Left-handed saw-horse

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

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

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

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

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

crossing the border

We lived for several years in NE England before finally washing back up on the shores of Ireland.  If I had to live in a city, I might have been tempted to stay in Newcastle upon Tyne, a city bigger than Cork but smaller that Dublin with ready access to a rural hinterland of moors and beaches. That last Summer in England we went for a weekend in the English Lakes and slept in, like, a bed, rather than camping . . . because we weren't students anymore. Putting on the razz, we arranged for mine host at the B&B to share his views as we walked up Scafell Pike together. It's the highest peak in England, so like Everest, attracts a disproportionately heavy footfall. The path was well worn. We paused at a big cairn beside the path to look the view. The Beloved and I added a stone each to the way-marking cairn; and our guide picked another stone from the cairn and tossed it away! His position being that there was far too much evidence of human activity in uplands of England. And I say Fairy Nuff.

On the East side of our hill is a megalithic monument recently renamed St Fursey's Altar. It is only obvious from certain angles and it's not marked on the OS map, so many walkers pass it by. Last year our community marked out a relatively easy path to this dolmen from the main track used by ramblers heading for the local high spot of Mt Leinster.  A handful of relatively unobtrusive white stakes about 50cm tall were driven into the moor to indicate the path. And I say Fairy Nuff.

Last Wednesday, after some concentrated research in mapland which wrestled out the GPS coordinates. I yomped up the track and drove a small round stake into the ground just West of the track as it begins its final climb to Mt Leinster [above L]. As far as I can judge this is where our Townland ends and our neighbours' commonage begins, so I had painted their respective names on opposite sides of the peg. The other picture [above R] is the view of the shoulder of our hill above 1km to the SouthWest - the arrow marks where the border to the townlands crosses the ridge in a dead straight line and heads downhill to hearth and home. I moved the White Rock from nearby on the featureless heath: we'll see if the local walkers are cairn-accreters, like the English. 

And what about Ry Cooder's mournful beautiful Across the Borderline?

Six degrees of confusion

I can so read! I learned at about the age of 8. For the next ten years I read A Lot: St  Augustine, HE Bates, Ag Christie, Ch Dickens,  TS Eliot . . . WB Yeats, Em Zola. Then, in short order a) I left home  b) met The Beloved c) got real d) was learning how to Dad. I won't say I stopped reading, but I found that there were other ways of acquiring information and ways-of-seeing. Now, 45 years later, I R retire and I am finding more time to read and "read" [audiobooks]. Dau.I the Librarian has been amazing for half-inching books off the selves at work and sending them down country to her locked <hic> parents. Good choices: maybe not what I would have picked; but all the more interesting / challenging for that.

We have A Lot of books on out own shelves, of course, but I haven't yet been tempted / driven to re-read any of  them. Certain others of my family are happy to re-read green Penguins of which we have dozens, as memory of whodunnit fades with age, these mysteries recover their purpose. I wasn't explicitly casting about for something to read but, despite it being fiction, The Beloved added The Illusion of Separateness by Simon Van Booy to my reading stack and I read it through, more or less in one sitting. "despite it being fiction" sounds super-pretentious but I do recognise that literature can a) be diverting b) offer clues to how best to be human and alive. Science is no help at all for the latter!

It is hard to work out where the centre of the story is. The acknowledgments flag that the story of John and Harriet Bray is inspired, in part, by the real life story of Bert and Annette Knapp. But that straightforward tale is too slight to fill a book that will secure a publisher's advance. John/Bert married in America and shipped to Europe and was shot down over Nazi-occupied France. Both survived the war. While in France, John has a p2p encounter with a poetic German soldier. But he also met dozens or hundreds of other people in England and France whose lives intersected his and then lanced away on their own separate trajectory. The key meeting between soldier and airman is deliberately obfuscated by an authorial trick of writing the chapters out of chronological sequence. Flash-back, flash-forward is a thing that writers do for . . . reasons. But Van Booy is sufficiently uncertain of his ability to convince the reader where-in-heck they are and who is Dave? that he flags each chapter with a place and date stamp: 2010 - 1981 - 1968 - 1942 - 2005 - 1944 - 1939 - 2010 - 1944 - 2009 - 2010 - 1944 - 2010 - 1944. It keeps circling back to 1944.

