Wilf Rock

Thus let me live, unseen, unknown; 
Thus unlamented let me die; 
Steal from the world, and not a stone 
Tell where I lie.

When I was in Grad School in the early 1980s, I was trying to get a novel handle on the [Euro]peopling of New England and the Canadian Maritime Provinces. I did A Lot of reading about pre-colonial demographics. I also put in a lot of field-work foot-miles from Cape Breton to Cape Cod in the East to New York and up the Hudson River valley to Montreal and the St Lawrence. Starting in to Year Three of this project my boss advised me to enroll in an evening course at the Harvard Extension School. It was something like "Grave markers and iconography in colonial New England cemeteries". As reg'lar readers may suspect, I have a low threshold for "gosh how interesting, do tell me more". I can't remember any details but if you plot "flying skulls" across time and space it looks like this fashion for memorializing the beloved dead in this way swept like a wave across  New England . . . only to be replaced by "sad angels", Our teacher projected A Lot of 50x50mm slides from a very large collection.

My abiding memory is of gravestones remembering several children from one family dying within days of each other. Also considerable discrepancy in age between husband and wife. And so many dead young mothers. Death omnipresent, a belief in a happy hereafter, but people still wanted [their names and dates] to be recorded forever in this vale of tears.

My Grandfather Wilfred [L, R] was born in in 1879 at The Big House in King's County as the youngest son. There was no future there, let alone a fortune, so he upstakes and joined the Army seeing service in the Second [Colenso, Spion Kop, Mafeking, Ladysmith, that one] Boer War and on the NW Frontier.  One story is that he got rather too deeply in a romantic entanglement in India, so resigned his commission and fled to America in the 00s of the 20thC: maybe winning a section of the Hollywood Hills in a card game; maybe being in San Francisco during or just after the 1906 earthquake; maybe losing all his money to become a panhandling hobo for a while. With more certainty, he volunteered for the RNVR in WWI and lost a lung while serving a balloon-observer in the North Sea. Later he was stationed in Egypt with the RNAS (Air Service) which, in 1918, was merged with the RFC to form the RAF Royal Air Force. I'm sure there were other people who served in all three divisions of the armed forces, but he's the only one who is related to Me. When peace broke out, he became Harbourmaster at Dunmore East, which is where his only son, my father grew up. The photo was apparently snapped in 1952, when Wilfred was about the age I am now. He's got a better hat, but I've got a better sofa!

Wilfred [was] retired in 1947 and lived out his remaining days across the water in Co Wexford. He died in 1957 and was buried [R] in St Mary's, the Church of Ireland First Fruits church where his cousin (and landlady) played the organ. I always found it peculiar that there should be a (Carlow white granite) cross at the grave-head because in practice he was agnostic edging atheist. But then again, your still living rellies have the final say w.r.t. grave-goods.

The Board of First Fruits was a cunning plan which, between 1778 and 1833 funnelled a lot of money into building "established" churches (and glebes to house the rectors) across the island of Ireland. 700 new and refurbished churches over 50 years had a significant impact on the landscape of vernacular architecture. At some level of consciousness we'll have twigged "Oh, another Protestant church on that hill, down than lane" there is no need to read the sign-board, if any, to recognise the Gestalt. St Mary's has the same look-and-feel as the church in Bunmahon which is now the Copper Coast Visitor's Centre. 

Wilfred lay there among the Protestants, quietly weathering topside and composting below. Thirty-something years later, we came back to Ireland in 1990 and I would drop in to say hello if I was passing. I reported to my father that the lettering at the foot of the cross was weathered almost to illegibility. In 1998, we asked the local monumental mason to "make it better". This stone-guy emptied a £15 bag of chippings onto the concrete slab and sent an invoice for £120. Which was a bit disheartening. Shortly after that my father died in his turn and grave-keeping slipped way way down on the list of priorities. That chippings episode turned out to be useful because my letter to the mason recorded the full text of the inscription while it was still, barely, legible.

Forward another ~25 years and there were more deaths in the family. Three of them were buried in Kill, Co Waterford and a rather spectacular, somewhat foreign looking, ✞ was commissioned to mark the spot. This was all the work of Thomas Glendon, a quite-famous mason and letterer, and last year I drove a shovel to facilitate some up date-ing. We all liked the cut of Tom's lettering: very elegant, the ligatures. Tom is even older than me, and with a sense of clock ticking, we asked Tom to re-cut Wilfred's 1957 inscription.  I lied about the inscription in 2o2o. It's not Stephenson's Home is the sailor, home from the sea And the hunter, home from the hill but rather Sleep after toil, port after stormy seas [as L and below] from Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene which has the virtue of being a) shorter than RLS b) penned, possibly in Ireland, by a planter from the Other Island. Our planter family came over about 50 years later . . . and stayed.

As they do, and like Topsy, the project growed. From two lines scrunched at the base of a granite cross to 200kg of recumbent Kilkenny black limestone slightly battered to shed the rain, and filling about 20% of the space between the curbs of the grave. That took forever several months of to-fro, but on a bitter wet and wind-driven day at the end of January, Wilf's Rock was delivered to site [R] as we watched white horses scudding across Bannow Bay.

Book 1. CANTO IV, verse XL
He there does now enjoy eternall reft
And happy eafe, which thou doeft want and craue,
And further from it daily wandereft:
What if fome little payne the paffage haue
That makes fraile flefh to feare the bitter waue?
Is not fhort paine well borne, that bringes long eafe,
And layes the foule to fleepe in quiet graue?
Sleepe after toyle, port after ftormie feas,
Eafe after warre, death after life does greatly pleafe.

Title a rather weak reference to Wolf Rock which caused HMS NormalAccident in 2002. The more familiar, because nearer, Wolf Rock has a lighthouse. Waterwolf is another, floodier, thing altogether. 

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 

Domhan beag

In the September of 2006, I rendered a small service to an elderly US Citizen. I was leaning on the farm-gate with a straw in my mouth when a people-carrier containing a family of USCs came up the lane a little hesitantly. They, six adult sibs and their mother, were on an Irish roots tour and believed that their people might have been buried hereabouts before the family upstakes and left for America in ca. 1880. Their data was better than mine on the genealogy; but I knew where to park their bus and for good measure said that the matriarch, or any of the party, was welcome to use the 'bathroom' when they came down the hill after their historical explorations. And it was so. That Christmas I was included in her Holiday Round-Robin and the following Christmas the holiday RR included a bit of teasing (I paraphrase) . . . that Bob - he's been a better son to me than [not all of ] my sons. All good fun. 

Over the next twenty (20!) years, each one of the adult children from the '06 people-carrier has come by for tea, or lunch, or both, or a pee, bringing their own children; and the younger generation have occasionally come visit on their own as they make their separate pilgrimages to The Ould Country. On one memorable occasion Jim was on a coming-of-age road trip with Jim Jnr. Their visit coincided with the unfortunate death of one of our ewes. We were chatting in the yard after their arrival when the truck from "the fallen animal service" backed into the yard. Oh maybe we can help? offered Jim because that's how the family was r'ared. As the back-gate of the truck clanged to earth, we were assailed by a wall of noisesome smell, a buZZZing cloud of flies & the enormously bloated carcass, legs pointing every which way, of a not too recently dead cow. The Jims retired as gracefully as two city-boys could when Mother Nature presents her more piquant parts. As so often, a cup of tea revived them a short while later.

Last week, Jim Snr.'s youngest brother Dan [whom prev] was on a lightning trip to Ireland to use-it-or-lose-it some 2025 annual leave. He had lost a day stateside when a flight was cancelled and so had to re-arrange a rather tight schedule. That meant that he came to ours twice - on Tuesday for lunch . . . and Thursday to climb the hill behind our house - which, as we've since established, is also behind the house of his ancestors. I am back to my May fitter-than-fatter regime of powering up the hill to The Fork of the Cross (An Gabhal na Croise) [as R]. What with lunch-and-all on Tuesday, I didn't get going on my yomp till dusk. 

Most unexpectedly, I encountered my neighbour below - much further up the hill than he is usually to be found. As we walked down together he confessed that, working from home behind a tight hedge on the county road he got to hear A Lot of quite indiscreet gossip. Why, just that afternoon a large blue Audi had stopped on the road and the driver had got out to have big chat with a pedestrian who was a) wearing a cowboy hat and b) pulling a small yappy-dog. You've been here longer than me, said Neighbour, do you know who the doggone wannabee cowboy might be? I ran though some incorrect suggestions and we left it there. But I did admit to knowing who was driving a rented blue Audi that afternoon.

Thursday noontime, after a cup of tea  in the morning with a possible 5th cousin, Dan rocked up ready to roll up some heathery miles to become the first of his generation to pass St Fursey's Altar to the Summit >!taRAAA!< of our Cnoc. And it was so; && we detoured South to visit the Holy Year Cross; && we descended on a different route to make a satisfying  3 ↩ mile x ↗1,000↘ ft circular yomp of it . . . with plenty of time to pause <puf> <puf> <puf> to admire the view; natter with another couple of walkers at the summit; natter to each other about this and that. 

On the way down Dan threw out:  Oh I almost forgot: as I left you after lunch on Tuesday, I had to go slow because of a fellow walking a dog and, as we do, I rolled down the window to say excuse me and how d'ye do. And (of course) I introduced myself and it turns out we share a surname. Wait. Stop, I said, curtly interrupting him, did your new relative have a cowboy hat and a yappy dog? Of course he did. Because Ireland and its entire diaspora have only 4 degrees of separation it is An Domhan Beag [small world] as The Boy found out in Poland two weeks ago. Dan's new Rellie also shared cell phone numbers for some other potential family members across three counties. Doubtless there will be some comparing of DNA bases at ancestry.com.  The Cousins and The Summit:

Beach off-limits

A lot can happen overnight, so I get out and about as soon as I've downed my first pot of tea. The key thing is to head-count the sheep: anything other than N = 15 it's Houston we have a problem.  It has happened that we have extras, as when two years ago our abutting neighbour bought in a handful of particularly jumpy sheep. But it's more likely for the count to come up short. Anything missing is dead OR has its head caught in a wire fence OR has gone on holiday. All of these are a pain in the arse. It is therefore a relief when, after repeated counts, the missing beast bursts out of the shrubbery; or is revealed cudding in plain sight exactly masked by a 'larger' sheep [not small but far away] in the foreground.

08:00 last Wednesday it was N = 14 again and I set off à la BoPeep. I say again because one of the sheep has been persistently AWOL over the Winter. She had a bad case of The Itch, lost chunks of fleece and looked quite wretched altogether. It was as if the poor creature had been sent to Coventry or the sheep equivalent of Leperstown. Despite expecting any day to discover her stiff with her legs in the air, she has survived two rounds of treatment and the worst of Winter. When she is away feeling mizz, she is often to be found in or around The Skunch. The Field Over The River is so called because beyond its Eastern edge the land falls abruptly 10m to the river stream which bounds our farm. This cliff tapers off along our field immediately N. Between this gentle slope and the cliff is a bosky dell or 'skunch'. There has always been a low wall parallel to the river in the Skunch and beyond it is a tiny beach covered in willow and shade-loving woodland plants. The kids used to have picnic-and-paddle down there when they were tots, but it's gotten jungly and briar-grown since the girls left home.

And that's where I found the errant sheep. In her earlier lonely sojourns she'd eaten her way through to wall and now was hopped over to the beach. Thence is but a short paddle to Wexford and the neighbour's meadow. Which would never do, so I hooshed her out of it, and spent the rest of the morning running a fence along the dwarf wall. Running a fence requires the assembly of a measured length of sheep-wire + stakes, pry-bar, shovel, staples, sledge-hammer, claw-hammer, pliers, secateurs, gloves, chain-saw + PPE. Then pushing a wheel-barrow full of kit 300m down-hill on a 1:10 slope. Down is easy, but you really don't want to push 40m = 20kg of off-cut sheep wire UP hill. 

We'll have to see what happens but the beach is now officially off-limits. ↑ indicating the two more-or-less vertical trees which book-end and support the wire. Dry-stone walls are the very devil for driving fence-posts unless they are tall enough and wide enough to have two faces back-filled with small stones and sod. Not the case here, so three (3) posts will have serve for the 11m run of fence.

Fakkn Darragh

There is a sense in some quarters that Met Eireann tends to throw out Orange and Red weather warnings with gay abandon. That leaves them in the position of having to say "no no we really mean it this time . . . don't make unnecessary Crossmolinas". Storm Darraaaaargh arrived at tea-time Friday 06Dec24 upgraded to Status Orange wind for the whole country, Red for Atlantic NW. Obsessively checking on the nullschool weather map , as I do, I could see the storm barrelling relentlessly across the N Atlantic and crumping into the Wild Atlantic Way.

Two hours later, just after midnight, we lost power [with a couple of flickers then plunging darkness] despite being a long old way from any coasts or any Red counties. We are misfortunate living in a sparsely populated rural back water because [and proper order] when the ESB does triage on where to restore power first, sparsely populated rural back waters come after schools, towns, google server farms, hospitals. If you're a dairy farmer you need a generator, because ain't nobody going milk 160 cows by hand . . . and how would you get it down to 4°C a.s.a.p.?

Those who built our farm-and-yard were great vernacular architects and faced everything South on a downhill slope with the out-buildings sheltering the yard from the predominant Westerlies and the chilling Siberian Easterly winds. 80 years ago, Old Jim he planted a shelter-belt of Scots Pine Pinus sylvestris round the acre that includes house, yard and haggard. All bets are off though in a global warming world where the warmer ocean fizzes up the wind. We are now in a managed retreat from living surrounded by trees and hugging them as we pass.

After storms, my first light task is to go out for a walk to assess the damage and count the sheep. If N_sheep = zero, a fence is down somewhere and the flock is whooping it up in the next county. Also I need to know if the lane from our gate to the county road is clear. Saturday morning I found a number of trees lying W→E at right angles to the ditches/walls that had anchored them for the last several decades. My next action was to send an ironic txt to my eponymous pal "Fakkn Darragh, throwing shapes agane. We are 3 trees down. How are y'all?" As I was out, I went to visit our nearest neighbour, at the bottom of the lane, and found his front garden full of horizontal trees. Part of his Cupressus x leylandii hedge, allowed to get far too big, had clattered against a lanky 30 y.o. Eucalyptus and brought that to the ground as well. I could hear his voice "I'm okay" and if I knelt down could see the lower part of his legs, but nothing of the [undamaged] house behind him.

My first task, though, was to deal with a rowan / mountain ash / caorthann = Sorbus aucuparia, which like my neighbour's trees had fallen out of one of the ditches and neatly filled the lane with a six-foot wall of ivy Hedera helix and horizontal rowan branches. Two hours later, I had reduced this impenetrable wall to a single trunk-supporting branch which any person or sheep could step over but prevented vehicular access to the uplands. I was just finishing up when the branch settled, pinned my saw and I borked the chain getting it out.  So I had to leave things thus:

you can see the lane up beyond the obstacle. And hey it's sunny after the storm: quite makes you believe in god or at least Gen9:13. That lane filled to the brim with drifted snow in late Feb 2018 which is another sort of impassable.

Sunday afternoon, I had time for him-next-door (an even more recent blow-in than ourselves) and joined a meitheal of miscellaneously skilled and equipped neighbours clearing a path through the Eucalyptus. For every person who was in the garden cutting pulling and stacking logs and brash, at least one car stopped to gawp or get out of their car and offer unasked-for advice to say how the clearance should be done. For the second time [first] in four weeks I can harrumph about the hurlers on the ditch. I dunno why it's so much easier to find fault than pick up a shovel and help. These clear-up operations are so often a Javi Problem: if you set to (with help is better) you can make substantive progress in a couple of hours. And by tea-time yesterday, we were confident that our neighbour could get his motorbike on the county road liberated from his brushwood prison.

We got power back at 16:00, forty (40) hours after it went out. Some of our neighbours were for throwing food out of their freezers. Me, I was for eating a hella gurt quantity of ice-cream in case it was spoiled.

Postscript for posterity: gusts of 120km/h were recorded at Shannon; homes and businesses 400,000 were without power: some are looking a week w/o power + 35,000 broadband fails; the Holyhead ferry terminal was whacked out of commission.

Clueless in Cloughjordan

Bruce Darrell set up in Cloughjordan when it was rebranded as an/the EcoVillage. His enterprise was the RED (Research, Education and Development) Gardens Project which is a lot more useful and kinder to the planet than TED and all its TechBros. Here he is calling a halt to one of his long-running community actions.  RED Gardens grows food organically and offers surplus next to an honesty box. 12 years ago, looking for more nutrient input, he put out the word that [local] folk could add their compostable waste to his compost bins . . . and he'd turn it - sieve it - sort it - barrow it - dig it . . . [one year later] . . . harvest it.

I've never met Bruce, but a lot of our home-ed & rice-cakes, Birkenstocks & FloatySkirts pals have passed through the Eco Village, so I daresay I've washed the dishes [at the annual HEN gatherings] for the self same people, or their carefree childer, who can't be humped to keep plastic out of their compost bin. Bruce started believing that he was getting an asset for free, so of course he should add the labour needed to transform the gift into something garden-useful.

Poor bugger is now worn out with fetching uncompostable shite [mostly plastic] out of compost as he turns and sieves it. He's spent years cutting his co-composters some slack. Our small veg-peeling knife turned [lit.] up in the compost the year after Javi left: it must have gotten submerged in the potato peel. But the compost of others is no longer worth the candle. And so, earlier this year he stopped managing this community resource . . . but let everyone know that Compost Manager was available in sits.vac. Of course, nobody else stepped up the the plate, just as nobody else had offered to put in an afternoon compost turning in his garden.

Read the comments attached to the YT: they are an instructive collective confessional of other people's experience with compost, lost sink-plugs and community action. Bruce baulked at putting a DO NOT sign beside the bin because 

• a) he worked as a design-wonk in a previous life and believes signage is only needed because the system is poorly designed 
• b) the people who leave plastic cookie packets in their compost ain't a gonna read no sign 
• c) it seems officious

But I did like his idea [see below] of creating a 'lost&found' board next to the compost intake bin on which were pinned a weird and wonderful selection of what The Community had mistakenly concluded was compostable. See my earlier rant about tea-bags and the difference between bio-degradable [years] and compostable [months].

