WOFFAL!

For months and months, I've had a book lurk unread in my Borrowbox reading list. Finally, a week ago, I brought 21st Century Yokel [2017] by Tom "never 'eard of 'im" Cox into play and it was a treat. He was born in the same year as Caitlin Moran [prev] and had a similar early career trajectory: working-class kid from Up North with a good ear and zeitgeist taste gets job as mainstream music journalist in London. They've branched out on different paths since then, but are both still writing and still lol funny. Tom Cox has a good dozen books out and about.

Cox [as R on a Devon cliff] found the pace and prices of late 20thC London a bit much and went upstakes to the country, first in Norfolk and then to Devon. He reflects in one chapter about the richness and variety of landscape to be found in such a small island as "Great" Britain. It ranks 9th after Honshu, ahead of Ellesmere. The coast of Devon and Cornwall is all cliffs, storms and sandy bays [much like Costa na Déise] while East Anglia is is a pancake haunted by fogs, and getting eaten away through erosion [bloboprev].

Cox embraces the fractal nature of landscape, asserting that there is a life-times interest and engagement to be had in the square mile surrounding his home outside Totnes. Indeed any square-mile, if you live nearby and pay attention. It's like Louis Agassiz spending the Summer vacation working his way across his back yard. We don't need to go to Bali or Iguazu for The Amazing: head to the nearest hedgerow be small.

The interface between domestic and wild in Cox's world is his cats. He's written a tuthree whole books about them. One chapter of Yokel tells how one of his cats was savaged by an off-leash dog and needed two operations and days of veterinary care to survive. The [enormous] vet bills were mostly covered through a crowd-funder organised by his fan-base. "wollen sie ewig leben?", it's not for me to judge how folks spend their own money.

21stC Yokel was published by Unbound, a cunning publishing venture which laid off the risk by crowd-funding the books they accepted for publication. It worked extremely well for Cox, who had a) track record b) loyal and extensive fan base. And his next handful of books were published by the same venture. For other authors, not so much. Unbound went into administration in 2025, 14 years after launch, owing royalties to multiple dependent authors. One of the directors John "QI" Mitchinson [whom prev] acquired the assets of the bankruptcy to create Boundless. "Author Tom Cox, whose latest book Everything Will Swallow You was due to come out this Thursday, became suspicious after months of not having received payments he was owed." That's the thing with bankruptcy, incompetent or unlucky entrepreneurs get to cut their losses and walk away to start new ventures. Their suppliers, clients, customers just have to suck up the losses - counting themselves fortunate to get pennies in the pound of what they are owed. 

otoh!! Walter Scott's printing business went tits-up in 1825 owing £130,000. Scott undertook to write himself out of his debts and died doing it. But the creditors' investment was returned and we got Woodstock, The Fair Maid of Perth and Castle Dangerous.

Tom Cox has a Dad, Mick (not Michael) Cox whose antics make an excellent foil for some of the book's humor. His catch-phrase is “WATCH OUT FOR FUCKWITS AND LOONIES!" [WOFFAL] while his aphorisms, and peculiar certainties, are always delivered SHOUTING. Apparently, this ALL CAPS conceit was first used by John "Garp" Irving in A Prayer for Owen Meany [1989], which is the favorite book of Cox Sr. John Irving was making a lot of waves when we was living in New England in the early 1980s but I never got further than The World According to Garp [1978]. Owen Meany sounds like a rec to me and I've reserved a copy at the Library.

And Solution begat Problem

Institutions, governments and countries all have structural inertia. I worked for several years teaching science in The Institute. Science has been the driver of the technical changes impacting Life for at least 100 years. I can do things from my sofa you 11.y.o. me wouldn't believe (video call to CapeTown; pay Joe the washing-machine whizz; buy a book from Kennys; order Tesco to deliver bacon, cabbage and spuds asap). Tech which is commonplace now, was unimaginable 5 or 10 years ago. We teachers at The Institute aspired to launch students who were equipped to thrive in the New New. Devising a new course was was easy: ask what needed teaching, and what resources were needed to achieve that. But, getting the new course approved by management was trudging through a paper mangrove swamp: learning outcomes LOs had to be written up in Officialese; deliverables had to conjured in optimistic babble; technical staff had to be schmoozed into, like, working with new kit rather than drifting between tea-breaks. What gets lost in the obsession with curriculum, documentation and LOs is teaching our technical good-pair-of-hands students to think on their feet rather perform by the book.

Although life is 'more convenient' it is also more complex. The number of things Ordinary Folk can/should do themselves diminishes with each passing year. In the house we bought in England, I installed a new electric-socket on the far side of the living room by hauling a cable after me in the crawl-space under the floor-boards. I wouldn't do that now: I've known at least one case where faulty wiring caused a fire between the studs of a kitchen wall. This January, I learned about RCD [residual current detectors] which are now routinely installed in domestic electric circuits to trip before incommming water causes an electrical short, fire and multiple deaths. One thing I learned in January was that you really don't want to lose power to your fridge or freezer while you're away on, say, holiday or a field-trip.

But modern Sparkses are aware of that issue and modern best practice is to put the fridge-freezer on a separate circuit. So that, for example, a leaky kettle doesn't trip off the entire kitchen circuit and ruin your wholesaler stash of frozen pizza. That's a solution to a potential problem, but the devil is in the details of implementation. Pat-the-Salt's old gaff on Costa na Déise has spent the last year undergoing a major refurb and refit. We were down there for a few days at the beginning of May: cleaning and gardening and chopping wood for a new stove. As we were leaving, Dau.II pointed to the wall switch [as L ☉] beside the fridge and asked "Should that be off?". We agreed that the light should be red and the fridge should be left ON. And it was so, and we left, without getting into blame about who had switched the freezer off.

Four weeks later we were back in the house and I opened the fridge to get a dash of milk for the tea. Because I was alone in the kitchen and right in front on the door, I heard a click and noticed the fridge light went off. Aha! If anyone opens the fridge door fully, it makes contact with the separate-circuit rocker switch on the wall and turns the fridge off. The electrician's solution to a vanishingly rare eventuality was to install a switch which is far more susceptible to getting switched off accidentally. Very slow hand clap.

We are now canvassing solutions. I favour gluing half a beach-combed tennis ball to the fridge door (anywhere will do, except right opposite the switch). But a stack of hilarious fridge magnets, or half a wine cork would serve as well. Someone else suggested a frame round the switch - it just needs to be 2cm proud of the wall. 

