Gach Treo Augo 2024

Poppy harvest is In. Poppy seeds go a long way and are A Gift to bread. There's a "dead" corner of the polytunnel between the potting bench (mostly filled with a clatter of crusty seed trays and wretched flower-pots) and the wonderful ever-giving rosemary bush. Because the corner is "dead", weeds come in and poppy is the quintessence of weed. Most years we get some poppies in that corner. This year three of the most successful started up out of the dirt adjacent to the block-faced bed. I build a little mud dam and have been carefully supplying these pioneers with water. Friday I topped them off and shook out the seed into a fine white pasta bowl. Very happy, me.

• 83 y.o. aces Leaving Cert Irish.
• Beau Miles deposits A Lot of cans at 10c a pop
• Climbers: how strong are your belay-loops?
• Alain Delon, un monument français, est mort
  
• Tancredi being sexi
• Jef on Le metro
• Jef prefers les Citroën DS
• Which DS?  2709 RR 75
• Directing early AirMail NYC to LA
• Alabama Paradox exposes the sketchy quality of historical data . . . not everything in Wikipedia is correct 
• Aural illusions exposes the fact that I've been wearing my LIDL-special headphones on the wrong ears.
• Irish seaweed = yum && can't be beat
• I'm yours Jason Mraz
  

graaassseeeddd

We make a lot of hay out of having a traditional hay meadow. Which means we get a modest stipend from Brussels to not cut / graze between 15 Apr and 01 Jul in any year. Which means we get very little hay because we are unmanaging our four largest fields to promote species other than Lolium perenne = perennial rye-grass. This un-grazing regime means that by the 1st of July the grass (and all the other trad meadow species) is too long for sheep to eat . . . but long enough to give a painful cut between the hoof-claws. Sooo we contract to have the grass cut and baled . . . and sold. 

Several years ago we foolishly agreed to allow the contractor to store the wrapped bales in the top corner of the Home Field until they were needed during the winter. When these bales were, in due course, loaded onto a trailer and carted off site, the ground was winter-wet and the tractor skidded about leaving troughs and ruts deep enough to hide a sleeping dog. Contractor promised to make good but never did; so that corner was too buckety to mow the following year, and the next year, and the next. Succession happened: nettles and brambles got footing, a hazel bush up-sprouted and the ruts were covered over with thatch to create a trip, ankle-turn and fall hazard.

Finally, we met up with Séan the Mow and he agreed to ① grub up the bushes, ② rotavate the sod and ③ roll it all flat. And I agreed to re-seed the area between ② and ③. Of course, a normal person would go down the creamery and buy certified-to-sprout grass-seed for this purpose. Except that a) the smallest quantity available is 12.5kg b) that cost €70! and c) it is all ryegrass with ~10% clover Trifolium repens as a token of sustainable nitrogen fixing. 

One of the several tasks which Séan carried out was "knocking the thatch" in the haggard, leaving large clots of cut grass-and-weeds to mulch in. In early July it was a bit early for grass-seed, but I found that dumping the drying clots into a wheelbarrow winnowed out a lot of grass-seed and eventually I had a bucket-full of bio-diverse grass-seed [as L] which I broadcast out to reseed the was-bucketty field corner. My seed weighed light because it was contaminated with stalks, husks, awns and other not-seed grass parts. But I finished up with 11 lt = 600g. Over the next several weeks I stripped off almost as much again from clumps of grass around the field edges. This was [probably, my grass chops are pretty weak nowadays] mostly Yorkshire fog Holcus lanatus which Hubbard damns with faint praise: regarded as a weed, but when young it has some value for grazing, especially on poor soils unsuitable for more desirable grasses.

It's nice that the area to treat was small ~600sq.m. which is 6% of a hectare or 15% of an acre. Teagasc advises that meadows should be re-seeded at 12.5kg / acre which must be one reason why that is the standard bag-size at the creamery. Calculation suggests that we need a bit under 2kg of seed for our modest corner. Also note that Teagasc advice also recommends that the field is "burned off" with round-up as part of the re-seeding process: damn the diversity full ryegrass ahead!!

In early August The Beloved and I were in a garden centre: a place I never go on my own.  I thought it would do no harm if I bought a small sack of lawn-seed because, whatever about diversity, at least the stuff was guaranteed to sprout. It was also appealing that at 1.75kg, it weighed exactly what was required according to my calculations. I feel, it's a bit like me adding a bit fresh yeast to my sourdough: not exactly a cheat but not a purists solution either. That was lurried out on top of my mixed bucket-o-seed and 'raked in'.  Raking in turns up stones and these have been picked out to fill the tuthree feed-sacks visible in the picture above.

