Collateral damage

Now that I R retire and have cut down on The Blob, I have more time to read books. Like everyone I have my prefs [non-fiction, travel, biogs] but will read anything which comes recommended. And I am usually: I've started so I'll finish about it. And, of course, Borrowbox the Bringer of Earbooks has opened up whole extra vistas for absorbing information while off my sofa.

I grew up in another century where grown-up books tended to be walls of text but my offspring and their pals get through A Lot of graphic novels. They told me I should read Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton; but to be careful - it might be too much stress for me. Beaton grew up in Mabou, Nova Scotia on the east coast of Cape Breton: facing across the sea to PEI. Born in 1980, it seemed sensible to take on some debt to put herself through college. But when she popped out of the education mill with an Arts degree, she found that the parchment could not be parlayed into any sort of a job. And local service jobs didn't pay enough to leave home let alone pay off her student debt. One place which was booming with hardship-money employment was the Oil Sands of Alberta. It's about as remote and hostile as Uranium City, Sask. where my doctoring pal Mac took his family in the 80s. 

The economy of Cape Breton was built on coal and fishing and both these industries died a death, as in Newfoundland, at the end of the 20thC. So only the infrastructure [teachers, nurses, shop assistants, bus drivers] jobs were left. Accordingly young Kate followed neighbours and family to Fort McMurray, AL.

I liked this vignette of being forced to watch The Health & Safety video again. The primary purpose of which is so that Management show a fig-leaf of care for the survival of their Workers.:

I fainted dead away when I had to sit in the same room as the H&S video [I couldn't watch!] as part of my chain-saw handling and maintenance course in 1999. At about the same time, the Company PR department announced that 8,000,000 person-days had passed without a 'serious' accident. This was met with hoooots of derision by the work-force; who felt that the definition of 'serious' had been finagled to produce this positive statistic.

And the Ducks? They are a metaphor for the collateral damage meted out on workers in the pursuit of profit. A large flock of migrating ducks had chosen to rest on their journey on a fine looking lake - which turned out to be a toxic tailings pond. The response was not to stop using tailings ponds (that's an effective method for meeting legal /environmental requirements) but to stop ducks landing on the ponds (with scarecrows)  it's called fixin' the glitch. Same with fragile humans working under adverse conditions with frighteningly powerful machinery . . . make sure everyone sits through The Video. Blame for accidents can then be shifted to victim.

Likewise misogyny and sexual assault. Who did what to whom in bunkhouses? The Company treated that as a private matter  - beyond corporate control. Kate and her sister and their friends had a much more compassionate view of why men behaved like predatory shit heads when away from their families for months at a time and there was nothing to do but drink. They ask how their dear old Dad would turn out if economic necessity forced him to drive a dumper truck in N Alberta. It's a question we could all ask about ourselves when we rush to judgment about the actions of the dispossessed.

We must suppose that The Oil Sands worked out for Kate: she stuck at it for two years, thrifting away a portion of her pay and bonus until she'd cleared her debt to the state for getting an education. And her cartoons about the Hard Life developed into an income stream independent of coal and fishing. But not everyone is sufficiently focused to come out on top - spaffing each paycheck up the wall and owing their soul to the company store. There's got to be a better way which is more generally applicable.

Lost & phoned (part III)

I was on about how good my eyesight was and how not-so-good it is. Also how hard it can be to find 2 sq.m. of beige cow in 2,000,000 sq,m. [200 ha. = 480 acres] of brown dry heath. Of course it's a bit easier because a) there are 15 cows that hang out together b) they move about in a way quite distinctive from dry heather blowing in the wind.

Way way ago at the birth of The Blob, I lost me phone - it fell from my shirt pocket while changing a flat tire on the way to work. It took two days and 5 people to pass that parcel until it came back to me. The blessing (and curse) of living in a connected rural community! Five years ago, my all black smart-phone fell out of the same pocket when I stumbled into a gryke up on our 200 ha. of red hill. I knew it had happened within a couple of minutes but it still took 20 minutes for me and my neighbour M (of the cows) to find t'bugger down among the heather roots. Since then, I attached a bright yellow lanyard to the phone to make it more visible. 

Because things happen in threes [3s] if you have 12 years to play with, I lost my  yellow Nokia  at the end of September. I was up and out before breakfast, like the Good Shepherd, to count [N: 13 + 4 =17] the sheep. Unlike M's cows, our sheep disdain to herd together. The four new Charolais, for example, lambs are toooo refined to mix with our rag-tag flock of mongrels and will often be in a different field. And who thought it was a good idea to buy a black lamb which disappears in the shadows of any hedge, ditch, wall, dyke or copse ? I am requested&required to take my  Nokia   with me when out and about - lest I have an I R Old seizure. I did the outdoor man shepherd tasks and came home for tea and medals toast. Then I thought it would grand entirely to go for bracing yomp up t'hill and patted my pockets for the  Nokia . 