Lett Us Create

On dit que The definition of stupidity is doing things over and over hoping for a different result. It's defo like that with me and lettuce. I like a BLT; shop-lettuce is a dollar a pop & can be awash with coliform; we have hectares. 
Q, How difficult could it be to GIY?
A. For me, molare-sappingly, uneconomically difficult.
But here we are in 2026 on lettuce-repeat. I bought seed, they cost money. I planted them in tiny pots on 21 April. Five weeks later, half of them were no-show; half were 5-leaves / 8cm big and cluttering my window-sill. I planted them out [R]; they fell over, and despite the referee counting they were disinclined to get up.

In May, I was given a 5-leaf courgette plant among a trayful of misc tomato and squash. It is doing much better [L]. Not to be the ingrate, but I get cognitive dissonance over yellow courgette, so I'll have to eat them blindfold. Likewise bell-peppers, which should be green or maybe red, but they are often sold 🇧🇯 🇲🇱 🇨🇲 🇧🇴 🇨🇬 as if a) we all had a faarm in Africa and b) were ardent patriots. We have grown bell-peppers in the polytunnel . . . two of them, the size of crab-apples. At least they were green.

There has been a bit of a reno down at Pat the Salt's gaff on Costa na Déise. A pair of antient wrought-iron gates turned out to be supported entirely by rust and brambles and were pulled out of the gap in the road-frontage wall. Only mad people have steel gates down on the Costa where the half-life of a wheelbarrow is about 15 months. It's the salt, innit. The Beloved was inclined to screen the gap with a garden trellis and encourage honey-suckle or sweet-peas to fill in the gaps. These trellises are made from lath-and-staples which might stop a jack-russell, but were scarcely capable of having me lean-on-the-gate while chatting to the neighbours. and they only came in 600mm, 1200mm or 1800mm lengths [we needed 2300mm] and they cost €40.

It's not for nothing that I've spent half my life, combing the beaches of the Costa. Fathoms of rope, scores of buoys, a dozen fish-boxes, an anchor have all been saved from Poseidon Manannán mac Lir and given a new life ashore. But I have also been slowly progressing a project to make a sculpture from wave-tossed and sand-scoured tree-branches which in cycles litter the tide-line.  I figured that when I had 206 pieces of the right size (from phalanges to femurs) I could assemble an articulated wooden pal for buoy-boy. Obvs, I knew that I'd need more like 2060 timber-toes to pick-and-choose from. 

A few days later, when I was alone on site, I gathered by driftwood archive together. I made a frame from 5 pieces of timber off-cut about 1m long and made a proof of principle ProtoTypoGato; 

I left the original where The Beloved couldn't help but see it and sent a photo to the next generation. Everyone hated it! But were kind enough to say little. Which was just as well because, once The Shock of the New had its corners knocked off by a couple of sleeps, I had constructive comments about how the basic idea could be improved. Rip some of the Western Red Cedar planks from the 2016 woodshed project to make the horizontal rails, for example.  I feel a mort happier about this than I do about verdomde GIY lettuce.

Tonn Nua Lá Nua Burj Nua

Two years ago we were part of a  l o o n n g tailback approaching the Luffany roundabout at the N end of the Waterford ring-road. We had seen the future and its works to mangle Lincoln Steffin's 1919 assessment of the neonatal Soviet Union. Because we have become dependent on energy: for the toaster, the uber, the video-calls, the wireless, that X-ray, those youtubes, the zone underfloor heating. Generating electricity is only part of it; creating the infra-structure to distribute, deliver, store. maintain and service the MWs is also required.

cw: I know buggerall 40min worth of advocacy about Offshore Wind 

. . . but should put in the work to know more. Last Tuesday, we invited Dave "Salesforce" Dempsey to talk at the Wexford Science Cafe about Offshore Wind Energy and we got a 40 minute tsunami of data and a hurricane of acronyms [OWE, DMAP, ORESS, GWh, CfD, CBF] and there was time for many questions and informed comments from the floor. One reason why the talk was lucid is that, while Dempsey wrote the book about "Industry Trends in Cloud Computing" [a snip at €130], he's recently had to teach himself the language, politics and numbers of a National Energy Plan. Fewer Curse of Knowledge assumptions! [wch bloboprev]

I think Politics is key here. Offshore was last mentioned at WxScCa when we had the Management of SETU, the ambitious SunnySouthEast multi-campus University, saying they were going to launch MW-engineering and energy-tourism courses at their Wexford Campus. But they don't have a [proper, like, with labs] Wexford Campus! That project is still bogged down in unresolved CPOs, site-changes, finance over-runs, NIMBY, judicial reviews ten years after it was approved in principle. It's like the National Children's NOTpital in small. I don't know if we [the people, politicians, players] are capable of delivering Big. Thinking Big we can do - just listen to blowhards and hurlers-on-the-ditch two pints down in any Irish pub. This is where EirGrid are at:

Tonn Nua [en: New Wave; fr:  François Truffaut nouvelle vague] is currently the most favoured and most advanced Designated Maritime Area Plan (DMAP) to launch the energy future of Ireland. If Tonn Nua works, then they intend to roll out ~50% larger capacity wind-farms further out to sea called Li Ban, Manannan and Danu. Tonn Nua is planned to have 60 x 15MW, bottom-fixed turbines spread over 300 km² more or less shadowing the Costa na Déise from Helvick Head to Hook Head. 60 x 15 = 900MW capacity - enough to power 800,000 homes. I use "shadowing" deliberately, because there will be complaints about The View from people who have bought sea-view retirement homes [with added toasters etc.] all along the coast. Few of them will be complaining on behalf of the crabs and conger which will have their homes turned over in the maelstrom of civil engineering.

Dave Dempsey  is not in the pocket of The Man or FAANG; he's made enough money to be independent. Like successful entrepreneurs, he looks at the horizon, thinks big and is prepared to take risks. Independent, sure; but also a Booster for Offshore Wind Energy. He expresses a resistance is useless vibe about Future Ireland. “I'd say it's better for your children to look at that than look at the Burj Khalifa or the Sydney Opera House when they wake up in the morning". Adding that there are 3,500 jobs to be had at peak rollout.

