Down with the Paps

In the middle of last week a surprise exam was sprung on me. I was, of course, wrong footed on this [because it was a surprise] and mildly annoyed because I long ago resolved not to do exams anymore. Lucky I took notes! . . . and that it was Open Book. One of my brightest and most enthusiastic colleagues is on maternity leave and she has been replaced by another one of life's nett contributors.  The latter, whom we'll call La Fadista, trained in the world of Medical Technician and spent some years reading Pap smears in a cervical check laboratory. She wants The Institute to develop a new degree in Med Tech as a counterpoint to our recently launched BSc in Brewing and Distilling. Both ideas are driven by a perceived 'needs of the industry'.  Some time this year during the snows-of-2018 La Fad was stuck with an out-of-schedule Biology Practical, so she made the students do the diagnosis of some cervical smears: asking them to bin each slide into normal and abnormal. Of course, she explained the principles first, showed a number of examples and explained what to look for . . . and then made them commit to a diagnosis on a number of 'unknowns'.

Me and The Other Guy in 1st Year Biology agreed to incorporate this off-the-cuff practical into the manual for next year but to do that we were put through the practical under the stern didactic eye of La Fad. Well I learned a lot, starting with the fact that Pap smear is not named from human papilloma virus HPV but an abbreviation of the Papanicolaou Test invented by Γεώργιος Νικολάου Παπανικολάου, a Greek medical cytologist who realised in 1928 that he could predict uterine and cervical cancer by scanning a microscopic sample of vaginal mucus or a scrape from the cervix for abnormal looking cells. "The first observation of cancer cells in the smear of the uterine cervix gave me one of the greatest thrills I ever experienced during my scientific career."

This is a brilliant example of scientific training. You have to be told what you are looking for because, to a close approximation, most people look at a cytological [cells] or histological [tissues] prep and all they see is pink. The trick is to twig that not all pinks are equal . . . and by heck it's not all pink! The prep shown [L] is basically pink but a moment's reflection reveals that the whitish circles are not missing data but something interesting: in this case fat which fills the cells of adipose tissue to such an extent that each cell's nucleus [identified with black arrows] and cytoplasm [cell contents] is pushed to the periphery. The picture is of a slice through somebody's buttock; the cells are really 3-D balloons. The normal cells identified in the blue picture [R above] are squamous epithelium whose purpose is to cover a surface in a thin layer of overlapping scales [Latin squama]. They are definitely not spherical; indeed the need to cover an area makes the nucleus quite small in comparison to the ragged disc of cytoplasm. The cancer cells indicated are no longer squamous, they have bunched up and started their uncontrolled cell-division run: the nucleus is proportionately much bigger.

The technician charged with making a diagnosis is carefully, relentlessly, scanning slides, looking for something that looks peculiar. It could be an obscuring clot of semen (please don't have sex the night before your smear it makes life harder for the person on the diagnostic end). It could be an obscuring clot of red blood cells if it's another sort of bad timing. That noise in the signal could be covering a couple of pre-cancerous cells, giving you a false all clear and a missed opportunity for early treatment.

With the clear connexion between infection by (certain strains of!) Human Papilloma Virus HPV and subsequent development of cervical cancer, it would be nice to have a cytological test for HPV as well as malignancies. If malignant cells are present it may already be too late and will certainly indicate much more invasive, expensive and distressing intervention. Providentially there is such a test. HPV infected cells tend to have two nuclei [arrowed R] with also a sort of halo around them as if the cytoplasm is being pushed clear. That won't be obvious to you-and-me but with experience a competent Med Tech will have these signs leap from the page. Two nuclei could mean two cells stacked one on top of the other. But if you see a clatter of too-close-for-comfort nuclei you'll flag that slide up for further investigation. Further investigation will likely include a PCR-based genetic test for the five strains of HPV most closely associated with cancer. Then you and your doctor will be worried but also extremely hopeful because you're ahead of the malignant posse.

Your smear test will also pick up signs of herpes, chlamydia, actinomyces, other bacterial infections of the vagina, candida = thrush. The thing everyone wants to avoid, and this is the source of the current scandal, is a false negative diagnosis especially under the Irish regime of testing only every 3 years.

So how did I do on my impromptu exam? Not very well! with the help of my notes I was able to clock the HPV infection and the normal. But I missed a cancerous lesion down in the bottom left corner. In a world with rigorous standards that should have cost me my job in the same way as people who kill other people with their cars are put off the road.

