More 2024 firewood

It was the week of three named storms. After Arwen in November, I can only suppose that somewhere in the WEA experienced Barra and Corrie but it didn't make the news or raise a breeze in our part of the archipelago. Storm Dudley was, au contraire, certainly a secure loose objects thing. Two days later, on Friday, Storm Eunice barrelled through the Southern half of Ireland with even more fizz. The SOP after a stormy night is to check the lane for tree down at first light to see if we could go to rescue their neighbours if it was needed - indeed vice versa. Then breakfast. It was gusty all through the morning of Friday 18th Feb and about 1100hrs, during a lull in the buffet, I got out of my jim-jams [I R retire!], dressed for the outdoors and went to count the sheep and see if anything gravitational had happened over night. Nada.  But about an hour later I looked down the yard because something was aslant in the orchard.

It was a huge lump of ash Fraxinus excelsior which had broken off from our second tallest ash tree where the trunk splits into two maybe 4m off the ground. It was 30-40cm ⌀ in the base and 14m to tip of twig. Because ivy Hedera helix, it photographed as a great green wall but also because its fall had been broken by row of evergreen laurel Prunus laurocerasus coppiced from the felling of their parents in ~2008.

Much as I regret the loss of any tree, this fall was quite remarkably convenient. a) Saved us having to call Sean the Surgeon b) The last twigs merely brushed the top of the nearest woodstack c) I've been meaning to thin or pollard the laurels d) The heavy duty trunk fell parallel to, and 2m North of, the wire fence without touching it e) Winter = no leaves f) The logs, as they are cut, will be really close to where they need to be stacked!

As I R retire, I am fit poor but time rich, so there is no steaming hurry to process the wood.  Not least because two days after Eunice, Storm Franklin drove through the country on Sunday 20/Feb night. I felt we got a worse drubbing from this third-of-three storms; but you wouldn't have known it from the [lack of] twig fall around the farm. Believing in having one day/week without brrrm BRRRRM noise-pollution, I don't do machinery on Sundays. But on Monday, I fired up my little under-powered chain-saw to dismember the tree-fall into its component parts . . . resolving to stop when I got through a tank of gas.

• Cleared ivy for the sheep so I could see where the branches were
• No amount of PPE will protect you from a slap of laurel as you release it from tension
  
• Trimmed back the laurel ends and some of the ash twigs to get access to the ash-branches
• Cut down the oblique up-standing branches
• Parse branches into logs-to-split; logs-as-is; loglets down to thumb-width; kindling
• Laurel logs will take twice as long to cure, so will be stacked separately

On Tuesday, I had another session with the ch.saw cutting off and logging the remaining branches and the top 4m of trunk.

On Wednesday, before another spell of wet weather, I delivered another load of ivy to the sheep and raked all the twigs, leaves and raffle into a heap under the hedge. It's all looking quite ship-shape and bristol titties. A good chunk of split and stack to do; but like I say it's all in place for that.

Thursday morning there was a light dusting of snow but at tea-time a milky sun came out. I cleared the last of the 2016 cypress logs out of their home for the last tuthree years, rebuilt the end wall of their stack and started splitting and loading [Ash 2022] on the existing pallet. A lot done, more to do! Warm evenings in 2024 . . . if Europe as we know it survives that long.

pay peanuts, propagate pandemic

Joinedy up thinking is harder than promulgating a series of arbitrary rules: 

• 2m distance; 
• 15 minutes of contact; 
• outdoors good, indoors bad; 
• masks not visors; 
• not those masks, these masks;
• corona not coronaries;
• covid not cervical

You will have heard the no-mask argument that "people" [that's me, and you] will take greater risks on distance and parties so long as they are dressed bandito. As if "people" were incapable of dealing with two ideas at once. Ian Mackay's swiss cheese model for comprehensive complementary control measures is graphical and helpful

It's like the sieve of Eratosthenes a series of grids each with a different granularity and starting points which allows only a tiny fraction of the particles to reach the other side. It's not an ideal model because it would be super-helpful to know quantitatively which slices were most effective [had smaller or fewer holes] especially if these were cheapest [in money and social cost] to implement. I suspect that distance trumps masks and probably hand-washing. Me, I would be really leery about touching tap in a public restroom. The chief benefit of I R Retire is that I don't have to use the jacks at work which, at the best of times, were never properly cleaned. and they offered only warm-air aerosol concentrators for hand-drying.

Tweeters I love and respeck are getting grumpy at the continuing uncertainty: "Just tired and ground down by this. The back and forth, the absolute waste when the gov. make a reopening roadmap they abandon a few weeks in, a detailed level structure they immediately ignore. Mental health is paramount, but you can only see people if you can pay to go out."

In March, I was paying attention to the nightly reports of covid-cases and covid deaths. I had them all in an excel spread-sheet and was plotting the % change as well as recording our family's coffs and sniffles. Then about the middle of April I stopped: the covid cases count was meaningless unless The Man was testing people pro-actively rather than reactively. Better still would have been to test a large number of randomers off the street to establish a baseline. That was why I was excited when Ioannidis and Battacharaya carried out the Santa Clara County count. That got a lot of adverse scrutiny and I had to retract my imprimatur. 

But FFS, IF 80% of infected people are asymptomatic but still infectious THEN we should be testing a hella lot more people to flag the carriers so they can be isolated. Even if the tests are imperfect, we should be making it easy and free/cheap to get tested 

• a) if we're feeling crook in the covid-peculiar [I can't smell anything PDF] ways of feeling crook 
• b) if we know we've been [< 2m + >15 min] too close to a likely contact.
• c) if we are worried [give everyone Three Free Covid-test Vouchers and a back-up referral to an OCD clinic]

It's like STD clinics; it's a pub[l]ic good service. Heck, the STD clinics could be doing the testing: they are trained to be careful with bodily fluids. When Dau.I was sick in the Summer and work paid for a test, she had to wheeze her bike 5km to  the nearest test centre and 5km back home to bed and  lem-sip . What's that about? It's like schlepping a vulnerable 95 y.o. to a fomite-blistered clinic for a 'flu jab. Outside the box thinking [rather than suit people with good health, a government job thinking] would deliver these elders their inoculation outside their own front doors.

Tom Cotter: "The reason Taiwan and South Korea were so successful in controlling covid19 was rapid relentless testing and contact tracing. If you were a close contact they even came to your door to test you. No ifs or buts you got tested. This is not the case on Ireland I’m afraid".  Just how little of a shit the Irish Government gives about testing & tracing was revealed when Contact Tracers, a skilled job requiring painstaking dedication, were getting offered zero-hours dismiss-at-will contracts. Oh no, that was a clerical error,  the HSE claimed, when this shameful fact was public-domained by radical TD Richard Boyd-Barrett. 