Any 15MW wind-turbine is massive and this is one reason for off-shore windfarms. The changes at Luffany roundabout were to accommodate the first bottle-neck in the delivery of 80m turbine blades from Belview Port to King's County. The blades for 15MW are 120m long. Road improvements to get those big boys where the wind requires them would consume the entire budget of Transport for Ireland. Offshore has no hedges. Nevertheless, 15MW turbines, their towers and blades, need some (flat and extensive) on shore ground  for assembly and maintenance. And they need it next week. Rosslare Europort plans to tender to provide this service but they are probably too-little too-late too-entitled. Pembroke Dock / Milford Haven across the channel in Wales, with it's deep-water harbour and existing oil refinery is well ahead in that race. In addition the brownfield site at the old [Tata] steel and heavy industry complex at Port Talbot is 100km East but within the logistic catchment and will get mighty devt grants from the UK government. See: it's not just for Tonn Nua: the winner will get the contracts for servicing all the future Irish, Welsh and Cornish Offshore projects.

The other issue is that the Irish Grid does not have the capacity to land anything like 900MW at Great Island at the head of Waterford Harbour. The Greenlink Interconnector from Wales, which comes ashore at Baginbun Co WX and tootles across county to Gt Island, has been live for a year now. But apparently, when Tonn Nua switches on, that route will all have to be dug up again to install fatter cables from there to Great Island. Some questions:

• Who is in charge of future planning at EirGrid?
• Who is cheese-paring at the cabinet table at Govt Centraal?
• Who among them has a Vision for Ireland longer than the next election ?

But there is "with one leap we were free" solution to the imbalance between supply [too much and uneven] and distribution [inadequate] & demand [insatiable]. Tonn Nua is owned by Helvick Head Offshore Wind DAC: a joint venture between ESB and Ørsted A/S, their Danish oppos. Helvick is already talking to 'private' customers to suck up the surplus when the wind blows faster than 10m/s. And at 03:00 hrs when all the toasters and TVs are asleep. Up above, by using "800,000 homes" I've fallen for the standard narrative where demand is imagined as from reg'lar folk just like me: coming home to their 2.4 children at 6pm and ALL switching on the kettle for a nice cup of tea after a hard day staring at a screen. But it's not like that any more: a single data-centre might need 100MW [the same as the entire city of Galway or Waterford] 24/7 and there are A Lot of data centres. They already the consume 3/10ths of Ireland's electricity and who knows how much water for cooling their chips and discs. Dempsey invites us to imagine 'green' industrial parks discretely tucked in behind the dunes: taking in energy from Tonn Nua, Tonn Dó, Tonn Trí . . . and spewing out Gbytes for MegaCorp.

IMO we should all be more intentional and more careful in our energy usage: a shirt could go two days between washes; two baths a week and showers the other days; walk to school; cycle to work; put on a sweater before putting on the central heating. You get my thrift. But I can see Offshore Wind as [part of] the solution to our energy needs. And I'll vote for the party which has a coherent sustainable energy policy in their manifesto: that budgets for safe clean decommissioning when the blades reach the end of their useful life. 

But I will be a very reluctant party to any proposal planning to fill the horizon with turbines which are enslaved to The FAANG Empire.

maggie and milly and molly and may

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tidy Towns
Beach Box
Swap & Share
Lost & Found 

More hay, less speed

Thirty year ago, it were, when we were living in Dublin. Bright and early one Saturday morning, The Boy getting hammered on Thunderbird in a dip in the dunes at Portmarnock being at a pal's gaff overnight, we took a figairey to visit Souad & Pat the Salt on Costa na Déise. There was no M50 and no M9 back then, although the Naas Bypass 30km from Dublin opened in 1983. We took the scenic route, albeit called the N9:  Naas - Kilcullen - Moone - Castledermot - Carlow - Paulstown - Gowran - Dungarvan- Thomastown - Ballyhale - Mullinavat - Waterford - The Sweep - Kill - Tea! With clear roads and a following wind it usually took 3 hours: . Then, sometime after Kilcullen, the car started to peck and stutter. We pulled into Carlow, were given a diagnosis of air-in-the-fuel-line, and advised that we'd be fine if we kept to 80km/h rather than bouncing up and down like pop-corn poppin'. On Sunday evening, revived by the sea breeze and good food, we sedately returned to Dublin. It was busy enough with traffic, as loadsa 1st or 2nd generation Dubliners returned from helping with the {shearing | haying | muck-spreading} at their several home places across the country. Being compelled by mechanical necessity to keep the speed below 50mph = 80km/h, the return journey took us all of 3hours and 10 minutes. And Arrive Alive: which is always a win.

The Man aka The Nanny State has since last Friday 7th Feb 2025 curtailed Our Rights to drive like the clappers down any and every road in the country by setting a default 60km/h on Local roads - down from 80km/h. That is the meaning of the bend sinister with 5 lines sable on a ground argent [as L]. Huge Ballyhoo in Ballyhale! and across the country. The importance and, to an imperfect degree, the quality of Irish roads is designated by the initial letter: M motorway - N national - R regional - L local. Every highway and byway in the country is so designated - on a server in the National Roads Authority.

Less so in the hinterlands. Where a lesser road connects with a greater, the signage is present as at the start of the L4015 in Waterford. But at any subsequent forks in the road all bets are off. With SatNav and GPS and EirCodes, physically labelled road intersections on roads less travelled is a bit yesterday. Old timers still navigate from farm-gate to the creamery or into town for new wellies without any sort of road sign. The intention is to install the new bend sinister signs at the start of all L roads, so drivers know where they are . . . even if they have no idea where they are, like

Whatevs, so long as R roads still default to 80km/h, I don't think it will much affect journey times. If they get cranked down to 60, then we'll have to allow an extra 5 minutes to get to the railway station. That well-used [hey, free travel!!] journey offers two routes
1) directly over the hill [20.6km 24 min] or
2) 500m to the R702 and then into town [23km 26 min]
As route 1) is almost entirely L roads, it is likely to now take longer to accomplish at a mandatory 60km/h. But t.b.h. we gave up on that route after two actual tips and several NDEs: meeting boy racers coming round blind corners on two wheels or a handful of sheep burst out of a gap in the hedge. Option 2) 'main' road is winding, with potholes in the margins, but at least there is a line down the centre and enough room for a car and a 30-tonne dump truck to pass without clipping each other. 

That road with which we began our journey today used to be The Waterford Road and then The N9. Since they opened the M9 motorway, the N9 has been down-graded to the R448. Proper order too, it was a terrible road if you were in a hurry: with l o o n n g stretches where we were compelled to bumble along behind a mud-slinging tractor because the road was all twists and turns and blind gateways.

Footnote on etymology. I was always confused by more haste, less speed because in modern usage haste and speed are close synonyms.  But in Old English spēd meant success or luck, a meaning which still exists in Godspeed for bon voyage. Which makes the translation: take it handy or you may regret it.

Grace first, the rest nowhere

Big day for Democracy.