Is it green? I think it's green. Tell me it's green!
Unsurprisingly, given that we missed out the RoundUp step, the rotavated lumps are now (a month later) sprouting up with fresh grass quite independent of my saved and bought seed. Although it is hard to swear that none of the seed has sprouted. A few nice showers in mid-August for sure helped bring things along. I hope and believe that the strewn seed will tilt the process towards productive grass without becoming a dreary mono-culture. The watch-word is 'good enough' - almost always a better outcome than 'perfect'.

Books about book-people

Que si j’eusse esté parmy ces nations qu’on dit vivre encore
souz la douce liberté des premieres loix de nature, je t’asseure
que je m’y fusse tres−volontiers peint tout entier, Et tout nud.
Ainsi, Lecteur, je suis moy−mesme la matiere de mon livre.
. . . Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne (1533-1592)

If I had lived among those nations, which (they say) yet dwell under the sweet liberty of nature’s primitive laws, I assure thee I would most willingly have painted myself quite fully and quite naked. Thus, reader, I am myself the matter of my blog. Bob the Scientist (1954 - not.yet).

Although The Blob has a tendency to range widely over time and space (including a glance at Michael de Montaigne), it might be said that its point is to record everything I can remember of my own life built up in 600 word blocks. Biography in metaphorical Lego. It is nit-pickingly detailed about the last 11 years (because recorded within a few hours of each event) and sparse indeed for earlier times. My family groan when I trot out one of my well rehearsed anecdotes for company. Jakers, Pa, did nothing else happen in 1971??

Thus, it's all about meee, but two recent ear-books have also been what do we talk about when we talk about readers [phrase tip Lanchester, Carver]. 

① The Secret Lives of Booksellers & Librarians : True stories of the magic of reading, ostensibly by James "Churn 'em out" Patterson and Matt Eversmann but actually a compendium of authentic voices of those who work in the book-trade. Several of these workers at the coal-face of literacy have a version of the Blue Book meme (Customer: "I wonder if you can help me re-find a book I enjoyed at a teenager? . . . it had a blue cover") and many of them have heart-warming tales of getting the dispossessed into the world of books. I'm guessing that the named authors thought up the idea and corralled the several dozen narrators into getting something about their lives down on paper. Probably bashed some of the less coherent tales (you can love books, read a lorra books, but still not be a natural writer) into shape.  And several have benefitted from Patterson's Page Turner scheme to use his million$ to support independent bookstores.

② Shannon Reed's Why We Read: On Bookworms, Libraries, and Just One More Page Before Lights Out.. This is more cohesive and long-form because, like The Blob, it selectively samples the life and times of a single teacher of Lit at Pitt. If you're quick <link-rot, paywall alert> you can snag an excerpt of Reed's musings about Lincoln in the Bardo filtered through the lit-blog of George "Lincoln in the Bardo" Saunders. Which really is as recursively back-scratching louse-riffling as it sounds but nevertheless gives you, dear reader, an appetizer for the style of Why We Read - cw: can be larf out loud funny. As you should expect from a book by Reed about who / how to Read, it reads easy but offers insight into the hard graft involved in proper writing. Not the easy one-time-pass gab of The Blob, but something which has been drafted and copy-editted and redrafted . . . and redrafted [and shared and feed-backed] until the document is living its best life into posterity. One of the nice anecdotes is when students at a creative writing class get to realise that they are not cut out to be a writer but will so be a much better, more critical, less superficial, reader for having taken Reed's course.

I've returned both these books to the Borrowbox available bin; but you'll have to get in line behind Dau.I the Librarian who tag-teamed them after me.

Bangor to Bobbio

I've been circling round Teagasc, the agri-food semi-state institution, since it was An Foras Talúntais. Some of my best academic-adjacent friends have worked or are working there. But despite this leaven, Teagasc is generally conservative, complacent and dull. This long week (18th-25th August) is Heritage Week and Teagasc's Friday agri-zoom call went early with a talk: Discovering Heritage Through Old Routeways - Ireland's Pilgrim Paths by John G O'Dwyer (Chair of Pilgrim Paths Ireland) with promo by Ronan Healy (Project Manager National Heritage Week at the Heritage Council). With a redundancy typical of the feather-bedded Irish semi-states, it requires two Teagasc people to introduce these talks, one of whom is nail-bitingly poor at public speaking; did I say 'dull'?

This year there are 2,200 events comprehending a very broad definition of Heritage: walks, talks, bees, lighthouses, gardening, painting, baskets, céilí, science. Chekkitout? especially for kids?? they've made efforts to be inclusive.