At the beginning of Coronarama we were hopeful, in a silver lining sort of way, that the crisis would force us to address other shameful treatments of the weakest members of our society: workers and residents in nursing homes and créches, the dark denizens of direct provision centres, shelf-stackers and cashiers in the retail sector. What this force-of-change amounted to, in the end, were a series of cost-nothing, do-nothing sops to the collective conscience like institutionalised rounds of applause for front-line workers.

I R Retire now since 2nd October, but I'm still on the mailing list for The Institute. The President's address on Friday 16th October reflected on the plans for an inevitable change upwards of the Pandemic containment measures from Level 3 to Level 4. NPHET, [National Public Health Emergency Team] has been advising for Level 5 measures for 2 weeks now (and the government have been stalling; the cabinet meets again today). But The President was/is unable to plan effectively for this extremely likely development because "The prospect of a movement to Level 5 restrictions for Adult and Higher Education is less clear because the descriptor for this level currently states, “Recommendations based on situation and evidence at time”.  WTF? 

If not now, when?

Lost & phoned (part III)

I was on about how good my eyesight was and how not-so-good it is. Also how hard it can be to find 2 sq.m. of beige cow in 2,000,000 sq,m. [200 ha. = 480 acres] of brown dry heath. Of course it's a bit easier because a) there are 15 cows that hang out together b) they move about in a way quite distinctive from dry heather blowing in the wind.

Way way ago at the birth of The Blob, I lost me phone - it fell from my shirt pocket while changing a flat tire on the way to work. It took two days and 5 people to pass that parcel until it came back to me. The blessing (and curse) of living in a connected rural community! Five years ago, my all black smart-phone fell out of the same pocket when I stumbled into a gryke up on our 200 ha. of red hill. I knew it had happened within a couple of minutes but it still took 20 minutes for me and my neighbour M (of the cows) to find t'bugger down among the heather roots. Since then, I attached a bright yellow lanyard to the phone to make it more visible. 

Because things happen in threes [3s] if you have 12 years to play with, I lost my  yellow Nokia  at the end of September. I was up and out before breakfast, like the Good Shepherd, to count [N: 13 + 4 =17] the sheep. Unlike M's cows, our sheep disdain to herd together. The four new Charolais, for example, lambs are toooo refined to mix with our rag-tag flock of mongrels and will often be in a different field. And who thought it was a good idea to buy a black lamb which disappears in the shadows of any hedge, ditch, wall, dyke or copse ? I am requested&required to take my  Nokia   with me when out and about - lest I have an I R Old seizure. I did the outdoor man shepherd tasks and came home for tea and medals toast. Then I thought it would grand entirely to go for bracing yomp up t'hill and patted my pockets for the  Nokia . 

It wasn't there, so I cast about in the kitchen, on my desk, down the woodshed and behind my sofa cushions. The phone was ri♬gi♬g but not within earshot. Only 30 minutes had elapsed, so I had a pretty good idea of where I had been bo-peeping the sheep. Accordingly I re-traced my steps with my eyes sweeping arcs on the ground as I progressed. I paid particular attention to the boundary wall [L] where I had crossed from one field to another for a shortcut. For good measure I counted the sheep once more for luck.

When I got back to the house, the Beloved emerged from her own busy life and offered to call the phone while I checked the polytunnel and the woodshed agane! In my head I was making contingency plans for writing the phone off and changing my whole identity [the shame!] for an 083 number. But it was Sunday, so I could hardly implement any such protocol. Of all the people I know, I am the least attached to my phone, on which I get through about €30 of credit in a year and I did live for 30 years as a grown arsed adult managing without one entirely. But I'm not a luddite and do recognise there is a reason Germans call their cellphone a handy.  But, it was Sunday, I R retire, I canned the idea of going for a recreational yomp uphill and re-re-traced my morning sheepwalk.

When I scanned the boundary wall the first time, it was under the hypothesis that the phone had popped from a pocket when I scrabbled through the bushes and/or jumped down off the wall. The second time, (possibly because I had tested and rejected that hypothesis and approached the task with a clear hheart and open mind) I saw ◎◎ the  Nokia  in plain sight on the wall. Can you? it is two pixels wide [L].

And the scale of that problem? Compared to cows? The four fields where the sheep currently graze are 11 acres in total. That's 4½ hectares or 45,000 sq.m. The phone otoh is ~10cm x ~5cm or 1/200th of a sq.m. ratio 9,000,000 : 1. Finding a phone is only 9x harder than finding a single cow. Answer to Where's Wally Nokky below the fold.

Last of the fallen

In mid-Feb 2022, the country was battered by Storm Eunice. Among other damage the wind brought down a tree-sized branch from an ash Fraxinus excelsior near the front gate of our farrrrm. Ash has many uses about the farm: firewood, tool handles, artwork. But the species is locally doomed from an invasive and destructive fungus Hymenoscyphus fraxineus called ash-dieback. At the time I wrote:  As I R retire, I am fit-poor but time-rich, so there is no steaming hurry to process the wood. But, having logged, split, stacked and labelled [L] all the branches, I was left with a 6-7m long trunk of solid ash which was about as wide ⌀ as the length of my saw-blade and so I treated it like a daunting Javi Problem. One issue being that the limb was lying directly on the ground with potential for a) striking stone frrrPPP or b) having the beast settle on the blade like King Arthur's sword.

Archimedes δός μοι πᾷ στῶ καὶ τὰν γᾶν κινῶ [Give me a place to stand and the earth can be moved] to the rescue! A few months ago I took a small fulcrum log and an iron bar and found that I could lever one end of the bough an inch or two above the earth. With some contortion and some iteration, I was able to get a stable wedge under the wood and . . . sink back exhausted. The next fine day I seized my saw, touched up her teeth, fueled and chain-oiled and fired that sucker up. I cut a few rounds off. But with each cut the ⌀ increased and so I stopped after half a tankful and a mountain of sawdust. It's been like that for 21 months (!), intermittent levering wedging cutting and splitting. 

On Saturday, 28th October 2023, I got near enough to the butt of the fallen branch that I was able to lift up the last 80cm and stand it on its end. You can see the last round of it under the slitting maul which reduced it and the rest of the stick to billets small enough to go up the chimney. A good few large branches and a couple of whole hawthorn trees have fallen to the ground about the property since Feb 2022 and I've found those easier to process. But I'm right glad to make an end of The Big Stick that was in my face every time I was down by the woodshed.

You will note that I've taken to labelling the several woodstacks around the place: it find a use for the many many broken slates which have rained down from the sheds over the last 30 years. I can't be relied on to remember when each bunkerful was cut-and-split. And even if I could, I R an Old and I'm not guaranteeing that I'll outlive the stacks. It would be a shame if those who came after attempted to get some heat from laurel Prunus laurocerasus or no tar from Scot's pine Pinus sylvestris by putting them in the stove too early.

