woodwork woodwonk

Did I mention there was a lot of wind-throw this Winter? I did! In broad terms, Storm Darragh laid trees flat from West to East, while Éowyn knocked them South to North:

Key: Crateagus monogyna sceagh, hawthorn Fraxinus excelsior fuinseog, ash; Sorbus aucuparia caorthann, rowan.

Last week, on the gorgeous dry sometimes sunny days, I finished chopping and came to a natural state-of-stop on the processing of all the tree down. All the stumps have been cut back to where they get too thick and gnarly to split for firewood. And all the twiggy brash has been stripped of ivy [yum!] by the sheep and tucked back against the ditch. With the embarras de woody richesse , I don't have room to store all this kindling in the dry so it is designated habitat. 

I've learned quite a bit on the job about the physics [compression? do not cut! tension? cut!] of fallen timber. So I've only pinched my saw blade a handful of times. The biggest and gnarliest of the rown trees fell across the fence line with my neighbour above flattening the sheep-wire and snapping some fence posts. I looked at this, blenched, and have arranged for another neighbour to turn up with a [saw and a] backhoe to lift the several trunks [rowan / mountain ash tends to bush out, rather than have a single stem like real trees] out of it. I'll then re-fence the boundary.

Fence-posts? I have lots of them from Jim Davis and his Graigcullen sawmill. Jim supplied the cedar cladding for Young Bolivar's mighty  2016 woodshed. These are excellent 50mm x 50mm x 1.5m from oak Quercus robur which therefore have a lot of natural tannins against the microbes that will attack dead timber in contact with earth.  It's all very well to paint the sharp ends with creosote and I've done that already. But I decided the the remaining dozen stakes would be left to end-soak in creosote for an hour each to really suck it up. These posts have been sitting in the dry for a couple of years, so should be thirsty. It seemed best to do this serially, as it's hard to find a tall container that will take 5lt of gloop. You can see them [L] drying out after their ordeal.

Call this a resort - blehhh

Sheep? Who'd have 'em? It's not rocket-science but it takes a certain amount of engagement, and presence, to manage sheep. The worst thing that can happen is that a) one of t'buggers dies b) we don't realise for a while. Since the foot&mouth epidemic of 2001, farrrmers can no longer leave dead sheep in a quite corner to be recycled by fox and crow. Every beast is now ear-tagged and the DeptAg wants to know the entire life history [incl death, disposal, or sale] of every tagged sheep. We got complacent, unmindful and careless in 2020 [must have been Covid!] and allowed one of our aged ewes to die . . . and get partly dismembered by "the cleaners". I ignored the flies, pretended I was CSI Midlands, and shovelled the bits into a heavy-duty plastic bag for delivery to The Fallen Animal Guy the other side of the mountain.

Since then I count the ewes [60 legs and 15 wet noses and I'm satisfied] several times a day. I've had to cut sheep-wire to free sheep-heads on numerous occasions - hint: cut a vertical strand rather than a horizontal one. And, face-it, it's easier to handle a whole dead sheep than her scattered parts. 

Pegleg trough (see shadow below)

We're in an awkward season now. The grass really hasn't started to grow, so we are having to rotate our stock flock through the various paddocks. We had a bin full of sheep muesli and, one chilly spring day in March The Gaffer decided that the sheep may as well eat it. Accordingly The Outdoor Man heaved a feed-trough from of a distant field and left it in the field with a bucketful of muesli. The sheep were delighted. A tuthree days later, also frezzzing, I cast thereto another bucket of feed. Much gambolling and unseemly shoving at the trough.

But shortly after that I found that the empty trough had been kicked to buggery [see top L]. The end piece out and one side hanging by a thread. All the sheep were looking at their hooves all innocent, or whistling nonchalantly at the far end of the field. What ever these professions of not me guv'nor it was easy to imagine them developing expectations from getting quality chow with added molasses and then abruptly not getting it: Call this a resort? - blehhh - take that <kick>; think it's easy being a sheep? <stomp> horizontal sleet, eh? fancy some?

But something had to be done, though, with the thoroughly broken-through trough ^*, even if that was choppitup for kindling. What I did in contrast was use the least rotten trapezoidal end piece as a template to cut two new ends from western red cedar off-cuts from the 2016 woodshed project and the 2023 planter-box project. Once these ends were installed, it was easy to cut 400mm off the rottenest part of each trough . . . making good for another couple of years use. No complaints that the troughs are now 15% shorter & 10% lighter for hefting about the property according to the exigencies of the muesli service.

Credit to Young Bolivar for making the original troughs that same 2016 Summer as he designed and built the cedar woodshed.
(*)Where I grew up, these 'appliances' were called troffs, hereabouts they sound more like trocks.

Taming the deluge

Did I tell you we have a polytunnel with a bigger foot-print than our house? I did! Did I ever boast about seeing the Petitcodiac Tidal Bore progressing relentlessly up stream? I did! And I've been on and on and on about collecting rainwater for the said polytunnel; or rather the plants which grow inside it. After a month of drought in May and June this year, we finally had a dump of rain on Father's Day w/e 18th June. We had drained all our water-collection devices - buckets, herring-barrels and 1 tonne IBCs before May was out and were watering >!shock!< the veggies from the tap. Apart from anything else, the tap-water, from the bore-hole in the yard, which serves the house, is a deal more acidic than rainwater and not everything delights in dilute HCl.

After the hottest June since records began, July has been much more unsettled = rainy and 'cold'. After the parched Summer of 2018 and the Great Drought of May 2023, I am inclined to catch as catch can whenever the opportunity presents . . . I am not afraid to run out in my undies through a night-time deluge to capture the water.  

It is all very well to water the veggies but they only occupy a faction of the inside area. After years without rain, the soil is as dry as the Atacama Desert and it can be dusty enough to darken the laundry. But I've covered that part of the floor with a layer of wood chips which lays the dust. The last two (of 8) bays of the tunnel [i.e. between the supporting hoops] has been allocated as sheep-quarter quartier des brebis and was fenced off neatly and securely by Young Bolivar in 2016. Wood chips wouldn't do there because the chips get hoovered up by fleece on the occasions when we have to shear in the tunnel.

That happens only if Paddy the Clip has to come when the weather has been all rainy. Under those circs, we run the sheep up to their part of the tunnel the night before the shear, so they can dry out their own fleece as 37°C convection heaters. That is advantageous because it also starves t'buggers which makes for easier shearing.

I thought we'd get caught thus by the wet June 2023 weather, so I spent a couple of days slopping water on the dirt at the sheep-end of the tunnel. There is a little grass growing by the door - where the rain blows in; and some tired wisps under a couple of small holes in the plastic above. Then [outdoor] shearing came and went without incident and the priority returned to saving water for veg. But I have since decided that greening the sheep-quarter is desirable for the long-term and did two things towards this outcome: 1) I cut several sheaves of gone-to-seed grass: mostly Agrostis spp.and Poa spp. and lurried them up to thresh in the tunnel. 2) I continued to water the soil. In order to enhance absorption, I also dug over the grassless, compacted regions  and raked them flattish. Well, to my surprise and delight, yesterday it was clear that a thin fuzz of green was springing up in several parts of my incipient indoor 'lawn' [R].