It's election day in Ireland. We're going to the polls for a) local candidates on County Councils b) supranational Members of the European Parliament. In neither of these constituencies are there bye-elections if the incumbent dies, retires, resigns or self-combusts: that democratic privilege is reserved for TDs departing the Dáil. For CoCo and MEP, when you vote for a candidate, you are also voting for their replacement. The full list of nominated replacements. Christopher Doyle's replacements, for example, are both Doyles and live in his Wexford home; so you're voting for a dynasty.

Obvs, my #1 is going to Grace O'Sullivan with whom I have traded poetry down Costa na Déise way.

Full list. UL has done some candidate polling to find out where they stand on issue that matter. Not everyone has responded to the request for info: some are too busy assaulting refugees, or denying women bodily autonomy. To help decisions down the lower end of the list, I have struck out populists, haters, nut-jobs, fascists, people-with-eyes-too-close-together . . .
 Billy Kelleher (Fianna Fáil)
 Grace O’Sullivan (Green Party)
 Seán Kelly (Fine Gael)
 Mick Wallace (Independents 4 Change)
 Kathleen Funchion (Sinn Féin)
 Paul Gavan (Sinn Féin)
 Niamh Hourigan (Labour)
 Susan Doyle (Social Democrats)
 Patrick Murphy (Aontú)
 John Mullins (Fine Gael)
 Cynthia Ní Mhurchú (Fianna Fáil)
 Cian Prendiville (People Before Profit-Solidarity)
 Eddie Punch (Independent) [fancies a bit of eutrophication]
 Derek Blighe (Ireland First)
 Ross Lahive (The Irish People)
 Una McGurk (Independent)
 Graham De Barra (Independent)
 Michael Leahy (Irish Freedom Party)
 Michael McNamara (Independent)
 Lorna Bogue (An Rabharta Glas)
 Christopher Doyle (Independent)
 Mary Fitzgibbon (Independent)
 Ciaran O'Riordan (Independent)

If I've failed to exclude known monsters, please help by flagging them in a comment. More down-in-the-grass local politics nerdling from RTE.

Stranger meeting

Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless.
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,—
By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell. 

We're last farmlet in the County and the last [only] still inhabited home up the scruffy, bucketty, grass-centred, bohereen on which we live. Car traffic up the lane is either determined . . . or lost. I was on the stoop surveying the yard hmmm, far too wet to mow, I'll sit down again, when I heard a very quiet car. The driver was reversing s l o o w l y down again having met the gate above us beside the ruined cottage. He turned out to be both lost and determined.

Young chap sprang out of the car with a glittering eye [but no grey beard] and announced that he was a) 24 b) from Ballinabranagh [=almost Kilkenny] c) Fianna Fáil d) running for the CoCo elections in June. It was mid afternoon at the tail end of lambing, so I daresay he'd knocked on the doors of a lot of empty houses, and he was determined to talk. I R retire, it wasn't actively raining, so I was prepared to accommodate his needs. Three planks of Young Dan's platform are a) mental health b) rural buses c) housing for young ppl like him and Dau.I. Here he is [L], with his future empire as backdrop.

The links say that The Blob has had rather a lot to say about all three of these topics and I was happy to give him both barrels of my exec summ. I suggested that, if we had a society rather than an economy, rural transport could be solved by the local community. The public health nurse and the postie could do something for the mental health fallout of loneliness and isolation, and someone could take Old Colm in for his doctor's appointment. The trouble with the ubiquity of personal cars is that it sets the baseline of being able to get anywhere at a moment's notice. Even if few folks over the age of 25 actually want to spring in their car to get more butter, let alone go for spin. 

It's not for nothing that my mother held onto her own wheels long into her pension and called her car SS Independence. She also did a good bit of heavy community lifting taking the old or infirm into town. In her younger, "married woman" kids-at-school, days she'd been a cog in the Meals-on-Wheels machine in Plymouth, Hazelmere and Harlow. Old Sonny, across our valley, benefitted from a volunteer driver service getting him in for dialysis. I guess I'm saying that, with planning and fore-thought, having a bus service once or twice a week might make carless rural living sustainable and kinder to the community carbon footprint. We're still mullocking along with one car now that I have no work to go to even it means one or other of us being marooned for a few days up the hill or in town on Costa na Déise.

Mental health is another matter entirely. It's easier for an old chap like me to get a triple by-pass than for a young fella to get adequate help for his despair and suicidal ideation. But a hanging in the garage is just as fatal as a myocardial infarction. Good luck with that, young Dan. As for housing, that doesn't seem to be solvable without a revolution. My neighbour, TD, and very briefly cabinet minister, Mary White was a County Councillor for a number of years. Her experience was that you had to focus on One Achievable Goal. As a Green she pushed to keep recreational vehicles off the county uplands . . . with limited success before retiring from active politics. A word from the wise to young Dan: (mental health OR housing OR rural buses) NOT (mental health AND housing AND rural buses).

Go on you must be joking

At the mill with boons

• Woodies
  
• 2 years ago Beau Miles planted 1400 whips; check-in time!
  
• milling and turning storm fallen timber 
• Judgement of Paris by Rubens is being restored
• Hügelkultur: log filler for raised beds.
  
• Plywood made in Pakistan 
• History and Folklore
• Andrew A1 Doherty talks Costa na Déise
• Templeludigan fairy whiskey
  
• Phylogeny of painting: spot the diff in Hokusai [whom prev] 
• See [R] for one of the other 36 Views of Mt Fuji
• Pot roast - Chesterton's Fence - Skeuomorphy - Primo's Onion - Five Monkeys . . . MeFi thread about historical inertia
  
• ♬ ♪ ♫ ♩
• Idris Sardi is 10 years dead today
• Во поле берёза стояла
  
• Grace Cummings - Sweet Matilda
• Cantadores de Alenejo
• Grândola Vila Morena - Amália Rodrigues. Thursday 25th April was the 50th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution in Portugal. Playing this song on the wireless just after midnight was the signal that the Coup was ON. More? 45m on The Rest is History
• Biodiverse Belfast Sink in the English Peak District [location location] 
  

Scenic Routes

Did I mention being Grand Marshal of the Scullogue Gap last weekend? I did. The night before, I threw together a steward's pack incuding a  HiViz  jacket. Imagine my mortification when I arrived en poste to find I had snagged a  HiViz  bolero [R] from the coat-rack. I'd been dancing at the same cross-roads 5 years previous when I had to make my own signs, this time signage was a lot more professional because of sponsorship by Aptus the broadband people. We all have a tendency to big up our contributions to any common venture but my station was key because it was where the shorter route-options [50km and 80km] turned for home while the 100km and 140km hard-chaws headed for the full circuit of Mt Leinster.