"Having said that, I was thinking of setting up a big board beside the compost where I could hang all the stupid things that I found in the compost, almost like an art instillation. And label it 'Lost and Found' or 'Is this Yours?' or something like that, to make a joke about it, and so that people can see what does end up in there. I think that would be more interesting, effective and educational, than an instructional sign."

Darwin Glass

The Blob's Southern Correspondent TBSC aka the BiL in Kaapstad ZA sent me an enigmatic email:
>> Subject: Darwin . . . May be of mild interest to you.
but no attachment; to which I replied:
>> Subject: Re: Darwin . . . Missing link Darwin? or Oz City? or Uruguayan footballer? 1999 asteroid?lunar crater? All interesting.

But closer to home than the moon, there is Darwin Crater: a terrestrial geo-feature near Mt Darwin in Tasmania. This is a circular 1.2km ⌀ dimple in the landscape, about 15km South of the mining community Queenstown (pop ~1800). The peaks hereabouts: Mt Darwin [1030m] Mt Owen [1150m] Mt Lyell [920m] Mt Sedgwick [1150m], all named after 19thC Brit geologists, are 'mountains' in a cosy not very tall sense, such as we have outside our own back door in Mt Leinster [800m]. Although they look a bit more craggy than Mt Leinster.

There are strict criteria for deciding whether divots in the surface of the Earth are cause by extra-terrestrial impacts and none of these have been clocked for the Darwin Crater. But the smart money is on meteorite because a 20km x 20km area round about is rich in Darwin Glass [fragment R]. Geologists, like all good scientists, get narked by by the niggling unknown and so  “[Dr. Ramsay J] Ford accompanied a team that bulldozed a path from the Franklin River Road into the centre of Darwin Crater in 1974. The team drilled cores up to 230m deep in search of diagnostic shock features. “

That quote is from an account by Brad Dare, as part of his project to map and visit all the known, and aspirational, impact craters in Australia. It looked straightforward on the map. All he needed to do was park on the Franklin River Road, find the bulldozer track, yomp in, take some pictures and yomp out - it's only 2 miles = 3 km. Not so fast puny mortal. 

Mother Nature has had 50 years to return the rainforest to its pre-dozer state and soon Dare and his companion found themselves in Woozle status “After battling the swamp for some time, we noticed some footprints and, feeling elated that we must be closing in on the original track, followed them. Our hearts sank when we realised not too long after they were our own footprints, and we had inadvertently gone around in a circle. “ and later their 21stC equipment blinks out “The swamps’ humidity had allowed water to get inside the housing of our electronic equipment. With a flicker of the screen, both the GPS and compass went dead, and we were on our own. “ 

They did make it out, as do almost all folks who are lost in the woods, but it does put into perspective what a daunting task it is mount a search when folks get lost in wilderness national parks. See also when my neighbour lost his dog and his phone forever [last para] in a treeless (but fissured and scrub-covered) area a few dozen hectares in extent.

Turns out that Darwin Crystal is an asset, at least among the Woo: €31.16 Darwin Glass Healing Crystal ~28mm. Having physically transformed by the celestial slam-dunk “Close to 11,250 cubic metres of Darwin Glass was thrown into the air and scattered over a circular area totalling 400 square kilometres.”
Q: What would that be worth aliquotted as €30 = 30mm 🧊s?
A: There are ~30 x 30 x 30 = 30k such 🧊s in 1cu.m so about 300 million frags in total; valued retail at ~€9 billion. That's A Lot of sugar: enough to run all the schools in Ireland for a year.

Imagine! an asset that you just have to pick up from the ground on either side of the Franklin River Road! I've high-lighted the just because it's doing some heavy lifting. By happy coincidence the Darwin glass is spread over 400 million sq.m. or one chunk per sq.m. Since they were scattered far and wide 800,000 years ago, a good bit of a) jungle, b) swamp c) razor sharp grass d) leeches have moved in on top. There must be easier ways of earning $30.

AFOL LEGO BURP

How much information about the Tokio Express do you have capacity for? Tracey Williams doesn't think that a book's worth is TMI! On 13 Feb 1997, the container-ship Tokio Express was caught in a brutal storm between Land's End and the Scilly Isles and a freak wave carried away a number of TEUs which were washed overboard. Within a few weeks specific designs of Lego 'bricks' started to appear on Cornish beaches. Lego head-office supplied an inventory of the lost pieces and they are still being found nearly 28 years later. And not only in Cornwall.

Ironically, a good proportion of the lost pieces were nautical themed: octopus, life-raft, flippers, sea-grass, life-jacket. The available inventory tells how many pieces of each type were hoiked off on their journey in 1997, so finders can assess how rare their pieces are. Green Dragons are the Holy Grail in the field.

I'm a beachcomber, buoys and rope division. Dau.I is a librarian, Northside Dublin division. She correctly surmised that I would like to read Adrift: the curious tale of Lego lost at sea (2022) by Tracey Williams. When I became one of the earliest unDanish adopters of Lego, aged 7 in 1961, there were only red bricks. The spaceships, dragons, flowers and helmets all came later. I really wouldn't count as an AFOL [adult fan of Lego] although several of my family wear that badge. With my failing eyesight, I don't imagine I'll become an ABOL [adult beachcomber of Lego] because the search image is too small. a BURP is a big ugly rock piece, see also LURP. 

What else did I discover? The standard Lego plastic is made of acrylonitrile butadiene styrene ABS, which come together in varying proportions depending on the polymerization conditions. ABS is hard, shiny, chemically resistant, stable, ductile (= un-brittle). All these properties contribute to making Lego the brick of choice for the last three generations. But also ensure that pieces can withstand the buffets of waves, sand, salt for decades before landing on a beach and getting a second life as a rather shabby collectible. 

My son the engineer put himself through Open University to get his first degree and is now designing signalling networks for British Rail. Make an error here and people will die. I like the idea that there are life-and-death averse B.Eng.s who are working for Lego tonking a concept brick 100x with a precisely weighted hammer and looking for cracks.

Irvine's foot

Because things come in threes it is fortunate that we can now add Sandy Irvine's foot to Capitaine Legionaire Danjou's [wooden] hand and maybe Galileo's finger. But knock yourself out: Susie Dent has written a whole book on famous body parts Vital Organs . . . also on YT [45m].