The least effort, max return watering device has been to extend the gutter which fills the [currently brimful] tunnel-interior 1 tonne IBC out into the top part of the tunnel with the help of a cross-trees [see this jimmy-up arrangement above L].  The water then runs down-hill - the whole footprint being on a 4% slope because of an inattention error when we 'levelled' it 15+ years ago. You can see L the trickle of water wringing out (at the rate of 15 lt/hr - I measured) the last bit of a rain-storm on 15th July. Later the same day, rain was fair drumming on the tunnel roof giving a rate of >500 lt/hr! Tricking about in the dirt, making water channels is absolutely my jam. I definitely won't mind mowing an extra 35 sq.m of lawn. If everything works out fine, we'll be able to have tea there.

Her lovely horse

For a few months in 2016, we had "Young Bolivar" aka A Good Pair of Hands staying /WWOOFing with us learning English. His last project was building a mighty, and mighty handy, woodshed at the bottom of the yard. We measured up and decided that for the desired design we'd need N=130 lengths of western red cedar Thuja plicata to clad the walls. Jim Davis in Graigcullen didn't cut to length and threw in a few extra planks for luck, so we were left with a big stack of surplus planks not to mention many offcuts of different lengths from 150mm to 900mm in length. Heck'n'jiminy that's seven (7) years ago! The cedar planks have been stacked at the back of the woodshed all that time, quietly drying out some more.

This Spring Dau.II would have nothing but that we build a tree-house for her niblings down in our sustainable micro-forest. That's as well as the refurbed garden seat. And, because cedar is naturally pest-resistant and because it was already on site, we robbed the stack in the woodshed to fabricate the base of the tree house. 

The latest QALY adjustment here is planting salad and other veg for home consumption. But ppl can't live by bread alone and the democratic majority has voted for The Return of The Sweet-pea Lathyrus odoratus to grace the front of the house.In years past I have constructed functional outdoor beds for either side of the front door. But the pallet-wood aesthetic is sooo yesterday and when these planters stand directly on the ground they become a residential hotel for slugs, snails and ants; for which the democratic majority has little tolerance. Furthermore, pallet-wood definitely doesn't last forever when it is permanently butted up against wet soil. Accordingly, I pulled out all the longer [800-950mm] cedar off-cuts and paired them off to those of equal length and then started making jardinières / window-boxes / Blumenkastenpflanzer. I also sourced 4x ash logs from the wood-pile that were close enough to 30cm tall. 

Another option is to add legs to the boxes which make them a lot lighter and more convenient to move around. But the ash-logs are prolly better for the sweet-peas because that allows the planters to get up close to the wall all the better to string-up the peas. Yes, yes, I know it's possible to have two vertical legs at the back and stabilizing splayed legs in the front - speak to my carpenter. The problem with four legged furniture is that unless the floor is actually flat it is a royal PITA to get all four legs touching base and sharing the weight equally. You can see my third iteration in the foreground [L]. Notwithstanding George Orwell's “Four legs good, two legs better! All Animals Are Equal. But Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others.” In this case three legs is best of all. The top may not be spirit-level flat, but all three legs must be in contact with the ground and doing an equal amount of the work. That's why milking-stools have three legs.

Sharing is caring! It seems invidious to construct such lovely functional outside furniture and become all hoarder about it. The Girl Who Invented Herself [who prev] is WFH really hard while juggling her caring commitments. The [only?] good thing about WFH is that the inevitable 'unproductive' office time is not spent waiting for a meeting in your cubical or chatting at the water-cooler. TGWIH, by contrast, can nip out into her own garden for a bit of dead-heading or weeding as the sea-mist rolls in. The lawn is out to contract mowers but the rest is a mix of raised beds and jardinières containing a striking array of plants shewing off their reproductive parts. In her younger days, she was mad about the nags and spent a few years shovelling shit for a pittance and meagre board before she came to her senses. It turned out that, like Jack Woltz, we have had a spare horse's head about the place since Dau.I and Dau.II dragooned their HomEd pals [and associated parents] into a perf of Cinderella at the village hall. Said head and a plywood cut-out wheel painted silver had been screwed to a baulk of timber to conjure the arrival of cinders at The Ball with his glass slippers. All it took was a hank of straw stapled to the other end et voilà - cheval! My ♩ove♩y horse, indeed.

Ever Last Post

<note: Not Last Post Ever - that was 22 May 2021 and turned out to be a porkie-pie>

One of my first jobs as a teenager was to creosote the fence of the rather wonderfully named Walter Wheel, an elderly semi-retired farmer who lived within sight of our front door in rural Essex. Sadly no other kids lived anywhere near, so I couldn't, like Tom Sawyer, negotiate any help with the task. It took 2½ days and "ruined" 3 pairs of jeans; my mother thought it was the devil's bargain.

Several decades later, shortly after we embraced rural life with kids of our own, I went to the creamery/sawmill ans bought a dozen milled [⌀ = 75mm, L = 1.5m] fence-posts. I came away with a jug of creosote as well because "I couldn't in all conscience sell you those fence posts without giving you the means to protect them".  In due course, I slapped on some creosote, "ruined" another pair of trousers, and drove the posts into the top of a ditch to hold up a length of sheep-wire. Even with the creosote they didn't last very long. After a few years, and many fence-posts, that jug of creosote was all used up. But you could not buy creosote any more because it was deemed to be carcinogenic "But here, I can sell you this dark brown slightly viscous gloop for fence posts. It's called creocote and not the same thing at all". The evidence for whether creosote ("a category of carbonaceous preservatives formed by the distillation of various tars and pyrolysis of plant-derived material, such as wood or fossil fuel") is indeed carcinogenic is sketchy-to-weak but it surely does stain clothing - but then so does creocote.

Painting fence-posts is a messy drippy chore and for the last several years I've turned up my nose at milled softwood posts and ordered up square oak 50x50mm posts rough-sawn and hand-pointed from Jim Davis' sawmill at Graiguecullen. Jim also supplied the truly beautiful western red cedar Thuja plicata boards for Young Bolivar's woodshed. Oak posts are loaded with tannins and last pretty well without artificial preservatives. Downside is that an iron nail or staple, once hammered in, will not come out of oak. 

It has been in my mind for a few years to make a post-dunker from the heavy-duty cylindrical tube that centres rolls of silage wrap. They are 2ft6in = 750mm long and get discarded in our fields every haying season. Despite sleepless nights and several years of cogitating I couldn't workout how the ideal way to seal the bottom of the tube. This year I concluded that perfick is the enemy of good-enough and sealed the bottom by inserting a tapered plastic pot, previously used for glacé cherries, and a generous squirt of silicone gutter-sealant.  That seems to work, although you will see [R] that I have the apparatus a) tied to a stout immovable pole, against upset b) set in a back-up bucket, in case of failure. 40 5ft = 1.5m oak fence-posts cost me €100 plus, say, €1 for creocote.  That's about 2x the price of peat-briquettes, yes; but I can still burn them when their utility in supporting fences is exhausted.

In other news - I've been down in the thinned woodland with my Zomax chain-saw and blocked all the logs from the hardwood side of the forest. I've hauled these logs up to the haggard and split them with a maul. The heap shown above is about 2/3 of the final quantity of split logs ready for chimney 2024. I'm leaving t-buggers out in the breeze while we have a hot-and-dry spell. They can be stacked neatly under the roof of the woodshed nearer winter. I wasted a good bit of time thinking about the optimum labour-efficient way of hauling the wood up-hill to the yard. But in the end stopped piffling about and loaded the stuff into the wheel-barrow [several to many times!] and pushed. Progress.