Flahavoatly nopely

Sinterklaas[avond] today - I am baking a mighty B for Boterletter to practice calorie intake for "The Holidays"

Oatly is a milk-like concoction developed by Swedish food engineers in U Lund in the 1990s. It has gone viral global since then, at least partly carried forward as a fashion accessory by neurotic people who believe they are lactose intolerant. It's hard to stand on even a pimple of the moral high ground over global dairy. Cows are a disaster for the planet, far less efficient in food conversion than, say, chicken and they burp prodigious quantities of methane, the greenhouse gas. I love dairy products; raw milk not so much but cheese, crème fraiche, buttermilk, and recently kefir are a significant fraction of my diet. But it's hard to justify filling the fridge with them. But I'm not going to replace milk-milk with {Oat Base (Water, Oats 10%), Rapeseed Oil, Acidity Regulator (Dipotassium Phosphate), Calcium Carbonate, Calcium Phosphates, Iodised Salt, Vitamins (D2, Riboflavin and B12)}; I'd rather go continental and take my tea zonders - without milk.

I wrote a conflicted piece about Oatly in 2016 because it started to appear in the weekly shop Chez Blob. Since then, I've been assured, by one who sinks a lot of lattés, that "Barista" Oatly makes much the best cappuccino. Like, whatevs, I only have cappuccino on Saturdays which could be pretty much any day since I R Retire. I'll tell ya something though. in 2016 1 lt of Oatly was €1.60 or 2x the price of milk. It is now €2.49 a +50% increase in cost in 4 years. I presume the product is now so well established in the shopping-basket of its supporters that it has become price-inelastic: they'll have it at any price. There is a hearts-and-minds war in Sweden between Big Dairy and Big Oatly.

Now there's a new kid on the block [Déise Oatly L]. The Beloved, a Waterford gal, snagged some of this as soon as she saw it. Of course we all want to shop local and reduce the transport miles on our food. What's not to love about something "made with IRISH OATS made with"?  And the price €2.49 is pitched toe-to-toe with Oatly's imported kvasi-mjölk. I'm sorry to report that Flahavoatly, despite being "tasty & foamable" ain't cuttin' the rug in the dance of white beverages. It's too minimal:  {water, oats (11%), Sunflower Oil (1.5%), sea salt}. Mouth feel, and coffee-lightening potential aren't as good as Oatly, sorry. It is also a concern among the osteoporotic that calcium supplements are missing; and in this Plague Year that vitamin-D is also absent. Of course there are other sources of Ca and vit-D (and riboflavin B2 and cobalamin B12) but it's an extra faff and cost to source them in sufficient quantity. There are excellent nanny-state public health reasons, dating back to Elsie Widdowson and WWII, for adding Calcium and B12 to milk. 

Another reason to support Flahavan's is that Oatly blotted their right-thinking copy-book by selling a 7% stake in the company (for $200 million in liquidity) to black-hearted Blackstone [triggers: Trump, rain-forest]. 

Feb Fst Sun

Bits

• Winston does the kanon
• Meute - Peace in a warehouse  
• Edward Colston, where are you now? Drying out, getting conserved [R getting a good kicking while he's down]
• The Before Times in Fermoy
• Why I left academia Me = I R Retire
  
• David Bridwell: we rate what we can measure
• Final straw for four more [only some tears! wtf?]
  
• Turns out there is a whole YTgenre of those stories  
• Norma Waterson just died
• 30 foot trailer
• Hal and tow
  

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.

Hard Work at Patriarchy

I'd like to think I've become a better person over the last ten years. Although I fully expect Alphabet = Google = Blogspot to pull the plug at short notice and cast The Blob into dustbin of history, today it is still a searchable 2 million word archive of my evolving self.  In 2013, I wrote a fanboi piece about Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman a book of anecdotes related by Richard Feynman to his bongo-pal Ralph Leighton.  Five years later, I was forced to see that I, Patriarch had been blind to the running sore theme of misogyny that pervades SYJMF. Five years after that (last week) I was compelled to watch a three hour take down of Richard Feynman showing that he'd been a bad influence on young scientists. 

Angela "Physicist" Collier is a critical thunk science blogger in a similar space to Rebecca Watson [whom BloboPrev] who devoted the last 12 months to rage-reading everything on Amazon about Richard Feynman. Her reason for doing the work being that there was A Lot of SYJMF circulating among the physics bros (skewed bl♂ke even more in the 90s than now) when she was making sense of the world in college. Collier's position is that some = far-too-many young men reading about Feynman's clever clogisms and iconoclasm had not ignored the sexism but rather leaned into it . . . and blanked or insulted or disrespected her. Particularly galling examples included young chaps who assumed that, because they'd been top of the Calculus class in Bohunk High, they could continue to get As in college without doing the work. These chaps were baffled when Collier did get the As because she was serious about Project EduCollier and put in the hours.

Collier's 3 hour piece-to-camera came up on MetaFilter and that generated a little light and a lot of heat. I R retire, I am invested a bit [clearly too much with all the sexism] in the Feynman myth, so I watched it through (with a 24 hour intermission) despite it being a bit woolly in the edit and so far too long. In the last part of the YT, having cut the misogyny down to size, Collier looks at a might-have-been Feynmyth [he's 40 years dead now] which drew attention [summarized / clipped in black-and-red above] to his many good qualities.  

There are lessons in SYJMF even if they are fables: don't be (a) Dick; pay attention; do the work; polish your crap-detector; be kind. Collier adds [point 5 above] condemn least publishable units LPUs to the flames of hell even if, as now, no trees were harmed in the process. MeFite ngaiotonga put in the work to make an executive summary of Collier's YT: part1 + part2 + part3.

Just fishin'

Our house is awash with books and one just surfaced which a) I haven't read b) I didn't know we owned. It's only really since I R retire that I've found time to read, like, books, like I did in my 20s. A full time job and a full time Blob sure fills the time. Andrew Grieg is a poet, novelist, climber and rambler from Scotland. As a 17 year old from Anstruther, Fife he sent a sheaf of his poems to Norman MacCaig, a poet whose work he admired. As a 17 year old from rural Essex, I sent a sheaf of my poems to R.S Thomas, a poet whose work I admired. Grieg got a much more positive response; possibly because he's a poet rather than a self-pitying, hormonal mess with long hair and spots. Indeed he received a post-card asking him to drop in when he was next in Edinburgh. MacCaig [L, as ever with whisky and fag] was about 40 years older than the restless young Grieg but treated him with respect and sensitivity and it began a friendship which last for nearly 3 decades until MacCaig died, in the fullness of his years, in 1996. Young Grieg thus got to hang out with the best Scots poets of the previous generation and such peripheral luminaries as, own own, Seamus Heaney.

Sometime, in the mid-90s, Grieg and MacCaig were getting drunk together again and, in his cups, the young fella asked The Master what was his favourite place in all the world. MacCaig replied "Assynt".
"I know it's Assynt, but where in Assynt? what's your favourite place?"
"I think that would have to be the Loch of the Green Corrie. Only it's not called that . . ."

Game on!

The next time they were in the same room, MacCaig was in his coffin, and the book At the Loch of the Green Corrie is the story of Grieg's pilgrimage to catch a fish from that loch [spoiler location R] in honour of the great man, his mentor and friend. He chooses to go camping & fishing with the Dorward brothers whom he'd known since school days and one of the threads in the book is men being comfortable in each other's silence. There is whisky, of course, and lazy evenings of talk after a hard day of thrashing the goddamn loch for fish which are utterly indifferent to their efforts. On the third day of this quixotic quest, Peter Dorward, the luckiest, most skilled and persistent of them, catches and lands a fish. Honour is satisfied and the three middle-aged men return to their day jobs in three different continents.

The book is 300 pages longer than that and those pages are not blank. They are full of poetry and appreciation of the good things in life, with some regrets, some near-death-experience to stop it seeming saccharine. The good things are not Volvos or iPads or even whisky. It is rather the moments of earthy heaven, so right, so brief, so real.

"It is what Norman and [his bestie] AK Macleod, looking down from the place they do not believe in, would give anything for - one more day of catching or not catching fish at any lochan. Fish supper warm in the hand on a cold wet night, heading home hungry - nothing beats this, nothing. This is what the dead envy us, the sweetness at the heart of physical existence".

All day we fished

the loch clasped in the throat

of Canisp, that scrawny mountain,

and caught trout and

invisible treasures.

We walked home, ragged millionaires,

our minds jingling, our fingers

rustling the air

Norman MacCaig (1910-1996)

Going gone

Did I mention that I R Retire? Did I ever stop? Did I say that, nearly 1,000 days after my last day at work, The Institute formally said goodbye? I did. In contrast to The Blob, the Goodbye Do was not all about me. Lockdown had accumulated 8 of us silverbacks looking for their ice-flow. In the before times, the retirement celebration was bundled up into the Christmas party on the last Friday before the end of term. The President presented each person who had finished in the previous 12 months with a large glass vase etched with their name. The retiree said a few, or far too many many, words. There was a smattering of applause or a ragged cheer and everyone went home to their family for the holidays. On of the last things I did before leaving work for the last time was to urge my HoD to please please not etch-a-vase for me nor yet a clock. Rather give the equivalent money to the student emergency welfare fund.

But there was an admin shake-up after I left and my well-briefed HoD was no longer in that post
and nobody read The Blob on the matter of vases
and it wasn't all about me
and there is a process / protocol / tradition
. . . so dear readers, I am now in possession of trophy [R] shaped like a tear-drop because the concept is so sad. Quite properly, they gave out these, identical except for name, ornaments ordered by length of service. Me first: a paltry 7.5 years. Everyone else had been in post [in the same place] for at least 30 years and one for 42 (!) years. It's little wonder that The Institute tended towards cliquey: these people had spent their entire adult lives together. I was just passing through.

The 1cm thick tear-drop is a lot more robust than a vase. Even if we had a mantel-piece, I wouldn't put my go-gift up there. It will be just the thing to bury in our 2122 Centennial Time-capsule: it's surely not going to degrade over that time and will be sufficiently enigmatic to those who dig it up later. There are no dates in the dedication, for example.

Dread, existential

Morning folks, it's Solstice! and how are we doing on watching The Giant Conjunction? Tonight is as close as Saturn and Jupiter have [apparently! they are never closer than 700 million km in their terms] been since 1623. We've had, since the 18th, two of our grown-up childer on site to share the wonder but it's been miserable viewing weather for star-gazing. Last night, after a brilliant crisp sunny outdoor-work Sunday afternoon, I had great hopes for the evening show. But although Mars and the Moon were early visible high in the sky, a thin miasma of horizon-hugging cloud over the Kilkenny shore occluded Saturn and Jupiter. Dang!

Miserable? Did someone say miserable? Not me! Apart from having the dearly beloved Dau.I&II home for Christmas [my cup runneth over] I've had a real great lockdown. I've been legitimately allowed to do nothing at all for much of the time: unless I feel like a yomp up the hill, or some logs need splitting, or the drains cleaning, or The Blob a-writing. Two months of Saturdays since I R Retire. But m'pals at Metafilter have been reflecting on how children are handling the pandemic: not very well in some cases. Because their time-scales and grasp on the world are different from ours. Gdau.II was due to transition to school this last September, and did, but her experience has been, shall we say, weird; and a substantial fraction of her life has been spent unable to hang with her peers. A peculiar (and life-changing?) New Normal.

I think we all have a story of misunderstanding some aspect of the external world because, as children, we lack experience to give context. On Sunday 4th Feb 1962, when I was 7½, I was not paying much attention to the 6 o'clock News, when they broadcast a segment from India, showing crowds of people wailing and throwing dust on their heads. The magisterial BBC voice-over explained that tomorrow, 5th February all the classical planets would be in conjunction:  

Mars: 02♒22; Saturn: 03♒50; {{Sun: 15♒42; Moon: 15♒42}}; Mercury: 16♒55; Venus: 17♒47; Jupiter: 18♒37 . . . and there would be a total solar eclipse at Noon. And, according to the dusty folks in India that presaged The End of the World.

Well, I woke up the next morning in a state of existential dread! and spent the morning wandering around, on the edge of tears, silently saying goodbye to things. My anxiety neurotransmitters were up to ninety, and it was hard to walk so heavy was the slump of shoulder. When nothing happened by lunchtime, the cloud lifted a bit. I won't claim to have questioned where on the planet that aligning Noon was going to happen with a clap of thunder and the bray of terminal trumpets. Apparently the line of totality was almost entirely across the Pacific: with hindsight, I could ask what the lads in India were making such a fuss about. It never occurred to me that I could share my worries with other people at home. Imagine what it's been like for 2020's introspective 7½ year olds. Nine hours of worry were exhausting; nine months must require drawing deep on their reservoirs of calm. Let us all be kind to tots and cut them some slack?

In the wrong place

The family were downhome over Easter and Dau.II took a proprietorial walk through the fields. She reported that the top corner of one of those fields was carpetted with a particular sort of dicot sprout with 2 elongated seed-leaves and a robust reddish stalk. WTF? she enquired. I investigated and admitted that I'd never noted such a phenomenon before. But I formed a hypothesis that the pair of sycamores Acer pseudoplatanus in the ditch just to the South must have had a mighty year for seed set, as had several sweet chestnuts Castanea sativa down in the adjacent woodland. And sho'nuff Dr Google confirmed that sycamore seedlings looked just like that.

That was all a nothing-burger until Dr Google threw up "sycamore seedling poisonous to horses" on the off-chance that was what I was really after. Equine atypical myopathy, aka atypical myoglobinuria when myoglobin is detected in the urine because muscle tissue is disintegrating. But you'd only [call in the vet to] look if your previously happy horse is stiff, reluctant to move, collapsed. Regardless of treatment, it is typical that 75% of affected horses will be dead with 2-3 days. The proximate cause is a toxin called Hypoglycin A HGA.

It is a known thing that horses have a rough-and-ready digestive system: shovelling its outcome is what gives teenage stable-hands such prodigious upper-body strength. Sheep are ruminants and their dietary carbs get a double hammering mediated by a sophisticated gut-flora. Nobody is flagging HGA toxicity for ruminants, so I suppose that some guild of their microbiome is digesting Hypoglycin A HGA before it is absorbed through the gut wall to start to digest the muscle-mass. No quarter given in evolution. [note added in press: the sheep were moved from the traditional hay-meadow to the sycamore-rich field 3 days ago, and nobody's died yet]

But, as I say, I've never seen so many sycamore sprouts and who knows of what digestive heroics our mixed bag of sheep are capable. The family had buggered off to the Gaeltacht within hours of alerting me to the sycamore nursery; I R retire; I finished my book; I chopped wood and hauled water; . . . dum de dum . . .; I went across the lane to pluck sycamore as prophylaxis against an unlikely but devastating event. At 71¾, I am no longer limber as a 7 y.o., so I can't pluck at a sustainable rate for a working day. The weather  was Irish-changeable sunny with showers and my shop-steward won't allow me to get rained on while bent double. After a few sessions over three days, I had a bucketful of sycamores untimely ripped from mother earth. How many?

Well mates, I wasn't not going to count them as I went but I did weigh the whole harvest on our kitchen scales = 25oz = 700g. And I did count off a random selection of single plants until they tipped ½oz = 15g that was N = 30. My math indicates that I have killed [25 x 2 x 30 =] 1,500 potential trees in a natural selection exercise. How potential? When Sean the Forester was thinning our little woodland in 2022, we discovered a substantial sycamore in the NE corner of the plot. That's about 75m due West [and thus downwind] of the two fecund sycamores mentioned above. In 2008 that corner of the plot was still pasture, so in 18 years one seedling similar to my Easter-holocaust now has a girth of 85cm or ⌀ = 27cm at chest height. The height of the tree can be estimated by measuring a) a distance from the foot and b) the angle from there to the top of the tree and looking up a table of Tan= opposite/adjacent. In this case ~12m tall. That a much better place for a sycamore tree than shedding seed into pasture.

In the wrong place? I did eventually agree to go off-site for a tuthree days with  the family when they touched base briefly after Connemara. But on the morning of departure, our RCD [residual current detector] tripped OFF  twice! again. There was no way I was going away for two days if the 'lectric was going to fail the deep-freeze: & for me to return to a puddle of rotting food.  They went off, and I did some diagnostics, and the RCD behaved itself for 24 hours. [I think it's the extension that runs to the polytunnel - but it requires some positive testing of this hypothesis when there is only me at home]. Anyway, I did agree to go South-for-beaches the following day. But while way, I twigged >!Shazzam!< that an unintended consequence of having the Fronius app to monitor the solar array, is that I can remotely check to see if our router/modem at home is still powered up. And if so, assume that freezers and dehumidifiers are also working.  Here's a re-assuring snap-shot of an overcast day at home from 80km away.

 

New sawyer

We felled out a couple of slow-dying ash Fraxinus excelsior trees recently. I've been stacking, sawing, splitting and [wood]shedding through the mountain of fallen timber that resulted.  It's ash, so IF I expose the maximum amount of interior surface area, by splitting anything thicker than my arm, and stack it in a nice draft, covered against the rain, THEN it will be ready to burn next winter. As I said to the New Faller Seán, ash-dieback is going to be his bread-and-butter [and our wi♬ter fuuuuuel] for the next ten years. I like doing the post-op ground-work: there is no tearing hurry, like there is on Felling Day, and log splitting is a contemplative puzzle with elements of zen. I go through the smaller logs with by bushman bow-saw because it's quiet and the cut is razor thin. I've so far filled one bay of the Hilbss Woodshed with ~2 steres of split logs [R with splitting maul for scale, and face shield for safety]. That's a little over half a cord for any Nordamericano readers.

Knotless, branchless ash logs split very nicely with a satisfying >!tonk!<  but they have to be cut to a length [400mm max] which will fit in my woodstove and for that, as for the gnarly bits, a chain-saw is your only man, despite losing 1 cm of each cut to sawdust. Quite apart from the hassle of getting into my kevlar PPE before picking up the orange workhorse. Anyway, on Sunday arvo, I cleaned my chain-saw and touched up the teeth with a file, so I'd be ready to do some work the following [I R Retire, so every day is Saturday except the Sabbath] day. Imagine my chagrin when I test-started the saw and the pull-string failed to engage.  Because, as it transpired, one of the two key watch-springs in the mechanism had broken.

Luckily, making idle conversation over tea and chocolate biscuits with Seán, I had asked who was his Go To for chain-saw mechanics. Tree-surgeons don't expect to do more than routine in the woods maintenance; no more than you know how to replace a timing belt on your car. And the answer for North Central Wexford is Diarmuid Sweeney Grass Machinery at The Harrow. Accordingly I called him up early on Monday morning and delivered the chain-saw before lunch. It was all very agreeable not least because Sweeney's watchword is "No Problem" uttered in a calmly competent manner. It was as well that I tried finding him on Monday because the following day Storm Barra carried away a crucial direction sign.

"No Problem" Sweeney called me first thing 48 hours later to say that my saw was working and ready to collect. That is the fastest turnaround I've ever gotten from the 1, 2, 3, 4 chainsaw-guys I've dealt with over the last 20 years. And the price was less than we pay the plumber. We had company for lunch, which was delightful, but there was still an hour of daylight left after I nipped down to the Harrow and back to collect the saw. Brrrzzzzt brrrrrrzzzzt cut cut.

Late return fees

 . . . won't be applied in the case of the missing notebooks. Librarians in Cambridge are, au contraire, cock-a-hoop that two of Charles Darwin's leather-bound notebooks, half-inched in the 00s, have been carefully wrapped up and returned in a pink gift bag. Anonymously, of course.

We can't be more specific about exactly when the notebooks were stolen because the security systems back then was so full of holes that any bad-hat could drive a coach and horses through them. A 19thC metaphor for a 19thC mindset, when the only people who would want, or obtain, access to archival manuscripts were gentlemen and scholars. Theft being unthinkable the librarians assumed the material in their charge was somewhere in the vaults. It took Jessica Gardner the new, and less complacent, director in 2017 to insist on a root and branch search and conclude that the notebooks had been stolen. If this is ringing a distant tinkle, it may be because you read about in The Blob at the end of 2020.

Back in the 1970s when I was studenting in Trinity College Dublin I requested, for my own extra-curricular researches, access to a 17thC book. I was sent up to the rare books room in the old library and a while later, the book was laid on the table in front of me. There were rather strict rules and regulations about bringing ink anywhere near the old books and manuscripts. Presumably in the knowledge that at least some of the gentleman-scholars might have a palsy while filling their pens adjacent to the priceless ancient paper. It would have been difficult for me to stuff the book I was reading up my jumper when I packed up. In the regular TCD Science Library at that time before magnetic bleeper strips, it was easy enough to liberate a book; ask me how I know.

The missing Darwin notebooks were a particular loss because one of them contained the Great Man's most famous doodle [see L]. This 1937 tree-of-life pic is widely disseminated as an example of the process whereby the ghost of an idea is developed into a stated hypothesis which can be shared with the community and, importantly, tested. Darwin was notably engaged with his many children, dragooning them to help him catch and mark humble bees or collect worm-casts in the garden at Down House. At least some of the doodles in the Darwin collection were contributed by his offspring.

The collection in Cambridge is huge, and I'm not in a position to chide them for not knowing where every item is at all and any times. But it really is a lesson for folks like me, who have a lot of books - and eek scientific notebooks, me - to speculate on the utility of maintaining an extensive personal library. Lucky that I R retire and have time on my hands because I spend silly amounts of my remain time on earth trying to . . . find . . . that paper . . . which . . . I know is somewhere in the house.

Vaxie's Dargle

Says my aul' wan to your aul' wan

Will ye go to the Waxie's Dargle?

Says your aul' wan to my aul' wan,

I haven't got a farthing. [Pogues]

I R retire; I get the pension; I lack for nothing; Cabbage n Spuds is cheap. Accordingly, I have a farthing or two or three. Indeed, I have the €5.00 which it cost me in petrol to jaunt to the next county for to get vaccinated. As I live a very sheltered life up a lane in the middle of Ballyganáit, the spree passed for a Dargle edutainment, if not exactly excitement: the kind of thing we used to spend €5 for in the cinema. Yes, it is a long time since I was at the movies.

Obedient to the laws, I arrived at the Cillin Covid-19 Centre carpark at 1505 for a 1510 appointment. 

I was asked four (4) times by four (4) separate stewards for the time of my appointment. There was not quite enough room in the short external marquee corridor for everyone with the same appointment time. When I got to the head of that line, I was sent down the hallway to reception desk. 

(5) I confirmed my name to a scribe behind the perspex, and had it highlighted off a printed list: I was expected! He sent me onto a shorter line where

(6) I was handed an information brochure and directed to one of four reception guichets where 

(7) I was again name-checked and asked a catechism of questions all expecting the answer no: had I been recently vaccinated; had I recently copped a 'Rona; had I ever experienced anaphylaxis from any vaccination; had I been through a stroke; are you or have you ever been a member of the anti-vaxx party [kidding].

Then through to a long snaking line [so long and so reminiscent of the Before Times that I started to remove my belt, shoes and change-purse] where I spent 12 minutes in a block of 20 people indoors. That's perilously close to the >15 minutes and <2m which government messaging for the last 15 months means certain death.

8) Eventually I was fetched to one of ten cubicles by John the Doctor who asked me for my mobile# and dob . . . but only to confirm my name. He then asked a subset of the same medical history questions as I'd answered for my earlier catechism. Maybe they are checking for short-term memory loss. After a bit of phatic blather, I exposed my left shoulder [note to 14-week future-self: wear the pink Yes t-shirt rather than your patriarchal 3-piece suit. The prick when it finally came [me looking la la la can't hear you in the opposite direction] was far less intrusive than I've had from my dentist or phlebotomist.

Afterwards I was invited to take a widely spaced chair in the other half of the hangar and told to stay there 15 minutes [honour system] and leave when that was up.

The whole show took 50 minutes - bring a book? You're not allowed to take photos [I guess for GDPR rather than to protect the security] so I had to do the selfie [R] when I got home.

Bucket List

I'm very much with Louis "glaciers & Harvard" Agassiz on celebrating the ordinary. One of the benefits of lockdown is that I have a copper-bottomed excuse for not travelling to Rose Red Petra or Valparaíso de Chile "before I die" so that I can tick these venues off my Bucket List. If I ever had a bucket list, I've long ago ceased lugging it about. Because . . . what do I do with the fact that I've been  to Vienna and eaten cream-cakes Brattleboro, New Hampshire where I've never dined finer? For example I am one of a very few people who have witnessed the Petitcodiac Bore - a tidal event at the head of the Bay of Fundy [multiprev]. Pat the Salt (b. 1925) avers any day you wake up alive, is a good day. True Dat! We are all allotted about 30,000 of them: if we achieve something useful and something kind on most of those days, why, that's a bucketful of blessings.

Yesterday was a pretty good day, no piña coladas or  sea-otters (*)but I did tick a couple of items off my TTD [things to do] list. I put my 14 y.o. Red Yaris in for the NCT. I believe in the NCT, it has had a demonstrable positive effect on road safety since it was started 20 years ago. But it's still stressful getting the old bus through its exams. New rules this year: 

1. by government fiat NCTs were pushed forward by 4 months to accommodate Covid back-log and reduced capacity as NCT engineers got sick
2. Nobody can sit in the waiting room while their car is being processed. You are advised to dress appropriately for outdoors. For about a third of the days in Winter that will be Sou'-wester and real greasy Aran sweater. Not yesterday, It was sunny but chill without a whippy wind, so all you need is a good talking book on your phone. Borrowbox rocks!

We didn't pass - one pesky broken brake-light - but I know that the car is good to go for another year. So that's a relief. Me, I don't need a car since I R Retire but I know a Returning Native who is coming home in January and will need wheels to function in an impossibly rural location up the Déise.

Back in February a medium-sized Scot's pine Pinus sylverstris [example, not ours, R] developed a green-stick twisting fracture in the main trunk and pitched over the boundary into the neighbour's field. I went up the next weekend to tidy up the raffle. I cut the smaller branches into heavable chunks and pitched them back on to our side of the line. That left two limbs driven into the ground supporting the "top" of the tree while the other end hung from the trunk by a complex of twisted fibres. Since then it has been g r a d u a l l y collapsing like a drunken diva towards her chaise longue.  The lines of tension and compression in a fallen or leaning tree are not obvious to all thinking people; so these cases are known in the trade as widow-makers. On Tuesday last, she slumped down to rest heavily on the top strand of the fence.

My risk analysis had to juggle a) replacing a section of fence to keep the cattle out of the garden vs b) getting the saw jammed in a settling cut and having to borrow a front-loader to take the weight off and retrieve my saw-blade. The 13in blade of the saw was just long enough to go through the fattest part of the trunk; I correctly gauged whether to cut up or down; and in about 20 minutes we'd cleared the field but for the saw-dust. Win! I can lose a lot of sleep not doing things, so I am working on myself to face up to tasks and just make a start . . . like Javi.

(*) Satire supplement Groundhog Day for black man.

 “Political satire became obsolete when Henry 

Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.” 

Tom Lehrer.

End of Year

To any regular readers, thank you for staying the course through 2020. We were blessed to be allowed for two weeks to have Dau.I and Dau.II back at the home in which they grew up. They decided that nothing would do but they create a gingerbread village to house the ghosts of Christmas Past:

I include a cup for scale, to indicate just how small ghosts are. This year has been longer than usual [hint: 29 February] and, for me and many, a lot lighter on the carbon footprint. I R retire now, so there is no need and small excuse to go off-site at all. It is such a privilege to be able to run about the hill behind the house without having to get into a car: 200 hectares of plague-free dry heath. 

Hang in there until Midnight, lads, we'll all turn into 2021 pumpkins and be the better for it.

All Colonels

I had a real conversation last week with, like, a person rather than the grainy moving image of a person. It was legit because it was generating uplifting broadcast fodder to stop the People of Lockdown going postal. We talked a bit about working and [I R Retire!] not working and Chris cited a story he'd seen recently on BBC, about Greg Jackson who runs a £1billion company without an HR department! Jackson is a serial ideas-bloke entrepreneur but the seminal lesson in management came when he was in his 20s. He was new to the job but tried to helpfully manage one of the key effectives in the company.  The other party held up her hand until . . . "She finished the call, like a consummate professional, and she turned to me and said: 'Greg, I bring up two boys and a husband on the poxy wage this company pays. If I can do that, you can be pretty sure I can do anything this company wants from me. And by the way Greg, I was here before you were here and I'll be here after you have gone. I love the company more than you do, so you never need to tell me what to do.'"

I take a couple of things from that anecdote. a) Some people are not driven only by money; they have an internal clock for value, self-worth and standards; they do their job well because they can do it no other way. b) Management often gets in the way of productive work.

I had a life-time in academic science and was often poorly managed. Far too much time was spent in meetings to generate Learning Outcomes [always always using Bloom's Taxonomy] for academic courses and none spent obliging me to become a more thoughtful, creative, inspiring teacher. I went to several CPD workshops: courses on statistics, programming and grant-writing but these were voluntary, even if carried out on company time. Through the crappy partition walls I'd often ear-wig on appalling teaching practice in the room next door: hectoring, exasperated, monotonous.

Promotion in academic circles takes you further from coal-face-time with students and actual scientific research - like with test-tubes and Petri dishes - and more into a managerial role. I've never heard of any senior academics being mentored for better budget control, HR or time management. All of which are essential management skills to get the best from the available resources. One of the places I started working had recently promoted their most effective researcher to be Head of Department. Like many highly effective scientists, this person was far better at coaxing life from a stone than interacting with people. They were hopeless dealing with, say, The Viper, a sarcastic, self-important, undermining bully; or a demarcation dispute between lecturers and technicians; or a really distressed, recently orphaned, student. They should have stayed at the bench but promotion carried a bit more money, considerably more prestige, and a bigger office with, like, a window.

A few years later, a management restructure created a Head of School to interface between HoDs and the {CEO, CFO, VPthis, VPthat cabinet} which ran the institution. The former HoD applied and was duly transfigured into HoS with the vital role of managing two [that's 2] subservient HoDs. Supervising two presumably competent people is not a full time job, so the working week was filled with meetings of important committees and exactly duplicating, not very well, the work of the HoDs.

Take travel. If I needed to go elsewhere on company business or on CPD, I could claim travel expenses. That might be a train ticket, mileage for the car if trains went the wrong way, a per diem, and/or overnight accommodation if essential. Once, I took two students to a conference of interest in Dublin. I filled in The Green Form to get prior approval and claimed mileage for the car, essentially giving a free ride to the two impoverished students. The Form was signed by my HoD, counter-signed by our HoS and forwarded to Finance for approval by the CFO. Many weeks later, The Form came back stamped DISALLOWED because I drove to Dublin rather than taking the train. That's fair enough, but it was galling that neither the HoS nor the HoD paid sufficient attention to doing their job well to flag the problem before the event when it could have been remediated. And WTF is it about a system that can't trust anyone to make a honest claim for their out of pocket expenses and, worse, can't trust the HoD to give appro for any such claim? Lack of trust engenders lack of trust-worthiness.

So many managers all washing the linen that has just been laundered by a subordinate. So big their salary, so mighty their pension prospects. I written before about how often hopeless these people are when the shit hits the fan Frrrrrp! and some actual management is required. I've written about wholly disfunctional management, but also management which fell apart when required to manage.

I'll finish with a graphic image seeded in my mind by my favorite talking-walker. In the Before Times, I'd meet this fellow on the lane when he was mitching off from his day job to watch larks ascending on the upland heath above us on the hill. The previous weekend to one such encounter, he'd attended an on-farm CPD meeting in the next county. Whatever they were being shown cannot of been so interesting because he started idly to calculate the suit-to-effective ratio. There was an actual farmer, with mud on his jeans and shit on his watch-cap, wrestling with some piece of demonstration machinery and two more farmers watching with empathy and attention. Then there were a dozen fonctionnaires in new wellingtons and clean trousers: the men [yes, all men; and yes, all on expenses] out for the day from their offices at Teagasc, Coillte, DAFF, IFA, the CoCo, Quango-X, Bord Bia, RELAY, Bord na Mona. My informant estimated that the suits were sucking at the government teat to the tune of €500,000 /yr, while farmer, a grown up with 40 years experience, was making less than a trainee teacher.

Collateral damage

Now that I R retire and have cut down on The Blob, I have more time to read books. Like everyone I have my prefs [non-fiction, travel, biogs] but will read anything which comes recommended. And I am usually: I've started so I'll finish about it. And, of course, Borrowbox the Bringer of Earbooks has opened up whole extra vistas for absorbing information while off my sofa.

I grew up in another century where grown-up books tended to be walls of text but my offspring and their pals get through A Lot of graphic novels. They told me I should read Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton; but to be careful - it might be too much stress for me. Beaton grew up in Mabou, Nova Scotia on the east coast of Cape Breton: facing across the sea to PEI. Born in 1980, it seemed sensible to take on some debt to put herself through college. But when she popped out of the education mill with an Arts degree, she found that the parchment could not be parlayed into any sort of a job. And local service jobs didn't pay enough to leave home let alone pay off her student debt. One place which was booming with hardship-money employment was the Oil Sands of Alberta. It's about as remote and hostile as Uranium City, Sask. where my doctoring pal Mac took his family in the 80s. 

The economy of Cape Breton was built on coal and fishing and both these industries died a death, as in Newfoundland, at the end of the 20thC. So only the infrastructure [teachers, nurses, shop assistants, bus drivers] jobs were left. Accordingly young Kate followed neighbours and family to Fort McMurray, AL.

I liked this vignette of being forced to watch The Health & Safety video again. The primary purpose of which is so that Management show a fig-leaf of care for the survival of their Workers.:

I fainted dead away when I had to sit in the same room as the H&S video [I couldn't watch!] as part of my chain-saw handling and maintenance course in 1999. At about the same time, the Company PR department announced that 8,000,000 person-days had passed without a 'serious' accident. This was met with hoooots of derision by the work-force; who felt that the definition of 'serious' had been finagled to produce this positive statistic.

And the Ducks? They are a metaphor for the collateral damage meted out on workers in the pursuit of profit. A large flock of migrating ducks had chosen to rest on their journey on a fine looking lake - which turned out to be a toxic tailings pond. The response was not to stop using tailings ponds (that's an effective method for meeting legal /environmental requirements) but to stop ducks landing on the ponds (with scarecrows)  it's called fixin' the glitch. Same with fragile humans working under adverse conditions with frighteningly powerful machinery . . . make sure everyone sits through The Video. Blame for accidents can then be shifted to victim.

Likewise misogyny and sexual assault. Who did what to whom in bunkhouses? The Company treated that as a private matter  - beyond corporate control. Kate and her sister and their friends had a much more compassionate view of why men behaved like predatory shit heads when away from their families for months at a time and there was nothing to do but drink. They ask how their dear old Dad would turn out if economic necessity forced him to drive a dumper truck in N Alberta. It's a question we could all ask about ourselves when we rush to judgment about the actions of the dispossessed.

We must suppose that The Oil Sands worked out for Kate: she stuck at it for two years, thrifting away a portion of her pay and bonus until she'd cleared her debt to the state for getting an education. And her cartoons about the Hard Life developed into an income stream independent of coal and fishing. But not everyone is sufficiently focused to come out on top - spaffing each paycheck up the wall and owing their soul to the company store. There's got to be a better way which is more generally applicable.

Frayed Atlantic Edge

Blessings on the family librarian! A couple of years ago, she issued me with a Dublin City library card with a memorable PIN and advised me to go mad with reading material . . , including listening material to fill the 90 minutes a working day I would spend to-and-fro to work. Indeed she was more proactive than me and I'd often be surprised emails saying that such-a-book, which I had ordered was available for collection in Waterford.  I came to borrowbox too late in my commuting life [I R Retire] to really benefit from its resources of downloadable e-books. But I really enjoyed listening to EO Wilson's biographic advice in his own distinctive Alabama voice.

My latest hit from borrowbox is The Frayed Atlantic Edge [colour supplement] by David Gange. His day job is Senior Lecturer in Modern History at U.Birmingham, UK, and by his account that's quite fulfilling. But some elemental part of his soul is nourished by The Wild. He's happy out sleeping on a mountain-top in midwinter; I suspect that, like John Burns, The Last Hillwalker, he'd consider cooking dinner over a smoking gorse-twig fire in a windowless bothy a bit soft; because roof. Along the way he's acquired competence in a kayak. A few years ago he was inspired to carry out a practical salt-in-yer-hair research project, very much in the same tradition as The Holistic Landscape. 

His plan was to jiggle his teaching and admin commitments in U.Brum to win himself two clear weeks every month for a year . . . and paddle his own canoe from Muckle Flugga, Shetland 62°N to Lands End, Kernow 50°N. In my most judgmental pilgrim's hat, I'd disapprove because a good part of the process of any journey is getting in the zone through unremitting deliberate practice. If you return home every fortnight for clean clothes, a dry bed, classes, cinema and mowing the lawn, then it is work to get enough of your sensibility back to talk to the seals.

This is a wonderful book, as a pilgrim and a traveller, Gange is welcomed all along The Edge. The locals extend a generous hand because strangers are guests but also because strangers bring news. He is accorded time and attention because he appears from along the whale-road which requires skill and effort that resonates empathy with communities who have lived and died by the wave. It is not the same if you rock up in your fully provisioned camper-van. Gange is a man with a mission: to refocus the lens of history to bring the sea-ways, cliffs and anchorages front and centre as they were in The Before Times. An abundance of legend and story (essential for survival on the unforgiving Atlantic Edge) preserve songlines of the seaways. A band of towering cliffs on the Ordnance Survey map is represented by an inconsequentially thin line and the sea itself is blank. From a kayak, the cliffs are a looming vertical landscape, a storm of gannets, a calliphony of cries, odd bushes, cascades of guano. From a kayak you can eyeball those seals and daydream of selkies.

Did someone mention maps? Gange pulls ashore in Roundstone by appointment with Tim "The Map" and Mairéad Robinson [covid obit April 2o2o] expecting a cup of tea and an interview about the boundary between land and sea. They suck him in, settle him down for an exchange of stories, place-names, lore and song and it's 11 hours before he looks at his marine chronometer and escapes from Tim na nÓg to continue his journey South. Much of his journey repeats that trope: arriving cold and locating the oldest extant salt in the village to share tales of Life on The Edge. He has an ear for bird cries but also an ear for poetry and cites a number of local poets including Christine Evans of Bardsey / Ynys Enlli; WS Graham of Kernow; our [obit] own Seamus Heaney. 

But our intrepid voyageur goes incandescent in Mayo when he pulls out at Erris and hears the tearing cries of the Shell to Sea campaigners. The proposal to bleed profit from the offshore Corrib Oil field seems to epitomize the unholy stitch-up between big business and central government and the collateral damage that accrues to local people, local livelihoods, local culture and local ecology. The Satanic bargain may work in financial terms [or may not if naive politicians and bureaucrats are seduced, suborned or bamboozled by the consummately brutal apparatchiks of St Mammon] but only because it is "impossible" to put a dollar-value on culture and continuity: allowing these assets drop off the balance-sheet and blow away on the wind. In 2018, between Gange's visit to Rossport and the publication of his book, Shell threw in the towel and walked away from too much trouble. Win! It could have been far worse! if the people of Erris had been black and living on a different coast in the Niger River Delta. The Rossport Five would have been the Ogoni Nine hanged after a stitch-up military tribunal. The Irish Constitution is really strong on property rights but the law favours those with the deepest pockets and a centralized government can be more easily bought because there are fewer people to pay off.

An evocative revisionist tapestry of a book weaving natural history, poetry, storms and lonely sunrises into a magic carpet that carries you from the dawn of human history to the day before yesterday.

Check out The Blob's Island Index

some of which feature in Frayed.

Note: approach the talking book with caution: the pronunciation of some of the proper names will make you gasp and there are A Lot of proper names here in Scots Gaelic, Welsh, Irish and English. And the Scots and Irish accents are laughable unnecessary generic.