Andrew Comyn Irvine was last seen on The Blob in 2021. . . or with George Mallory near the summit of Everest on 8th June 1924. They found Mallory's body in 1999. But Irvine had the camera which might retain the evidence that the intrepid Brits had made it to the highest point of the World a generation before Hillary and Tenzing. Now they've found Irvine's boot with what's left of his foot inside.
Q. How did they know that it was Irvine's boot?
A. Because the sock had his name tag on it!
They'll do a DNA test and compare it to his grand-niece Julie Summers who is also author of his biography Fearless on Everest The Quest for Sandy Irvine (2020, £20) But any reasonable person would consider it case closed. Sandy's sister Evelyn married his school-friend Dick Summers. It is claimed that Irvine had a fling with Marjory Summers the step-mum of Dick Summers; or something - I'm frankly Scarlett about illicit interwar bonking, given the reg'lar old-fashioned forensic evidence in this case.

That evidence [see L] gave me a frisson. Part of my very expensive education required me to leave home for about 3/4 of every year and go boot camp with hundreds of other chaps. Laundry still had to be done in those institutions and we were requested-and-required to supply the commissariat with 12 handkerchiefs [remember them?]; 12 shirts; 18 collars; 12 pantses; and 12 vests. WTF collars? Yup we had to attach the collar to each shirt with a pair of studs; also cuff-links. These had to come back to the correct locker, so each item was labelled with Cash's name tapes. As you see Irvine's [mother?] chose the default colour. In our family, for reasons lost in the mists of fading memory I was B.T.SCIENTIST in black, my brother's name tapes were blue and my sister's green. At about the same time (as Charles Windsor was playing The Pirate |King at Gordonstoun) Cash's won the right to say 'Manufacturers of Woven Name Tapes to Her Majesty the Queen.' 

PS MeFi commentary on foot of the story. Interesting idea: check Mallory and Irvine's pockets for [top souvenir] rocks rather than cameras.

Lost in Dublin

I guess I am a diasporan. In 1931 my father left Dunmore East at the age of 14 and more or less didn't come back: like Pat the Salt he ran away to sea; although The Da aka "Sir" didn't ship before the mast, but rather, in time, got to drive very big naval ships in quite exotic [and mundane] places. All his kids were born in England - Dover, because my mother was born there and went home to deliver the sprogs. But all my paternal rellies were in Ireland and, as kids, we returned every year to visit a diminishing store of agéd female relatives - Rosslare - Wexford - Tipperary - Wicklow - and home to wherever home was that year in England.

The year I turned 12 years old, we rang the changes on this round because my folks had business with the family lawyer in Dublin. It was also, coincidentally, the year we came with a 14ft touring caravan to save on hotels. The lawyer occupied fantastically dusty and decrepit chambers round the back of TCD - since demolished for the extension of the Mont Clare Hotel. Lest we die of boredom or from inhaling spores from long dead protestant dust, we three kids were deposited in the snug of Rice's Bar at the top of Grafton Street with minerals and bags of crisps. A peculiar choice? because Rice's, at least when I was a student a few years later, was The Dublin Gay Bar. But then again the whole othering anxiety balloon about The Gays (let alone The Zombies and The Kidnappers) hadn't gone up. So here we are in Rice's [◎pink blob] on the NW corner of Stephen's Green S; the parents are at the solicitor [▶blue arrow] on the NW corner of Merrion Square M. The car & caravan are parked extravagantly occupying several parking bays somewhere on Merrion Square.

As a Plan: so far, so good. But when I'd guzzled my mineral and the crisps were finished and I'd had enough being teased by my sibs, I announced that I was going to hang out in the caravan and stomped out of the pub. A while later, my parents returned to collect their family and head off towards the ferry port. Consternation! Contingency plan to leave one parent in Dublin to liaise with the Gardai and the Bureau of Missing Persons; while the other parent returned to England as scheduled with the rump of the family.

Meanwhile, I'd made two circuits of Stephen's green [we'd parked beside a large park with trees, here was a large park with trees] and found no caravan. I then started cutting through the Green to sneak up on the ephemeral caravan and catch it before it disappeared again. Eventually, I cut my losses and returned to Rice's to endure more [parched] abuse from my brother and sister. Let me tell you, the Prodigal son was in the ha'penny place compared to what I experienced in a torrent of relief-plus-annoyance. So it all ended happily ever after, as we all caught the ferry together that night. The mobile-phone generation cannot imagine the sketchiness of communication protocols in the 1960s.

We never toured in the caravan again and it was parked up on blocks in the field next to our house in Essex. I adopted it a tuthree years later as my atelier: banging out rubbish poetry on an old Olivetti portable typewriter.

A few years later, I was old enough to vote and old enough to leave home so I left Essex and turned up to try studenting in Trinity College Dublin. I was no longer answerable to my parents who were 400km and an Irish Sea away; so I could get lost in Dublin without causing an international incident.
I was still trying to locate people / things round the periphery of Stephen's Green though.

Small but perfickly formed

Earlier I was writing about how well we'd done this year w.r.t. processing the traditional hay-meadow into, like, hay. But the title to that piece Haircuts All Round, was a very partial account. 

In parallel this year we found, hidden in plain sight in the next village a traditional hay-mower. Years ago, when we first blew in, there was a agéd farmer who could still wrastle a pair of horses into harness and have them draw a plough to turn sod. We came this ⇐⇒ far from getting him up to work for us, but it never happened and then he died. Séan The Mow is about my age and owns an MF135 tractor which is older than any of our children. It's super-dinky and he's super careful. Young chaps with big tractors tend to race around like it was a cross-country rally both on road and off- [Séan's opinion]. 

For small buckety field with doubtful margins, tearing around is a recipe for >!kerChang!< broken kit when, say, a mowing bar meets a lump of granite which has tumbled off the field boundary into the long grass. We have two fields on the far side of the world lane which we really need for grazing between {15 Apr and 01 Jul} when the main paddocks are going All Trad.  Being under-stocked, these fields tend to grow bracken Pteridium aquilinum and rushes Juncus ?effusus. In 2022, it took me 2½ hours to scythe the most bracken-jungly small corner of one field. I was only 68 then - a fit young stripling; but as an annual solution it's barely sustainable. Séan did the whole field in the same time: bracken thistles rushes gorse and miscellaneous thatch all together. See [L] that could, the little MF135 taking it handy. Being so small means that the tractor can e a s e  its way through any small gate no matter how tight the turn, and also up a real narrow uneven slope between two trees to reach the top step of the field.

Part of the contract was to mow a sadly neglected heritage apple orchard at the bottom of the field over the lane. [Above] you can see Séan making a start on that task. His fully extend rig is less than half the width of the Big Boys Tonka Toys which were roaring around the bigger fields. Volume is the cube of linear dimensions, so those tractors are 2 x 2 x 2, call it 10x the size of the humble MF135:

• MF135 45 horsepower = 31kW; 1.4 tonnes in her socks
• Claas Arion 630 = 121kW; 6.6 tonnes

Apart from anything else, the bigger tractor is nearly 4x more powerful but 5x heavier and will compact the soil that much worse. Leaving the footprint which will absorb less rain and send the water down hill to cause flash floods downstream as well as ripping out the pearl mussels Margaritifera margaritifera and riparian trees. This MF135 is held together, literally, with baler-twine and, metaphorically, with prayer. The inset shows the lucozade bottle half full of bar oil which miraculously sits on a I-beam above the PTO - convenient to its task. No matter how lumpy the field or pot-holey the road to the job, this bottle never bounces out of its trough to be lost.

Change Islands

My Parapals Rory and Alastair, for all that they mad-busy, are great readers altogether. I've taken on board a few of their book-recs out of respect to their sense of what's worth spending time on. The latest rec to be eased out of the library has been  Radical Help: How we can remake the relationships between us and revolutionise the welfare state (2018) by "social engineer" Hilary Cottam. 

Cottam's thesis is that William "Charterhouse, Balliol" Beveridge's 1942 vision for a Welfare State is no long fit for purpose in a post-industrial society top heavy with extractive plutocrats and ranks of declining Olds. And always the ♇!⊗king market, as if competition was always obvs better than community and cooperation. Maybe Capitalism = Koyaanisqatsi = "a state of life that calls for another way of living": Caring for each other is not about efficiency or units of production. It is about human connection, our development, and at the end our comfort and dignity. 

In the UK, there are 100,000 neighbours-from-hell families, each of which is costing The State about £250,000 every year. One case study of a (single parent four offspring one preg) family in Swindon clocked 74 different professionals from 20 different agencies (tutors, counsellors, police, housing, health visitors, the social) involved in the family's care and attention. Cottam's people shadowed (with a time sheet) the eldest boy's social-worker and found that 74% of his time was spend on Admin (the forms, the forms); 12% on the phone haggling with other agencies; leaving 14% of the working week for actual work with the chap. But that social-worker's case load was much longer than one troubled teenager. 5½ hours a week spread across a dozen kids barely gives a social worker time to take off his coat, and in-fill another questionnaire before driving off to the next meeting. FFS don't use neighbours-from-hell and the like, it lacks compassion and smacks of hubris - the overweening complacency that it could never happen to me coupled with victim-blaming.

Cottam sets out the stall for the UK welfare state as it now stands. The Irish equivalent is not substantively different. When novel "obvious to all thinking people" good things are suggested, The State puts the kibosh on them double-quick:

• See the same doctor? Too expensive
• Help another person? Too risky
• Provide solutions through a known community group? Against the rules of competition

Manage need vs develop capabilities

The middle section of the book looks at left-field "Experiments" or pilot-studies with which Cottam has been involved; professing, if not actually solve, to ease the burden of problems in 5 areas where The State is only rearranging the deck-chairs and not delivering a lot. Well 1 million people are employed to help make things better for their fellow citizens - 1 million adults not collecting the dole, so there is that. For ten years, Cottam's NGO Participle did the state some service and demonstrated how agile, focused orgs might deliver more QALYs for less money.

1. Family. Their Life programme set in place mentors / listeners who had time to listen to the manifold problems of the dispossessed; develop a holistic view rather than silo-thinking; engender self-respect by respecting the troubled rather than joining the line of comfortable people who want to beat on them
   
2. Youth. Their Loop programme swept up lost youth and found them work-placements in the community - a bit like the best examples of Irish Transition Year work experience. The pilot study was going gang-busters with obvious benefirs accruing to The Yoof, The Community, The Employers. But when they held an open day for government agencies, the scheme was immediately closed down . . . because teens were developing a relationship with an adults who was neither a family member, nor a teacher. In the eyes of The State, all adults are potentially if not probably predators on the young.
   
3. Employment. The first thing in Backr was to call out the complete failure of Job Centres to place the unemployed in work. They then created a network of MeetUps where job-seekers could network, commiserate, and even crowdfund money to get small businesses over the threshold for creating a new position.
   
4. Health. Another problem, another daft label. Wellogram applies similar holistic views to health and well-being. It's normal now to refer people with unlabelled malaise deeper into the maws of the NHS. Maybe it's better to take them out of that mill altogether and treat their loneliness, stress, and feeling crap with kindness and a cup of tea. The GP has no time to listen and for some people some of the time, tea and chat is at least as effective as [and FFS cheaper than!] anti-depressants, anti-biotics or anti-inflammatories. Health education is the unsexy, unfunded, unseen part of the health service: but it doesn't have to be like that..
   
5. Aging. The End is Circle. This experiment facilitated Elders getting together and telling each other that they could so do more for themselves rather than relying on the State or it's agents. Call me the complacent patriarchy but I've found that fixing stuff, making stuff, myself is empowering. It also frees me from dependence on someone else's timetable, engagement and priorities. And it saves money. I know, I know it's a short step from victim-blaming but making people do for themselves can be done with kindness, with panache, with respect.

There you have it. Dozens of ideas, thrashed out round a conference table, and rolled out into the local community. Some of the schemes are still chuntering along years after the initial funding dried up.  Related to this is Samuel Smiles [prev] and his vision for the world in Self-Help (1859). But what do I know? I've returned Radical Help to the library. You can read it next. It might outrage you enough to do something different.

Change Islands? A decade ago The Blob wrote a neat 900 word essay about fishing on the North shore of Newfoundland, parcelled it up, tied it with a green white & pink ribbon and launched it into the blogosphere. The next day I butterflied off to write about Sellafield / Windscale about which I was marginally better qualified to express an opinion. That was then, this is now, and flitting about long ago and far away won't butter no parsnips. 

 

woodworder

It was a surprise, though it shouldn't have been, when it was revealed that our latest plumber is also a certified electrician. You really have to be, he said, otherwise how would immersion heaters get installed?. The thing with tradesppl is that they often have to work together all hugger-mugger and sometimes the 'prentice calls in sick. Who's going to hold the far end of the carpenters snap-line? The sparkie! Soon enough, if they pay attention, are respectfully curious and make really strong tea, youngsters can learn how to cut a 2 x 4 into 3 equal parts; lay a row of bricks not too shabby; snake a wire and connect the socket. All building contractors started in one trade and became competent in the others. At least so that they could recognise crap workmanship.

One of the most important things I learned in University was how to hold a handsaw: use your index finger to point, you'll cut straighter. I was helping make flats for the lunchtime theatre club and the college carpenter kindly came to lend a hand supervise the gilded youth. I've made tables, chairs, boxes from unlikely materials but my standards are low on aesthetics if adequate on engineering.

I've given up browsing in the library. My reading list works heavily on recommendation, so my library trips are confined to when books I've reserved come in. That and Borrowbox which delivers [earbooks] to the sofa. The Beloved operates more old-style and throws herself on the mercy of the shelves. Last week she took a punt on a book for me, by and about a philosophical carpenter from NYC. I romped through this memoir of a life dealing with flawed [aren't we all] people and the  material world. It's like Lewis "LOTC" Thomas and Robert "ZAMM" Pirsig mentored Ernest "Fighty" Hemingway.

The book = How to Build Impossible Things: Lessons in Life and Carpentry. A carpenter's notes on life and the art of good work (2023) by Mark Ellison The title subtitle subsubtitle is quite meta because, like the interminable The End of the LOTR film, there is Final Chapter, then an Epilogue, then a Further Thoughts before we get to the Acknowledgments . . . there is no index. Random House produced a Editor for the book who might have been tighter, hmmm? Ellison produced the illustrator - his son Martin Ellison.

Typical of the f[l]ights found in the book is this: "One and a half trillion dollars [for the F-35 fighter plane program] is coincidentally enough money to send every high school senior in the country to MIT for four years. Now, MIT wouldn't take them: it's highly selective, and most seniors wouldn't go anyway, having lost interest in education way back in grade school when the teachers couldn't even come up with serviceable blackboard erasers. But it's interesting to imagine what might occur if we lived in a country that put as much value in educating its populace as it did on eliminating the perceived threat that foreign populations represent".

Ellison is a skilled carpenter and is no more qualified to opine about government spending than my cat any other chippy from the Rust Belt. Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man. That paragraph in a book about design, materials and shitty clients smacks of Dunning-Kruger and poor editorial control. But then again, Nobel Prize winners do this alll the time [looking at you Vitamin Linus], so why not master carpenters? . . . and my cat says miaaow. I can't resist having a snipe at another unintentionally funny editorial lapse. One of Ellison's perfectly designed spaces is "The Knave of Chartres Cathedral" - you can see his foot [R].

If you've ever been in the midst of a renovation project [like us for 8 months 1996-1997] you know that the chaos mounts as the deadline approaches. A week out and the client sees wires blurfing out of the walls, the kitchen sink still in its packing, a hole where the stairs should be and believes their agree move-in date is shot. But six days later at tea-time the lads are sweeping the last of the wood-shavings and wire-strippings into a dustbin as they knock off for their final day on site. Proper craftsmen work fast and well: figuring it's easier to do it right as make a weeping hames of it.

Comparisons are made [during an interview in Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research, no less]  between carpentry and orthopedic surgery: each trade works with organic material and requires microscopic tolerance but not perfection. Because organic, finishing the project can be dynamic - doors warp, joints go osteoporotic after the fix has been signed off. I've cited this article because it gives a flavor of Ellison's voice, without having to buy the book.

The most disturbing aspect of this memoir is that, for decades, Ellison's clients were comically wealthy dot-com billionaires and hedge-fund managers with a sprinkling of pop and film stars. The material waste is colossal. Mistakes are made and fashions change and perfectly serviceable kit is ripped out and sent to the dump. The apparatchiks of power [architects, project managers, designers, decorators] are [not all] lazy and incompetent make-weights. It's unfair to be finding a wall for the super-rich when the revolution comes without making room for their enablers and parasites.

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].

Bawo = father etc.

Very Misc

• Comms: International signal flags [sample R] 
• BT Young Scientist 2024
  
•  ♩ ♬ ♫ ♪
• Ndikhokhele Bawo Just some school kids && Phila Mpofu
  
• Ndikhokhele Bawo U.Pretoria 
• Nkosi Sikelela iAfrika
  
• Ashokan Farewell Jim Anon
• Phil Ochs - When I'm Gone
• Mark Knopfler - Miss You Blue  
• Skinny Lister - Company Of The Bar
  
• Waterford named as 1/52 NYT places to go in 2024. 
• with woeful want of imagination because ditto 2022 when it was an "Offbeat Destination". It is now mainstream - expect charabancs and land-cruisers and litter
  
• Alaska 1282 Door Failure. The missing plug door was recovered yesterday by a Portland school teacher identified only as "Bob" in the Cedar Hills neighborhood who found it in his backyard, NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said, saying she was "very relieved" it had been found.
• Other debris found on ground
• Juan Browne Blancolirio summarizes quite possibly TMI!
  
• Aloha Air 243 Bloboprev
• Alaska beachcombing = glass floats
• Reversing a B-double
• It’s all in the thumbs [simple trailer]
  
• Don’t drive above yer own ability and don’t be a goose
• Keep the rubber-side down
• IRL: This is the moment I knew it would work
• Metafilter offers comments
  
• Finnish Lumberjack
• Making a hung tree sliiiiide
  
• 2 x 4s: modern is weaker
• The science of marbling
  
• Stuff: French couple sold cheap and have to lump it. 
• History: my pal Dan looks for ancient DNA . . . in the library? 
  
• Literature: Faber&Faber reluctantly take a chance

It's my Dad's anniversary tonight. He died "suddenly" in hospital in the wee hours of 15 Jan 2001. My mother waited until "it was decent" [0800 hrs] to call their children with the news. The hospital "lost his records" when his death seemed so unexpected as to warrant an enquiry. He knew Bannow Bay, Co Wexford rather well: his own father is buried just over the headland on the right of this picture. He used to paint views such as this: being rather better at clouds than at people.

Shingaun shenanigans

Dau.II has been learning to drive. Waiting  for 9 months because of a shameful backlog in slots for getting tested. This is entirely on the RSA Road Safety Authority; the quango which hand-wrings and finger-wags about road fatalities but lacks a budget to, say, re-configure or re-surface known accident blacks-spots. For many years the RSA baulked at recruiting new driving-testers because the bean-counters revolted at being obliged to take on more employees and their pension entitlements; preferring rather to put hundreds of young people on the long-finger and effectively unable to apply for the numerous Irish jobs which require a car to get to work . . . public transport being woeful-to-absent. RSA was recruiting in April 2023 but that effort is now closed.

Finally, many weeks after leaving the sunny south east for Dublin, the RSA found her a test date in Waterford in mid-December. She has been peppering the intervening time with a number of paid lessons with a Waterford-based instructor and as much practice time with her old man as her knees can stand. You can drive for hours [although twee uur rijden, kwart uur rust is better] under normal circumstances but repeated left-hand reverse turns, hill-starts and 3-point turns require significantly more delicate muscle control and repetitive strain so 'er legs start to go all trembly after an hour. And because we live remote, we have to drive for at least 15km to find a quiet residential development to practice, practice, practice.

Last Tuesday she stepped off the train in B'town in the afternoon and we drove about town until we found an older-model housing estate which has, like, roads at right-angles and off-road parking to clear the public roadway. We only mounted the sidewalk s l o w l y twice, so that's a win and a learning experience.

The next day we headed off in the opposite direction to E'town having done some Google Streetview research to locate suitable quiet roadways with suitably configured intersections. We turned off into a 00s-era estate called Shingán [drone-view above L] and didn't mount the sidewalk at all at all. So that's progress. The trouble with learning a new task - like a left-hand reverse turn - is that A Lot is going on. Once you've mastered the skill, it is impossible to imagine why it was so berluddy complicated at the beginning - see prev Curse of Knowledge. Let fall any one of the numerous steps in this simple task and you fail the test and have to wait for yonks again.

My sister and brother both failed the test first time round. Sis quietly mounted the pavement on the left-hand reverse and the tester kept telling her to "continue round the corner, please" until she snapped back that she'd have to go forward or she'd take out a lamp-post. They never recovered the relationship. The Brother's examiner came out of the Test-Centre in a neck-brace having been whip-lashed by a learner-boy-racer the previous week and was understandably quite the cross-patch. 

A recent The Rest is Politics (Question Time) included a question from Sarah Jane Blakemore about limiting the number of passengers in cars driven by recently qualified drivers. It was in reaction to the case where 4 teenagers spun off a Welsh road and drowned. Ooof! We had a 4xdeath in Clonmel earlier this year. In Ireland, novices are required to swap L plates for N plates until they get their road-legs. Rory Stewart learned to drive and passed his test first time in Crieff - population 7000, no roundabouts or traffic lights. In celebration he drove his mother into Edinburgh and nearly lost her in several white-knuckle adventures in, like, traffic. Dr Blakemore is an expert on the adolescent (that's 14 to 24) brain.

Protocol. Stop by curb [30-60cm out?] - gears in neutral - hand-brake on - adjust mirror to see on-side rear wheel - take deep breath - check all round for moving objects - engage reverse gear - release handbrake while multitasking the clutch - when curb starts to veer away from rear-wheel start turning steering wheel (not too much) - quick check all round while moving backwards - ensure that rear-wheel maintains distance from curb - ignore what's happening to front-end of car: that will take care of itself - once round the corner continue in a straight line parallel to give the impression that the wild fish-tailing was all part of the protocol - re-adjust wing-mirror for normal driving - follow tester's instructions for next task. As I say, that's A Lot of processing.

Shingaun maybe from Siongán, a place abounding in ants or pismires. At least they named the estate after the Townland rather than giving it a bucolic English nonsense-name like Meadow Features or Valley View.

Loada bollix

In the course of my very expensive education, I learned how to play golf: aka a good walk, spoiled as The Enniscorthy Guardian had it in 1901. My father and I went to a local junk-shop and acquired (for buttons) a 'short set' of golf-clubs in a canvas bag all of probably Edwardian vintage. A short-set included a "driving iron" a "mashie-iron", a "mashie-niblick", a putter, and a couple of wooden "drivers". The bag had a side pocket for golf-balls and a bit of bandolier-webbing for the all important golf-tees.

You can look up what the modern names are for these antient projectile launchers - hint it's all in the angle of the [striking] face of the club w.r.t. the shaft. But I can tell you that "mashie" was wrong-wrong-almost-right [= machete] for tween chaps looking for missing balls in shrubberies and briar-patches beyond the target hole. It didn't take me long to crack the shaft of the mashie-iron pretending I was making progress with Colonel Fawcett in the Amazonian Jungle. I bound up the crack with glue and twine and it worked okay. We always always found more golf-balls that we'd lost.

The other amusement to be had with golf-balls which had been hacked about a bit was to remove the outer shell and unravel the yards and yards to rubber string which formed the magma of the sphere. In the centre was a little bag of white lead 2PbCO₃·Pb(OH)₂ which is toxic but about which we were not especially careful. This is all by way of introduction to a mildly amusing hoax perpetrated on the world of mycology by the 'discovery' that golf-balls which had endured a brush-fire bore passing resemblance to he fruiting bodies of certain fungi. The story was published by Kew Gardens in London on All Fools' Day this year.

The first example was sent to Kew from Lancashire in 1952 asking that the experts help identify what species it represented. One of the ID tests carried out is to leave the fungus (gills down if any) on a sheet of clean white paper. The spores, if any, are diagnostic for species when looked at under a microscope by a sufficiently expert mycologist. The waggish taxonomists decided to play their game straight and the specimen was given a name Golfballia ambusta [i.e. golf-ball which has passed through the furnace] and accession number. In the intervening 70 years, two more examples of the species have been duly recorded and added to the collection. All good fun, till someone gets in the way.