12 colonels no squaddies

Charlie Bird, a leftist Irish big name journalist, has a diagnosis of motor neuron disease. MND is a horrible way to go. In the early 00s, a good pal of mine put his career on hold and came back to Ireland to care for his father after an identical diagnosis. Up until then, I'd imagined that the deficit of being unable to walk was a bummer, but perhaps surmountable. I hadn't realised that you need motor neurons to swallow. That presented a lower circle of hell to the nightmare. Our Charlie has decided to use the remaining power in his limbs to climb Croagh Patrick, Ireland's holiest high place. On 2nd April, possibly and tragically because he doubt that he'll be able for such a task on Reek Sunday [bloboprev], at the end of July; the traditional day for this arduous pilgrimage. And if your spirit and legs are willing but logistics are weak, Charlie is inviting you to walk somewhere else on that day. Preferably having shaken down your friends and relations to raise money for Pieta House, Ireland’s national suicide prevention charity and/or The Irish Motor Neurone Disease Association (IMNDA).

Okay, and fair enough. Me, I'd rather share my walk with buzzards than 100s of people but I can see that most of us need something to get us out to do something for the dispossessed because The Man is failing it big time, all the time. A few years ago, some of my actively christian neighbours elected to rehab the Cross which was constructed on the top of our hill during the Holy Year of 1950. I remember that Young Bolivar, our handy Venezuelano wwooffer went up the hill with them in 2016 when the cross was rededicated. I demurred because 20% of the party were the disagreeable neighbours to whom we haven't 'spoken' since 1999. The cross looks sprucer since the rehab meitheal - pity about the disintegrating half bag of sand, two broken pallets and a raffle of cracked plastic water containers.

At the end of January, this same neighbour announced that 1,000 people from Wexford were intending to walk up to the cross in solidarity with Charlie Bird. And that we couldn't, for shame, allow them to walk up a lane all tore up by the Christmas day flood. As Dau.II said "I don't get why people tidy the house when company is expected; I tidy up because I like living in  a clean house". Ahem, quite so. But you can't stop people who are determined on a course of action and on Thursday 03 Feb evening the county road was half covered with several loads of 1-down road gravel. Either 60 tonnes, 100 tonnes or €1,000; you choose. And we were called to spread it up the lane on the next Saturday.

Farmers are independent traders who might have €2,000,000 worth of property but earn less than the minimum wage from those acres most weeks of the year. They are not in the habit of being told what to do because they The Boss. Farmers are also, like surgeons, decisive! They get a thing done rather than piffling about over-long thinking about it. The very opposite of me for whom the perfect is always the enemy of the good enough.  Anyway, four of the neighbours turned up early each with a big front-loader on their tractor and another appeared with a venerable JCB back-hoe. Seven foot-soldiers were mustered with shovels and rakes to distribute 1-tonne loads of stuff across the lane from the heaps where the gravel was dumped. A while later, all the gravel had been brought up from the county road and parts of the lane were suitable for landing a light plane (with short wings) . . . and other parts were still a muddy mess. The pink arrow marks one such transition:

Because there had been no discussion about A Plan, there were 12 plans going on in  parallel. And nobody NOBODY would listen to me about fixing the drains before dressing the surface! But IF there isn't a big spill of rain that washes all that fixin' to buggery THEN the pilgrims may be impressed by the road surface. I await the diktat that I am to paint my front gate rather than bringing shame on the parish for that.

Left-handed saw-horse

I was writing the piece about my father's disappointing departure gift and the word for the board on which artists mix paints escaped me.  The Beloved was at the same table and on enquiry delivered palette. Which is, of course, correct but 'easel' was still nagging at my 'brain'.
"I wonder is easel is related to ezel [NL] a donkey?", I mused
"That's nonsense", she replied "although the Irish is asal"
"But we have saw-horse, another support mechanism".

Turns out [Chambers 20thC] I was right. Sometimes English uses horse - saw-horse, clothes-horse - sometimes donkey. We don't use ass, which is cleared rooted with asal ezel, much nowadays: probably because if offended prudish late-Victorians. Irish seems, boringly to use binse [bench] for saw-horse. Netherlanders use a zaagbok, usage which I think they share with American saw-buck.

Get on with it Bob! What about these left-handed saw-horses; is that even a thing? Indeed it is, as I recently discovered in a typically Bob what could possibly go wrong project. I am the bloke who installed a run of sheep-wire upside down so that lambs could escape through the big holes. There are only four possible ways you can arrange the reverse sheet if you want to xerox something back-to-back . . . I would always take at least 5 attempts to get it right. When we rocked up to the farm 25 years ago, I brought a car full of dismembered pallets and crates: every time a centrifuge or -80°C freezer was delivered at work, the chief technician would tell me there was more wood by the big dumpster. A 40ft x 4ft euro-pallet is almost a perfect kit for making a saw-horse and the farm had a lot of fallen timber for fire-wood. I made a saw-horse [still standing, albeit with a list to port L] and a while later made another for Pat the Salt my then not so aged father-in-law. They have both been well-used and are shorter now than when made as continuous contact with wet-ground has rotted out the legs.

The time had come to make another, not least because it would be unseemly for my three adult children to have to fight over who was to inherit two saw-horses. The pallet wood is long used, re-used, re-used and sent up the chimney. I took delivery of a dozen each of 2x4s and 2x3s before the pandemic drove the price of lumber to astronomical levels. I chose the ropiest, shookest, knottiest 2x3 and cut 4 lengths to 90cm for the cross and, for the horizontals, 4 same-length off-cuts of western red cedar planks from the Young Bolivar woodshed project of 2016. Cut cut cut; drill drill drill; screw screw scree, bish bash bosh . . . et voilá chevalet! [L]. Except that, if you're sawing as close to the horse as you can (as you do) you are almost certain to tonk your fist, thumb or knuckles on the corner of the 2x3 which is pointing directly at your shoulder. Yarooo! The irony is that, with my head, I'd acknowledged this problem and carefully thought about it as I was drilling the counter-sunk bolt-hole . . . and still managed to get it wrong.

Part of me was preparing to say meh! and put it down to experience and move on. My poor knuckles argued vehemently against this lazy-arsed option and after a night's toss-turn-thinking, I tooled up again and disassembled one end of the saw-horse. It took me two attempts to re-assemble it as [R] so that the 2x3 nearest the work is further from and facing away from the working fist and so much safer. If you look carefully, you can see bolt holes 10cm further from the ground. These were drilled when I thought I was a much bigger man than I really am and resulted in a Brobdingnagian saw-hippo than was really uncomfortable and inefficient to use. Wot a palaver, mates. Bodging is good fun but it consumes hours of time. Lucky I have nothing better to do.

Chopper

Since as long as I can remember I have been a tree-hugger. Not literally, mind, because the noblest trees are usually too big in the girth to get your arms around. Since we bought the farm 20+ years ago, I have planted thousands of trees both on our home place and as part of a meitheal for friends and neighbours. On balance, I think that offsets the carbon footprint of sending so much wood-smoke up the chimney each winter. But trees require more than hugs and having trees on your property comes with responsibilities. Every storm that crashes in from the Atlantic, trees or parts of trees come crashing to earth and have to be cleared up. I can do the tidy up and enjoy the work because the result of the honest toil is a pile of fire-wood to boil the tea-kettle in a couple of years time. But some trees are too close for comfort and then it is dicey to wait to see when and which way they fall. We were lucky with the Darwinday Storm of 2014 because the wind blew the 4 enormous Mackie Cupressus macrocarpa trees away from the house and not on top of it.

