Gratitude

The Blob has had rather a lot to say about gratitude and the art of saying thank you [most recently]; like when I realized that editing newsletters was it's own reward and that expecting any readers to send cakes for my efforts was all frosting. I've ignored Mark Twain "Write without pay until somebody offers pay. If nobody offers within three years, the candidate may look upon this circumstance with the most implicit confidence as the sign that sawing wood is what he was intended for."

I resolved to take a break from the ould social media because I was starting to care what other people thought about my comments. It's not a good place to be, because pleasing a bunch of para-social randos is a recipe for regression to the mean until we all sound like each other. It makes the world a very boring place if there is no grit of dissent.

There is only so much entertainment to be got from staring at the ceiling - especially in winter when there are no flies drowsily circulating up there. Accordingly, casting about for something to read, I pulled from the shelf East & West, a collection short stories by W. Somerset Maugham [bloboprevs], and opened it at random. Maugham was a story-teller and to achieve that he needed to be a story getter: travelling outside his echo-chamber; conscientiously listening to other people; probing and poking and goading a bit . . . et voilá! more copy. The Back of Beyond [full text; cw: adultery, domestic abuse] is one of many set in the East: in particular colonial Malaya where the rubber [supervising, tapping, patriarching R] came from. It concerns a bit of adultery between two consenting adults married to others who should have stuck to being good neighbours but had inclination and opportunity to try something more interesting than watching geckos on the ceiling. For reasons, they agree to give up the ould nookie and return to their wedded spouses. He then dies [off-stage] and Her extravagant grief allows her husband to rumble his own cuckold's horns.

Husband is severely pissed off because his dignity is affronted and he goes to an older chap for advice about how to handle the divorce. Old Chap, calling up his own younger-self experience, says he'd be mad to divorce his wife just because she had a fling with another bloke. Husband rails on about how he's always giving and few seem to appreciate his generosity. To which Old Chap, with characteristic Maugham cynicism retorts:

"One mustn’t expect gratitude. It’s a thing that no one has a right to. After all, you do good because it gives you pleasure. It’s the purest form of happiness there is. To expect thanks for it is really asking too much. If you get it, well, it’s like a bonus on shares on which you’ve already received a dividend; it’s grand, but you mustn’t look upon it as you due . . ."
 "You'll have to walk warily. She'll have a lot to forgive too . . .you're behaving very generously, old boy, and, you know, one needs a devil of a lot of tact to get people to forgive one one's generosity." 

I posted the whole of The Verger, another story by Maugham a while back. I like Maugham's writing: his insights into the human condition seem to hold value in our different world.

Walking round his father

Christopher Somerville [R staring at some folklore] has a nice gig if you can get it as The Walking Correspondent of The (London) Times. Being a scion of The Patriarchy must have helped to get a foot in the door there, but The Times would have turned him out if he hadn't been able to write with knowledge and insight about boots, lanes, hilltops and blustery weather. I don't take the Times, so I haven't read it since I was living in my parents' [who did take it] place[s] as a teenager. Through my childhood, every 18 months on average, my naval father would get a new posting which usually involved a new home for his family. It was what it was, and the destabilization has help craft me. There's no future in going what if? about the past.

No shade on Somerville for deciding to squeeze a few more walking miles from his life by writing books about it. I've just yomped through his The January Man; a Year of Walking Britain the conceit of which has the author re-viewing past walks (with his Dad) through the lens of his more recent encounters with people in remote places. This is what pretty much all books about landscape and walking do. I have had occasion to crit such books in the past: it's not a good idea to include every encounter. A good editor is key if the author wants to be considered for a Wainwright Prize. One of which was won by Dara McAnulty [bloboprev]. Another for Underland by Robert MacFarlane [bloboprev]. Somerville was shortlisted but didn't win in 2017. Jan Man is still an excellent example of the genre.