Years ago, I went to visit my foster-family in Boston. The day after I arrived The Gaffer and his Dau.II were off for the last of 8 evening classes in Oriental Carpets. I could have stayed at home watching TV or rootling through the file-cabinets and kitchen drawers, but they persuaded me to go along with them to the carpet shop in Watertown where the course was scheduled. As it was a course and the last meeting, it was exam night. Each of the punters was asked three questions about carpet styles from Isfahan to Damascus and if they answered correctly they were given a little souvenir sampler carpet about 35cm square. After each person answered a question, the teacher gave a little lesson to the rest of us about the salient features which confirmed the diagnosis. It was interesting because I'd never paid much attention to such carpets before, although my Dad had picked up a few on his travels. I learned for example that the octagonal 'elephant's foot' motif [R more pink!] is typical of carpets from Bokhara. Everyone in the circle had been through the mill successfully when Teacher said "And the foreign gentleman, would he chance his arm on the knowledge of carpeting?". With some reluctance, I agreed to have a go, answered three easy questions correctly: if you've seen 3 or 4 Bokharas you can't help but get the message - and was presented with a carpet! It's nice, it's sort of useless, it has an elephant foot design.

Stuffing the head

Since I was told in January 2013 " . . . and you can finish a 75 contact hours course teaching Human Physiology", I've learned A Lot about how my body keeps itself upright and ticketty-boo without me having to think about it. It's the homeostasis, silly. Whether my poor students have learned anything during that time is another matter; but I've been working on it. I know that bulleting a bunch of facts onto powerpoint slides doesn't help very much - even if I read them out s l o w l y. Over the years, I've realised that teaching is just theatre: a good performance is memorable because you've never seen anything like that before. But I'm pretty sure that the bits which stick are when I lurch off the script and head off into the back-country of my experience. Of course a tale of projectile vomitting can be s(t)icky as can fainting and panic attacks. The women (who make up >90%) seem more interested the plumbing details of vasectomy because the men are too busy crossing their legs. Whereas everyone feels sick at the abuse of power in symphysiotomy. Another frequent 'sharing' [TMI TMI, the students silently cry] from me is the consequences of being the oldest person in the room by between 10 and 45 years. One of the most interesting things about homeostasis is that it gets crumblier as you get older, so I can talk with experience about failing sight and hearing-aids and my wonky thumbs.  Eee you 'ave to larf.

But college is not only about learning stuff; it is also about learning how to learn and how to process and critically evaluate information. It is broadly true that, if they had been taught study skills at school, my students wouldn't be at The Institute - they'd be at University in Dublin or Cork and planning to take Harvard by storm later. That was my route because I had a very expensive education: I went to TCD and then. missing Harvard by about 5km, did a PhD at Boston University. The exams I sat on this bumbling journey to an academic job required a certain amount of cramming and rote-learning in The Art of Memory and mnemonics helped to remember

• the cranial nerves I - X of a dog-fish
• old Oppenheim occasionally pinches three aspidistras from audrey's glass vase
• and the 
• geological periods between Cambrian and Quaternary [prev]
• camels ordinarily sit down carefully perhaps their joints creak too quickly

I've been in mnemonic land before with core body-temperature and  blood pressure and mitochondria. This April for the last revision class of the year I launched a clatter of aides-memoires for some of the systems of checks-and-balances that keep things-of-the-body in homeostatic balance. I was careful here to emphasise YMMV - my cultural references: born in a different country less than ten years after the end of WWII, learning latin, and how to write a précis, will be alien to the students. It works best if you make up your own images to associate with the concepts. Then again, the ancients recommended using images that were bizarre, disgusting and naughty - or all three together - and you may need some help with these . . . because you've been brought up proper.

I sat my last exam in 1981, put down my pen and vowed never to do that again. I've been true to that resolution since. But in the pre-1981 days, I found that writing things down helped bang them into the head and re-writing the key-words of the notes into a long, multi-column list was also helpful. I could remember where many of the words were on the pages and scan up the mind's eye up and down to fill in the gaps.

Trading Places

I'm a navy brat, who shifted homes about every 18 months until my father retired when I was 13. I was born less than 10 years after the end of WWII during which both my parents wore uniform and spend some time at the Front Lines. You really wouldn't have known it, though, because they talked very little about the most exciting (and stressful) time of their lives. I have, therefore, some interest in trying to figure out why people do madly dangerous things when duty and training calls upon them to do so. I am also a utilitarian and a scientist so I have an interest if what I may call The Calculus of Death. My father served the first few years of the War in Motor Torpedo Boats MTBs in charge of a lethal weapon operated by a crew of 12. At some level, my father must have carried out risk assessments on a daily basis: was it worth compromising his crew and their expensive equipment to achieve such an outcome with such a probability of success. In contrast to Grand Theft Auto, a miscalculation could leave real blood on the deck of the cockpit. The title of a famous set of memoirs about US Navy MTBs was entitled They Were Expendable.  My father appreciated that, in certain circumstances, he and his ship were also expendable.

Because of this interest in discovering what makes warriors tick, I found myself watching TEDx talk by Colonel Mike Drowley [L in combat fatigues] There Are Some Fates Worse Than Death.  Drowley talks about shoot-'em-up missions in Iraq and Afgo where there was real incommming from unfriendly forces. In one example, on the very edge of the decision threshold he aborts a rescue mission because he sees that he is risking the lives of 40 Americans to save . . . two. A short while later, he realises that he is over-emphasising the Mission probably at the expense of the Missioneers; and resolves to spend more time thinking about and accommodating the unsexy, boring,  infrastructural aspects of his command. The flight-mechanics, and the rest of the base staff, have to be looked after in the same way as parents have to look after their own oxygen masks before they sort out their children's. Against all his Action Man heroic instincts, Drowley was able to Just Say No.

I was writing about the Nisei, second generation Japanese Americans, the other day in the context of Pete Seeger getting indignant that US Citizens were being sent to internment camps because of their Japanese ancestry. No such ideas were bandied about concerning citizens whose parents came from Italy, Austria or Germany. Despite having their whole community dispossessed, a group of Nisei volunteers were formed into the Japanese-American Combat Team including the 442d Infantry Battalion:  all the squaddies were Nisei from Hawaii and the West Coast but the officers were all of European extraction. This was the same as for African Americans who fought and bled and died for America in black regiments. The 442d became the most decorated unit in the US Army fighting with conspicuous bravery from the beaches of Anzio up through Italy and France. They famously went forward to rescue the Lost Battalion of the Texas National Guard who had been too ambitious in their advance and were surrounded by the German army.   25 minute documentary on the 442d. The 442d sustained far more casualties than their Texan compatriots and the calculus of war was wonk in ordering the relief operation to go forward. This assessment is obvious to us now but, in 1944, the Nisei were not weighed as valuable as white soldiers. They died for their country anyway.

Psychology Matters

Well it does, doesn't it? In the same way as you're reading Science Matters because it does. And the same way I teach Human Physiology with passion and interest because, well, I have a body. Psychology Matters is also the title for  series of symposiums around the country on Psychology Matters Day 2018 . . . that was last Saturday 12th May. Someone told me at short notice and I, in a desultory fashion, alerted  my contacts in the venue Cities: Dublin Galway Waterford and . . . somewhere else. The Psychological Society of Ireland PSI has unaccountably cleansed the PMD18 webpage. Lucky I took notes. Because I got off my sofa on a sunny Saturday afternoon and drove +50 km to see what was happenin' in Waterford Institute of Technology WIT. Thinking I might double the audience, I was amazed to find that at least 50 other people had turned up to learn something scientific about how the human mind tick-tocked.

And my conclusion? Mixed! It was certainly more engaging than sitting at home; alone; on my sofa; looking at the ceiling; with my mouth open; and my mind closed. But it was a bit like the PSI had canvassed their membership for people to give up a chunk of their weekend, and travel to Waterford, pro bono publico. and a totally random set of 20 minute talks materialised.

• The PSI President Brendan O'Connell came down because he grew up across the road from WIT in Lisduggan. He talked about pathways to prison and presented some really depressing statistics about how you could predict who was destined to grow up to spend time in chokey. He refuses to countenance the term psychopath: it's a cop-out for not addressing any sort of solution for our most troubled citizens.
• After those statistics, it was [perhaps consciously] appropriate to hear from James Claffey, whose expertise in dealing with depression [with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy CBT, as a sports coach] started when he became clinically depressed as a teenager. His watch-word is "It's okay not to be okay" and he is campaigning to End Mental Health Stigma at See Change. May 2018 is Green Ribbon month to raise awareness and stop people burying their troubles until they trudge out to the cow-shed with a rope.
• Next up was another professional who uses CBT: Anita Corfe who works with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder OCD. There is rather more to OCD and it's a lot more widespread than <Judi Dench alert> Lady Macbeth washing her hands. This gave an interesting angle on what I know about OCD - mostly garnered from a project student a few years ago.
• The next fellow was Seamus Power a lecturer from WIT whose position was that chronic disease is triggered by diet and lifestyle. Not strictly Psychological, and not really surprising to be told again that if you don't sleep 7 hours a night; don't eat breakfast; don't exercise but do smoke, do get hammered regularly, do eat between meals THEN you'll likely finish up obese, and/or diabetic, and die before your time from a coronary infarction or a stroke. Power's position follows Hippocrates "If we could give every individual the right amount of nourishment and exercise, not too little and not too much, we would have found the safest way to health." which should remind you of Michael Pollan's foodie regimen: "Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much"
• Next to bounce up was Ciara Losty who is a sport psychologist. I mean, that's a job! She advises teams about their psychological status and devises protocols for making this better - as in more effective at winning. The most useful take home was her advice that, rather than trying to think the optimum strategy, it is often better to just do it and think through the consequences of your action afterwards. For a bloke who lives in his head, this was salutary advice which I have been working towards for at least 20 years.
• The schedule next delivered another Lecturer at WIT called David Delany who holds a PhD in computational neuroscience from Trinity College Dublin. His position seemed to be that <Trinity-speak alert> unless you used schemogenic thinking in your dealings with the world, you were effectively behaving like a pre-literate savage. My take on his long explanation was that he was making it all far to complicated. I feel vindicated by the fact that schemogenic thinking is a googlewhack mainly because Google doesn't recognise schemogenic as a word. But it could be me: maybe I have a metaphorical bone through my nose and make a living banging two rocks together.
• The final speaker was Fiona O'Donovan a post-graduate student from RCSI, the Royal College of Surgeons up in Dublin. She is writing a PhD and has had to do a comprehensive literature review of her area of psychology. She clearly has a well-polished crap-detector because the title of her talk on Saturday was "How credible is psychology" and her answer was "in two words: in-credible" [im-possible is not a Goldwynism apparently]. It's because the academic psychology literature is fat with under-powered, tendentious, headline-fishing nonsense which would never have been published if someone like Ms O'Donovan had refereed the paper. We're not to unduly slag Psychology for this because my own field is also fat with under-powered, tendentious nonsense which should never have been published. But nobody really cares about synonymous codon usage, whereas every human, including lazy-arsed newspaper editors, has an interest in, and position on, psychology. Ms O'Donovan cited the Reproducibility Project [bloboprev] which tried to replicate some key-note studies in psychological research. Woefully, only 36/100 of these findings were vindicated. That needs to be said, but you have to wonder whether the best venue for washing science's dirty laundry is on a Saturday afternoon at a Psychology for the Public event.

Hats off to the Psychological Society of Ireland for organising these events across the country. The Public Understanding of Science - including psychology - is not great. Joe Public needs to be able to critically evaluate the claims of science - in the efficacy of the HPV vaccine for example - in order to make informed choices.

Peaking too early

Dau.I was born in front of a roaring fire in the depths of Winter in a 'breezy' farmhouse out near Dublin Airport. In 1993, that was  a few km beyond the city limits, so we went to register the birth at the Dublin County offices in Swords. I think it was the 3rd birth that year in the County because almost everyone else would have broken waters in one of three Maternity Hospitals - Coombe, Rotunda, Holles Street - in town.

Three years, and a sister, later we left that rented farmhouse and bought our own halfway up a mountain in the Sunny South East. Our Gaff was remoter (you can't get further from a bus-stop and still be in Leinster) but warmer (it's the underfloor heating silly). In due course, the girls taught themselves to read and soon ran out of books at home. Accordingly they spent several hours a week in the library in Graiguenamanagh, across the River Barrow in County Kilkenny.  Because they were educating themselves at home and there were no regular school hours, they were often the only kids, and best customers, in the library.

The girls showed an early interest in the catering trade and learned their maths from having to modify cake and cookie recipes. They also became food engineers: if a three layer cake asks for 4 eggs but you only have 2 cake tins what quantities of butter and sugar are needed to compensate for the egg [67% of 4 is not a whole number of eggs] discrepancy?  If we ate all the cookies that were baked we would now be enormous. Dau.I took an entrepreneurial leaf out of Lucy's book and started putting a large box out in the lane on Saturdays with a plate of cookies and an honesty box. Most Saturdays we'll get a few dozen walkers going past the house heading for the uplands beyond. The biscuits would disappear, the cash-box would acquire weight and everyone was happy. What about books? she thought, I'll put out some surplus-to-requirements books with a sign saying "Fund-raising for Graiguenamanagh Library". That also had some success. When she brought the take into Graig, she was asked kindly to please cease-and-desist. The library and the librarians were paid for by the County Council and income from charitable donations was an accounting nightmare. Nevertheless, Dau.I decided that, when she grew up, she too would be a librarian . . . and be a lot less rigid about money.

She left home, and country, before she was old enough to vote to go to Woowah Steiner 'College' in England. She stayed there working for a few years but saudades and hiraeth tugged at her soul and she resolved to return to the county of her birth. Before she left, on the advice of her Dublin pals, she applied to work as a Librarian for Dublin City. Heck and by Jimmy it takes a long long time to land that fish!  Aptitude tests . . . intelligence tests . . . background checks . . . After many months she was told that she was 67th on a recruitment panel and would be hired if and when there was a vacancy while the panel was still active. In March she was told that her name was now at the top of the list and, if she was still interested, she should report for . . .  medical checks . . . Garda vetting . . . qualification verification . . . and probation.

This last week she reported for duty and was assigned as a relief librarian out in Cabra. A relief librarian, like the Son of Man, hath not where to lay her head and must be available for work in any of the 22 branches of the City Library [see map L, pink circle marks birthplace]: lucky she has a bicycle. It's coming up for Bloom's Day, you can practice your Dublin geography by matching names to lollipops:
Ballyfermot - Ballymun - Cabra - Central - Charleville Mall - Coolock - Dolphin's Barn - Donaghmede - Drumcondra - Finglas - Inchicore - Kevin Street - Marino - Pearse Street - Pembroke - Phibsboro - Raheny - Rathmines - Ringsend - Terenure - Walkinstown. To say that I am proud and delighted would be an understatement. On one level it seems a bit limiting to be signed up permanent and pensionable before you turn 25 but the gods get ticked off if you throw away the cards you asked them for.

Sunday by-catch 13 May 18

Sunday comes round again, time travels real fast after the age of 13.
Speed? What about:

• Guy Martin is a fitter and a speed junkie:
• Doing the ton is a soap-box (unintentionally hilarious subtitles) 
• Sometimes he comes off
• Interviewed by the BBC
• More contemplative: beans on toast
• Valparaiso Cerro Abajo downhill
• Needle thrown through pane of glass

Computers. Last week I had a couple of links to Brian Kernighan who wrote the book on C, the programming language. It was so engaging that I went on a bit of a Computerfile jag listening to old buffers a bit older than me talking about the old days when computers were rare and wonderful and it was all to play for. The co-author on the C book was Dennis "dmr" Ritchie who invented that now ubiquitous language.

• More on dmr and other TLAs = early adopter usernames
• I wrote about the war between ASCII and EBCDIC before. Here is some EBCDIC history
• Brian Kernighan crosses the pond by boat: because he relishes a week of wireless time
• Ben Sparks on Phi, the math of the golden ratio 

Food engineering

• A couple of days for sourdough
• 5 days to to make gourmet KitKats by hand
• Kvikk Lunsj is better than Kit-Kat although the latter came first

Following up:

• Kathryn Mannix on the End of Life Trail: Macmillan Nurses
• Blood Roses [yest] by Tori Amos
• Footage of aftermath
• Q. Wot are Mitochondria? A, the powerhouse of the cell [last week]
• Lena Broditsky on the language of colour [prev]
• Here's a multiplex Aoife McLysaght talks about Lynn Margulis and Mitochondria
• Animation about how the powerhouse of the cell makes ATP

Other stuff

• A man who values garbage
• Zero waste and incineration for energy
• Woodworks
• The Amberley Bodger
• Make a rake
• Art of the Wheelwright - Building heavy wagon wheels
• The BBC asks people about their first shag. Which is of interest because it's an example of risk taking behaviour
• Which might be associated with a genetic variant in CADM2 on chromosome 3
• Here's another recently surfaced genetic variant V370A in EDAR a TNF-like receptor which affects the development of teeth, hair follicles, sweat glands and milk ducts.

Blood roses

I don't think I've given Irish Water  a particularly good press but at least I haven't hysterically claimed that water falls from the sky and so should be free to all. At The Institute on Friday afternoon I was prepared to be neutral while the ecological guy from Irish Water explained some of the regulatory tribulations that beset the company in its mandate to clean up the water supply. The other speaker was from Veolia [previously dumping a mountain of sewage sludge across my only access to the outside world] who gave a long technical talk about the latest techniques for cleaning foul water. That was fascinating and I wouldn't have missed the middle 10 minutes of his talk if I hadn't had so much free lunch. When I registered for the two-talk symposium I joked that I was only there for the canapés but the truth is that I'd rather take advantage of any 'extras' which are going down on campus. The alternative is to mark exam scripts and who wants to do that? I've left my notes on my desk at work but I have one story that I can remember enough to do a capella.

It concerns Vertigo geyeri and the plain people of the North-West. V. geyeri is a terrestrial pulmonate gastropod mollusc aka whorl-snail that is nowhere near as big shown [L] but more like this [Arial 10pt] g! I guess I'm here guilty of the same exaggeration for effect as the No campaign in their 2m tall foetal posters. These teeny creatures breathe air but live in wet-lands and don't fare well when their marshes get flooded . . . or dry out. It's a wee bit fussy and so acts as a sensitive indicator species; a bit like a miner's canary. The Environmental Protection Agency EPA have requested and required Irish Water to clean up the water supply for Glenties in Donegal. The water treatment plant is several decades old and cannot cope with either Cryptosporidium [prev] which flush the guts of the plain people of Donegal out goodo OR the mildly carcinogenic trihalomethanes [prev] which are an unintended consequence of chlorinating peaty water supplies.

But Irish Water cannot just fix the water treatment plant so that the identified environmemtal hazards are reduced or eliminated. No, they have to satisfy the County Council Planning Department that their solution to two problems doesn't launch another. Environmental legislation has largely originated in the EU where they have to leisure to care about the environment and the resources to carry out studies and then legislate to protect what they deem in need of protection . . . including Vertigo geyeri. Donegal CoCo doesn't even have discretion to give Irish Water a waiver on the necessary Environmental Impact Assessments. Likewise, the EPA's policies are driven forward by the EU Water Framework Directive / Wasserrahmenrichtlinie / Directive-cadre sur l'eau / Rámcové směrnice o vodě / Vesipuitedirektiivi. Irish Water are caught between the rock of planning and the hard-place of protection and has to pay at both ends. Indeed, all of the players are spending government money in the very Irish pass-time of lawyering up and trying to do the minimum in order to move on.

The plain people of Donegal are thus suffering years of paying for cruddy drinking water and occasionally losing a few citizens to a session of very loose bowels because of a mollusc so small that not even the French would eat it. The Utilitarians among us [meeeeee!] will want to suggest that someone does a risk-assessment and balances the QALYs of 2,000 person/puka-puka days and 20 cases of cancer in 20 years time vs the rights, privileges and utility of 20kg of Vertigo geyeri.

Before you get all shouty and certain about the obfuscation of bureaucracy and the nanny state, we might reflect on another watery disaster that just unfolded in Kenya at supper time of the 9th May 2018. One of several irrigation and water-storage dams on the farm of Mansukul Patel in the Rift Valley collapsed with a >!crump!< [see dam with its own rift valley R] and sent 70,000 tonnes of water downhill in a rush. Unfortunately a large number of Mr Patel's employees and the families lived downhill from the reservoir and 30+ of them are now dead. Well it seems that Kenya's Water Resources Management Authority WARMA had been concerned about the safety of the dams on the estate which had been subjected to a year long drought until torrential rains started to fill the reservoirs this March. Indeed that had recently ordered that the water be dispersed and the dam demolished or fixed The farm manager says that the dams are not illegal but he hadn't been in a hurry to sort out 'normal' seepage.

That's why we have rules and regs and the bureaucrats to enforce them. They are a total pain in the tits when they stop us doing something but without them we'd have more child-killing tragedies, as the pursuit of money outstripped someone's sense.  And what does Mt Patel irrigate with all that water? Roses . . . for the European market . . . a business which works because wages life is cheap out in Kenya and we love roses.

About one dam thing after another, I've had an absurd amount to say,

• 09 Oct 1963 Vajont 50 million tonnes
• 27 Mar 2009  Gintung 2 million tonnes
• 02 Niv 1925 Eigiau 1.5 million tonnes
• 04 Oct 2010 Ajka 1 million tonnes
• 09 May 2018 Patel Solai 70,000 tonnes