Two years later, in February 2016, the one surviving Mackie [R looming massive previous to treatment], now exposed to the full brunt of the SouthWest gales started to shed its upper branches and so I asked my tree-surgeoning pal Rissoles to tog up and bring them safely to ground rather than waiting for them to fall on the fragile garden shed immediately below. I did the ground works as and when timmmmmber came down from above. While he was up there he did a bit of prophylaxis: evening up the weight upstairs and tidying the ragged ends of previous falls. When he'd finished the tree was safe and looked neat. I was happy and relieved.

A very few months later, the owner / rentier of the house next door announced that he was going to sell his house as part of his retirement package . . . and would we now agree to fell out another large ratty looking Mackie that stood on the property boundary overhanging both his garden and the county road. It looked ratty because about 20 years before a family friend had gone up the tree with a chainsaw wearing jeans and a pair of runners and cut away random pieces of top hamper to reduce the windage. Feeling pressured by a fellow who hadn't been bothered to say hello previously, I didn't feel super-happy about this ultimatum proposal; but agreed to it. At least the neighbour, who stood most to benefit, offered to go halves on the cost and announced that he knew just the man, a contractor from the banks of the Suir, to do the work. I've met a good few tree surgeons and lumberjacks over the years and they are mostly efficient, highly-skilled, mild-mannered people with a hearty appetite. The contractor turned up a week later with 3 workers, a truck, a van and a chipper/mulcher. His people worked like the divil and reduced the whole tree to its component parts well within the working day. But it was ugly to see the teenage apprentice hazed and harried, and the Polish groundsman disrespected while their gaffer leaned on his shovel or made phone calls all day.  At one point he drove his 4x4 directly at me and young Bolivar because it was too much trouble to ask us to step out of the way and it mildly amusing to see the shock and fear on my face as we dived left and right.

When the tree was down and everything was almost all tidied away he gestured at the pruned and tidied Mackie on which Rissoles had worked that Spring and asked <sneer> "Who did that?". The clear implication was a) that I was a fool to pay for the work and b) that sort sort of thing was a waste of time. The next statement was quite explicit "The only thing to do with them big Mackies is to fell 'em for firewood". The idea of respecting the right to exist of a tree that had been 60 or 80 years a-growing was, to him, laughable. The thought that a tree, in and of itself, was a thing of beauty in the landscape or utility in the ecosystem was impossible for him to imagine. Big trees were just something in the way, which had potential to be converted into money. I've told this story to a number of people in the tree and timber trade and they've all had a flash of recognition. I don't have to name the crusher of the treescape because he is an archetype - so common as to be almost the norm - whose chainsaw is a vital part of his sense of machismo. Is it a wonder that they behave like dicks? . . . and they make money by paying the workers as little as possible.

crogging

Years ago when The Blob was still in diapers, I wrote about a friend who indignantly refused to act as a community trash-collector on a beach North of Boston. Insofar as we choose to take some exercise away from home, we generally choose not to plod across a land-fill; or something that looks like one. If a beach is really heaving with plastic we're likely to be strolling on our own: normal people are on a beach where the trash isn't disgustingly obvious. In 2013, I was of the opinion that no one person could make inroads into the 38 billion plastic bottles which are discarded every year in the USA alone.

But my math was wrong because that's only a couple of bottles every week [for each and every man woman trans and child]. Steven Moody is an Irish runner who set himself the goal of picking up a few items of street trash every time he went out jogging. Not enough to require a bin bag - if he saw a bottle in the gutter he'd pause long enough to pick it up and carry it to the next trash bin he passed. He considered that he could, in this way, make a visible difference along his regular route and make himself happier. I think he also subscribed to the broken window theory: that a clean street was harder to first-trash than one which was already awash. He was also delighted to have had an original idea. Turned out that plogging [jogging with plastic] had been a thing [plocka upp = pick up] for several years in Sweden; so his idea was a First For Ireland <huzzah!>. I heard Steven on the wireless a while back pushing a plogathon on Sandymount strand last Wednesday 22 Aug 2018. Many of the beaches round Ireland have now been owned by Tidy-Towns type people who go out regularly with a bin bag. The great thing about plastrash is that it packs light: you can carry a huge volume away with you if you bring a bag.

Okay, that's plogging! What the heck and tarnation is crogging as in the post-title. That's where you train crows to pick crap up in exchange for peanuts or Purina Cat Chow pellets. via Neatorama. Last year they trained crows to clear cigarette-butts. Now they are suggesting corvids as electrical component sorters, search and rescue, car-key finders. Instructions for making the exchange box for crows.

Finding things? We met up with Young Bolivar [multiprev] when we were down in Cork last month and he has just lashed out to buy himself a drone. He showed us some distant selfies taken with his new toy. Just the thing for finding our sheep which have gone awol on the mountainside. Would such drone-hunting be drogging? Ooops no, drogging is something else entirely.

Physics of cold

Met Eireann tells us that it has stopped snowing and I can feel that it has stopped blowing quite so hard from the East. I was out in the dark a couple of hours ago, sieving out the ashes from the wood-burning stove and bringing back the warm charcoal to start today's space-heating. It was almost balmy without the wind-chill and the horizontal snow-fall. The Beloved, who was born in Nigeria and grew up in the moderate climate of 1960s Ireland (one cold winter in 1963), like Sarah O'Malley, Everything she knows about Blizzards was learned from Little House on the Prairie. Anticipating a disorientating white-out and needing to check on her sheep, she tied a rope to the back door-handle and snaked it up the steps behind the house; tying the other end to the tree which supports one end of the clothes-line. The other end of the clothes-line is attached to the door-jamb of the poly-tunnel. By hooking on like a trolley-car, with one change of line she could get safely to the tunnel where the sheep were steaming away in relative comfort. The small-small down-side of the rope was that it got covered in snow which was dumped inside the house when I opened the door.

The sheep did much better inside than out, although they and their feed-troughs got a dusting of snow through the gaps in the poly-tunnel doors. Emma's snow was notably light and penetrating. The problem with blizzard is that the sheltered areas fill up with snow while exposed areas are stripped. In the picture at top you can see grass in the lower half of the yard but snow up to the window-sills near the house. A peculiar vortex kept the snow clear from the actual walls of the house on three sides, which made per-ambulation a lot easier.

If we had left the sheep out to fend for themselves they would have likely been drifted in; or at least we would have had to struggle through drifts to reach them. Most people would call our sheep 'white', some with black faces; but they look positively Latin American [above R] compared to the white-white of the snow. Note also the Santiago-scallopped gate, crafted by Young Bolivar when he stayed with us in 2016. In the extreme left you can see my red-and-yellow iron bar which I use to make a hole before driving in a wooden fence post. When I wrastled it out of the earth, it brought a clot of frozen earth out with it. Dang! I thought, that will mean the ground will be frozen and it will be hardship driving in a couple of posts to support a temporary gate outside the p-tunnel.

Not a bit of it! There was snow on the ground which effectively insulated the soil beneath and made it soft as shite. Presumably the iron of the bar conducted the cold of the air down into the soil and frozen it deeper locally. In another Pa Ingalls anecdote from the Little House series, he gets benighted by a blizzard between the rail-station and home and survives in an ice-cave for three days eating the children's christmas candy. Earlier in the week I was delighted to see a teeny field mouse skitter across the snow in the fields before disappearing into a hole where it was safe and warm[er].

A few dozen people were stranded in their cars by Storm Emma; the advice from WinterReady.ie [yes, it's a thing] was to stay in the car with the engine running until help arrives. Don't do this in a snow-drift: you'll fill the car and its occupants with carbon-monoxide from the exhaust. A palo-palomino lives close to the N25 the main artery between Rosslare Ferryport and Cork. They noticed a car trapped between snow-banks on the main road and brought the driver into their home for a cup of tea and a bed of the night. Driver was reluctant because The Man had said stay with your vehicle until rescued. The householders e x p l a i n e d  that they were that rescue; the emergency services were dealing with, well, emergencies. Relevant joke about rescue and using your noddle.

Greenwashing

The photo has been circulating in the Irony sections of the Irish agri-blogosphere. It shows a wonderful wide-open landscape typical of the West of Ireland. The hedge in the fore-ground, an essential element in sustaining bio-diversity, has been flailed to stumps  . . . and replaced by government sponsored wooden bird-boxes. Presumably on the assumption that birds should accommodated in high-rise apartments like the poor of London.

My heart is in the right place, but I am continually being wrong-footed in my greenness.  When I was kid, we had fly-spray in the cupboard under the sink and I used to hunt flying insects round the house going pffft pffft: ignorantly destroying the ozone layer [which wasn't A Thing yet in 1963] with the CFCs in the propellant, not to mention filling the house with a dilute haze of nerve-gas. To be fair, I was also wicked deadly with a fly-swatter, leaving little splots all over the walls and ceilings for somebody else to clean up. 'Organic' hadn't been invented then, largely because the local farmers were very light on the p'isons. But when I grew up and left home, I started to care about organic: we got a copy of John Seymour's Self-Sufficiency, for starters. I harvested a bunch of dandelion Taraxacum officinale roots in one of the scabby back-gardens that we were renting and made organic dandelion 'coffee' from the chunked and dried roots - it was okay but an acquired taste and I didn't stop drinking tea.

By the time we moved back to Ireland in 1990, we'd internalised the organic aspiration and set about finding "an old farmhouse with out-buildings and 10 acres" to raise organic veggies. That aspiration took 6 years and 2 more children to fulfill. In the search for Seymour II, we started to buy organic milk and organic greens and joined the Dublin Food Co-op for beans and cheese. Then my sister came to visit and said (I paraphrase) "Yes yes organic is fine and dandy but what about the air-miles?". My smug right-on bubble collapsed with a flabby pffffffffff. Of course, it was stupid to observe the niceties of organic while condoning the air-freighting of baby asparagus from Kenya - a practice which was destroying the ozone layer and converting a lot of aviation fuel into greenhouse gas. I then started to obsessively read the labels on the stuff we bought and you've seen the result throughout The Blob over the last 5 years.

We've been living up the mountain on Seymour II for more than 20 years now and trying to do the right thing. We sought advice from Teagasc, the government agrivisory bund and signed up for a succession of schemes that encouraged us to Do Right. Who wouldn't accept financial help from Brussels to do what you were going to do aNNyway? And it worked! getting the grant impelled me off the sofa to tidy up the hedgerows, cut back the bushes from the field margins and put in some fences which were sheep-proof.

One's cynical suspicions would have been alerted by the frequency with which the schemes changed their names. REPS (rural environmental protection scheme) I II and III were binned and AEOS (Agri-Environment Options Scheme) rose phoenix-like from the ashes of burning brochures and letterhead. In turn AEOS has been replaced by GLAS (Green, Low-Carbon, Agri-Environment Scheme). A cunning desk-johnny in the Dept of Ag has made a backronym of the Irish word for green. We signed up for REPS I because it gave us money for doing what we'd do aNNyway, with our place . . . IF we could find time between raising two children and earning an honest crust off-site. We planted 400m of hedge ten years ago, which is now full of bird-nests. I was encouraged to cut the gorse / whin / furze Ulex europaeus back from invading the fields but leaving it to augment the field boundaries with the scent of coconut. 2016 was the year of the boxes when Young Bolivar [multiprev] made a few dozen wholly artificial nesting boxes to encourage bees, birds and bats to share our space [L - bat-boxes were required to be installed in triplicate facing different points of the compass].

It's mostly a bunch of greenwashing nonsense: making folk like us feel virtuous by rowing in behind the available cash.

Wood-stacks

This above is moh2o's cord of firewood, three different species in a well-built self-supporting pile. Well, I've finished Lars Mytting's Norwegian Wood and I feel like a failure. I wrote in the New Year about reading an early paragraph and rushing out to split some wood. I have a dreadful feeling that I was waaay too late. What I have failed to grasp is the separation of two stages in the life of fire-wood: a) drying and b) storage. It is much better if your get the wood dried down quickly to <20% moisture in a process of evaporation before the wood succumbs to the necrosis of fungal infection. Even invisible fungi can block the water-filled tubes of the wood, so that water cannot easily escape.

One of the last things Tadek, our wooffing Pole, did during his second winter with us was thin out a dense dark stand of laurel Prunus laurocerasus, which was sharing the bottom of our yard with the 6 tree apple orchard. The apples were probably heirloom species but were almost useless to us because the fruit was +5m up in the air at the end of wispy twigs. There was nothing near against which to lean a ladder. The reason for this was that the laurel and apple trees had been fighting for the light. It was so dark in the orchard that no grass grew. Tadek went mad with the chain-saw and cut down a LOT of laurel and then cut it into lengths about 30 cm long, and then returned to Poland. I started to stack the small-enough logs into a pile at the edge of the orchard. The bigger pieces, which were easy to split, I split. Then my competent friend René came up and said my pile would be at nothing unless I raised it off the dirt floor. So I threw down what I'd started, found a number of beat-up pallets and, with the help of a 12 y.o. Dau.II, stacked them all up again so that they were clear of the worms. It filled out at 1m x 1m x 5m and I covered the top with election posters weighted down with the gnarly unsplittable lumps. I opened one end of the stack last winter and am working through the rest now.

Stacking the wood in situ was a good idea because it meant less barrowing the stuff about, but tucked in a corner of the orchard; up against the dry-stone wall; covered with plastic was not exactly encouraging of water loss. It would have been better to stack them more openly where the sun and especially the Summer wind could whistle through to carry away the moisture THEN after a significant weight loss move t'buggers somewhere dry and convenient to the stove.  It's been the same with all my other wood stacks around the farm: too dark; not enough air-circulation. And especially, I have failed mea culpa mea maxima culpa to strip off the bark from the unsplit logs to expose more water-loss area. The bark is, by design, waterproof - if it wasn't trees would weep bitter tears down their trunks.