It wasn't there, so I cast about in the kitchen, on my desk, down the woodshed and behind my sofa cushions. The phone was ri♬gi♬g but not within earshot. Only 30 minutes had elapsed, so I had a pretty good idea of where I had been bo-peeping the sheep. Accordingly I re-traced my steps with my eyes sweeping arcs on the ground as I progressed. I paid particular attention to the boundary wall [L] where I had crossed from one field to another for a shortcut. For good measure I counted the sheep once more for luck.

When I got back to the house, the Beloved emerged from her own busy life and offered to call the phone while I checked the polytunnel and the woodshed agane! In my head I was making contingency plans for writing the phone off and changing my whole identity [the shame!] for an 083 number. But it was Sunday, so I could hardly implement any such protocol. Of all the people I know, I am the least attached to my phone, on which I get through about €30 of credit in a year and I did live for 30 years as a grown arsed adult managing without one entirely. But I'm not a luddite and do recognise there is a reason Germans call their cellphone a handy.  But, it was Sunday, I R retire, I canned the idea of going for a recreational yomp uphill and re-re-traced my morning sheepwalk.

When I scanned the boundary wall the first time, it was under the hypothesis that the phone had popped from a pocket when I scrabbled through the bushes and/or jumped down off the wall. The second time, (possibly because I had tested and rejected that hypothesis and approached the task with a clear hheart and open mind) I saw ◎◎ the  Nokia  in plain sight on the wall. Can you? it is two pixels wide [L].

And the scale of that problem? Compared to cows? The four fields where the sheep currently graze are 11 acres in total. That's 4½ hectares or 45,000 sq.m. The phone otoh is ~10cm x ~5cm or 1/200th of a sq.m. ratio 9,000,000 : 1. Finding a phone is only 9x harder than finding a single cow. Answer to Where's Wally Nokky below the fold.

Spot the diff

In WWII, my father was known as cat's eyes because of the acuity of his night vision while hunting enemy targets in his MTB. By his florid viz, he was aka Two Poached Eggs in a Bucket of Blood but that's another story.  I inherited this trait and up until my mid-40s my eyesight was really good - out on the hill, down the microscope, or star-gazing, all three. Things have slumped since then but I'm still withng the 'normal' range for my [venerable] age. My solid neighbour M has taken to running her cows on the mountain because she can and because free food. We were chatting in the yard the other day, and I asked what the head count was. I added that, if I was up the hill, and I saw her galloways, I'd text her a count and location, to save her an extra trip, like. The hill is 200 hectares (or 10x more if you include the unfenced contiguous uplands) and that's a lot of hide-and-seek territory without you have a pair of dogs, a quad-bike and/or a rather fancy drone.

I've re-started my May 2025 mountain-yomp regime again after the Summer: round trip up to The Fork and back; takes less than an hour if I'm not distracted . . . by counting cattle.

I walked straight past 'em on the way up: destination-driven is a terrible thing when there are 40 shades of brown and ditto green to delight and distract. On the way back downhome, otoh, with a different perspective and less baggage, I found M's cattle in the midst of Mackey's Walls which is one of their habitual haunts. So I stood up on a rock and counted them . . . 11, 12, 13. Two missing! Dang. So I stepped off the path into the soggy field, walked down to the County Border and found one more having a vacation in Wexford. hmmmm, I climbed up on the ditch and scanned the near terrain. Mackey's N wall seemed to be topped by a clump of beige but without my glasses I couldn't determine whether it was dead gorse, a dead fox or a peculiar stone. I resolved to bide-a-wee and a few seconds later a second clump of beige lifted up beside the other one: clearly a cow's head; so full count, job done and home for tea and medals. 

