooner: bringing salt, shot, fish-hooks and flour in the Spring and taking cod-planks in the Fall. A couple of times, the sea delivers a Robinson Crusoe bonus to the kids by wrecking a ship out there and washing the debris [hats, coats, rum, cordage] ashore. Survival is the driving theme but nookie and the results of these liaisons also stitches together the teenage lives. The ending is happy: for some definitions of happy.

Diversity, inclusion and sex are also central to Philip Mansel's Levant his history of the Near East  in 19thC & 20th. He focuses on three jewels in the crown of Levantine cosmopolitanism: Smyrna, Alexandria and Beirut. I worked with a fellow in the 1980s who had, as a student, achieved the epitome of sophisticated cool in 1974: (snow powder) skiing on Mount Lebanon in the morning and water-skiing off a Beirut beach in the afternoon. On 13th April 1975 a random act of sectarian violence kicked off 15 years of Lebanese Civil War. 

In 1975, the population in Lebanon was ~2.5 million, over the next 15 years, +1 million fled and 150,000 were murdered by the neighbours. Same thing happened in Smyrna in 1922 [bloboprev]. Same thing (on a much smaller scale) occurred in 1882 Alexandria. In the background, and profiting from the disruption, were citizens and emporia of The Great Powers. Before the sht ht the fan, these three cities were kind of wonderful to inhabit - if you had a bit of money [a little hard currency could go a long way]; if you were a little bit gay [CP Cavafy R]; if you couldn't accept every word of your vicar, imam or patriarch. In Smyrna you could read a french newspaper, in an armenian café, eating greek pastries, while wearing a smart suit from your jewish tailor. Women could also sit in the same café sans hijab; a thing impossible even 10 km into the city's hinterland.

The Beloved's grandfather, some sort of Christian (Maronite?) left his crappy Lebanese valley orange grove with his brothers and migrated via Beirut and Alex to West Africa 100 years ago. His three daughters grew up in multicultural colonial West Africa in the 1940s. By 2000, they all finished up, for reasons, in Ireland. It was a wonder to watch them making houmous: bickering in English, French, Hausa about garlic and salt. Always too much food but so much kindness and welcome as well. Smyrna and Alexandria are now as boring, parochial and monoglot as the small town with the big cathedral where I went to school in the 1960s. Beirut is rebuilding itself from the rubble as the last bastion of The Levant - where cultures clash and get into bed with each other and synergies result.