Lars Mytting and his compatriots actively go out into wood-lots and cut down trees - huge debate about the optimum time for felling. Or they get firewood delivered by authorized dealers - who guarantee them as less than a maximum moisture content. They get to choose their species and to some extent the individual tree (nice and straight, please, minimal knots]. We on the other hand have been able to rely / subsist on what has fallen out of the ditches (usually rowan  / mountain ash Sorbus aucuparia) or come crashing down from the crown (ash - Fraxinus excelsior & Scot's pine Pinus sylvetsris). This bounty tends to become available during winter storms and I try to cut them up there, then. When the fields are dry in the summer is the time to load up the Yaris and bring them to the yard. Since we had Young Bolivar working with us, we've had a nice airy wood-shed with hit-and-miss walls and a well-high roof but I should nevertheless dry the wood first in the breeze.

You should check out "artistic woodstacks" on Google Images: despite firewood being essentially ephemeral, some people prefer to make something beautiful as well as functional. "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful" Wm Morris.

Updates etc 060517

Last week I was on a bit of a pulley jag showing some footage whereby you can achieve some mechanical advantage with levers and especially with pulleys. I got a tsk from my pal Russ saying that I shd have mentioned the eSpanish windlass as another way of making things move.  I have mentioned the eSpanish windlass in the context of applying a torniquet to a sheep's leg.  It is a really nifty appropriate technology tool for, say, tightening up a length of fence and Young Bolivar and I used them when building the woodshed last Summer to force the telephone-pole uprights upright.  to .  This is how the thing is made, with diagrams and safety notes.

The same principal is at work with a windlass winch, except instead of the rope shortening by twisting about itself as with the Spanish, the slack of the rope is taken up by being wound around a log.  Another log at right angles applies the necessary leverage. In using this tool it is not necessary to behave like a neanderthal misogynist git who is (marginally) politer to his dog than his wife and various hapless twigs.

But there's more!  Here is a flip-flop winch which allows a single person to set up and use a system with a rope and two stout sticks to shift a heavy object.  Or two stout sticks and a couple of fit young Germans

And then there is a Chinese windlass where the key for leverage is a difference in the circumference of the axle. Never heard of that: very clever the Chinese.

All those solutions to weight moving are temporary examples of bricolage with what is available at hand in the forest.  It you want to make a more permanent capstan with a curious mixture of modern tools and medieval technology check this video out.

Last week one of the links made a comparison with the Man Who Planted Trees. Here is another such story from an island in the Brahmaputra [prev]. The importance of trees in stabilising riverine banks is illustrated in this report on slumping in the levees downstream from Oroville.

Thelma and Louise

The road-trip has a revered place in literature. Maybe not in your literature: you may have read the entire works of Simenon or all the volumes of Proust’s à la recherché du temps perdu, which don’t seem to GO anywhere. Maybe it’s my peripatetic ‘navy-brat’ childhood or my long walks through Iberia, but I like travel books. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig [prev]; One’s Company by Peter Fleming; A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush by Eric Newby and the Lost Continent by Bill Bryson are embedded in my head not least because the last three at least made me laugh out loud. ZAMM isn’t a laughing matter but is nevertheless profound.  Of course the quintessence of road-trip in book form is Jack Kerouac’s On The Road which more or less gave the name to the genre.  And the road movie crystalizes the concept in under two hours: think Easy Rider or Thelma and Louise. Forget Bored of the Rings, though: far too much filler not enough laughs.
It’s not every week that I get a chance to go road-trip with my offspring. In 2004, The Boy and I walked the 100km from Portugal to Santiago de Compostella and my feet took years to recover from the brutal pace of day 3: 24th July 2004. Two years ago, Dau.II and I went on a journey to The Edge while making puddles in the bottom of a small boat on Lough Derg. We’re still recovering from the shared terror. This winter [can’t say this year anymore because it’s a new one] both the girls came home for Christmas which was wonderful. But all things must pass; and Dau.II had to go back to work before the New Year rush.

One of the peculiarities of Christmas gift giving within families is that, because they all love each other very much, they can get too much on the same wave-length. On my 13th Christmas I got two (2!) chemistry sets because two different rellies had recognised a developing Bob the Scientist before the recipient had recognised it in himself. Another year at about the same time, the five members of my nuclear family received twenty (20!) mugs at Christmas, some from external sources but many gifted internally. For Xmas 2016, Dau.II got a new set of four (4!) pillows to replace the ratty, lumpy, mitey, wretched things she’s been sleeping with for the last 3 years. She also got a large pair of throw cushions for her living room and the usual clatter of books, cheese, and a hot-water bottle. It would have been possible to schlep all this stuff on to the bus and off at the other end but I offered to drive her back to Cork instead. She said thanks and offered to pay me in grocer’s crates, of which her restaurant has accumulated a large and inconvenient store. Sometimes the crate has travelled so far through so many handlers and suppliers that is isn’t clear who owns the damned things.

On the last Thursday of 2016 we set off in the fore noon planning to get to Cork City by tea time. The great think about a long drive in the car is that there are no distractions (except for a bit of navigation, a bit of shopping and a bit of admiring how a crisp, sunny winter’s day impacts one’s mood) so we were able to talk round the houses about work, and life and balance; and food safety; and science and standard operating procedures SOPs; and of course the Universe and Everything.

We looked at the map and decided that rather than scudding past on the bus or being a hurry to get there in the car, we’d stop off in Ardmore, maybe the oldest ecclesiastical settlement in Ireland, and have a look at an invitingly sandy strand round the corner called Whiting Bay. And it was so. We paused in Ardmore long enough to hop widdershins on one leg round the medieval round tower [R]. Actually Not! That is a sure fire way to fall pregnant and neither of us wanted to have that happen at this time. The faded, eroded, medieval bas-relief sculptures that decorate the ruined ?cathedral? beside the tower are mournfully evocative of long, long ago. Although Ardmore is only a small village [pop about 300] we got hopelessly lost in a maze of narrow roads zig-zagging up the cliff-face but eventually escaped to Whiting Bay; which was worth seeing but not worth going to see.

As so we swept into Cork empty-handed: no buoys, no rope, no fish-boxes. But who needs fish-boxes when they are going to collect 25 fit-for-food-use grocery crates? An added bonus was that Young Bolivar, not seen since September, was working a shift in Dau.II’s restaurant and offered to help carry the crates out to the car. Just a perfick day, I’m glad I spent it with you. Damned glad we didn’t drive the car spectacularly off a cliff at the end, as well.

la heroína de la piscina

We were the second blow-ins to The Valley. The first was a musician and handyman who bought a 2 acre field on a 25% slope and built a wooden house at the top of the plot and an enormous wooden boat at the bottom near the road . . . 40 km from the sea. At least our eccentricities were confined to home-education, Birkenstocks and tree-hugging.  Après nous, la deluge d'artistes: visual, conceptual and mental. Without them there would be no Blackstairs Film Society and we'd have to watch films without subtitles. But the only one we're on borrow-a-cup-of-sugar terms is La Torbellina de Tenerife TdT a multi-tasking, multi-talented woman from Spain who married into one of the local families. She was a rock for O'Manch' and Young Bolivar, our long-term visitors and English language students: bringing them eSpanish food and translating when mutual understanding was vital.