John G has written The Book on Irish (hill) Walks, but more to the point he's written Pilgrim Paths in Ireland - A guide from Slieve Mish to Skellig Michael. He was also one of the main movers to establish St Declan's Way from Cashel to Ardmore which was officially opened in 2021 [Event tomo!]. Dau.II and I clocked the finger posts where the St.Dec crossed the N25 on the couple of pandemic trips we made to&from Cork. Here's a JGO'D mnemonic D.A.R.E.S. to suss pilgrimage:

• D iscovery, self-
• A ppreciation, for grace and favours from the almighty
• R emembering those gone before
• E scape from the press and stress
• S implify, simplify [Thoreauprev]
  

Oddly enough, in the question session on Friday, O'Dwyer professed to know nothing about Turas Columbanus despite the fact that the local-to-me part of that trek has finger posts all over Co Carlow.

"All over" because the route zig-zags back and forth across the county after it lurches away from the River Barrow at Borris or at Clashganny heading for Mt Leinster and Myshall before rejoining the River at Bagenalstown. We cross the Turas 3x getting to our nearest Aldi. This turns a lovely flat [kingfishers, dragonflies, swallows, otters, buzzards, fish] 12 km walk along the towpath of the Barrow navigation into 36 km of schlep along country roads shared with litter, boy-racers, tractors roaring past with trailers of livestock shitting themselves on the way to termination. There are no verges on much of this voyage, let along footpaths; so you must be prepared to plunge into nettles and briars or meet your maker plastered on a front bumper like an extra in Herzog's film about driving-while-txtn. Much as I deprecate sanitizing the Camino de Santiago by taking all the hard bits out; I can't approve of paying for and setting out a set of laminated pilgrim story-boards linked by finger-posts without contemplating how pilgrims are going to navigate with reasonable safety. 

Turas Columbanus follows the life story of St Colmán aka Columbanus starting at Bangor, Co Down and jinking hither and yon until it finishes in Bobbio between Milan and Genoa in N Italy. It takes in pretty much everywhere where legend has it that Columbanus laid his head or knelt at a tomb. Fermanagh, Cornwall, St Malo, St Coulomb [no surprises there?] Rouen, Luxeuil-les-Bains, Soissons, [Hildegard von] Bingen,Tours, Nantes, Schengen, Koblenz . . . all over.

When they / we do the Camino de Santiago, most pilgrims acquire their "credential" = passport at the start of their journey, and get it stampe at each refugio and hostel. Although there are many Camino to Santiago, they all finish at the City of God. In Ireland it's more of a free-for-all. Several Saints, several destinations. Presenting your credential at an office in Santiago gets you your Compostelle: a document asserting that you've walked at least 100 km in the right direction.  Ballintubber Abbey in Co. Mayo has taken up this bureaucratic mantel: taking €5 for a passport and €15 for your personalized Teastas Oilithreachta:

Whoa! and, like, Whoo-hoo. There's our own St Fursey hanging out with more famous saints like Patrick, Kevin, Brendan, and Finbarr. Maybe Ballintubber will up-date their docs to include St Declan of the Déise. At least we know where to walk in his footsteps. I cannot get any handle on a Camino Fursana, but hazard a guess that it involves Headford.

Time was that tourists came to Ireland for the fishing - they said in 1990 that every rod-caught salmon added £1,000 to the economy (B&B, pints, car-hire, dinner, céilí, souvenirs). But we sacrificed the salmon on the EU altar and shat in all the rivers, so that was the end of that. Folks like John G O'Dwyer are starry-eyed about the possibility of making up the deficit in the rural economy through pilgrimage. May the road rise to meet them!

Fertility schmertility

This and that

• Kitchen direct: growing veggies on food scraps.  tl;dr: use compost
• Digging? . . . graves by shovel in NZ via MeFi
  
• The diff: white vs black pepper - same species diff treatment
  
• Jpeg-xl vs AVIF:quality vs compression
• 2023? Wettest Ireland on record
• Heritage Week! The fishin' at Waterford Harbour
  
• Salthill prom shelters: swim not sin
• Shelters? Woodpile hide-out  

Beansprout and the possums

Robert "Beansprout" Long left the rat race in 1980 at the age of 25 and occupied an abandoned miners' shack at the mouth of the Gorge River. Gorge River is a two day hike [43km] South of Haast on the underpopulated West coast of the South Island of New Zealand. It's further still to the Milford Track which served as The Boy's intro to his Kiwi Year in 2005.  A few years later Catherine Stewart threw her cap at him and then there were three four humans living there off-grid. With two tots, twice yearly supply treks took five days rather than two and reduced the adults' carrying capacity. Who'd have kids?? A fit young teen or 20-something can yomp along the bouldery beach in 6-7 hours.