One of my points of engagement is that Somerville is cut from rather similar cloth to me. Like mine, Somerville's father had an intermittently bloody exciting WWII as a career naval officer. It took several decades and a few pints before Somerville Jr. heard the least peep from his father about what he'd seen and done. My brother went to visit our father in retirement, 50 years after the end of the war and they went off to the pub for a bonding pint while my mother prepared Sunday dinner back home [sometime the cliché is the lived experience]. As the sat in the pub, The Brother tried "In the war, like, were you ever scared" to which The Da responded "Harumph, look at the time; drink up, we'd better get back to your mother". Which was ridiculous because it lacked at least 30 minutes to 1300 hrs [± 2 mins] when lunch was started every day. Somerville Jr otoh secured an harrowing anecdote about evacuating bloody, soot-smeared British squaddies from a small harbor in Crete in May 1941. It was like Hemingway's On the Quai at Smyrna:

The Greeks were nice chaps too. When they evacuated
they had all their baggage animals they couldn't take off
with them so they just broke their forelegs and dumped them
into the shallow water. All those mules with their forelegs
broken pushed over into the shallow water. It was all a
pleasant business. My word yes a most pleasant business.

Each chapter in The January Man is pegged to a month, but the narrative loops back and forth through time and space often reflecting on how father and son settled into a relationship which could pass for love between two buttoned up Brits. Shared adversity in crappy weather and wild places eventually gave them some common ground to talk about . . . without getting too emotional, you know.

The January Man of the title is taken from a folk-song here sung by Steeleye Span. You might think that January Man is olde, anon, trad but it was conjured and written by a folkie called Dave Goulder in 1970 and has since become part of the English Folk Canon

Catadromous

My statement at dinner that my latest earbook was The Book of Eels: their Lives, Secrets and Myths by Tom Fort was met with gales of incredulous laughter from Dau.II. I was disconcerted at the reaction because monographs on aspects of the natural world are my jam: Salmon by Mark Kurlansky for one example. The laughter came from a place thinking that eels were unimportant, effectively invisible and so rather a niche thing about which to write an entire book. True, but that the great thing about publishing 100,000 new titles every year - there's a long tail to entertain those with minority interests. The world would be a duller place if all there was to read was Harry Potter and Stephen King. 

As a book-l'arning biologist, I know something about the life-cycle and economic history of eels Anguilla anguilla but I'm a crap field biologist and lacked the persistence and contemplative habit required to fish effectively. Tom Fort makes the point that anyone in Europe who has walked beside a river, mere, beck, drain or culvert has been within spitting distance of some eels but very few of us have seen them. His book was first published in 2003 and that point is unlikely still to be true for anyone born in the present century. Because like so much of nature's bounty, eels have not proved to be inexhaustible in  supply.

After a wigging from my pal P, I have now sorted out the inventory of anadromous species of fish: These are fish which spawn in fresh water but spend some part of their life-cycle at sea. Catadromous fish, including eels, mate and spawn at sea and live the adult part of the existence in freshwater. Whichever way they are going, the transition between a marine salinity of 35 ‰ = 3½% and the 0.2% = 2,000 ppm generates an osmotic shock which requires a host of physiological actions to maintain the internal salinity at a comfortable 9‰ = 0.9%. Eels, salmon and mammals, including us have essentially the same level of salt in our blood plasma and lymphatic circulation. They say that is because when vertebrates evolved the salinity of sea-water was about 1% and pumping excess sodium and potassium ions through the membranes wasn't an issue. The last 450 million years has swept a lot of soluble minerals into the sea. In that time also the Atlantic Ocean has opened up from a crack to a pond 5,000km wide. Gradually the adult eeels have had to travel imperceptibly further each generation to reach the trad spawning grounds.

The first part of Fort's book tells how scientists from Italy (🇮🇹 Giovanni Grassi) and then Denmark (🇩🇰 Johannes Schmidt) showed where adult eels go when they leave their home rivers, lakes, drains and marshes for a last sex-fuelled vacation. That hot coupling destination is the wide Sargasso Sea on the Bermuda side of the Atlantic in the middle of the North Atlantic Gyre. You're quite right to give side-eye to the flag-emojis because wot-in-heck does nationality have to do with the great enterprise of Science? But 100 years ago, chauvinism and flag-wagging was very much to the fore in funding the research to solve the catadromous details of this important species in European feeding.