After a life-time lifting tureens in the catering trade her back is crook and she has regular therapeutic sessions in the 25m swimming pool of one of the local hotels. Last week her attention was drawn to a family: mother, father and two excited children: a boy and girl probably twins. TdT noted that the mother was focusing 85% of her attention on her smartphone. Something [precognition is quite possibly one of her many talents] made her think ' keep an eye on those kids' and she was thereby distracted from her normal length-swimming regime. Sure enough, a few minutes later the girl ran whooping straight out of the ladies changing room and disappeared beneath the surface of the pool. TdT swam furiously to the spot, dived down, grabbed the child's arm and heaved her like a drowned kitten onto the poolside tiles. She was no longer pink but a terrible blue. But small children have an imperative to live and the girl coughed up some water and sat up. Her father came quickly on hearing the hullabaloo but the mother was still changing . . . apps on her phone. TdT told the father that he might mark the day as his daughter's [re]birthday and he replied that the twins were indeed 4 and the swim was a birthday treat.  And the life-guard? Out behind the desk in the lobby sharing his attention between the CCTV view of the pool and his laptop. These goddamned devices will be the death of someone one of these days, why, I was almost killed by device-driven inattention.

The St Adjudor's Saving-from-Drowning club in The Valley is fairly select and the only other member I know about is me. When the girls were small, going swimming was part of the relentless round of off-site edutainment that gave them 12 hours a week in the car listening to audio-books and having roiling discussions about life, the universe, and the Eiffel Tower. Those trips, reading books, and the roiling discussion in the car and at the kitchen table was what constituted their education. Despite hating to get wet socks, sometimes I had to be the adult-in-charge at the pool. I loved being with the girls but I didn't like swimming because it was another of the things I was crap at when I was young. My brother and sister were like fish and passed successively their bronze, silver and gold swimming and life-saving exams and have the medals to prove it. I have a certificate for Swimming One Length of the Drake Baths in Plymouth. I could manage two lengths but my bottle gave out beyond that: it was like my anti-prowess at running. ANNyway, about ten years ago, I was standing up to my neck in the water watching the girls coursing up and down when my reveries were distracted by a commotion down at the deep end. A large woman was splashing about unable to make any progress to the edge of the pool. Without thinking, I swam towards her and by holding my breath and standing underneath her I was able to push the woman by her capacious bottom towards the pool side. And the life-guard? That spotty youth was running up and down the poolside shouting . . . and had also been off-site chatting to the girls at the check-in desk. Apparently, not getting into the water is part of the standard operating procedure. We still had 20 minutes left on the clock, so I went back to standing up to my neck in the water until the girls had finished their antics. The woman's husband cruised up at some point to say thank you, but the woman herself was quite oblivious to the drama she had caused. There is, of course, a certain irony that the only one of our sibship who is not qualified to save anyone is the one who has actually saved someone.

Because, in fairy-stories, things often come in threes, I have another life-saving tale. Maybe 20 years ago, shortly after we had left for Ireland, my late lamented pal Roy was walking along one of lone and level beaches that stretch from the outskirts of Newcastle upon Tyne to the Scottish borrrder. In the distance he could see two boys digging a cave into the face of the sand-dunes. As he got a little closer he realised that only boy was visible and he was jumping about in a peculiar manner. Quick as thought, Roy ran to the scene and saw two sneakers poking out of a heap of freshly fallen sand. With a super-human desperate heave, he hauled the other chap from the embrace of death and helped clean the sand from his nose and mouth. Within a couple of minutes, the boys were running off down the beach joshing and shouting towards the distant and invisible parents. Roy wondered afterwards, but didn't lose sleep about it, if the parents ever realised how close they came to a funeral.

These effin' qualifications are now the tail wagging the dog of all aspects of our lives. Train drivers who are 'qualified' without ever going out on their routes. I stopped using the chain-saw for about 5 years after I'd taken a chain-saw handling course which can hardly have been the intention. An elderly neighbour told us a few days ago that he'd been compelled to take a farm-spraying course after 20 years of spraying farms on contract. "Did you learn anything?", I asked. "A little bit about safety,", he replied, "but the paper-work and the exam were a struggle - I was never any good in school". He passed despite the exam, nobody has any interest in failing sprayers; The Man just need to get the optics right.

Flagging energy

It could happen to anyone. When Young Bolivar and I pulled into the centre of Cork last Saturday, the car in front of us sported a green and red flag with a central crest. I nudged YB and asked him to sing his national anthem [he can live in Ireland because he has a Portuguese = EU passport]. But he demurred a) because he didn't know the words and b) it wasn't the Portuguese flag.  And indeed it wasn't: when the traffic sped up, the flag de-limped and exposed itself as belonging to a proud family from Mayo. But you can see how a mistake might be made.

Today is An Event on the Irish sporting calendar: 'tis the All-Ireland GAA Football final.  As ot happens between Mayo [see above] and Dublin the favorites. Almost all the Irish counties North and South of the borrrrder have two colour flags, which makes it dead easy to run-up a few flags cheap if you have two bolts of correct colour cloth and a sewing-machine. That stems from the foundation of the Gaelic Athletic Association in Hayes Hotel, Thurles on 1st of November 1884. The early members of this sport and chauvinism bund were small farmers, laborers, and small town workers who didn't have a lot of money; so cheap flags mattered.

The exceptions to the two-colour convention are but three:

1. Co. Kildare has a plain white flag and are thence nicknamed the Lillywhites. Having a pure white flag is not original to Co. Kildare. It was used by the Ancien Régime of France until it was replaced by the tricolour with the revolution. The pure white flag has subsequently been used by the Taliban and for the first year in power in The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.
2. Co. Offaly, which is really King's County, where my people are buried, has a tricolour, which is green white and gold: effectively the same as the National flag making it, quite frankly, a weird choice.
3. Co Carlow, where I now reside, also sports a tricolour. I have floated the hypothesis that Carlow is so crap at the GAA because nobody can relate to their over-complex flag.

Okay quiz time:
Q1. which of the two tricolors [L]is the county flag of Carlow and which is the national flag of Mali? Do you know the national anthem of Mali. Dang! or is either Guinea, or Guinea Bissau, or Senegal or Ghana, or  Benin. All of them run through green yellow and red variations.

Q2. And while we're about it, is the flag represented [L] the county flag of Offaly or Flag of the Republic of Ireland or neither or both . . . or the flag of La République de Côte d'Ivoire? Would the national anthem help?

You could wonder at a certain lack of imagination is choosing the county colours in the 1880s and 1890s. More than half of the counties are represented by just four colour combos

1. Blue & Gold: Roscommon, Longford [which even share a border], Wicklow, Clare and Tipp. Some pretend to be different by saying it's Saffron or Primrose and Blue, but that's just pedantry.
2. Blue & White: Waterford Up the Déise! Cavan, Laois and Monaghan.
3. Yellow & Green: Leitrim, Meath, Kerry, Donegal. Yes, yes everyone calls it Green and Gold, but that's just gilding the lillow.
4. Red & White: Derry, Tyrone, Cork, Louth.

The flag I like, on its own merits, is that of Co Down which is a bold red and black. There is a lot of flexibility in how these GAA flags are displayed: horizontal or checkerboard are often seen at matches as well as appropriately coloured hats, scarves, ribbons and face-paint. Red and Black have, since at least the Spanish Civil War of 80 years ago, been strongly associated with Anarchism but I've heard no rumours that the plain good people of Down are about to occupy Tesco in Newry and give all the food to the poor people or eject the county councillors from wherever they meet. If any GAA board votes to change the county colours to cerise and magenta, I shall sell up and move there.