I've just finished ear-booking The Boy from Gorge River, which is Christian "Beansproutson" Long's report on growing up as Lordling of the Sandflies Austrosimulium ungulatum. He flew the nest in his teens to get some schooling and see the world and has lived a very adventurous life in locations yet more extremely isolated [mushing huskies in Norway during Coronarama; crewing a yacht through the NW passage from NYC to Nome, AK; communicating with Russians, Americans and penguins Aptenodytes forsteri in Antarctica] than Gorge River. Like our own children, who all left home before they could vote, Beansprout's two kids come home on the regular and they bring back their learned experience of the outside world: forcing their hippie-adjacent vegetarian parents to kill a few deer and get satellite broadband.

[aside: 20 years ago we were w a a a y behind the curve on our internet connexion. The Boy came home from New Zealand and was trying to help the crumblies get with the program. One of his techie pals in Dublin cut him short "Just how remote are your folks? Can they see the sky?" before explaining that satellite-to-home was not substantially different from satellite from Dublin to Bethesda, MD and it wasn't 100x the cost of copper.]

The common brushtail possum Trichosurus vulpecula [R, looking cuddly] was introduced from Australia in the 1850s in a cunning plan to supply bush-meat and fur. It turned out to be an ecological and economic disaster: possums are ① a far more effective vector for bovine TB than was ever the case for Irish badgers Meles meles ② as relentless omnivores they cause a fatal biodiversity reduction on NZ-native bird eggs/chicks and trees.

Young Chris spoke to the helicopter deer-hunters who flew along the coast blazing away at large mammals for meat and money. The idea was planted that the chap could kill possums and pluck their fur, bundle it up and sell it up the coast. Possum hair shafts are hollow, have high insulation value, and are organic. He sold his first few bales of possum fur and bought a rifle which made it easier to knock possums out of the trees they were depredating in the virgin forest. Whole possum skins, being harder to obtain, carry a premium better than fur, and soon mother and son were making possum-skin hats, scarfs, throws, and other chicerie. The possum carcasses are buried in the veg garden and help produce enormous beets and cabbage as they are recycled below ground.

The Boy from Gorge River is okay. The true-life adventure stories romp along. Too many of them are apparently the X-est whatever in my whole life; which gets a bit tiresome from repetition. Believe me, from the vantage of 70, you'll do sketchier, crueller and stupider whatevers in due course.

For others

I was chatting to Dau.I The Book the other day. For a read-all kid, she's done well for herself and was about to move to a new branch of the Dublin Library service. She was in reflective mood, and mentioned that, a while back, she'd brought in a reasonably compendious bicycle repair kit and left it behind the desk. I thought that was a brilliant example of mission-creep: if The Man wants us all to leave the car at home and travel healthy, then it's a good idea to allay people's anxiety about getting a puncture far from home. Why not have Libraries, a public facing, widely distributed, open in the evenings (someplaces, sometimes) the place where cyclists can fix a puncture?

I was running ahead of the intention a little here, because the spanner and tire-patches were primarily for co-workers, 50% of whom arrived most days by bike. Nevertheless I thought that kit was pretty cool as an unexpected contribution to the common good. Others please copy? 

The apple falleth not far from the tree?  Shortly after we returned to Ireland in 1990, I needed a screw-driver at work. There wasn't one to be found. The next Monday I brought in a rackful of different varieties of that handy implement. Being me, I added an ironic label "The Bob Memorial Screwdriver Rack". Over the next several years, all of these tools found irregular use among my co-workers: fixing bikes; putting up shelves; opening paint-tins. I can't remember which end-of-contract clean-out brought the rack home [as L in a dark  corner of the tool-shed], I'd happily have left it.

I did leave my privately collected [beg borrow steal indent-in-triplicate] co-worker-available key rack behind when I wrapped up at The Institute in 2020. Those keys were all 'owned' by particularly needy colleagues and the one-stop-shop for keys to all the labs on the science corridor was thrun in the dustbin of history. It's like the flapjacks I made on the irreg'lar through my eight years at The Institute. They all got ate. Several people said thanks; several asked for the recipe; to the nearest whole number, zero people reciprocated with home-made anything in any month while I worked there.

Didn't ever turn me churlish and huff off about the one-wayness of the cookie traffic, though. If you start thinking about such small-small t'ings as being transactional you'd be tempted to stop. And then where would we be? Flapjackless! . . .and having better teeth, probably.