When I reported in to M, she replied that she'd worked out how her cattle were escaping off the mountain and wending their way back toward the home-place . . . where they are filling the roadway from ditch to ditch with 'evidence'. It is fun to imagine our many recreational walkers avoiding the obstacles picking their way on tippy-toes. According to M part of the mountain wall had collapsed to the West of Shannon's Knock. Accordingly the next time I was aYompin' I turned left at the mountain gate to see how much work it would be to repair the wall. There are four (4) strands of barbed wire on ancient posts above the wall and some of this has come loose. But the rough, rolly, rocks had slumped and shed to make a gap beneath the wire which would be no-trouble-at-all to a sheep - and probably negotiable by a determined cow. BEFORE:

I had gloves, I had time, and set about counter-acting the forces of gravity and time. When I'd exhausted the supply of easily accessible / liftable rocks, I dusted off my gloves and walked away. AFTER

It's like one of those spot-the-difference puzzles which used to appear in "the funnies" of newspapers when we were children: tiny, barely perceptible changes. I might come back later to pick stones up from the other side of the wall. But the heat is off because I was at The Wrong Hole in the wall. The cattle-passing hole is further down and clearly built to accept a gate:

Standard practice nowadays is to throw a Euro-pallet into these exit-gaps and tie it off with baler twine, so my 'skills' at dry-stone wall repair are probably redundant. 

Triage Sudan

Not having had my fill of Maskalyk, I snuck into the local branch [part-time] of the library and borrowed his first book Six Months in Sudan A Young Doctor in a War-torn Village [2009].  In 2007, he went to Abyei at the border between Sudan and South Sudan as a volunteer with Médecins sans Frontières MSF. Like me, at the birth of The Blob, he elected to blog about the transition between clean sheets and sheet ice in Toronto to the squalor and red dust of Africa. The book excerpts from that blog and riffs on its themes in a more considered, grammatical, less immediate manner.

Every day and every dollar, MSF lives the dilemma of "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day vs teach a man to fish and he feeds himself for life". By setting up a mission in some remote place trampled by all four horsemen, they allow the local government to bail out of their responsibility to/for the local people. 

In one example incident, the family of a sick child from a distant village gather, beg, hock, and spend all their resources to deliver her to the MSF hospital; and arrive ten minutes too late to save her. They now have nothing, less than nothing and ask if that idle land-cruiser could be used to carry their beloved tiny corpse to a pace for burial. MSF, fearing the thin end of an infinite wedge, refuse this charity. Their mission = Médecin, and they have to be strict in their delimitation of what they are prepared to do. But it is Maskalyk, fresh from futile chest compressions on the girl, who must be the mouth and face of "Policy". It is demoralizing and probably makes people wake up screaming years later . . .
"you want to drive every patient where they want to go . . .drip all of the blood into this patient bleeding in front of you even though it means there might be none for the next ten, but today you have it, and today is his lucky day and tomorrow you will worry about tomorrow. but we don't, we are measured, and careful. it is what tomorrow's patients expect of us and the tomorrows stretch towards forever, and today is nearly done". 

Whatever about Sudan, same thing happens in Irish ICUs. IF an old chap like me rocks up to ER = accident&emergency ANDIF he's really unwell ANDIF there's a bed in ICU THEN he'll be admitted. And once he's installed he'll stay until one of 
a) d.d. discharged dead 
b) a bed be found in palliative
c) miraculous recovery and return home, possibly via a regular ward bed in the hospital.

If 20 minutes later, my pal V, aged 35, father of four, gets poured out of an ambulance shattered after a head-on car crash . . . he's out of luck. The best the system will do it expedite him to another ICU bed in a different part of the country. As it happens, there was a bed for V that night, and an orthopedic surgeon got back into scrubs and spent the next eight hours in theatre deciding which broken long-bone to fix next. V died twice in ICU in the following 12 hours but eventually made a good recovery. Good enough to go back to work to support his family.

Holy holy holy

There is a Holy Well Project afoot. I was part of this venture one recent Saturday. It didn't seem to have much lasting effect on my mental state (or immortal soul); but I applaud the idea that such shrines have a place in community. Even if that place is secularized to fit the needs of 21stC Ireland.

One element of the project is to go visit some of the 42 Holy Wells in the county, make a little video & say a little prayer poem. 

• Overview, introduction 
• St Andrew, Dunleckney 
• St Bridget, Myshall 
• Our Lady, Clonagoose, Borris  
• St Fortune / Fortchern, Killoughternan
• St Lazerian, Lorum (not to be confused with St Lazerian Old Leighlin) 
• These are hosted by the County Library YT Service, where more such clips may appear. 

The key reference article is The Holy Wells of County Carlow (1933) by Edward O'Toole.

As we're talking about heritage, it is with some sadness we report the death of Manchán Magan, gaeilgeoir, broadcaster, prolific writer and Master of Woo. I am a bit of a fan. His republican antecedents are dynastically impeccable - Grannie. As a spoiler, I wrote down all (and more) of his Thirty-two Words for Field when that book came out in 2021. He was interviewed on RTE, essentially from a hospital bed, just a couple of weeks ago when it became known that his prostate cancer had metastasized all over. Still and all, three weeks notice is a bit tight for setting the affairs in order. His latest book Ninety-Nine Words for Rain (and One for Sun) is available at Kennys and in the library but there are 2x reservations as there are copies in the system.