If there is anything to be learned from this fragged tale it might be that good deeds are rewarded, not in a paying forward sort of way, but by direct reciprocation even if the pay-back may take some time. This appears to echo one scientific theory - reciprocal altruism - for why people are nice to strangers or people who are not genetically related. It is an edge case for the idea of The Selfish Gene. That's pretty sad as an indicator for how to live your life: only be nice if you're confident of pay-back. It is vanishingly unlikely that you will both read this book and read this Blob but I have mapped out the relationships for me:

Easter 2021

All coming together

• Juan Brown of Blancolirio explains the Ever Given
• Juan was our Go To for the Oroville Dam failure
• Couple go on Irish road-trip. Stopping in St Mullin's and talking to my pal Rene's dogs
• Round about 10:30 my neffy Hazza's song Long Life becomes the sound track
• But Jaysus, lads, it's Ireland not I-land
• Extraordinary coincidence re-unites Bela & Marya Paskin after WWII
• Xyla "Woodie" Foxlin blags wood from all over to make a US state jigsaw
• Bob Hendrix from Delft makes biodegradable Loop coffins from moss fungus and sawdust.
• Or try recompose?
• Sean Moncrieff's AtoZ of Covid
• 🍰🍒🍞
• Cadbury skims the chocs for the lonely.
• Medlar Mespilus germanica the fruit [above R] known as openarse or dogsbottom on account of the calyx BBC
• Colorful dumpster diving in DK
• How to hot breakfast in NZ
• ♬u♪♩c
• Cajun: Tit Galop for Mamou or this version
• Across the Borderline - Willie Nelson
• Just when you think Trio Mandilli [prev] can not get cuter, the grandma appears.
• Pa$$wd anxiety?? It's largely security theatre say Hazel Murray & Dave Malone
• Kathleen Lonsdale [Bloboprev], Kildare's Own crystallographer gets a blue plaque . . . in Redbridge East London. 
• Recycling chopsticks
• Julia Galef [recently] reckons that Richard Dawkins (not my favorite person),  can change his mind, like James O'Brien earlier.

Going gifts

My Da was retired from the British Navy at the age of 50. Married late, he still had teenage children and their expensive education to support; so he hawked his CV around for a new job.  He accepted a position as sales-manager with an electrical engineering firm called Plessey Marine. As someone who was reasonably honest, he was shocked at the casual venality, laziness and incompetence of his managerial co-workers. When he finally finally retired, one of these jobsworths organized the whip-round and decided what they would get the old man as a going-away gift. The kitty was heavy and and Jobsworth knew that the hook was to be painting - water-colours being one of many things [history, travel, gardening, Ireland, politics] that my father cared about. At 4.30 on the last Friday after the speeches and encomiums, he was presented with a rosewood box, plaqued with his name in brass, filled with dozens of piffling-sized tubes of oil paint, fabulously expensive brushes and a most peculiar palette with a thumb-hole that was too small for an adult. He wasn't yet into oils but he knew that real painters preferred big tubes and fewer of them because, like, paints are miscible. In a way if was a great gift because it allowed him to dust off his hands from that part of his life and move on without regrets.

I R retire now after a life-time in science, and my experience is that the person who steps forward to handle the departure of colleagues is too often the tone-deaf departmental busy-body. I remember one senior person who had been so thoroughly disrespected by his institution that he was moving to the rival place across town. His HoD, who was incapable of irony, presented him with a large, expensively framed print of the front end of his, now old, college: "So you'll fondly remember your time with us". The HoD had made that college his entire man-and boy life and was utterly unable to appreciate that the rest of us were less invested in its patriarchal charms. That gift can also be read, psycho-analytically, as as a statements "We own you, son, you'd be nothing without our support; this picture will be watching your ignominious descent into mediocrity".

I know I'm not the easiest person to read, but the two times when I have been the presentee, the gift has been superficially right but actually so wrong. Because, whatever about my interests in pedagogy, long-distance walking and 19thC European railways, I really don't want more stuff, either then or now.  Coronarama has futzed up my retirement process, but I told my HoD that, in no way did I want a [the standard easy-thinking gift locally] cut glass vase with my name and The Institute's name engraved on the side: please donate whatever it costs to the student welfare fund"

The one time I've stepped up to the plate and been that departmental busy-body was when I read a departing colleague, a man of manifold skills interests and talents, as a cheapskate naturally thrifty. Quite possibly I was over-empathizing with that one aspect of his character, but I saved us all €10 of whip-round tax. Greg discovered long-distance walking during the 3 years he was living in Ireland. He came to us one Easter in the 00s having walked the Wicklow Way [127km] from Dublin in 30 hrs. He arrived in Clonegal at 0530hrs, decided it was too early to call me to come [20km] to pick him up. Accordingly he retraced his steps to a convenient ditch and flung himself down to doze until it was decent to disturb people by telephone on Sunday.