It was a brilliant sunny day with just enough chill on the breeze to prevent overheating - sunscreen defo advisable. I got to see a poor bloody buzzard Buteo buteo being hunted off the premises by a pair of crows Corvus spp. They say that 360 people had registered for the Blackstairs Cycling Challenge and it seems that €17,100 has been raised for the cause. You'd think that everyone would be happy, but I heard two separate tales of angry car-drivers taking the trouble to roll down their windows and curse at the cyclists for getting in my !&*%ing way, can't you proles see I have an Audi? which really helps people who might be a bit wobbly in the saddle. I was contracted to Be There from 10:30 to 12:30 for the anxious [nobody needed my spanners, tire-pump or blister plasters] because the signs were many, large and self-explanatory. But a really enthusiastic volunteer swung by on the dot of 12:30 and scooped all the signs into the back of his van. I was asked to hang on for a bit because there were known stragglers who by definition were less fit and more anxious. It would be a propaganda fail if such people were to miss 'my' crucial turn for home and get lost in the wilds of Wexford.

It was thus 13:30 before I Escape!ed and headed off for Costa na Déise. I was in a bit of a rush because family were >!surprise!< over from England. But less than 5km into my journey South, I got caught behind three [3] elderly but spruced up tractors. I hung loose reckoning they could be over-taken at the Ballinlug Long Straight. But when we finally reached this zoooomportunity, the long straight was old red tractors as far as the eye could see. I did a U-eee and nosed along the Scenic Route through Askinvillar Rathduff Ballygibbon Ballindoney Balligalvert Templeludigan and back to the known path at Ballywilliam. I've never been to or through Templeludigan (St Joachim's church! 1909 National School! ball-alley!) before, so [✓] to that.

Had a wonderful time with the family in Trá Mhór, including some care-and-attention for Pat the Salt as he lurches towards his 99th birthday. We came away at 15:50 on the Monday - I R Retire, so can go home when it suits. I had been apprised by my pal Russ that Belview Port is a designated landing point for 80m wind-turbine blades. In February, he suggested I look out for changes to roundabouts in the area to allow these monsters to traverse a national road network originally designed for the ass-and-cart. I had also noted the flashing signs  Luffany works 22/04 to 26/04 expect delays . How and ever, we found ourselves joining a 3km tail-back on the N25 Waterford Ring-Road. Of all the ways to approach Luffany at the N end of said Ring-Road, this is the worst because there is an unsurmountable median strip and no turn offs to winkly side-roads. We endured the stop-go car park in a fug of diesel for an hour but at least The Grape didn't boil over and it wasn't hosing rain. We're heading South again today . . . via Thomastown, Co Kilkenny, another Scenic Route. But not so Scenic as the back-road from New Ross to Waterford by Glenmore and Slieverue [R with more tractors].

All wet bro

Water water everywhere

• Czechia could be the canal nexus for Europe
• Canal Seine Nord connector West
• Fancy new Coast Guard building Costa na Déise
• Stats on WWII Liberty Ships
• Shackleton's Endurance found [deep]
• Beachcombing glass floats Alaska
• Trigger an avalanche
• A river runs through it 25 ha. of Canada
  
• Go with the Flow River Barrow
• Carrick cots River Suir
• Coracle making River Boyne style
  

Stuff your inner bear

New Ross is half way between Chateau Bob and Costa na Déise and we go through town in the regular. Less so since they completed the Fitzgerald Bridge on the N25 New Ross ByPass. I've billed Ross as being Ireland's most depressing town but own that they are making efforts to brighten the place up. otoh Claire Keegan's book Small Things Like These hasn't giving the town a tourist boost. I still stop often in Ross because there are a couple of Polskie Sklepy, the recycling centre and a choice of supermarkets. Last week I left the car in Lidl's carpark and walked [I know, hard to credit] to the excellent  Polski Sklep  for yeast and rye-flour.

On the way there, I noticed a shop front offering the opportunity to Build Your Bear. On the way back I stopped [I know, hard to credit] my rush and pushed open the door. There were only two people in the place mid-morning mid-week so asked them what gives? I'd never noticed the place coursing past at 50km/h and assumed it was new. And further assumed it was a sort of local government supported venture somewhat adjacent to a Men's Shed. Although it was hard to reconcile that specific detail [cue Billy Bragg] with, like, Teddy Bears. Brrrp! wrong on both counts. 

Craft Central is a commercial venture, it's been in Ross for more than a decade and it's more in the line of The Big Blue Barn - a primary colour softplay [ball-pit, slides, climbing frames] shed with a rudimentary café for Mums. Craft Central is a quieter option for, like, birthday parties. Although one available package is slime play and they also to host e.g. hen parties getting together for a bit of relaxed plate-painting or crochet.

The usual gig is to book the place (for 60-90 minutes) and rock up with up your pals. There looks to be about 20 seats. Once you've hung your coats and settled down, you can work your creative magic on mugs, plates, canvas bags, masks, T-shirts . . . clocks! All the matériel is supplied and hands can be held if your creative magic was b'aten out of you in National School. When you've finished, you get to take your piece home. Not sure on what the regime is for clean up. Me, I wouldn't allow the entitlement of paying for service exempt punters from leaving the place as they found it.

In my family growing up my, often absent, naval father was The Artist. On at least one day of the family hols, he'd absent himself again and take his satchel of water-colours to a lonely headland and paint how the sky met the sea. They were nice enough and there were eventually a lot of them. About halfway through their 50 year marriage, my mother was persuaded by a pal to take part in a 3-week Oil Painting class at the local Women's Institute. The first week, with a palette-knife, her thumb and most of a tube of gamboge she produced a respectable still life with orange. The next week, she brought from home and painted a life-sized crimson steel soda-siphon. It looked like the real thing. It was clear that, notwithstanding the labels she'd shouldered at school, she had a good eye and a sense of proportion. Sadly after the next and last session she got back in her box and left "Art" to the Old Man. Except for patch-work cushion-covers: at about the same time she started getting fat-quarters from Laura Ashley and sewing them together.

I was very much impressed by Dawn Morley and her team at Craft Central. That sort of service /business is good for community, good for creativity, good for self-esteem. The website on their brochure https://craftcentral.ie/ must have lapsed because is now all about the beer. You can find them on FaceBook, but I will not link the Zuckerverse here. Christmas?: C.C. stocks a range of hand-crafted stuff for purchase.

Butter called Sal

Years ago, I was a saddo single person living round the corner from a supermarket. After work (I had a job and the money that brought so I could shop), I'd wander up and down the aisles trying to think of something to cook for my saddo single dinner. I made disastrously foolish decisions on multi-pack Kit-Kats and cheap stir-fry. At the tail end of Orthodox Easter, we were down on Costa na Déise for a few days of elder-care . . . round the corner from a supermarket.

After dinner, a cry went up "More dessert is needed" - because who wants an apple? Dau.II and I took one for the team and went round the corner in search of something adjacent to  lemon posset  [whc prev]. The closest strike was Supervalu Sicilian lemon yoghurt but we also came away with 94g of "Munchies Gold Caramel Flavour Sharing Bag". As y' do, when investigating a new-to-me product, the ToC was closely scrutinized:

Sugar, Vegetable Fats (Palm, Mango Kernel, Sal, Shea, Rapeseed, Sunflower), Glucose Syrup, Invert Sugar Syrup, Sweetened Condensed Skimmed Milk (Milk, Sugar), Whey Powder product (Milk), Skimmed Milk Powder, Wheat Flour (contains Calcium, Iron, Thiamin and Niacin), Butterfat (Milk), Cocoa Butter, Dried Whole Milk, Emulsifier (Lecithins), Cocoa Mass, Whey Powder (Milk), Raising Agents (Sodium Bicarbonate, Ammonium Bicarbonate), Barley Malt Extract, Salt, Lactose (Milk), Caramelised Sugar, Natural Flavouring, Maltodextrin, Safflower Concentrate 

It's candy, so you'd expect a lorra sugar but we were intrigued by the gallimaufry of exotic vegetable fats [Palm, Mango Kernel, Sal, Shea, Rapeseed, Sunflower]. Sal?? never 'eard of it! But Sal [ripe seeds L] turns out to quite a big thing in India: a tree known as Shorea robusta; a member of the Dipterocarp [aka two winged seeds] family. Sal trees are sacred and under the protection of Vishnu. The mother of Gautama Buddha is said to have clutched a Sal branch while giving birth to Hissonour. 

Apart from the religious stuff, the seeds are the size of a seedless grape and 14% fat which is extracted to produce a buttery spread, which is solid at room temperature. Those who live in or near to Sal forests use the sal-ghee for cooking but entrepreneurs also convert the goop in soap, varnish, paint and lubricants. I suspect that the food engineers at Nestlé don't care much what sort of vegetable fat goes into the Munchie vats. The fat-ingredient is likely subject to the vagaries of global markets and the marketeers kick the ToC list to safety by including any-and-all species which might be in our 94g.

A final observation: pretty much the only customers in the shop at 8pm on a Monday evening were single silverbacks with more or less empty baskets. I imagine [I may be over-empathizing] that, like saddo me 20+ years ago, these old chaps are wandering around killing time in the aisles because 

• TV is utter bollix; 
• the Men's Shed is on Wednesday;
• Supervalu is warm and dry
  

A fleeting signal

 The Boy is back home in Ireland with his family for Easter. We had planned to run an Easter Egg hunt in our 1 acre woodland. Last Summer we had the arborist in for two days work putting manners on the 13-15 year old trees with some judicious thinning. It's lovely down there, with the canopy gone, some colourful spring flowers are getting their time in the sun before nettles Urtica dioica and brambles Rubus fruticosus choke them out. Some natural pathways are meandering round the acre: so that those so inclined can do walking meditation: after the arborist I went round pruning off the eye-pokers. 

But the optimistic elder care roster collapsed under coronarama and other interventions - we are none of us getting any younger. Accordingly we were down on Costa na Déise. We made a couple of visits to the quietly delightful Japanese Garden in Tramore, where Irish / Greek / American / Japanese story-teller Lafcadio Hearn spent some time as a youth. Gorra season ticket now, so we'll be back!

Easter Monday, after lunch, between showers, The Boy and The Bob took his daughters down to the strand at Kilfarrasy. The wind was really too bitter brisk to go swimming so we ambled about doing beachy things: digging holes, throwing stones and writing messages to the naiads. Whereas I have a fine cursive hand for sand-writing, I cannot frame a picture to save my life:

What I meant to say was

THE SAND IS A
PALIMPSEST

. . . which is surely true between the tides. Less so in the Sahara where jeep-tracks from WWII are still etched. I had more to say:

I think, with Linda McCartney widely available, even vegetarians can agree with that sentiment. The Gdaus are in beach-combing school and found this large rusty buoy on Inisheer on a visit the week before Easter.  

The parents stoutly maintained that there was no room in the car; so that buoy was sadly left behind.

Easing the spring

2nd of February AM: I went down the yard to fetch some sticks for the fire and thought that the grass in the yard looked and felt remarkably dry. Accordingly <carpe diem>, when I had filled the log- and kindling baskets against tea-time and a boiling kettle, I dragged the wee lawn-mower out of its shed and gave the grass a short-back-and-sides. It still being winter, and Ireland, you cannot count on grass-dry days at all at all, let alone when the grass is just the right length.We do what we can, when we have time. It is a blessing to be retired and/or working from home because then the moment ~45 minutes~ can be seized. The moment I seized to mow, someone else, 40 km distant, was teaching Human Physiology to 1st Year Pharm Techs instead of me. I guess I'm over Covid, if I can yomp about pushing a mower over the bumpy ground and not collapse wheezing. Sure pissed off Dau.II, though, because mowing is her job when she's here and she's copped a not'Rona flu-thing during a visit to Dublin [Ye Citie of Pox] and was hors de combat [she's all over la Francophonie so French phrases are allowed}.

One week earlier on a similar, sunny day, I'd touched up my chain-saw with the intention of cutting-to-length the two piles of logs I'd stacked under cover last June and July picture:

Cutting blocks with a chain-saw is hard work; I R old; so I said I'd only work through a tankful of gas; then split the bigger rounds and stack the whole lot in a wood-shed convenient to the house. And it was so. The Western pile is now reduced by maybe 2/3rds:

Not all of that reduction was the work of a noisy, dangerous and polluting machine. I've resolved that, anything smaller than my wrist will be cut with my trusty bushman bow-saw. This adds considerably to my mouse-driven upper-body asymmetry but is much better for the planet and my ears. They say that hand-processed wood warms you twice: once in the chopping and then in the hearth.

A week after I mow mow mowed the grass at the home place we were down on Costa na Déise on other business and found one hour of dryness to cut the grass down there, too. We'd missed a last cut in October 2022 for reasons, so things were looking 'tufty'. Now they are looking, still ragged-arsed, but less like Shere Khan might be hiding in  there; which is a great relief to the Things To Do TTD list which rattles about in my 'mind'.

WTF with Easing the Spring? Naming of Parts.

Here come the grockles

Lonely Planet has included The Copper Coast in their 2022 Offbeat bucket list. Trá na mBó is no longer The Secret Beach as it is specifically named as hidden honeypot for randommers in Peoria and Goteborg to plan their niche weddings. No sensible person is going to do this. Sensible folks must realize the irony of publishing lists of hidden places and consult the guide as places to avoid if they want to avoid the dowd crowd.  I guess there's a christmas / birthday market "let's send this book to Weird Uncle Jenks, so he won't be tempted to come visit us next Summer".

It happens that I have an excellent photograph of Costa na Déise at the very height of its charms, maybe Fiendface it at old Jenks?

And of course Dear Reader, I don't mean you. You are kind, discerning, keep your dog on a leash and take your litter home . . . and there's only a dozen of you anyway; half of whom are [otherwise engaged] in Ukraine.

* Grockle n. sarcastic name for a tourist in Devon and Cornwall

Splút

We shuttle between our mountain home and the Costa na Déise a lot and the journey is almost always via New Ross [R] - arguably the most depressing town in Ireland. All through the 20thC, small town Ireland was, it seems, too poor to afford house-paint. But the grim grey grey facade of cement-rendered public buildings (often convents and banks) was most obvious when you could see the whole panorama from the other side of a river. Ross has a chance now that the Rose FitzKennedy bridge has started diverting belching Rosslare-bound HGV traffic from the quayside. In 2010, for example, the Royal Hotel went up in smoke just after plans were announced to re-furbish it. For more than a decade the steep awkward town-centre site was vacant except for a set of weeping steps running beside the weed-abundant lot. Just this year, however, the former hotel site has been re-purposed as a steep awkward public park - absolutely not wheel-chair accessible; but for the moment full of promise.

At the Northern extremity of town, where the ring-road meets the road to Enniscorthy and Dublin, Mannion's farm-shop and garden centre has opened right opposite Mannion's Bar (food and drink). For us, this emporium was both too close and too far from home, and we were always destination-bound, so we never stopped to buy honey, strawberries or carrots . . . until Saturday 25th June. For a couple weeks, I'd noticed a discrete ad for Scúp ice-cream on the fence but that Saturday arvo, having Dau.II in the car, I swung into the car-park to chekkitout. 

Mannion's stock a variety of exotic food-stuffs that you'd never find in a regular Irish grocery: noodles, tamari, Italian petit-fours and, of course, a Baskin-Robbins-like bank of scúpable ice-cream from . . . Scúp which creates Luxurious Gelato in an industrial shed on the edge of Wexford town. Like Sustainable Sausage, so long as the product is edible, you can generate more sales with a professional website than by making something distinctively different/interesting in a blind taste-off. They paid for 1 minute of  marketing video too.You can get a taste of Scúp's aspirations by knowing about their Individual Masterclass €1,950. You can expect Scúp, fadas and all, to follow Nobó [prev] into the international market. After some dithering, I plonked €3 down for one scúp of mango-and-passionfruit in an edible cone - so I didn't have it in a single use waxed paper tub. Dau.II was off her feed after a curry binge the previous night, so sensibly refused to join me. 

I was disappointed at myself, the scúp-technician and the structural integrity of the product when about 40c-worth of my scúp detached itself from the cone and went splút on my shoe as soon as I stepped out into the dusty car-park

Mannion's don't have all their eggs in one basket. They have just started selling "Handcrafted Gourmet" Popsicles - the arty exotic line of colourful sorbets on a stick which was launched in Cork in the middle of the pandemic winter. I knew all the principals in Popsicle before they were famous and have given them a puff before. I'm delighted that their reach has penetrated 150km along the N25 towards Rosslare and the big international mondo di gelato 

The cloths of Heaven

An Fear aka The Man aka St Micheál of Martin, our Leader, announced that, from 10th May, intercontinental ballistic inter-county travel would be allowed for all. Clan Blob were quite slow on the take-up of these freedoms but we expect Dau.II to come across from the People's Republic later today. Though not without faults [who is?], nobody chid Dau.II for not being willing. She can change a plug, mow a lawn, saw a straight line through lumber and is happy with power-tools. 

It didn't seem fair to ask Corkies to break their journey on Costa na Déise to mow 10 or 12 ares of grass simply because they were passing. And there is self-interest in this: I'd rather not wait an extra couple of hours before the English Market hamper is opened and we can start tucking into cake, custard, cheese.

Accordingly, I scabbed a lift with The Beloved last Thursday when she travelled South about her father's business. It was apparent from the photo above that I wasn't the only one with thoughts of mowing: a farmer was in process of taking the first cut of silage from the meadow on the cliff-top just West of Kilmurrin cove. I can definitely be relied upon to take a crap photo; but this captures some of the magic of the Waterford Coast with its receding headlands all the way to Cork and backdropped by the distant Comeragh Hills. If there's one thing my father could capture in his water-colours it was the idea of the variety of clouds in Ireland. Taking a shy-and-retiring role in the composition is the banks of thrift / sea-pink Armeria maritima [prev] which is characteristic of The Copper Coast; partly because of its resistance to heavy metals.

Preparing for a [brief?] interlude of inter-county travel, Dau.II asked me to prepare a Beachcomber's Guide to The Copper Coast. I was nothing loath; indeed I have made a project of this in the past in anticipation of friends-and-relations visiting this gem of hidden charms - geological [go Ordovician], botanical [see above], ornithological [go Choughs Pyrrhocorax pyrrhocorax]. All those coves: Stradbally, Ballydwan, Trá na mBó, Bunmahon, Knockmahon, Kilmurrin [see above], Boatstrand, Benvoy, Annestown, Woodstown, [no, not the oyster Woodstown], Kilfarrasy, Garrarus, Trá Mhór. Since she could toddle Dau.II has been to all of them, but unless you're driving and or paying attention to the passing landscape, it can be difficult to a) tick them off in order b) remember which one has the towering purple cliffs and which are only accessible at low tide. It turns out that Waterford CoCo has not been idle during the lock-down but have prepared and distributed a lot of new signage [L], so you know where you be when the car-door opens and you can rush out to explore. As well as the finger-posts, there are new info-boards at each place with some handy annotated photos of what you're looking at. Especially interesting because there have been substantial, photo changing, rock-falls at least on Woodstown and Ballydwan beaches.

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

WB Yeats

Mudlarking, the book

I am having a pandemic that couldn't be beat w.r.t. the impact it's having on my life. In the Before Times, when I was alone on the farm at weekends, with the Little Red Yaris waiting for my whims in the yard, I'd often find an excuse not to go off-site and spend the whole Friday-to-Monday pottering about with shovel and saw. But it is getting wearing that I cannot go beach-combing; a pastime which involves solitary, outside, physical exercise . . . and cleans up the foreshore. So many tasks on the farm would be more difficult without an inexhaustible, every-sized, supply of rope and cordage scavenged from the tide-line.

When Borrowbox, the free audio-book gizmo provide by the Irish Library Service, suggested Mudlarking by Lara Maiklem [reviewed], I was all over it like a rash. Obviously there is overlap between the two professions, but I go big on brightly coloured buoys which are rare on the tidal reaches of the Thames. Over the last 30 years, I have gotten to know the nooks and headlands of Costa na Déise aka The Copper Coast. Over a similar time-frame Maiklem has developed an intimate knowledge of the 40m x 40km strip of mud-and-rubbish which is exposed between high tide and low from Erith to Teddington. Like a gambler who wins big on a teenage plunge on the Grand National, Maiklem was hooked by pulling an evocative chunk of history from the grey mud while walking beside the river. She has gone back to that well countless times over the last 20 years.

The second chapter uncovers the lost type of Doves printers and font-founders which I riffed on six years ago. She has a , which manifest itself as she scanned across the foreshore surface in a zen-like state looking-not-looking for something that was out of place and so perhaps interesting. What a coup! A physical link to William Morris, and the pre-Raphaelites . . . if that's what floats your wherry.

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Escape from

 . . . the Pepple's  Republic of Cork .

Lockdown? It's a bitch! Dau.II, like her sister 2 years prev, left home a few months before she was old enough to vote. After an au pair Summer in suburban Dublin, she shifted her duff to live with her bloke in the People's  Republic of Cork . For the last six years they've been living right in the City Centre. That was a big change from growing up as far as you can be from a bus-stop and still be in Leinster. But she was adamant that living in suburbia with a garden [lawn-mower, car, garage, 2.4 kids, annual Spanish holiday] was an unacceptable nebbishy half-way house. They were fortunate to snag one of the last landlords in the country with a shred of honour. The affordable mid-recession rent has never increased; despite The Market more or less doubling rental prices over those six years.

But living thrifty and having a really modest foot-print on our pillaged planet only takes living so far. In September, half of Dau.II's core social support crew went back to college and left town and Pandemic Man forbids her to talk to the rest of her pals. Neither of them are working and they're just haemorrhaging money for a really good 4th floor view of the River Lee . . . and access to the deli-delights of the English Market, of course. At Christmas, she floated the idea that she and her bloke might move one county East and live in her grandparents' old gaff in the Déise. It's flipping back to Lifestyle Remote but actually Costa na Déise is surprisingly well served for buses: 3 times a day each way between Tramore and Dungarvan.

And that would have been finio in The Before Times. Dau.II shops once a week on Wednesday which the Tesco Crowding App reports as being the quietest time of the week. She sits down in Tuesday night and plans the menus for the next seven days "It's way easier than trying to think in the supermarket". Sorry Tesco, no impulse buys in that family. But really in these Covid-days, you'd need a death wish, or at least a cranked up appetite for living dangerously, to get on a bus, even spaced out at 25% capacity. If you do the calcs, for a normal office fonctionnaire, in normal times their car is sitting idle (either in the driveway at home or in the office car-park) for > 90% of the time. [calcs for me: 90 commuting minutes a day M-F = 7.5 /168hrs = 4% active use rate each week]. It was my plan, coz I R retire, to pass the little Red Yaris, after getting her through the NCT in December, on to an enterprising Polish construction worker who wouldn't mind a few dings in the paintwork.

Then one of my rellies came home for good from Foreign and I added her to the list of insured drivers and handed the Yaris off on her until she found her feet. A cold coming we had of it [that would be TS Misogynist] in January. It was obviously going to be harder than I imagined to shake off a car that has been super-dependable for 8 years: hauling wood, dead sheep, sacks of feed, groceries, occasional passengers. It turns out The Pep, Dau.II's bloke, passed his driving test in 2014 more or less at the same time they started living together . . . in the city . . . with no need for a car at all at all. In those days, you could be taught by your Ma or Uncle Joe or really anyone with a car who was prepared to load their insurance to accommodate an absolute beginner. Having passed the test, you were good to go anywhere whenever you wanted - without having had any experience, let alone training, for driving at night or on motorways. Very shortly after than, the Road Safety Authority required beginners to swap their L plates for N = Novice plates for two years [prev]. At the same time they required formal instruction from a registered driving school, which was a huge bore for young tearaways who just wanted to get 💨Go Faster decals for their wheels.

After a turmoil of needless anxiety from me, it turned out that I could add The Pep onto the Yaris  insurance roster without any additional tearaway loading and last Wednesday I got up at dawn to {deliver the Yaris to | collect the 20-somethings from Cork}. We are in Level 5 lockdown; only "essential" travel is permissible beyond 5km. "Essential" is undefined and so far untested in the courts but the Gardai are now empowered to slap a €100 Fixed Charge Notice on anyone deemed to be transgressing these guidelines. The Media is a having an irresponsible field day reporting on a lot of edge cases: two pals done "for having a picnic" because they were consuming a Danish as well as lattes while taking a walk in a Dublin park; two lycra cyclists discovered exercising 20km from home; a lad who was found bypassing his local chipper and buying a rissole at a more distant emporium. Thus the only way to determine if "moving house" is essential is to pack your clobber in a van / Yaris and set out. I didn't sleep well the night before.

I dressed up in Full Patriarch [tweed jacket, open shirt, cravat, mask, recent silver hair-cut (self!!! I haven't been to a barber for 30 years)], because that almost always helps. I encountered only one Garda Check Point and was half way through my spiel "I'm going to pickup my dau" when I was moved on through "ghter who is moving house". The 20-soms were packed and ready when I arrived 3 hours later and with some ceremony I handed the keys to The Pep to drive us to his new gaff: 

Driving a car is like riding a bike, once you've mastered the skills, it all come back to you quick enough. Except that cars are evolving rather fast and have zero conventions about where the controls for lights, wipers, air and heat are located. We agreed that, as well as L plates and N plates, P plates for can drive but am rusty would be better for everyone. Whatevs. I've been on plenty of white-knuckle car journeys as a passenger and last Weds wasn't one of them.