Tír gan gaeilgeoirí, tír gan anam

 

 

Les Phares de Chansons et de Contes

A few years ago, I was wrong! I know, hard to believe, but I asserted in a book review that Le Tour de Cordouan featured as Gorodish's hideaway in the [super; cool] film Diva [wch prev]. Everbode kno that it is rather Le Phare de Gatteville [R wikicommons] in Normandie located just North of the D-Day beaches; but 380km = 5-6 hours by car from Paris. 

Three weeks ago, it was flagged on Metafilter that Bressay Lighthouse in Shetland is available for sale by Savilles.: a snip at £350,000 for 1 tower + 3 houses 7 beds 3 baths 3 sitting rooms. It is also about 5-6 hours [by plane and ferry] from Paris. Ah well, it's not going to happen for me in this lifetime. 

In the MeFi comments there was link to another lighthouse which fulfilled someone's dream. The light on Graves Shoal/Ledge is on the seaward edge of Boston Harbor about equidistant from Hull, Boston, Nahant and Winthrop. The shoals, which are about 40,000 tide-washed sq.m. [call it I acre] in extent had been ceded to the Federal Govt in 1903  by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for so long as the property was used as a “light and fog signal station.” It was bought from the Feds in 2013 by Boston resident David Waller for his own quixotic reasons. in 2019, the Town of Hull decided to asesss Graves Ledge for property tax. Mr Waller appealed and after much to-fro the Massachusetts Land Court decided Hull had no locus standi in the matter. This scrap of seaweed and seabird-shit covered 'land' is thus maybe the only unincorporated part of the Commonwealth. Check out the 50 pp PDF judgment if you like pedantic detail, mappes and historical research.

In 1990, we sold up in England and returned to Ireland "to give The Boy [then 14] a sense of cultural identity" and "to buy an old farm with 10 acres and outbuildings". I had secured a retraining fellowship and was pushing the frontiers of science in TCD. The cunning plan was to contact auctioneers down-country with our specs and go visit suitable properties at the weekends. The first place we got serious about was The North Light at Duncannon looking out over Waterford Harbour. That link is to a post by Pete "The Lights" Goulding on my pal Russ's TidesAndTales blog which gives an illustrated history of that piece of paradise. In 1990-1991 we found that, for £35K Irish, we had our pick of old farmhouses with 5-12 acres of scrubby fields with or without sheds. It was a buyers market at the end of then 80s recession and we were fussy.

The Duncannon light came with maybe half an acre [0.2 ha] of terraced 'gardens' at the end of a long bohereen. It was cosy. We rocked up to the auction with a ceiling of £35,000 and a counter cheque for 10% of that, then substantial, amount. For context we had sold our 4 bed 150sq.m. terraced house in Newcastle upon Tyne for £53,000. I got to throw my cap into the bidding twice but it blew through £35K and finally went from more than £100,000 to a couple of Dublin professionals as a second home. More details and pics at the NHBS National Heritage Buildings Service.

It took us five years and two more children to finally off-load our money on Irish property. But that wait bought us 16 acres as well as the farm and out-buildings. Despite reading and re-reading John Seymours' Self-sufficiency and Kains' Five Acres and Independence, we never worked out how we might make a living on and about the farrrm. And that aspect would have been even less likely at Duncannon Light.

Well well well-being

In the midst of Coronarama our county employed a Heritage Officer with a background in archaeology but very wide interests in culture, our place in Nature, our built environment, our beliefs and baggage. One definition of Heritage being: that which is a) valued  /valuable worth preserving and b) come down to us from the past. Go Eoin! He's been out to see our Ringstone several times despite it being right at the very edge of his bailiwick. His latest project builds on the fact that there are[who knew?] ~46 Holy Wells in the county - which is only 900 sq.km. in extent - so everyone is a short walk from the waters of balm.

Holy Wells? My jam! Ten years ago, I was 'supervising' a project at The Institute which was measuring Lithium in the groundwater. The Effective, Dr Lithium as he became, read the literature and came across the work of John Cade using lithium carbonate to control the devastating symptoms of bipolar and other mental disorders. In addition to obtaining and analysing several hundred water samples from domestic bore-holes, the Effective stopped whenever he passed a Holy Well and ran those samples through his analytical engine. Sorry folks, but we have waters of balm but not waters for balmy: the data is noisy, but there is no significant association between elevated Lithium [to soothe the troubled minds of bachelor farmers?!] and the location of Holy Wells: cf, - Saints, scholars, and schizophrenics : mental illness in rural Ireland [1979] by Nancy Scheper-Hughes. 

