Old Salt Route

Earlier in the week, I was visiting palomino Rene in St Mullins at the very start of the River Barrow Navigation. We've been there before. St Mullins is desperately romantic with a medieval motte-and-bailey on the village green, an holy well, a little medieval chapel and one of the earliest examples of hydro-power in Ireland. As we visited, the tide came in and the rocks in the broad reach of river threw off a hunting heron Ardea cinerea as the water covered them.  St Mullins is 30km from the sea but still tidal.  I expressed amazement about how the town of New Ross which is still 15 river-winding km from the sea grew to be a port at all at all. Why didn't ships just unload their cargoes at some convenient place on the coast and quickly turn around for more? Rene glanced at me pityingly and asked "And just how would people have transported those goods to their homes in the interior?" Red face, me and point taken.  On the way home from that visit, Young Bolivar and I were discussing how, even 100 years ago, labour was cheap but transport was expensive and that now the equation is neatly reversed. This has consequences on how things are built: 100, or even 50, years ago, houses hereabout were built as rubble-in-courses from the local granite rocks.  It takes time to patch together a 3-D jig-saw of random stone into a 500mm thick wall with two vertical faces. Nowadays, you can, for half nothing, get bales of "4 inch solid" concrete blocks delivered to your door and build walls faster, straighter and possibly stronger.

All that made me think about bulk transport in the days before motorways, so I was primed when a piece about the Stecknitzkanal popped up in Wikipedia. The canal was for a few hundred years an important part of the Alte Salzstraße which brought salt from the interior of Germany near Lüneburg to the great Hanseatic port of Lübeck on the Ostsee / Baltic coast. The trade in white gold served many aspects of food production but was vital for the preservation of herring Clupea harengus which in turn was vital for normal life in Catholic Europe when Fridays were deemed to be meat-free. Before the Stecknitzkanal was built to connect the North Sea, Hamburg and the Elbe with the Trave, Lübeck and the Baltic, the salt had to be carted over the intervening distance. Transport through the sandy heathlands was bad enough in High Summer but became frustratingly difficult when the road 'surface' dissolved into sludge in Winter.

In 1390 the merchants of Lübeck agreed to go halfsies with Erich IV Herzog von Saxe-Lauenburg to build a canal across the ridge between their two territories and make them both rich by taxing the traffic. The first shipment of salt - 30 barges containing 5-10 tonnes each - arrived in Lubeck in 1398. The trade peaked the following century at 30,000 tonnes/year but declined steadily thereafter.  And it wasn't only salt that used the canal: lots of bulk non-perishable cargo made the journey in the reverse direction: herring for starters, but also furs, timber and grain. Peat, coal, and bulk building materials like bricks, gravel and limestone were later added to the taxable traffic.

The length of the journey was considerably more than the crow-fly distance because the two navigable rivers didn't quite flow in the 'right' direction and were quite wiggly. Indeed, only 12 of the 97 km of the route were in a totally new channel.  The summit was only 17m above sea-level and a key element of the navigation was to install weirs to hold back the water into long horizontal reaches along which horses could tow the barges. These reaches were initially linked by 'flash-locks' incorporated into the weirs which were opened when a barge had to go through and closed as quickly as possible before all the stocked water rushed away down-stream.  This was fantastically inefficient and wasteful of water and was the cause of perennial dispute between bank-side millers who needed the water high to serve their mill-race. Eventually the flash-locks were replaced with single chamber locks which were technologically more sophisticated and much more conservative with the water. By the end of the 19thC, the 8m wide trench of the Stecknitzkanal had been replaced /upgraded to the mighty Elbe-Lübeck canal [R above] which is still used for commerce and leisure.

Fat City

If you haven't read Philip Pullman's magical [young adult] books, you really should order up the first book in His Dark Materials trilogy from your library. Here on The Blob, I used to cite books with a link to Amazon, especially if they were available for €$£0.01. We're boycotting Amazon at the mo, because of the air miles, the hunting of their employees and because I don't want such monolithic monopolies. Libraries are the future! One of the destinations in Northern Lights is Svalbard, an archipelago in the far North, where panserbjørne armoured bears do battle with the forces of evil. All good stuff; ripping yarn. Me and my pal Rene were getting fat on a cup of tea and sour-cream cake the other day racking our [shit-for-]brains to retrieve the old name Dutch name for Svalbard. Но́вая Земля́ [NL: Nova Zembla] was floated but we both knew that was further East. Ans: Spitsbergen! Rene made a pile of money working at sea in the fisheries when he was young and has a restless and skeptical curiosity about the natural and historical world especially concerning they that go down to the sea in ships. He mentioned the existence of the 1619 Dutch foundation of Smeerenburg on the NW corner of Spitsbergen. Less than a week later, I see a link to Smeerenburg on the bloggoburg, which I abstract for you here.