The second half of the book turns a spotlight on the catastrophic collapse of eel fisheries across the whole North Atlantic 'market'. Lough Neagh, the Rivers Thames and Severn, the Delaware River system, and Commachio where the Po debouches into the Adriatic. I won't even attempt to summarize the details but the story repeats itself. Demanding and cash-rich external influences seduced local fishers into eating their seed-corn. Globalization is a great disruptor of the commons: when resources are shared among neighbours there is a chance for sustainable development even if that looks like same-old same-old rather than "progress". Inexhaustible supply is a tenable position if those involved tweak traditional methods or harvest. If outsiders sweep in to feed at the same trough, often with different industrial-sized techniques, the balance is likely to get upset and the resources trampled into the mud.  It may be a small-small thing, seemingly unrelated, like installing street-lights on bridges. Eels prefer to travel on dark and stormy nights: 200W of sodium light across a stream mouth act like daylight on Dracula: no way up there. But what do I know?? my pal Russ actually fished for eels in Waterford.

Seanachie sunday

Misc

• Clare Muireann Murphy [R] stories with Michael Rosen 
• Comms is it? Unicode!
• British blizzard walking edition: Long Mynd 1865
• A short river on the Isle of Man
• Managing a fishing pond en Bretagne
  
• Engineering: acequias delivering water in Spain for 1,200 years
• bloboprevs
  
• Engineering: Ronan Point tower-block progressive collapse 1968
• Geology: Aiguille du Dru in the Alps progressive collapse 1950-2005 
  
• As you wish . . .
• Buttercup
• Dog owner assaults land-owner 
• watch my - - unsurprised - - face
• Beethoven's hair
  

Sleeping Benchy

One of our oldest pals had an interesting father: republican, volunteer, musician, journalist, and history buff. He's dead these last 15 years and his children are scattered: like so many families who came of age in the 1980s; then there no jobs, not even jobs for the boys. From somewhere, shortly after the funeral the idea materialized that it would be a grand thing to have a place to sit and look up at some rolling Irish hills and, if so inclined, say a small prayer for this man. The action items were:

• fence off a corner of one of our fields; with such a view complemented by a soundscape of water: tinkling, babbling or roaring according to the season
• source a suitable seat: preferably a bench because two is company
• lift a few of the paving stones from the old chap's yard
• clean out the brambles, gorse and ferns
• plant a little holm oak Quercus ilex to frame the view
  
• add a handsome flat-topped boulder for, like, the tea tray
• . . . and don't forget some brack

And it was so. Enda's Corner was a bit of work but I liked the outcome, and counted the project as a Win. But it was as far from our kitchen as it was possible to be; heck it was almost in the next county and so that bench was rarely used. I suspect that the longest the seat was occupied was a couple of Summer hours when I sat with another friend, also now dead, while we talked about teenage daughters, the joys and tribulations of raising such cr'atures.

This Spring, the daughter of the hero of our tale, our pal, announced that she planned to come home from foreign and would like to come visit with us on a whistle-stop tour of friends and relations.
[aside:We had another couple of friends in the early 90s: He - also dead and far too young - from County Clare via London, She from Canada via Scotland. Shortly after they became an item, he took her to visit his extended and extensive family in The Banner County. Jaysus, she confessed later, it was like she'd tapped into the motherlode of mouse-trottable tea with ham & salad sandwiches . . . and don't forget some brack].

Naturally we went down to visit with Enda in anticipation of the visit and were disturbed to find that 10 years of neglect, and exclusion of sheep, can reduce a comfortable and inviting coin de sejour into a prop from Sleeping Beauty. Our fairy-tale briars had been so feisty that the bench, let alone the paving stones, were entirely invisible from even a short distance. It was almost as much work to restore the corner to a semblance of its former state as it was to carve out the paradise from the wilderness in the first place. The bench, indeed, sadly under-engineered for two monstrous wide Dad-bottoms in the first flush of its youth, was reduced to fritters by 15 years of sturm und drang. So 'elp me guv'nor, the thing came apart in my hands when I tried to pick it up:

The holm oak o.t.o.h. was doing princely; having long out-grown its supporting stake and now 2.5m tall and thriving. The gorse had also grown back strong as ever but the fence posts were rotten through. Setting to, we generated some 5 cu.m. of brambles, gorse, twigs, and ferns and tucked this detritus under the nearest hedge . . . to mulch down . . . for habitat.