What I did when Greg left was locate a scanned, digital copy [not this one] of Hemingway's Big Two-Hearted River, correct all the s/m/rn/ OCR errors and substitute all the Nicks for Greg. One of our digitally savvy, graphics sensitive, workmates photoshopped Greg's face into a set of surreal illustrations of lonely pine-forests, trout, bridges, tents and crickets. We printed it as an A5 booklet with space for everyone to sign "hey all the best, mate" the frontispiece. If he didn't like it, at least it would do as a fire-lighter.

End of oil issues

Many children entertain fantasies that their Real Parents, who are [obvs] rajas or princesses, will come to rescue them from the drudgery of homework and chores and whisk them off to a life of peeled grapes and endless access to video games. The Boy, with rather more imagination, stoutly maintained that his RPs were a) a nun on Bangkok b) a deep-sea diver on the North Sea oil-rigs. [what sat diving entails: not for claustrophobics!] At that time, deep-sea diving had the second highest rate of occupational fatality after road-repairers; couple that with nun bang kok and . . .  come up with Prince Oedipus if you want.

We were living in Newcastle upon Tyne at the time which faces the roiling grey North Sea where the wild oil rigs are. The actual business of the rigs was mostly working out of Aberdeen, a good bit greyer and further North than Geordieland. Nevertheless the oil rigs were in the air as places of dirt, hard-work, physical courage and bonanza pay packets. We moved back to Ireland several years before The Boy might have been tempted to run away to Aberdeen to apprentice himself to his RealDad. He got to work in the airline industry for ten years after he left home, which was hard enough work but cleaner and safer than deep-sea diving. He's a railway engineer now.

We were talking about the MV Ever Given, borked in Suez. He brought my attention to Oil Rigs at the end of their useful life:

Such as the long drawn out saga of the end of Transocean Winner, which was constructed in 1983 as the Treasure Saga . It looks like an oil-rig but it's actually a ship with propellers and rudders than lumber across the ocean under its own steam. It's designed to prospect for oil and gas. If the water is shallow enough, these semi-submersibles are replaced by leg-fix platform but in deep water the rig can be held in position [forward/back; left/right; up/down] as it does its work. Given the weather and tides, that is an amazingly optimistic aspiration; which has been vindicated by decades of dividends to share-holders.

In 2016, after 40+ years of service, in a bit of a trough for oil prices, Transocean decided that the Winner was worth more as scrap and arranged for the hulk to be towed to Turkey for breaking up. The ocean-going tug and the Winner parted <baddoooinng> company at night in a bit of a gale off the coast of Lewis and the Winner grounded on a headland near Dalmore Bay the following morning. It was eventually salvaged, patched up and delivered to the ship-breakers in Turkey.  Longform at Grauniad - exec summ at BBC: which has an amazing picture of the drop-and-scoop submersible salvage ship Hawk.

As mentioned in February, another take for disposal of oil-rig was to leave the stumps in place to serve as an artificial reef. This saves Big Oil a bunch on the clean up costs and provides a refuge for certain classes of wild-life. What could possibly go wrong?

Maritime matters

**************************

Here's a post-mortem based on sat-track, showing how EverGiven grazed the left bank, then over-corrected into the right sand. If you want to stalk the EverGiven in future, we know where she lives. And more ship-porn: these container ships have all passed the Evergreen as she licks her wounds in the Great Bitter Lake after her sandy encounter.

There are thousands of these monsters shipping artificial limbs, buoys, car-parts, drinking glasses, electronics, fire-helmets, garden furniture, hair-dryers . . . Suez is not the only choke-point: access to container cranes at Rotterdam and Felixstowe is needed to get the containers onto smaller ships, trains or trucks. Crane-bookings are all ahoo for the next several weeks at least. Finally we need to give tribs to Cork's own Master Mariner whose considered wisdom and zoom-aplomb were much in demand from the media this last week: