maggie and milly and molly and may

 . . . went down to the beach(to play one day) [ee] 
[premature posting error on Friday! here released on schedule with added value].

may couldn't lift a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone. 
Which is just as well because it [L]was an interstellar messenger from the Planet Zorg cooling off in a rock-pool at Benvoy along Costa na Déise. I mentioned that my family left me alone with my weighty blanket after Easter and headed W to The Coral Strand = Trá an Dóilín in the Connemara Gaeltacht. I can just about handle having six extra [beloved] bodies in my own house . . . disappearing my charging cables tidying things up. But wrenching myself off a familiar sofa and, in a foreign environment, fighting over the breakfast cereal with m'fam? That was a too much for my agéd frame. Not to mention making a boarding-house queue with my fellow guests for access to the bathroom. At home, rain-or-shine, day-or-night, there is always the compost heap. So they went off and I stayed home and everyone was happy.

But they came back to the Sunny South East less than a week later and continued their live-like-there-is-no-tomo fun along the Waterford Coast. There is free-will, but in a sense they rolled their Ould Fella up in a bit of carpet, strapped him to the roof of the car and took him to Tramore. 

The timing was ungood because, a week before Waterford has been named the top destination in Ireland by Condé Nast Traveller, in a list of the must-see places to visit in Ireland. In particular they cite Trá na mBo so it will be even less of a Secret Beach than it has been since they added steps down the cliff and signage to get more footfall. I couldn't go: I was all tied up [nnggg nnnGG] with building works: being required to hold one end of a piece of timber and pass nails and screws to The Boy. But Dau.I took her niblings to Trá na mBo [you may call it cow-strand, if you live in England]. Together they made the rite of passage [woooooo] up the rocks and through the hole in the cliff to The Secret Secret Beach beyond. Which is important because Gdau.II is ten years old now - almost too old for Secrets.

I'm glad they didn't ask me for an opinion; because several years ago, I stopped making that micro-journey when it was clear that several tons of roof had collapsed since I last went to visit. But nobody died [Phew!] last week and they disturbed a seal, Phoca vitulina probably, who had hauled out at high tide. Seal probably thought "Fakkin' Condé Nast, I've been sunning myself here, minding my own business, for years - and now it's ruined by human yahoos".

One of the new additions at the car-park nearest to Trá na mBo is a box made of pallets and painted pink&blue with a scrap of fishing net atop to slow down the gulls. It says [in a rather spare, enigmatic ee cummings way - appropriate to a beach where one may encounter poets who are fluent in Spanish - and if you don't meet a poet you'll have to spout forth something yourself - do not mumble, the seals defo don't like mumblers.]

Tidy Towns
Beach Box
Swap & Share
Lost & Found 

The Best Day

Tuesday was the 1st of September: the day when, in a normal year, everyone who works at The Institute has to sign in to show that they are present and available for work . . . and not still sipping a pina colada [as R] in  a bar on the Costa del Rico. We weren't expected to do that, but we were requested-and-required to sign in to a Zoom call at 1500hrs and find out what's in store for us and the students for the 2020-2021 academic year. Our wireless "broad"band at home is so sketchy that I had in the Spring driven into work to Zoom at my desk.

Not Tuesday! The Beloved has a life too; and part of that is minding her antient father Pat the Salt - and keeping polished the remains of his collection of marbles. Tuesday was in the middle of a Week-On, so she was i/c; but she had a diary cascade of Zoomy busy events cluttering the morning and forenoon. Accordingly, I offered to take Pat off-site for a Thelma & Louise Pat & Bob out along Costa na Déise to visit some of his old haunts. And it was so-ho-ho

As we came round a cliff-top corner West of Boatstrand [Trá na mBád], we saw [above with wheel-barrow for scale] four people working diligently creating a mandala on the low-tide sand of Kilmurrin Cove. I like that sort of endeavour very much: you have a few hours to create something striking with hard physical work and then it's >!plooosh!< all gone. The antidote to hubris. I didn't abandon Pat and stride across the beach to help. I think it must be the work of Sean Corcoran who has a habit of creating these ephemera. 

Five minutes later we pulled into Pat's old gaff on the ridge above Bonmahon. It wasn't really sunny but it wasn't properly overcast either and there was a drying warm wind from the West. I parked the Red Yaris where Pat could see the back garden and started to mow the getting-leggy grass. After I'd done one section, I asked if he was ready for coffee and flapjacks - because it's so tiring watching other folk at work. I then declared Café Baldwin to be Open and unpacked him from the car for some of that fresh sea-breeze . . . and decaf n flaps. Then it was one man went to mow for another 40 minutes. I should add that Pat was mowing the grass - about 10 ares of it - without drive-wheels, let alone a ride-on, until the age of 85. Then he announced that a) he was not.going.to.mow.any.more b) he wasn't going to drive the car any more either.  That's when Dau.II and I started to do The Pension Run: mowing the grass for our dinner.

When we got home in time for my Haranguing The Troops Zoom, Pat told everyone who would listen that it had been The Best Day and how we had spent hours mowing the lawn, trimming the hedges, cutting down trees. I was grateful for the bigging up because I was invited to stay for dinner.  The Best Day, mind, not A Perfect Day.

Lett Us Create

On dit que The definition of stupidity is doing things over and over hoping for a different result. It's defo like that with me and lettuce. I like a BLT; shop-lettuce is a dollar a pop & can be awash with coliform; we have hectares. 
Q, How difficult could it be to GIY?
A. For me, molare-sappingly, uneconomically difficult.
But here we are in 2026 on lettuce-repeat. I bought seed, they cost money. I planted them in tiny pots on 21 April. Five weeks later, half of them were no-show; half were 5-leaves / 8cm big and cluttering my window-sill. I planted them out [R]; they fell over, and despite the referee counting they were disinclined to get up.

In May, I was given a 5-leaf courgette plant among a trayful of misc tomato and squash. It is doing much better [L]. Not to be the ingrate, but I get cognitive dissonance over yellow courgette, so I'll have to eat them blindfold. Likewise bell-peppers, which should be green or maybe red, but they are often sold 🇧🇯 🇲🇱 🇨🇲 🇧🇴 🇨🇬 as if a) we all had a faarm in Africa and b) were ardent patriots. We have grown bell-peppers in the polytunnel . . . two of them, the size of crab-apples. At least they were green.

There has been a bit of a reno down at Pat the Salt's gaff on Costa na Déise. A pair of antient wrought-iron gates turned out to be supported entirely by rust and brambles and were pulled out of the gap in the road-frontage wall. Only mad people have steel gates down on the Costa where the half-life of a wheelbarrow is about 15 months. It's the salt, innit. The Beloved was inclined to screen the gap with a garden trellis and encourage honey-suckle or sweet-peas to fill in the gaps. These trellises are made from lath-and-staples which might stop a jack-russell, but were scarcely capable of having me lean-on-the-gate while chatting to the neighbours. and they only came in 600mm, 1200mm or 1800mm lengths [we needed 2300mm] and they cost €40.

It's not for nothing that I've spent half my life, combing the beaches of the Costa. Fathoms of rope, scores of buoys, a dozen fish-boxes, an anchor have all been saved from Poseidon Manannán mac Lir and given a new life ashore. But I have also been slowly progressing a project to make a sculpture from wave-tossed and sand-scoured tree-branches which in cycles litter the tide-line.  I figured that when I had 206 pieces of the right size (from phalanges to femurs) I could assemble an articulated wooden pal for buoy-boy. Obvs, I knew that I'd need more like 2060 timber-toes to pick-and-choose from. 

A few days later, when I was alone on site, I gathered by driftwood archive together. I made a frame from 5 pieces of timber off-cut about 1m long and made a proof of principle ProtoTypoGato; 

I left the original where The Beloved couldn't help but see it and sent a photo to the next generation. Everyone hated it! But were kind enough to say little. Which was just as well because, once The Shock of the New had its corners knocked off by a couple of sleeps, I had constructive comments about how the basic idea could be improved. Rip some of the Western Red Cedar planks from the 2016 woodshed project to make the horizontal rails, for example.  I feel a mort happier about this than I do about verdomde GIY lettuce.

Escape from

 . . . the Pepple's  Republic of Cork .

Lockdown? It's a bitch! Dau.II, like her sister 2 years prev, left home a few months before she was old enough to vote. After an au pair Summer in suburban Dublin, she shifted her duff to live with her bloke in the People's  Republic of Cork . For the last six years they've been living right in the City Centre. That was a big change from growing up as far as you can be from a bus-stop and still be in Leinster. But she was adamant that living in suburbia with a garden [lawn-mower, car, garage, 2.4 kids, annual Spanish holiday] was an unacceptable nebbishy half-way house. They were fortunate to snag one of the last landlords in the country with a shred of honour. The affordable mid-recession rent has never increased; despite The Market more or less doubling rental prices over those six years.

But living thrifty and having a really modest foot-print on our pillaged planet only takes living so far. In September, half of Dau.II's core social support crew went back to college and left town and Pandemic Man forbids her to talk to the rest of her pals. Neither of them are working and they're just haemorrhaging money for a really good 4th floor view of the River Lee . . . and access to the deli-delights of the English Market, of course. At Christmas, she floated the idea that she and her bloke might move one county East and live in her grandparents' old gaff in the Déise. It's flipping back to Lifestyle Remote but actually Costa na Déise is surprisingly well served for buses: 3 times a day each way between Tramore and Dungarvan.

And that would have been finio in The Before Times. Dau.II shops once a week on Wednesday which the Tesco Crowding App reports as being the quietest time of the week. She sits down in Tuesday night and plans the menus for the next seven days "It's way easier than trying to think in the supermarket". Sorry Tesco, no impulse buys in that family. But really in these Covid-days, you'd need a death wish, or at least a cranked up appetite for living dangerously, to get on a bus, even spaced out at 25% capacity. If you do the calcs, for a normal office fonctionnaire, in normal times their car is sitting idle (either in the driveway at home or in the office car-park) for > 90% of the time. [calcs for me: 90 commuting minutes a day M-F = 7.5 /168hrs = 4% active use rate each week]. It was my plan, coz I R retire, to pass the little Red Yaris, after getting her through the NCT in December, on to an enterprising Polish construction worker who wouldn't mind a few dings in the paintwork.

Then one of my rellies came home for good from Foreign and I added her to the list of insured drivers and handed the Yaris off on her until she found her feet. A cold coming we had of it [that would be TS Misogynist] in January. It was obviously going to be harder than I imagined to shake off a car that has been super-dependable for 8 years: hauling wood, dead sheep, sacks of feed, groceries, occasional passengers. It turns out The Pep, Dau.II's bloke, passed his driving test in 2014 more or less at the same time they started living together . . . in the city . . . with no need for a car at all at all. In those days, you could be taught by your Ma or Uncle Joe or really anyone with a car who was prepared to load their insurance to accommodate an absolute beginner. Having passed the test, you were good to go anywhere whenever you wanted - without having had any experience, let alone training, for driving at night or on motorways. Very shortly after than, the Road Safety Authority required beginners to swap their L plates for N = Novice plates for two years [prev]. At the same time they required formal instruction from a registered driving school, which was a huge bore for young tearaways who just wanted to get 💨Go Faster decals for their wheels.

After a turmoil of needless anxiety from me, it turned out that I could add The Pep onto the Yaris  insurance roster without any additional tearaway loading and last Wednesday I got up at dawn to {deliver the Yaris to | collect the 20-somethings from Cork}. We are in Level 5 lockdown; only "essential" travel is permissible beyond 5km. "Essential" is undefined and so far untested in the courts but the Gardai are now empowered to slap a €100 Fixed Charge Notice on anyone deemed to be transgressing these guidelines. The Media is a having an irresponsible field day reporting on a lot of edge cases: two pals done "for having a picnic" because they were consuming a Danish as well as lattes while taking a walk in a Dublin park; two lycra cyclists discovered exercising 20km from home; a lad who was found bypassing his local chipper and buying a rissole at a more distant emporium. Thus the only way to determine if "moving house" is essential is to pack your clobber in a van / Yaris and set out. I didn't sleep well the night before.

I dressed up in Full Patriarch [tweed jacket, open shirt, cravat, mask, recent silver hair-cut (self!!! I haven't been to a barber for 30 years)], because that almost always helps. I encountered only one Garda Check Point and was half way through my spiel "I'm going to pickup my dau" when I was moved on through "ghter who is moving house". The 20-soms were packed and ready when I arrived 3 hours later and with some ceremony I handed the keys to The Pep to drive us to his new gaff: 

Driving a car is like riding a bike, once you've mastered the skills, it all come back to you quick enough. Except that cars are evolving rather fast and have zero conventions about where the controls for lights, wipers, air and heat are located. We agreed that, as well as L plates and N plates, P plates for can drive but am rusty would be better for everyone. Whatevs. I've been on plenty of white-knuckle car journeys as a passenger and last Weds wasn't one of them.

Here come the grockles

Lonely Planet has included The Copper Coast in their 2022 Offbeat bucket list. Trá na mBó is no longer The Secret Beach as it is specifically named as hidden honeypot for randommers in Peoria and Goteborg to plan their niche weddings. No sensible person is going to do this. Sensible folks must realize the irony of publishing lists of hidden places and consult the guide as places to avoid if they want to avoid the dowd crowd.  I guess there's a christmas / birthday market "let's send this book to Weird Uncle Jenks, so he won't be tempted to come visit us next Summer".

It happens that I have an excellent photograph of Costa na Déise at the very height of its charms, maybe Fiendface it at old Jenks?

And of course Dear Reader, I don't mean you. You are kind, discerning, keep your dog on a leash and take your litter home . . . and there's only a dozen of you anyway; half of whom are [otherwise engaged] in Ukraine.

* Grockle n. sarcastic name for a tourist in Devon and Cornwall

The cloths of Heaven

An Fear aka The Man aka St Micheál of Martin, our Leader, announced that, from 10th May, intercontinental ballistic inter-county travel would be allowed for all. Clan Blob were quite slow on the take-up of these freedoms but we expect Dau.II to come across from the People's Republic later today. Though not without faults [who is?], nobody chid Dau.II for not being willing. She can change a plug, mow a lawn, saw a straight line through lumber and is happy with power-tools. 

It didn't seem fair to ask Corkies to break their journey on Costa na Déise to mow 10 or 12 ares of grass simply because they were passing. And there is self-interest in this: I'd rather not wait an extra couple of hours before the English Market hamper is opened and we can start tucking into cake, custard, cheese.

Accordingly, I scabbed a lift with The Beloved last Thursday when she travelled South about her father's business. It was apparent from the photo above that I wasn't the only one with thoughts of mowing: a farmer was in process of taking the first cut of silage from the meadow on the cliff-top just West of Kilmurrin cove. I can definitely be relied upon to take a crap photo; but this captures some of the magic of the Waterford Coast with its receding headlands all the way to Cork and backdropped by the distant Comeragh Hills. If there's one thing my father could capture in his water-colours it was the idea of the variety of clouds in Ireland. Taking a shy-and-retiring role in the composition is the banks of thrift / sea-pink Armeria maritima [prev] which is characteristic of The Copper Coast; partly because of its resistance to heavy metals.

Preparing for a [brief?] interlude of inter-county travel, Dau.II asked me to prepare a Beachcomber's Guide to The Copper Coast. I was nothing loath; indeed I have made a project of this in the past in anticipation of friends-and-relations visiting this gem of hidden charms - geological [go Ordovician], botanical [see above], ornithological [go Choughs Pyrrhocorax pyrrhocorax]. All those coves: Stradbally, Ballydwan, Trá na mBó, Bunmahon, Knockmahon, Kilmurrin [see above], Boatstrand, Benvoy, Annestown, Woodstown, [no, not the oyster Woodstown], Kilfarrasy, Garrarus, Trá Mhór. Since she could toddle Dau.II has been to all of them, but unless you're driving and or paying attention to the passing landscape, it can be difficult to a) tick them off in order b) remember which one has the towering purple cliffs and which are only accessible at low tide. It turns out that Waterford CoCo has not been idle during the lock-down but have prepared and distributed a lot of new signage [L], so you know where you be when the car-door opens and you can rush out to explore. As well as the finger-posts, there are new info-boards at each place with some handy annotated photos of what you're looking at. Especially interesting because there have been substantial, photo changing, rock-falls at least on Woodstown and Ballydwan beaches.

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

WB Yeats

Mudlarking, the book

I am having a pandemic that couldn't be beat w.r.t. the impact it's having on my life. In the Before Times, when I was alone on the farm at weekends, with the Little Red Yaris waiting for my whims in the yard, I'd often find an excuse not to go off-site and spend the whole Friday-to-Monday pottering about with shovel and saw. But it is getting wearing that I cannot go beach-combing; a pastime which involves solitary, outside, physical exercise . . . and cleans up the foreshore. So many tasks on the farm would be more difficult without an inexhaustible, every-sized, supply of rope and cordage scavenged from the tide-line.

When Borrowbox, the free audio-book gizmo provide by the Irish Library Service, suggested Mudlarking by Lara Maiklem [reviewed], I was all over it like a rash. Obviously there is overlap between the two professions, but I go big on brightly coloured buoys which are rare on the tidal reaches of the Thames. Over the last 30 years, I have gotten to know the nooks and headlands of Costa na Déise aka The Copper Coast. Over a similar time-frame Maiklem has developed an intimate knowledge of the 40m x 40km strip of mud-and-rubbish which is exposed between high tide and low from Erith to Teddington. Like a gambler who wins big on a teenage plunge on the Grand National, Maiklem was hooked by pulling an evocative chunk of history from the grey mud while walking beside the river. She has gone back to that well countless times over the last 20 years.

The second chapter uncovers the lost type of Doves printers and font-founders which I riffed on six years ago. She has a , which manifest itself as she scanned across the foreshore surface in a zen-like state looking-not-looking for something that was out of place and so perhaps interesting. What a coup! A physical link to William Morris, and the pre-Raphaelites . . . if that's what floats your wherry.

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Go on you must be joking

At the mill with boons

• Woodies
  
• 2 years ago Beau Miles planted 1400 whips; check-in time!
  
• milling and turning storm fallen timber 
• Judgement of Paris by Rubens is being restored
• Hügelkultur: log filler for raised beds.
  
• Plywood made in Pakistan 
• History and Folklore
• Andrew A1 Doherty talks Costa na Déise
• Templeludigan fairy whiskey
  
• Phylogeny of painting: spot the diff in Hokusai [whom prev] 
• See [R] for one of the other 36 Views of Mt Fuji
• Pot roast - Chesterton's Fence - Skeuomorphy - Primo's Onion - Five Monkeys . . . MeFi thread about historical inertia
  
• ♬ ♪ ♫ ♩
• Idris Sardi is 10 years dead today
• Во поле берёза стояла
  
• Grace Cummings - Sweet Matilda
• Cantadores de Alenejo
• Grândola Vila Morena - Amália Rodrigues. Thursday 25th April was the 50th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution in Portugal. Playing this song on the wireless just after midnight was the signal that the Coup was ON. More? 45m on The Rest is History
• Biodiverse Belfast Sink in the English Peak District [location location] 
  

You can't get good help

Once upon a time a couple retired, in the normal course of events, and about the same time (he 65, she 60) they moved to a tiny cottage on Costa na Déise = The Waterford Coast. That was a good choice for two pensioners with limited means: 

• small is cheaper to heat; 
• small has less space for distracting clutter; 
• small can be cleaned quicker. 

The tiny cottage [IDed R], built about 100 years before, came with a mighty garden: 1.058 acres = 0.4 hectares = 100m x 40m. That was because, in the 1890s, cottagers were expected to plant sufficient rows of spuds to feed their extensive "every sperm is sacred" families. The previous owners had split the property, with a monstrous Leylandii hedge, into a lower paddock and a neat garden with exotic trees nearer the house. For years Pat kept a few goats to munch their way through the paddock but undertook to mow the rest of the grass himself. A third of an acre = about 12 ares = a helluva lot of mowing, especially if you go over it whenever there is a dry spell (in case the grass gets out of control, you understand). For the next 20 years, Pat mowed for Ireland. Then, quite abruptly just after he turned 85, he downed tools and a) refused to drive the car b) refused to mow the lawn: maintaining in both cases that he was now a liability to himself and others.

Over the next couple of years me and Dau.II split the lawn-mowing because someone had to do it. It was part of the weekly Pension Run where we picked up the old folks, took them into town to draw the pension, buy some groceries, load up on meds and get home in time for lunch. Mowing the lawn was the alternative to watching day-time television and both had their positive aspects. But there was no way I was going to gather up grass clippings to dump them down in the paddock. Then my in-laws moved into town, which meant they could walk to the post-office, Dau.II left home and I didn't feel responsible for the new lawn in the new place. Accordingly, a local bloke was contracted to mow that lawn for €25 a go, "whenever he thought it needed a cut and he could fit the job into his busy schedule". 

Well that was a creeping disaster altogether. This lawn-bloke . . . 

• didn't come with any regularity
• wouldn't respond to txts or e-mails
• dumped the clippings over the wall into the neighbour's horse paddock
• mowed over some lavender plants that had disappeared under the unmowed grass
• was truculent when called to account
• thought that €25 for 40 minutes work wasn't really enough
• still didn't come with any regularity

and now it looks like [dang and blast it] I've got my old job back. The lawn, having been unmowed for a month, was looking 'tufty'. When I set to, Pat was sitting in the garden with a silent / supervisory demeanour so I couldn't fire the clippings over the hedge. Nothing for it but gather up all the grass into a 1 tonne builders' rubble sack and take it away in my car. Sounds good in theory. But the mowing and gathering happened in the evening while take it away in my car wasn't until the following morning.

Well the following morning the inside of my car was like a tropical rain-forest. I couldn't see through any of the windows with their thick occluding pall of condensation. And there was a most peculiar smell which was probable the early stages of silage fermentation. I had to drive all the way to work with all the windows open hoping thereby to dry out the upholstery. Did someone mention rain-forest?

Notes to self: next time use smaller water-proof sacks . . . . and don't leave it so long between mowings yeh lazy git. And did someone mention the €25/ 40mins? meeeeeeeeee!

Boxing the heart

Last week I was down on the Costa na Déise aka The Copper Coast with my chain-saw to tidy up some of the lumber-piles from the DarwinDay Storm of 2014. There are still tonnes of unprocessed and part-processed logs about the place and every storm brings down more fresher, damper branches. It was low tide when I arrived so I went round the headland East of Eden ; Java Bunmahon looking for fish-boxes before I started the chain-saw <brrm BRRRRM>. All I found was a sand-blasted 4m length of 4"x2" = 100mm x 50mm . I couldn't allow that to be a hazard to shipping when it left on the next spring tide, so I brought it up to the house. It had a terrible twist at one end because 4x2s are milled by the million without a great deal of attention to quality. If it matters then don't get your 4x2s delivered! Some of the batch will be knotty, waney, bendy, warped or shook. Better to go to the yard and pick through the stack, rejecting the obviously defective.

Why was my new board twisted? Because it had been cut from a 'tree' species unknown, age unknown, season unknown but probably pine, spruce or fir. And then thrown in the sea. When boards dry out, maybe especially if kiln-dried to speed things up, the outside sap-wood will dry out at a different speed to the central, harder, more lignified heart-wood warping results to minimise the tension in the fibres. The knots come, as you know, from the foundation of side-branches sprouting from the main millable trunk. Saw-millers have known this since first a board was cut. They want to get as much usable lumber from each log that passes through their hands. In the old, local, pre-globalisation days, trees would be felled for a particular purpose in mind, cognisant of the fact that when planks, especially sap-wood planks, dry out they will have a strong tendency to straighten the rings. Amongst much else that means that floor boards have a natural up-side and a under-side. If you nail it upside down, the centre will 'sag' edges will finish 'proud' and put splinters in your socks. Hogging planks are fine because the edges sit down. Of course, with such long-established knowledge the language will be weirdly medieval.

The diagram of various cuts is lifted from a super-wonderful page on how to mill a log so that it is fir (sic) for purpose. Obviously if you need a mighty timber to support an upstairs or a fire place then you'll cut a whole piece and use the super-bendy off-cuts somewhere less structurally crucial. And you have to have something to burn in the fireplace too. This all took me back to 1972, when I was wrapping up the school-days under the care and attention of Mr Wilkinson my inspirational biology teacher.  My biology notes accumulated in 4 hard-backed exercise books which I've managed to hold on to. For reasons best know to himself, probably because he was really interested, he spend a couple of lessons talking about forestry, coppicing and timber. That was never going to 'come up' on the exams but it stuck to me anyway.

B for Boxing-the-heart is a compromise, as are all the cuts labelled in the previous picture. The thing about the generic cuts, like 4x2 or 3x2 is that they are good-enough for a wide variety of situations and so long as you keep the timbers dry-enough and airy-enough any old softwood or any old species will do. Even if you make the ceilings 2.4m high because that's half the standard length of sawn timber in the yard, you'll still have off-cuts and you can usually arrange it to discard the cruddy end of some of the timber.

Chocolate Fudge Cake

Just a perfick day. My birthday, Wednesday, was, like the electron, a bi-locating affair.  The Beloved and I spent the morning pootling about in the garden - a lot of shovelling compost and transporting water - and then set off for Costa na Déise to start a week of caring for Pat the Salt my venerable F-in-L. After a thanksgiving dinner that couldn't be beat we all set to on a generous tranche of of the pictured cake . . . with a few tart strawberries as counterpoint. But Pat goes to bed early, whatever the state of light beyond the window so I was able to escape for a yomp along the beach at Kilfarrasy.
As I haven't gotten my toes salt-wet since the beginning of March, I was delighted with myself.

On going to bed in daylight; my mother maintained that she never taught her children how to tell the time so that she could hoosh us off to bed when she had had enough.
"But can't we stay out a little longer? Vitamin D is still a-makin'"
"Nope, it's bed o'clock; I'll read you a story"

A fleeting signal

 The Boy is back home in Ireland with his family for Easter. We had planned to run an Easter Egg hunt in our 1 acre woodland. Last Summer we had the arborist in for two days work putting manners on the 13-15 year old trees with some judicious thinning. It's lovely down there, with the canopy gone, some colourful spring flowers are getting their time in the sun before nettles Urtica dioica and brambles Rubus fruticosus choke them out. Some natural pathways are meandering round the acre: so that those so inclined can do walking meditation: after the arborist I went round pruning off the eye-pokers. 

But the optimistic elder care roster collapsed under coronarama and other interventions - we are none of us getting any younger. Accordingly we were down on Costa na Déise. We made a couple of visits to the quietly delightful Japanese Garden in Tramore, where Irish / Greek / American / Japanese story-teller Lafcadio Hearn spent some time as a youth. Gorra season ticket now, so we'll be back!

Easter Monday, after lunch, between showers, The Boy and The Bob took his daughters down to the strand at Kilfarrasy. The wind was really too bitter brisk to go swimming so we ambled about doing beachy things: digging holes, throwing stones and writing messages to the naiads. Whereas I have a fine cursive hand for sand-writing, I cannot frame a picture to save my life:

What I meant to say was

THE SAND IS A
PALIMPSEST

. . . which is surely true between the tides. Less so in the Sahara where jeep-tracks from WWII are still etched. I had more to say:

I think, with Linda McCartney widely available, even vegetarians can agree with that sentiment. The Gdaus are in beach-combing school and found this large rusty buoy on Inisheer on a visit the week before Easter.  

The parents stoutly maintained that there was no room in the car; so that buoy was sadly left behind.

More hay, less speed

Thirty year ago, it were, when we were living in Dublin. Bright and early one Saturday morning, The Boy getting hammered on Thunderbird in a dip in the dunes at Portmarnock being at a pal's gaff overnight, we took a figairey to visit Souad & Pat the Salt on Costa na Déise. There was no M50 and no M9 back then, although the Naas Bypass 30km from Dublin opened in 1983. We took the scenic route, albeit called the N9:  Naas - Kilcullen - Moone - Castledermot - Carlow - Paulstown - Gowran - Dungarvan- Thomastown - Ballyhale - Mullinavat - Waterford - The Sweep - Kill - Tea! With clear roads and a following wind it usually took 3 hours: . Then, sometime after Kilcullen, the car started to peck and stutter. We pulled into Carlow, were given a diagnosis of air-in-the-fuel-line, and advised that we'd be fine if we kept to 80km/h rather than bouncing up and down like pop-corn poppin'. On Sunday evening, revived by the sea breeze and good food, we sedately returned to Dublin. It was busy enough with traffic, as loadsa 1st or 2nd generation Dubliners returned from helping with the {shearing | haying | muck-spreading} at their several home places across the country. Being compelled by mechanical necessity to keep the speed below 50mph = 80km/h, the return journey took us all of 3hours and 10 minutes. And Arrive Alive: which is always a win.

The Man aka The Nanny State has since last Friday 7th Feb 2025 curtailed Our Rights to drive like the clappers down any and every road in the country by setting a default 60km/h on Local roads - down from 80km/h. That is the meaning of the bend sinister with 5 lines sable on a ground argent [as L]. Huge Ballyhoo in Ballyhale! and across the country. The importance and, to an imperfect degree, the quality of Irish roads is designated by the initial letter: M motorway - N national - R regional - L local. Every highway and byway in the country is so designated - on a server in the National Roads Authority.

Less so in the hinterlands. Where a lesser road connects with a greater, the signage is present as at the start of the L4015 in Waterford. But at any subsequent forks in the road all bets are off. With SatNav and GPS and EirCodes, physically labelled road intersections on roads less travelled is a bit yesterday. Old timers still navigate from farm-gate to the creamery or into town for new wellies without any sort of road sign. The intention is to install the new bend sinister signs at the start of all L roads, so drivers know where they are . . . even if they have no idea where they are, like

Whatevs, so long as R roads still default to 80km/h, I don't think it will much affect journey times. If they get cranked down to 60, then we'll have to allow an extra 5 minutes to get to the railway station. That well-used [hey, free travel!!] journey offers two routes
1) directly over the hill [20.6km 24 min] or
2) 500m to the R702 and then into town [23km 26 min]
As route 1) is almost entirely L roads, it is likely to now take longer to accomplish at a mandatory 60km/h. But t.b.h. we gave up on that route after two actual tips and several NDEs: meeting boy racers coming round blind corners on two wheels or a handful of sheep burst out of a gap in the hedge. Option 2) 'main' road is winding, with potholes in the margins, but at least there is a line down the centre and enough room for a car and a 30-tonne dump truck to pass without clipping each other. 

That road with which we began our journey today used to be The Waterford Road and then The N9. Since they opened the M9 motorway, the N9 has been down-graded to the R448. Proper order too, it was a terrible road if you were in a hurry: with l o o n n g stretches where we were compelled to bumble along behind a mud-slinging tractor because the road was all twists and turns and blind gateways.

Footnote on etymology. I was always confused by more haste, less speed because in modern usage haste and speed are close synonyms.  But in Old English spēd meant success or luck, a meaning which still exists in Godspeed for bon voyage. Which makes the translation: take it handy or you may regret it.

Stuff your inner bear

New Ross is half way between Chateau Bob and Costa na Déise and we go through town in the regular. Less so since they completed the Fitzgerald Bridge on the N25 New Ross ByPass. I've billed Ross as being Ireland's most depressing town but own that they are making efforts to brighten the place up. otoh Claire Keegan's book Small Things Like These hasn't giving the town a tourist boost. I still stop often in Ross because there are a couple of Polskie Sklepy, the recycling centre and a choice of supermarkets. Last week I left the car in Lidl's carpark and walked [I know, hard to credit] to the excellent  Polski Sklep  for yeast and rye-flour.

On the way there, I noticed a shop front offering the opportunity to Build Your Bear. On the way back I stopped [I know, hard to credit] my rush and pushed open the door. There were only two people in the place mid-morning mid-week so asked them what gives? I'd never noticed the place coursing past at 50km/h and assumed it was new. And further assumed it was a sort of local government supported venture somewhat adjacent to a Men's Shed. Although it was hard to reconcile that specific detail [cue Billy Bragg] with, like, Teddy Bears. Brrrp! wrong on both counts. 

Craft Central is a commercial venture, it's been in Ross for more than a decade and it's more in the line of The Big Blue Barn - a primary colour softplay [ball-pit, slides, climbing frames] shed with a rudimentary café for Mums. Craft Central is a quieter option for, like, birthday parties. Although one available package is slime play and they also to host e.g. hen parties getting together for a bit of relaxed plate-painting or crochet.

The usual gig is to book the place (for 60-90 minutes) and rock up with up your pals. There looks to be about 20 seats. Once you've hung your coats and settled down, you can work your creative magic on mugs, plates, canvas bags, masks, T-shirts . . . clocks! All the matériel is supplied and hands can be held if your creative magic was b'aten out of you in National School. When you've finished, you get to take your piece home. Not sure on what the regime is for clean up. Me, I wouldn't allow the entitlement of paying for service exempt punters from leaving the place as they found it.

In my family growing up my, often absent, naval father was The Artist. On at least one day of the family hols, he'd absent himself again and take his satchel of water-colours to a lonely headland and paint how the sky met the sea. They were nice enough and there were eventually a lot of them. About halfway through their 50 year marriage, my mother was persuaded by a pal to take part in a 3-week Oil Painting class at the local Women's Institute. The first week, with a palette-knife, her thumb and most of a tube of gamboge she produced a respectable still life with orange. The next week, she brought from home and painted a life-sized crimson steel soda-siphon. It looked like the real thing. It was clear that, notwithstanding the labels she'd shouldered at school, she had a good eye and a sense of proportion. Sadly after the next and last session she got back in her box and left "Art" to the Old Man. Except for patch-work cushion-covers: at about the same time she started getting fat-quarters from Laura Ashley and sewing them together.

I was very much impressed by Dawn Morley and her team at Craft Central. That sort of service /business is good for community, good for creativity, good for self-esteem. The website on their brochure https://craftcentral.ie/ must have lapsed because is now all about the beer. You can find them on FaceBook, but I will not link the Zuckerverse here. Christmas?: C.C. stocks a range of hand-crafted stuff for purchase.

Green ways forward

Monday last week was we had the chilling over-heating report from the IPCC on climate change. Be very afraid, especially if you live near water. Then on Friday 12/10/18, The Beloved and Dau.I made a rare excursion to Wexford Library, Enniscorthy branch and came away with two books and two brochures "with my name on them". It may be that right now everything looks like Climate Change but both the brochures were relevant to the problem and/or its solution.  There's hint/preview [L] of a minibus juxtaposed with a truck for bringing copper ore to the surface.

The first brochure was a timetable for the LocalLink bus between Bunclody [pop 2,000] and Enniscorthy [pop 12,000 mit Kino und Schwimmbad]. It picks up in Bunclody M-F at 0800 and delivers you to the heart of the bigger town 45 minutes later. It takes so long for a 23km journey because it winkles through the hamlets of the hinterland picking up car-less folk coming in to collect their pension and blow it on horses, drink and mince-pies. It will take you back home at 16.15, which is rather a full day. On Friday there are 2 additional services in both directions, so you could nip into town and escape home before you'd spent your entire pension in boozer or bookies. That strikes me as money well spent, not only for climate abatement, but for social inclusion. One less person in a residential care centre because they've drunk themselves into oblivion at home alone will pay for the service. But here's the thing, the success of such services depends at great deal on their attention to detail. If a bus doesn't run because the driver is sick and there's no back-up, if it runs late in Winter because someone forget to fill the tank the night before, then people won't use the service. Attention to detail starts with the public face, which is a) the drivers b) the web. Here [R] is a slice of timetable for a fantastic new service along Waterford's Copper Coast / Costa na Déise from Dungarvan to Tramore.  Doe's anybody know where to put an apo'strophe any more? Doe's anybody care? Sportds Ground? Playgorund? Does it matter? Yes: a service that cannot be bothered to spell on timetable cannot be expected to run buses on timetable. That service runs three times a day in each direction on Tue Thu and Sat. I'm guessing that's better than running once a day everyday. It's good for us because Dau.II can get a Dublin Coach from Cork to Dungarvan for €5 and then along the coast to Bonmahon for another €3. She can have a bit of a swim, mow the lawn, have lunch, and catch the bus back to Cork. Win! best deal on carbon footprint, aerobic exercise, community service for old people and lunch thrown in. It's not just the Sunny South East: these rural bus services cover the country with a web of connectivity. Some of them are DRT [demand responsive transport] like Ring-a-Link of 20 years ago: you phone a switch-board and a minibus diverts to pick you up. Now listen up fellow shit-kickers, use these buses or some bean counter will take them away.

Mais revenons nous a nos brochures! The other leaflet that The Beloved picked up in Enniscorthy library was from the Office of Public Works and Wexford CoCo: Enniscorthy Flood Defence Scheme. For all of the 00s, Enniscorthy was where I caught the bus for Dublin. The town is built on a hill at a bend in the River Slaney, but the quays on either side of the river are subject to flooding. This is made worse by the fact that although 20km from the sea, the Slaney is tidal to Enniscorthy. Car swamping floods occurred in 1924, 1947, 1965, 2000 and 2015. The last was Storm Frank, which was the tail-end of the wettest December since records began [drone footage]. Building The Seamus "1916" Rafter bridge in the centre of town in 1991 created a significant impedance to waterflow:

I've been in Enniscorthy several times when the water was out of the river bed and creeping towards the houses and at least once when you couldn't see daylight under Seamus Rafter Bridge [SRB shown above when the water was 2m yet higher]. It's a problem because Enniscorthy is on the N11, the main road between Dublin and Europort Rosslare. The engineer who designed the dam bridge so low clearly flunked his/her hydrology exams in college. The current on&on&on-going never implemented plan is to demolish the SRB and replace it with a) a high level pedestrian bridge in the same location and a new road-bridge about 1 km downstream and a good 5 m higher [it all looks very modern in CGI]. That might do it by removing impediments to flow downriver; but expect the Rail bridge at the Northern upstream edge of town to be carried away in the next substantive flood.

Easing the spring

2nd of February AM: I went down the yard to fetch some sticks for the fire and thought that the grass in the yard looked and felt remarkably dry. Accordingly <carpe diem>, when I had filled the log- and kindling baskets against tea-time and a boiling kettle, I dragged the wee lawn-mower out of its shed and gave the grass a short-back-and-sides. It still being winter, and Ireland, you cannot count on grass-dry days at all at all, let alone when the grass is just the right length.We do what we can, when we have time. It is a blessing to be retired and/or working from home because then the moment ~45 minutes~ can be seized. The moment I seized to mow, someone else, 40 km distant, was teaching Human Physiology to 1st Year Pharm Techs instead of me. I guess I'm over Covid, if I can yomp about pushing a mower over the bumpy ground and not collapse wheezing. Sure pissed off Dau.II, though, because mowing is her job when she's here and she's copped a not'Rona flu-thing during a visit to Dublin [Ye Citie of Pox] and was hors de combat [she's all over la Francophonie so French phrases are allowed}.

One week earlier on a similar, sunny day, I'd touched up my chain-saw with the intention of cutting-to-length the two piles of logs I'd stacked under cover last June and July picture:

Cutting blocks with a chain-saw is hard work; I R old; so I said I'd only work through a tankful of gas; then split the bigger rounds and stack the whole lot in a wood-shed convenient to the house. And it was so. The Western pile is now reduced by maybe 2/3rds:

Not all of that reduction was the work of a noisy, dangerous and polluting machine. I've resolved that, anything smaller than my wrist will be cut with my trusty bushman bow-saw. This adds considerably to my mouse-driven upper-body asymmetry but is much better for the planet and my ears. They say that hand-processed wood warms you twice: once in the chopping and then in the hearth.

A week after I mow mow mowed the grass at the home place we were down on Costa na Déise on other business and found one hour of dryness to cut the grass down there, too. We'd missed a last cut in October 2022 for reasons, so things were looking 'tufty'. Now they are looking, still ragged-arsed, but less like Shere Khan might be hiding in  there; which is a great relief to the Things To Do TTD list which rattles about in my 'mind'.

WTF with Easing the Spring? Naming of Parts.

Splút

We shuttle between our mountain home and the Costa na Déise a lot and the journey is almost always via New Ross [R] - arguably the most depressing town in Ireland. All through the 20thC, small town Ireland was, it seems, too poor to afford house-paint. But the grim grey grey facade of cement-rendered public buildings (often convents and banks) was most obvious when you could see the whole panorama from the other side of a river. Ross has a chance now that the Rose FitzKennedy bridge has started diverting belching Rosslare-bound HGV traffic from the quayside. In 2010, for example, the Royal Hotel went up in smoke just after plans were announced to re-furbish it. For more than a decade the steep awkward town-centre site was vacant except for a set of weeping steps running beside the weed-abundant lot. Just this year, however, the former hotel site has been re-purposed as a steep awkward public park - absolutely not wheel-chair accessible; but for the moment full of promise.

At the Northern extremity of town, where the ring-road meets the road to Enniscorthy and Dublin, Mannion's farm-shop and garden centre has opened right opposite Mannion's Bar (food and drink). For us, this emporium was both too close and too far from home, and we were always destination-bound, so we never stopped to buy honey, strawberries or carrots . . . until Saturday 25th June. For a couple weeks, I'd noticed a discrete ad for Scúp ice-cream on the fence but that Saturday arvo, having Dau.II in the car, I swung into the car-park to chekkitout. 

Mannion's stock a variety of exotic food-stuffs that you'd never find in a regular Irish grocery: noodles, tamari, Italian petit-fours and, of course, a Baskin-Robbins-like bank of scúpable ice-cream from . . . Scúp which creates Luxurious Gelato in an industrial shed on the edge of Wexford town. Like Sustainable Sausage, so long as the product is edible, you can generate more sales with a professional website than by making something distinctively different/interesting in a blind taste-off. They paid for 1 minute of  marketing video too.You can get a taste of Scúp's aspirations by knowing about their Individual Masterclass €1,950. You can expect Scúp, fadas and all, to follow Nobó [prev] into the international market. After some dithering, I plonked €3 down for one scúp of mango-and-passionfruit in an edible cone - so I didn't have it in a single use waxed paper tub. Dau.II was off her feed after a curry binge the previous night, so sensibly refused to join me. 

I was disappointed at myself, the scúp-technician and the structural integrity of the product when about 40c-worth of my scúp detached itself from the cone and went splút on my shoe as soon as I stepped out into the dusty car-park

Mannion's don't have all their eggs in one basket. They have just started selling "Handcrafted Gourmet" Popsicles - the arty exotic line of colourful sorbets on a stick which was launched in Cork in the middle of the pandemic winter. I knew all the principals in Popsicle before they were famous and have given them a puff before. I'm delighted that their reach has penetrated 150km along the N25 towards Rosslare and the big international mondo di gelato 

Butter called Sal

Years ago, I was a saddo single person living round the corner from a supermarket. After work (I had a job and the money that brought so I could shop), I'd wander up and down the aisles trying to think of something to cook for my saddo single dinner. I made disastrously foolish decisions on multi-pack Kit-Kats and cheap stir-fry. At the tail end of Orthodox Easter, we were down on Costa na Déise for a few days of elder-care . . . round the corner from a supermarket.

After dinner, a cry went up "More dessert is needed" - because who wants an apple? Dau.II and I took one for the team and went round the corner in search of something adjacent to  lemon posset  [whc prev]. The closest strike was Supervalu Sicilian lemon yoghurt but we also came away with 94g of "Munchies Gold Caramel Flavour Sharing Bag". As y' do, when investigating a new-to-me product, the ToC was closely scrutinized:

Sugar, Vegetable Fats (Palm, Mango Kernel, Sal, Shea, Rapeseed, Sunflower), Glucose Syrup, Invert Sugar Syrup, Sweetened Condensed Skimmed Milk (Milk, Sugar), Whey Powder product (Milk), Skimmed Milk Powder, Wheat Flour (contains Calcium, Iron, Thiamin and Niacin), Butterfat (Milk), Cocoa Butter, Dried Whole Milk, Emulsifier (Lecithins), Cocoa Mass, Whey Powder (Milk), Raising Agents (Sodium Bicarbonate, Ammonium Bicarbonate), Barley Malt Extract, Salt, Lactose (Milk), Caramelised Sugar, Natural Flavouring, Maltodextrin, Safflower Concentrate 

It's candy, so you'd expect a lorra sugar but we were intrigued by the gallimaufry of exotic vegetable fats [Palm, Mango Kernel, Sal, Shea, Rapeseed, Sunflower]. Sal?? never 'eard of it! But Sal [ripe seeds L] turns out to quite a big thing in India: a tree known as Shorea robusta; a member of the Dipterocarp [aka two winged seeds] family. Sal trees are sacred and under the protection of Vishnu. The mother of Gautama Buddha is said to have clutched a Sal branch while giving birth to Hissonour. 

Apart from the religious stuff, the seeds are the size of a seedless grape and 14% fat which is extracted to produce a buttery spread, which is solid at room temperature. Those who live in or near to Sal forests use the sal-ghee for cooking but entrepreneurs also convert the goop in soap, varnish, paint and lubricants. I suspect that the food engineers at Nestlé don't care much what sort of vegetable fat goes into the Munchie vats. The fat-ingredient is likely subject to the vagaries of global markets and the marketeers kick the ToC list to safety by including any-and-all species which might be in our 94g.

A final observation: pretty much the only customers in the shop at 8pm on a Monday evening were single silverbacks with more or less empty baskets. I imagine [I may be over-empathizing] that, like saddo me 20+ years ago, these old chaps are wandering around killing time in the aisles because 

• TV is utter bollix; 
• the Men's Shed is on Wednesday;
• Supervalu is warm and dry
  

Pissing it away

I was down on the Costa na Déise last week mowing the lawn from the first time this hot dry grass-killing Summer. I noticed that the neighbour-across was out as well; painting his boundary wall. So I went and introduced myself: they've lived there more than  a year but it's the first time we've been on the street at the same time.  He's about my age and used to work as a paramedic in the UK. Indeed he spent 25 years of his life dealing with trauma: arriving on the scene by ambulance and even for a while by helicopter. God knows it was stressful and challenging but it was interesting and fulfilling and he vowed that he would jack it in when he stopped enjoying it. Things started to cloud over when he found that more and more of his working day was filling in forms and so less was available for actually relieving suffering and saving lives. The forms ensured that his boss's arse was covered if something went wrong ;and somebody somewhere else had a full-time job filing them in a cabinet bigger than the biggest ambulance.
[Aside from ROAR on bullshit jobs]:
""Right now nurses in New Zealand are on strike and one of their major issues is exactly that: on the one hand, their real wages have been declining, but on the other, they also find they are spending so much time filling out forms they can’t take care of their patients. It’s over 50 percent for many nurses.
The two problems are linked because of course all the money that would have otherwise been going to keep their wages up, are instead being diverted to hiring new and useless administrators who then burden them with even more bullshit to justify their own existence."" via MeFi here be counter-arguments.

Then he was transferred to a small University town. It seemed like every Friday and Saturday night, he would be called to take another student incapable through drink to the A&E. Then one evening after delivering a legless youngster to hospital he was called to a case of heart attack. He stabilised the patient and rushed back to A&E, only to find that there was no bed available; so he continued to watch and ward in the ambulance for another two hours. The bed was occupied by the young chap earlier who didn't know when to stop swilling pints. That was when it stopped being fun.

We agreed that a) we sounded like two old farts moaning about the Youth Of Today b) when we were young we'd both done foolish and potentially self-destructive things involving drink and/or cars. "I blame technology" the neighbour suggested, "in our day, we'd get home somehow; if not in our own weaving way then with the help of our pals. Kids now, they call 911 and get The Man to sort them out."

That reminded me of The Girl Who Invented Herself. When she lost her job in Germany and all her money in Brussels just before Christmas 1987, she came to stay with us. In the New Year she landed a job pulling pints and piling pizzas in the Student's Union. That conveniently evening work freed up the day for a Secretarial Course. Often and often at breakfast on the weekends, she'd report that when she had finished her shift at the bar, cashed up and locked the door, she'd find a student comatose in the flower-bed or slumped in a doorway with puke down his or her shirt. She'd go back into the Union and call for help again; when all she wanted, after 6 hours on her feet, was her bed. Sometimes she'd get really angry: what she could have done with a chance to go to college! You wouldn't find her pissing it all away in an alcoholic haze. And indeed nobody did. After a few years in London working in the office of a Danish construction company, she started a diploma then a degree under a day-release scheme. She is now Viceroy of Networks AsiaPac for Megacorp Telecoms in Singapore.

If I'm not exactly The Patriarchy (my beard isn't really sufficiently biblical), I do walk in a miasma of privilege. I had a very expensive education, for example; and my accent is at the snootier end of middle-class Southern British. Because of the accent and because I'm not black, in random encounters with the police, I tend not get barked at "place your hands on the bonnet with your feet apart". I took a year out after leaving school and worked in a hospital and for a publisher of primary school books. When I left home and country the following September, I had tried at least those two ways of making a living. I started classes in Trinity College Dublin thinking that learning was the main purpose for my being there. I knew students did other things as well - I joined the Film Society, for example, and started my love affair with Chabrol and Truffaut and subtitles; and I started another love affair as well with a real person - but learning was the axis around which these other activities rotated.  I wasn't totally clear about where I was going but I knew that flunking exams or failing to submit assignments were not wanted on the voyage. I also learned before I got to college that one pint can be lubricating; two pints impairs your judgement . . . often enough to believe that a third pint is a good idea. Like a rat in an operant conditioning cage I was able to associate four pints with a truly appalling sense of malaise the next morning: and so stopped going that far.