The redoubtable Dau.II resolved to reduce the bench to its component parts, discard the cheap and feeble slats and replace them with some naturally distressed 2 x 1s [18mm x 36mm] that had already seen service as a rabbit proof fence. From an early age, Dau.II has been interested in making things; but 8 years living in an 4th floor apartment in a city got her out of the habit of wielding a cordless drill and a handsaw. We soon realised that reuse, recycle, refurb is the worst of all construction projects.

• The original bench came as a flat-pack kit: the ends in cast iron with pre-drilled bolt-holes; 8 wooden laths all precision cut to the same length, holes pre-drilled; the bolts and screws all the same, appropriate, size in two little plastic bags. Idiotsäkert as they say in Ikea.
  
• A from-scratch bench made from wood and screws has enormous tolerance and is susceptible to any amount of bodging. I've made several of these from scaffolding planks and/or pallet-wood for the cost of the screws.
• The refurb job o.t.o.h. is constrained by the interface between the, effectively unalterable, cast-iron end-pieces and the timber. There is for example a gutter [R above] to receive the ends of each lath which limits the thickness of the timber - especially where the gutter is curved. These gutters are cast to different widths on the left and right arms! And ensure a rather feeble depth in all of the (bottom-supporting) planks.

Now a good pair of hands, a materials person, would have no problems with such a job. But Dau.II and I were spavined by lack of handy tools like clamps; and my best wood-saw was awol; and some of the 2 x 1s were too fat and needed to be chamfered to slot into the gutters; and some of the 8 laths were a few mm longer than the others (?!?); and I only have one cordless to both drill pilot holes and drive the screws. But we persevered! And with some puffing and blowing assembled a working bench, rather more robust than the original, which should be good for 2   3   6! years. I'm hopeless at this sort of thing: so many times have I swapped out a light-fitting only to find the protective cap in my pocket after I've re-done all the wiring. The first iteration of the bench proved to have a significant list to port when set upon its feet - but some assertive horizontal shear force ironed most of that out. And here's the finished product, with one coat of Danish oil. Yes, it is 150mm more cosy than the original 1200mm length. Bonus: bucket of kindling from the punky original laths.

La Chevalière d'Éon

Have you ever picked a fight with the wrong person? Is one of those questions that pops up on quora.com. These are usually stories of Hell's Grannies duffing up wanna-be muggers with deft blows of a sequinned handbag. All good fun and inspiring in their way. Sometimes the courage is not in meting out revenge but taking abuse on the chin and refusing to compromise your true self. I often think of Quentin Crisp in this regard. He was born in 1908 and openly flamboyantly wonderfully Out in London when to be even slightly camp was considered an invitation to be bashed. 

But Crisp was not the first to be gender fluid in London society. Nearly 200 years earlier Charles-Geneviève-Louis-Auguste-André-Timothée d'Éon de Beaumont was born into the Burgundian nobility in 1728 but was happier as La Chevalière d'Éon, and he came out as a woman at the age of 49. They had 30 years of living their best life in Versailles and London. Never 'eard of 'im? Never 'eard of 'er? Yup, me neither, but from Adam Savage at the armorer, I was off down a rabbit hole to the British Royal Armories at Leeds. Whooshing past plastrons, vambraces, breastplates and visors to land at a sword gifted by La Chevalière d'Éon to an English friend in 1777. Yere 'tis:

What it says on the tin steel in gold: "Donne par la Chevalïere d’Eon à son ancïen Ami Geo: Keate Esquïre. 1777". As one brought up as male in the French aristocracy, d'Éon was trained in the gentle art of fencing and served many years as a soldier notably in the Seven Years War. He was part of the mission sent to London to negotiate peace in 1763 and was rewarded with a purse of livres and a gong [Order of Saint Louis] when the war formally concluded at the Treaty of Paris. You really can't get more central to diplomacy centraal than that. Shortly after that d'Éon transitioned, but it didn't stop them fencing for sport, wager and cash; here against the Chevalier de Saint-George, another interesting, multi-talented fencer of the day:

The Prince Regent looks on from under a big hat. d'Éon died poor and paralysed from a fall in London at the age of 81 and is buried in St Pancras Old Church. Before his corporeal remains were interred, they were carefully inspected by a surgeon who found a well-developed bosom and normal-looking male external genitalia. We know now that has a rather poor consonance with gender identity. I'm quite sure that if some 18thC bravos decided to bully d'Éon, the way their shabby descendants abused Quentin Crisp, they could expect a poke in the face with something sharp.

There's Gold

. . . in them thar youtubes . . . for a teeny fraction of those generating content on that platform. A few years ago, I was suck[er]ed into a feed of snipers / snorklers / scubaristas who would plunge into rivers after the Labor Day weekend and retrieve Go-Pros, phones and jewellery from the murky bottom. The feed-back loop of para-social whoops and hollers from the comments led to these Sn/Sn/Sc people posting every week or every day as they rose up trove from the depths. It seemed too good to be credible. I came to believe that I'd seen the same alga-covered GoPro the previous month; and so I stopped watching dripping stopped-watches. I think I must have para-plunged into these inland waters from following beach-combers [a thing I do]; some of whom use metal detectors to scan the sand at low tide. The jaded palettes of folks-like-me need the content providers to be "exciting" or at least sufficiently different. 

On the principle of why keep a dog and bark yourself, I have gravitated towards actual gold-panners rather than recycling para-Go[Pro]ld hunters. There's a group of Canadian YTers who are extracting gold from the Fraser River of British Columbia in a way that is mildly entertaining and rings true to my not-too-fiesty crap-detector. DanHurdOfDanHurdProspecting is an older guy with a flaming orange beard who is working several claims with a shovel, a gold-pan and a wet bottom and sharing his finds with something North of 1 million subscribers. Pioneer Pauly otoh is a younger sniper; he shrugs into a wet-suit and plunges into torrents with sharp eyes and a snuffer bottle. Gold is super heavy [19x denser than water; 7x denser than granite!], so sinks to the bottom and gets caught in crevices. In quickly flowing water, Pauly can fan off the 'over-burden' with one hand and this sand and gravel is swept downstream to reveal the good stuff. Two Toes How To snipe.

TODAY is the 79th day of the year and, following my tribs to Tin [₅₀Sn] Day it seems appropriate to talk up Gold ₇₉Au today. Melts 1064°C, 1948°F, Boils 2836°C, 5137°F. It is chemically inert. So you can purify the stuff chemically.

Inventory: license; gold pan; sifter = classifier; high-banker; water; back-hoe; shovel; pick, crevicing tool; trowel (cat-food scoop will do); pry-bar; snuffer-bottle; metal detector [optional]; wet-suit; crusher; shaker-table; dry socks; hat; sunscreen; no-see-um repellent; milligram scales.

Prospector's jargon by size: nugget > nuggy > picker > flake > speck > flour. 

Gold panning is another way to sort heavy material and wash away the lighter stuff. Because gold is the densest material in any shovelful even flour can be concentrated in a gold pan in sufficient quantities to make it worth the work. A nugget much smaller than your pinky finger nail could easily weigh a gram and that's $60 at current prices. The 'picker' [big enough to pick up with your fingers] shown [R] is the reward for processing maybe 10kg of dirt. It's the cash-value for a day where Dan and Pauly get to hang out together which is the fun pay-off. Gold can be found all over the world:

• Ireland
• Broighter, Co Derry
• Tyndrum, Scotland
• Senegal
• Bank of England
  
• Yukon
• Brazil
• Serra Pelada 450 tonnes extracted more pics
• New Zealand
• Kenya
• Wales - mining old smart phones How To

 The price of Gold goes Up and Down; it is now worth $60/g = $1850/oz

• Feb 2001 ~$450/oz century low
• Aug 2021 ~$2200/oz recent high
• 10 Mar 2023 $1,834  . . . 19 Mar 2023 $2,001 ! Ya shd a bought a week ago
  

But you don't have to get your socks wet, or break your fingernails: you can sit on your sofa and make a fortune trading gold. Don't do this at home, folks, you will lose your shirt: Bitcoin - it's yer only man!