4th July 2021

Flags optional

• ♬ ♫ ♩ ♪
• Don MacLean - American Pie
• Carly - Let the River Run
• Indigo Girls - Closer to Fine
• Soggy Bottom Boys - I Am a Man Of Constant Sorrow
• Monkees - Daydream believer
• Vienna Tang - Level Up
• Hank Williams - I saw the light
• Bo Burnham - All eyes on me
• Brickit - the app that reads a heap of Lego and suggests a build
• Unknown knowns - the dark heart of dead Rumsfeld
• Martens and squirrels [prev]  to be cooked by capital [UK]
• Cronyvirus pandemic [UK]
• An archive of Saki [prev] read by Richard Crowest in his best Edwardian voice
• Getting your feet wet in Miami in 2030.

creep feeder

 Discerning carnivores, like my late-lamented mother-'t-law, talk about getting very young meat - suckling pig, kid, veal - because these products are unavailable in retail Ireland. Actually, Souad talked a lot more wistfully about mutton, which she claimed tasted of something. But then again she was a terror for <gnarr, gNARR> cruibíns [pigs trotters], marrowbones and all the wobbly bits inside. Me, I'd rather eat lentils for the rest of my life than gnaw sustenance from cartilage. Irish people eat a lot of meat but almost all of it appears <shazzam> on supermarket shelves in neat slabs and squares so that nobody has to reflect on the fact that a week ago that hamburger was eating grass. No business likes to have their capital tied up for too long. They like a return on their investment as quickly as possible. So it's economic to feed animals up to the gills, so that they reach "market weight" before the competition. This is most extreme in the case of chicken where 41 days is all it takes from hatch for 2.3kg of soya+corn to be converted into a trussed, shrink-wrapped, oven ready bird of 1.2kg.

Nobody likes mutton, and most folks are squeamish about eating lamb that has as much meat on it as a fat chicken. The Market dictates that "lamb" is a bruising great teenager of 45kg. Getting a newborn to that weight in, say, 15-17 weeks requires more than milk and a nibble of grass. You need to feed the ewes, sure, but you really need to supplement the feed of the lambs even if you have to pay ready money for nuts. Farmers want the best of both worlds of course ad lib milk but also nuts and something has to prevent the ewes from shouldering the lambs aside and scarfing up all the <yum> concentrates. On commercial farms where dozens or hundreds of lambs are growing through their paces every year a creep-feeder [R] is yer only man. There are many ingenious designs out there from swish powder coated monsters to rusty old yokes welded up from sheet-metal and steel tubing.

The deal is that creep-feeders allow unlimited access to the lambs while effectively excluding adult sheep. Bearing in mind that sheep can smell the goodies and will push over or crush anything insufficiently heavy or robust. In the past we have borrowed a creep-feeder from our neighbour after his lambs have gone to market. That monster required 4 grown men or a tractor front-loader to move it. Note the roof in the feeder [above R] - it's best to load in several days of feed at once and let the lambs work their way through it. You must do what you can to exclude a) rain b) ravens. I think it's called a creep feeder because many designs require the lambs to approach the feed on their knees.

This year after an outrageous number of false hopes and misinformation, we have a total of two [2] ram lambs which are each about 36-38kg. These b'ys need feeding up because if we can get them up to weight in a couple of weeks, they can piggy-back with the neighbour's crop on their final journey. So I needed to jimmy-up an exclusionary feeder from locally available materials. In the distant past, I had used two 12ft steel gates with one end attached to fence posts and the open end kept apart with a block of wood and a lot of knotted ropes. That creates a triangular lamb-only paddock where a bucket of feed may be placed. This year a far better solution occurred to me [not for nothing do I wake up at 3am, screaming].  I used a couple of 90cm x 200cm sheep hurdles, made locally by Daniel Whelan Engineering, which are a lot handier to handle [see above L]. We're leaving this all a bit late as you can see that the lambs are almost as tall at the shoulder as their dams. More to the point their head'n'shoulders are almost as wide.

Holding the door open with a block of wood wasn't going to answer, quite apart from the fact that I had no idea what was the crucial discriminatory distance between ewe-shoulder and shoulder of lamb. Experimentation is the key! I found a handy length of timber, cut it into 2 x 20cm lengths and pre-drilled holes every 2cm along the top edge. The Whelan hurdles, in contrast to a 12ft gate, have a couple of eyed lugs welded top and bottom at each end. Four robust wood-screws and some washers worked a charm.  A bit of adjustment revealed that 18cm was a pretty good distance. We still have to carry a couple of cups of sheep muesli up for the boys a tuthree times a day but we should be doing the journey anyway to check that the bould brats haven't gotten their heads caught in the sheep wire or indeed escaped into the forestry from pure divilment.
 

How they brought to schwa to Carlə

I sprang to the stirrup, and Dau.II, and she;

I galloped, Dau.I galloped, we galloped all three;

‘Good speed!'’ cried The Belov'd, as the gate-bolts andrew;

‘Speed!’ echoed the wall to us galloping through;

Behind shut the postern, the ewes sank to rest,

And into the daylight we galloped on quest.

Apols to Robert "Ghent to Aix" Browning

Whither gallop, me bold questers?

To The Fermentary ! next our new Post Office at the top of the one street of Borris:

Who knows how, when and where entrepreneurs take the plunge and sink their all into a new venture? I've been making annual cratefuls of marmalade for 20 years now, everyone loves it, a pot makes the perfect gift. Nobody has a bad word to say about the flapjacks either. I would never $ell the stuff, though - I just don't have the marketing and distribution chops: I'd have to scale up to satisfy demand; the kitchen would reek of Olde Seville; and I'd have contact burns all up my arms. Let's leave it at makes the perfect gift . . . perhaps with a small packet of flapjacks mit.

The Fermentary launched its retail outlet on the first weekend of June 2021. They might have had a slight failure in local marketing, because we heard about the event, after the event, from Dau.II in Cork. She's the foodie in the family, so hears the faintest distant drums of comestibility: cheese or cakes; charcuterie or . . . croissants. The next weekend, she came across the country, following her nose, to see if the product was good. The weekend after that, her sister Dau.I came down from Dublin. On dit que it was because my birthday went down during the week between these visits but good croissants have an irresistible pull to those who've ever had one. Or read the book!  

The Fermentary is an offshoot of The Plúr Bakery in Newtown Co CW where the gaffer is James Jordan. They've been making sourdough and other fermentables for a while now and selling it at the Saturday Foodie Market in Kilkenny. There's a linguist in the batter there because their signage has a schwa for the untrilled first syllable Fə'mɛntary and an {IPA 303} for the second syllable. Me, I really like their aux amandes - good to the last crumb but the reg'lar croissants are great and they do a crusty, aery, tasty sourdough loaf. A batterie de kombucha is available on tap if you like your ferments by the glass. They open at 0800hrs Fr Sa Su and when the croissants are gone, they're gone, so get there early prepared to queue. Chocolatine? Pain au chocolate?

Well now, I've had a great many fine examples of  Viennoiserie this month and intend to spend my carbon credits supporting this local business every possible weekend until I burst or they go bust (which heaven forfend).

100 focal

 Listicles! How long is your attention span? If you're on Buzzfeed it will be 10 lol cat fails that make you fart or 25 ways to impress your boss's boss. Then there's meta-lists. QI expects greater stamina: I wrote about 1339 [2013] and 1441 [2014] but you'll have to hunt up books 1234, 1342, 1423, 2024 yourself. For academic-adjacent books 100 is a nice round number. A History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor director of the British Museum was a magisterial romp through the BM collections giving context to each thing. Fintan O'Toole and the Irish Times had to clag up a derivative parity-of-esteem listarip-off  A History of Ireland in 100 Objects. Likewise, the linguist David Crystal compiled The Story of English in 100 Words in 2011 so the Royal Irish Academy RIA must contract for A history of Ireland in 100 words by Sharon Arbuthnot, Máire Ní Mhaonaigh, Gregory Toner, illustrated by Joe McLaren (St Brigid's Day 2019). Does that not show a certain want of imagination?

This endeavour passed me by entirely when published although I am exactly the demographic to buy a few copies for my gaeilgeoir pals. It took a flag from my cousin Trevor in NZ, who is a puzzle-cracking comparative linguist in his own right. I acted on that faisnéis and quickly located a copy, on a shelf, in Btown library. We were still a bit lockdowned at the time, but the librarian left the book outside on the TBC table, in a canvas bag, with my name on it. I get to keep the bag! Must do that more often.

And the book? It's fine, if a bit A camel is a horse designed by a committee (probably coined by Alec "Mini" Issigonis). MacGregor and Crystal wrote books with an internal coherence and one scholar's concentrated vision. The Irish me-too books are fuzzier and less focused because they are trying to please too many people. But ignore my snippy carping, if language is your beef, 100 Words will leave you well fed. 

What they've done is pick their 100 words, presumably leaving many on the cutting room floor, and gathered them into 13 bins like Writing and Literature, Technology and Science, Food and Feasting. I was surprised and little bit smug to note how many of these Irish words I knew despite níl focal Gaeilge ina phluc because I went to school in England. 

So the Science & Tech words? 

• Cló [form, shape, appearance], 
• Long [ship], 
• Fuinneog [window], 
• Gloine [glass], 
• Fadhb [problem], 
• Sníomh [spinning], 
• Caistél [fort], 
• Clog [clock], 
• Ríomhaire [computer], 
• Réalt [star] 

Some of these and their essays aren't notably techy imho but maybe it was a case of a must-have word needing a bed somewhere in the book. Clog got me a bit all riled up. There is a backdrop of discourse here in Ireland which tries to deny that we ever got anything from The English except oppression and taxes. So under Clog: " The Modern Irish for 'clock' therefore, was originally the word for 'bell' and not borrowed from the English "clock" as might be assumed". But that's the origin of [English] 'clock' as well! So both languages have have a common root word. There's at least one other example of similarly tendentious explanation. harrrumph! The irony here is that the whole concept of the book is lifted from an earlier example in English written by someone educated in England . . . although born in Lisburn <huzzah!>.

Last June 2021

Today - the Feast of St Sampson the Hospitable

• Banjo ♬ ♫ ♩ ♪?
• Roustabout - Jake Blount and Tatiana Hargreaves 
• I'm On My Way - Rhiannon Giddens
• Darling Cora - Amythyst Kiah
• NPR Tiny Desk - Kaia Kater
• Banjo: The Man from Ironbark
• A disused shed in Co WX
• The Talent
• Turing trib £50
• Listicle: Celebs like mattresses
• A BBC look at wrath
• Parassala B. Ponnammal died last week
• CrannogMedia [thumbnail R] on Celtic Women Warriors
• Materials
• Grady on bridge fails [prev gusset plate]
• Earth floors - linseed & tung oil finish
• Barn raising - Harrison mit hammer
• Ossip Zadkine Rotterdam
• Times New Roman
• A hella big diamond
• Skills
• Logic = volume of sphere
• Real sonar
• Sommelier: some cheap red wine is great
• Redistilling scotch

Health is broke

It's four years since I read and reviewed The Way We Die Now: The View from Medicine's Front Line (2017) by Seamus O'Mahony. That was essentially a reflection on how medical hubris had deluded people that they were going to live forever. That assumption may be uppermost in your 19 y.o. 'mind' when you launch your body off a cliff-face paragliding, base-jumping or mountain biking; at 79? not so much. The actuarial odds; your slowed reaction times; the leaching of calcium from your bones; the feebleness of your immune response; all these are stacked against you at 79. O'Mahony is six years younger than me but he retired in 2o2o just as soon as his pension enabled him to do so. His Death Book made him realise that he could do better with his literary talents than writing coherent case-notes and the endless reports required of him as a latter-day health bureaucrat aka consultant gastroenterologist.

I say latter-day, not because O'Mahony is a Mormon but because in his former days (when he was in live forever mode) he and his medical professional colleagues had considerable autonomy, not to mention privilege. For about 100 years, more or less bracketting the 20thC, doctors had become gods with the power of life and death. Aseptic technique and antibiotics had a lot to do with this power. But knowing when and where to apply the levers of medicine was built up through experience; and experience built up through insane hours on the wards, in theatre or seeing a lot of sick people in clinics. Then it all turned sour: sleep-deprived doctors made too many poor decisions with obvious adverse outcomes for patients. Families refused to defer to the actual doctor in Cork, when Dr Kildare was saying something different, and far more optimistic / godlike on the telly. Dr Google only added the last nails to the coffin of medical unaccountability and that only in the 21stC.

Since I was given a smart-phone in 2019 I've been downloading audiobooks from Borrowbox. When I saw another book by O'Mahony Can Medicine Be Cured?: The Corruption of a Profession (2019), I failed to read the small print and downloaded an e-book rather than an a-book. Different medium, and not accessible when driving or walking, but readable nevertheless. When that was finished, I immediately downloaded his third unpicking of the tapestry of modern medicine The Ministry of Bodies: Life and death in a modern hospital. One anonymous reviewer called him a physician-poet, which would have pleased him mightily because William Carlos Williams of the red wheelbarrow was another such.

In the same way that The Blob refers to The Institute as my quondam place of work, O'Mahony's last gig in Cork University Hospital is lightly fictionalised as The Ministry. He retired last year because he'd done enough. Most of us couldn't work in a hospital for 20 minutes, let alone 20 years of being shouted at by those in hopeless pain and treated as an interchangeable cipher by managers and auditors in comfy offices: "we need X+1 effectives on the roster this weekend, can't you postpone your daughter's wedding?" And ever and always, despite the rhetoric from head office, the patients are last on the list whose requirements must be met. 

• Problem: Bad headline about people stacked like cordwood on trolleys spilling out along the corridors from A&E
• Solution: Minister announces firm new targets for allowable wait-times; managers bully doctors into clearing beds in the wards
• Consequence: often no action because there is no infrastructure [nursing homes, district nurses, home-helps] to support folks who are still frail but no long need an acute bed.

Never enough joinedy-up thinking. Too much bean counting.

• Problem: Stroke
• Solution: The Man sets targets for reducing the incidence of clots with the blood-thinner heparin
• Consequence: every patient is routinely heparinised on admission which makes them ineligible for surgery lest they bleed out.

The very best doctors see the whole patient, not a clatter of ¿fixable? symptoms. Regular doctors just add more meds to the list, already too long, of brightly coloured pills that appears with breakfast. And according to these books, consultants engage in a perpetual internecine feud: refusing to accept difficult cross-discipline patients on their books. An elderly lady who has broken a hip because she fainted in the kitchen is neither cardiac nor orthopedic.

O'Mahony's special tetchiness is reserved for speech and language therapists. Mission creep has allowed this discipline to own choking and swallowing. Woe betide the doctor who has a weekend's leave and comes back to find half their ward sporting nasogastric feeding tubes because the junior doctors were unable to withstand the monomaniacal certainties of the SLTs. If you are really frail having the discomfort [abdominal cramping/swelling; diarrhea; nausea; vomiting/reflux; perforation, pneumothorax . . . I could go on] and disempowerment of a NFT makes your hospital stay decidedly crappier. Note to my adult kids: I can imagine worse ways to go than choking to death on one last meatball. The holistic existential irony is that, if your child stammers, the waiting list for a qualified speech and language therapist can be years rather than weeks.

On the wagon.

I've just finished audiobooking The Accidental Soberista: Discover the unexpected bliss of an alcohol-free life by Kate Gunn, well read by Caroline Lennon. Kate Gunn plunged like a duck to water into the post-dotcom internet bloggin' and blaggin' her way into the corporate world. She had the digital chops to help Capital show its shiniest face to the world. Good for her, I was there but lacked the imagination and the chutzpah to do the same thing. I started bloggin' just as it became old hat and influencers went Insta. Indeed I'd never 'eard of Kate Gunn before I saw her book on Borrowbox. But we have in common a tendency to over-share in our respective media. In 2019 Gunn published a book Untying the Knot about the dissolution of her marriage.

The Accidental Soberista is another confessional. Her post-wed partner Aodhán was medically advised to give the booze a rest, and Gunn elected to go along for the ride out of a sense of solidarity - and, I guess, curiosity. A significant support for the transition was the One Year No Beer campaign, which maps out some standard operating procedures for 30-day and 90-day modules of sobriety. If you can stay on the wagon for 3 months, you can probably do it forever. The argument is that it is possible to separate fun from alcohol and still have a social life, even in pubs, without feeling bleh the following day - Erdinger is your friend. You may need new friends as the sclera of your eyes return to the bright white of childhood because folks are not funnier when drunk . . . unless hilarious is synonymous with repetitive and boundariless. 

The Accidental Soberista is polemical. With the ardour of the convert, Gunn wants to share her joy with everyone; which is captured quite cleverly by her book's cover design [above L]: emptying the wine-glass reveals a new world of clear head, clear skies, sunshine and fluffiness. But I think she and her editor have made a strategic error by emphasising her post-booze sporting triumphs. Successfully training for and completing a competitive marathon and a competitive triathlon is frankly unattainable for most people in the bar on any Saturday night. Humble-bragging about these achievements just makes it easier for Joe Boozer to flip her off as That Wagon Wagon and relegate sobriety to a winning-the-lotto fantasy.

I was on the wagon for the whole of 2012. Up to and including 2011, we had been in the habit of glugging down 2-3 bottles of plonk a week. That wasn't hang-over territory, although it defo required a designated driver if we were going out. At the beginning of 2012, the post-crash tide drained out of scientific funding and I was contracted down to one day a week of paid science-work. Time rich but cash poor. Three bottles of wine @ €7 is (7 x 3 x 52) €1,000 a year which was more or less what I was pulling in each month as a Senior Scientist. So I stopped consuming alcohol. It was a commercial decision and I didn't miss it. Years earlier I had, with the intelligence of a lab rat, made the connection between having four pints in a session and feeling like the armpit of Beelzebub the next day . . . so I never consumed 4 pints. Except when I did. Those instances were always when two pints drained my sense of judgement  enough to take a third and then peer-pressure and the round of the generous hand delivered #4 to the table and I (now well buzzy in the head) lacked the will to let it go to waste. Maybe other folks'' hang-overs are different but I can't imagine embracing a life where I reliably feel wretched every weekend morning.

The Accidental Soberista is only 3 pints at Kennys or €0.00 on Borrowbox. It prattles along in a chatty and informative style and presents some quite sobering stats about the costs of alcohol in Ireland - malaise, road-traffic accidents, mental health, cirrhosis. Running a feckin' marathon is entirely optional but for you the cost-benefit equation might be food for thought?