Nothing like a rissole

Last year I was maundering on about camels, which allowed me to give hats off to Wm Shagsper with Hamlet teasing poor Polonius for his obsequious agreement "very like a whale" etc. with whatever His Prince suggested. Since I discovered the Wexford Rissole, I've been chuntering on about their virtues to anyone who would listen. By the Mass, I even induced Young Bolivar to try one as we spilled out of The Sky & The Ground after Science Café a couple of months ago. It was more complicated than you might think because there are two sorts of rissole - battered and breaded - which each have their staunch supporters. The [Polish] woman behind the counter asked what we fancied and explained, not really helpfully, than most people preferred them battered but she leaned toward bread-crumbs  . . . or the other way round. It would be unchivalrous, she being young and pretty, to reject her preference but perhaps foolish to reject the majority opinion. So we ordered one of each.  And very nice too: hot, tasty and not requiring a disposable fork.

Since she moved down to the Republic of Cork 3 years ago, Dau.II has been talking up the Cork potato pie as the local equivalent to the Wexford Rissole. When her sister was visiting in July, they ordered two of these crudités and received two objects the size of a baby's head. That would have been okay, except that they had an order of chips as well. Even Dau.II's bloke struggled, and he can capably trencher through a 800g sliced loaf if given a toaster, 200g of butter and half an hour.

I was down in Cork last weekend, launching Young Bolivar into a hostile world. I took the chance to hang out with Dau.II for 30 hours before the work goes mental at The Institute. On Sunday forenoon we piled into the Little Red Yaris and drove out to Kinsale for a walk. Cork has, over the last 50 years, developed as the foodie centre of Ireland and Kinsale is the Capital.  Of course the Real Capital is the English Market in Cork City Centre but that is almost too concentrated. The smells of coffee and cheese and salami and olives sends a rush of blood to the head. Kinsale [R] has more restaurants with more stars than any other town in Ireland. The planning office puts no limits on the use of paint and sometimes the clash of colour is exciting but unfortunate. After wandering around for a while and meeting folks - Dau.II's bloke and his brother seemed to know every busker and artist in town - we called for lunch and washed up in Dino's Family Chip Shop on the quayside.

We all ordered the kind of stuff you can buy in a chipper: chips, chips with cheese, fish, fish-cakes, and lurid coloured drinks. I took a battered sausage and a battered potato pie. The battered sausage was entirely what you would expect: pre-cooked, heated up in piping hot oil and 'robust' of flavour. But 'tis a long way from a rissole that the Cork potato pie was r'ared. What it appeared to be was a small fist of mashed potato lightly seasoned with salt and pepper and covered in chipper's batter like my sausage. A rissole has substance because it is recycling any old crud that is found around and behind and under the fryers at the end of the night. Now I have to confess that, while I still have my own teeth, I don't believe in mashed potato, even if merely a vehicle for butter and cream. It's not a food for infants who are following baby-led weaning [and all kids should be onto that]: they prefer a chunk they can pick up and gum at. Mashed potato too often has the consistency of the baby-rice you can pour from a packet and mix with water. There are plenty of fine authentic Irish recipes incorporating mashed spuds: colcannon, champ and boxty for example, all good. My Great Uncle Walter, fabulously wealthy from coal being discovered under his family estate in Northumberland, lived out his declining years in Budleigh Salterton on the South Devon coast, where the average age is about 65. We were certainly the only children on the beach when we used to visit him and our eccentric Aunt Lily who may have been married to him. ANNyway, Uncle Walter subsisted on Complan and whiskey. He probably ached for mashed potato as something to chew on for a change.

Ingles, not so much

Things move on . . . and so do folks. Last weekend, Young Bolivar, jack-of-all-trades except grammarian, shifted his duff to the Republic of Cork. Actually, I shifted it in the Little Red Yaris. We had our final road trip on Saturday morning. Since early April the business model has been that we will get him up to speed with his English and he will make himself useful round the farrrm.

The latter half of this devil's bargain has been been fulfilled in spades. The evidence of his tidy mind, attention to detail and skilled hands is at every turn. Field stone walls round the base of the wood-shed; the wood-shed!; a field stone gate-pillar; a clapper-bridge across a drain and steps up the ditch; a field without thistles; doors on the polytunnel; boxes for bees, bats and birds; shelves in the tool shed and a system for keeping it tidier.

The learning English? Well, not so good. If you're over the age of 14, learning a new language is hard. I learned Dutch only by total immersion at work in a zoo in Rotterdam.  All my work-mates m'n makkers, although they left school at 16 because they loved animals, were fluent in English and either French or German or both. I made a pact with those who worked most closely with me - bedankt Yvonne! - to only speak Nederlands on the job. There are therefore a lot of technical terms - bak, dekruit, schoonmaken, water verversen - that I've only used in Dutch and seem clumsy when translated into English. I'm sure Dutch has verb tenses and I may have used them, even used them correctly, but I never bothered with nederlandse grammatica. I've mentioned before how, on an earlier sojourn in Gelderland, I'd bought a Dutch translation of The Hobbit and a dictionary: that helped.

For Portuguese, I had formal one-to-one lessons courtesy of the Portuguese Government, who unaccountably paid for an delightful young woman to occupy an office in my English University and spread Portuguese language and culture. I never opened a book on Dutch grammar, but was compelled to struggle through Portuguese verb endings for the subjunctive,  conditional and imperfect tenses. But I also had an hour a week for many weeks talking Portuguese with a woman who was easy on the eye and not too brutal in her corrections. Later, I enrolled in a Portuguese Conversation evening class which helped cement some of the lingo with other lusitanophiles.  Even when I was In The Field in Portugal, the Atlantic Islands and Cabo Verde, it wasn't really total immersion. I was either walking up the coast, largely solitary, or gathering genetic data with at least one other anglophone. Nevertheless, I was the go-to-guy in our party when haggling with taxi-drivers or asking for directions. And I could comfortably read the newspapers in Portuguese.

Young Bolivar was far too old to learn a foreign language by total immersion and too orderly in his mind to be willing tp make mistakes. He didn't really have the aptitude to have formal lessons either. It's all very well being orderly in a carpentry workshop, but it requires work to apply rules and relationships to words. I found, learning German for a year in school, that writing down and learning off lists and lists of German vocabulary was a skeleton on which I could hang the grammar. But I was good in school with the old rote learning - that's why I'm still pretty good at Pub Quizzes. YB never really enjoyed school except things like art and technical drawing. I printed out pages of pictures of tools and materials with English labels, but that didn't seem to hook him. Hanging out in the middle of nowhere with a elderly couple whose eSpanish was even worse than his Ingles, was not the optimum way to get fluent. Even stacking shelves in Lidl will require an exponential increase in his language skills: the fellow workers are likely to be Poles or Nigerians who have not a word of Spanish and no interest in South American politics. And the manager is almost certain to be a monoglot who will expect his/her instructions to be acted on correctly and quickly.

One big difference between learning a foreign language in the 70s and 80s rather that in the 10s is that immersion used to be easier because that''s all there was. Now we have social media youtube and skype available in your native language. If you're lonely and isolated, it requires supreme self-discipline to switch off the snapchat and engage in the alien but physically present environment in which you find yourself. In my 9 weeks in Wageningen NL in the Summer of 1975, I think I made two phone calls home. YB spend several hours a day watching, listening and speaking Spanish which cannot have help drive the learned English deeper into his brain.

I've no doubt YB will make some employer very happy and he'll have a social life living in the centre of one of the hoppingest small cities in Europe. Thanks for everything and best of luck in the future!