Eoin would like evidence that Holy Wells do good for the well-being of the plain people of the County. What say renting a bus, filling it half full of old people [who are used to free travel!], and visiting a couple of accessible Holy Wells? And further, giving the crumblies a free lunch and asking them to assess their feelings of bliss before and after visiting each sacred place. Hold me back, dear reader, that is how I spent the last Saturday in September: watching the soggy countryside through the rain-spattered windows of a charabanc.

Setting off through the tail-end of a rainy front which passed over Ireland that Saturday morning, first we travelled South to St Lazerian's Well in Old Leighlin at the base of the Castlecomer plateau. The well is in a little dell on the edge of the village where the road takes a savage turn. It was not the safest place to park while disembarking a couple of dozen frail elders. But, heck, the L3037 is a minor road going from Smallsville to Unimportant so there wasn't a lot of honking traffic. The steps down to the well were also lethal slippy for the unsure-of-foot. But nobody died and no hips were broken. Perhaps because of the mediation of the many prayers uttered beside the Holy Hawthorn which is within the enclosure of the well:

The rain had blown through by the time we'd had a) a historical timeline / explanation on St Lazerian's well b) a reading by Caroline Busher from one of her YA books c) a reading by Clifton Redmond of a poem inspired by St Lazerian, St Moling and Eó Ruis one of the five sacred trees of Olde Ireland. I hope that these creatives were on the payroll, rather than will work for food like the rest of us. Free travel [✓] free lunch [✓] but the payback was several questionnaires on how our souls were feeling Before vs After each stop. Gotta say that my answers about happiness, engagement, anxiety did not alter one jot through the day. But I had a pretty good day without experiencing changed, changed utterly a terrible beauty is born. 

At lunch [in the Tinryland Community Hub - excellent home baking] we Olds fell to discussing recipes, virtues and thriftiness of bread&butter pudding. For the 30-something at our table it was like she'd just stepped out of the Tardis into 1943. I was also able to get out my phone and, between cakes, show my neighbour a picture of our neolithic art work. Gotta say that the lunch was better and more interesting than, although superficially identical to, the lunch we got in Myshall in August.

After lunch, it was back to work . . . into the bus and on to Cranavane [sunny spring pics] just off the N80 near Kildavin.  

Never 'eard of it, me; let alone gone to visit before. It's a very short detour from our route to Altamont Gardens, which we do go to on the reg'lar. I'll be sure to bring people back to Crann a Bhán even though the eponymous white tree was felled a few years ago before it fell on someone. St Finnian's Cranavane is a different vibe to St Lazerian's - more naturalistic [mowed grass, daffodils in season] and with less fetish. Kindly, because they surely didn't have to, a handful of the Cranavane care-and-maintenance team were there to greet us and show us their treasures. This absolutely made a difference: to get the insider details of how it all works and what it takes to make available a contemplative space for all. It's obvious to all, for example, that folks throw coins into the elongated pond in front of the Well. But without hearing it from the horse's mouth, I wouldn't know about the local custom of dunking coffins in that water on the way to the burial ground up the road.

The Carers were at pains to acknowledge that the avenue to the enclosure and the rath itself were the private property of a local farmer, whose father had been at the forefront of the "re-discovery" of St Finnian's a generation ago. I was little bit mortified when my lunching neighbour spoke up at that point with "and we should recognise that man Bob over there, another discoverer of Ireland's heritage, who a) was able to recognise the work of human hand on a tumbled old stone b) makes access across his fields easier than a lot of farmers would". I had to get me phone out and show another handful of people what he was talking about.

As The Guardian of the Ringstone in another part of the county my line is "According to the Land Registry, we own the fields but we don't own the heritage - that's part of the commonwealth or maybe better the common weal". Heck and jiminy, if, as Thoreau maintained, The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation then it behooves us Haves to share a little of our fortune with the Have-nots. 

CwCoCo Heritage is organizing a parallel jaunt 
data-gathering field trip this coming Saturday, 
there may be tickets still ask: 
carlowholywells@gmail.com

Further? There are some Carlow County Library YT explanatory clips assoc with the Holy Well Project. 

Title pun explanatory footnote: The Beloved's late lamented Uncle Henri had a much told funny tale which hinged an important English visitor to N. Nigeria being hilariously mistranslated into Hausa. 
I go further →→→ "kafin na kai ga uban kowa" ie. I visit your male parent
Well well well →→→ "rijiya rijiya rijiya" ie. borehole borehole borehole
By this I about doubled my Hausa vocab.