1619 is a long time ago - 400 years indeed. Boston was founded the following year. 600,000 people live in Boston now [just the city; if you include the 'burbs it's nearer 4,000,000] but the population of Smeerenburg is zero. Pretty much everyone [total is a tad over 2,000 souls] in Svalbard now lives further South in Longyearbyen. Dutch whalers had been coming North since Willem Barentsz had passed by looking for a North-East passage to Cathay and untold wealth in 1596. His reports of sleepy lardy bowhead whales Balaena mysticetus waiting to be de-oiled caused a bit of a gold-rush to the North. In 1614 a consortium of Dutch cities formed the Noordsche Compagnie and started to send ships to SpitsbergenThe hard chaws arrived as soon as the ice broke up in the Spring and stayed all Summer killing, flensing and trying down the white gold. The technology of the time required that the rendering [=trying] was carried out on land, and so the flensing process naturally followed ashore.  The Effectives lived ashore in tents. The dead whales were hauled in to the beach. Each year the whalers had to travel further and profits started to fall. In 1619, the shareholders in their comfy offices in Hoorn and Enkhuizen decided to build permanent housing in Smeerenburg, so that the work could commence three weeks earlier and finish three weeks later.

Because so few literate people went up there, the size of Smeerenburg and its facilities grew in the telling until folks back home were claiming that ~15,000 people were living and working in Blubbertown. Boston didn't grow to that size for 160 years. Subsequent writers tended to extrapolate from the very few contemporary reports, so that village became town; solitary wankers became a gaudy brothel; and reek of rancid fats competed with the smell of fresh bread from numerous bakeries. Recent archaeology indicates that at its height, Smeerenburg mustered only 19 dwelling! A permanent village turned out to be only a stop-gap. The whole enterprise closed down about 45 years after the foundations were laid. Whalers found it was more economical to process the dead whales close to the killing grounds. Readers of Moby Dick will remember the massive try-pots on the deck fed with fresh strips of blubber and fuelled by the crispers that remained when most of the fat had been boiled out of the tissue. Nothing went to waste in a massive jolt to the carbon footprint of the Western world.

Light pollutes the world

I'm back on MetaFilter - I furloughed myself for the month of August  after it all got a little too intense. One of the Ozzie contributors posted a piece about how streetlights force birds to sing longer than they are designed for.

My pal Rene lives in a mill building on the River Barrow (Ireland's second longest river). The mill, long defunct, used to draw water from a modest tributary which could be crossed by a bridge where it debouched into the larger river. In the olde days eels Anguilla anguilla ran, even across the fields, on moonless nights. For a few years, Rene had a pet eel about the premises. Some years ago, the County decided to pop a street-light on the bridge to stop people pitching in while returning home from the pub. It was cheaper than making a balustrade on both sides of the bridge. 

The once abundant eels promptly stopped running up the tributary. It has been illegal to catch them since 2007. But nobody can prevent the relentless spread of street-lights. Oops, I see I have had my rant about this in 2019. But we can surely reflect again on the unintended consequences of serving the convenience and comfort of humanity while everyone and everything else just has to get out of the way.  Wot are we like?

Carlow fence ♩ ♬ ♫ ♪ ! is a local sight. So much granite in the county, and so much time in the old days. Long square-sectioned chunks of granite were split from mighty granite boulders to fashion as lintels for houses like ours. It was trendy, and efficient, to cut a v-notch in the top of each square pier and join each pier with a horizontal lintel turned 45°. They are kinda useless: never high enough to prevent stock passing over and, at knee-height, a trip-and-fall hazard for [drunken?] walkers.

Clear as day

Dau.I, the family [photo] archivist, was home over Easter and showed us a 2005-dated photo of our polytunnel covered in [super clear] plastic. That really helped nail down the date: pre-Blob documentary evidence is rare and patchy. The tunnel is therefore almost old enough to vote! But like dogs, polytunnel years are not the same as human years and, like me, the tunnel is feeling its age despite having only 25% of my calendar years. Accordingly, in March we went on a jaunt to Highbank to scope out the cost of replacing the plastic. Polytunnel tech has moved on since 2005 and wooden frames are now considered supremely out of style. We got a blizzard of information about the New Way with polythene fixin's. Although we still agreed that a total re-cladding was required, enough unresolved logistical questions hung in the air that we put the whole project on hold. Eventually I called my tunnel-mentor Rene to have him explain the difference between Richel double clip rails and single Richel clip cladding rails and why the latter might be 3x the cost of the former. A few things became clear: 

• in 2005 the cost of the plastic sheeting €240 was the most expensive part of the inventory; (4 x 2)s, (2 x 1)s and screws being cheap as chips
• in 2022 the plastic was a small amount €420 compared to all the steel engineering infrastructure
• I've lost my mojo for bodging things up from scraps and off-cuts
  

Being a highly suggestible sort of bloke, it was easy enough for Rene to convince me that a good clean was the way forward and it would be a shame to dump out all that plastic for landfill. And, more importantly, with care and attention, there might be / should be years of life left in the ould tunnel. R and his pal K came up on Wednesday [midweek! when - I R retire - I didn't have to be at work offsite] with a vanload of hosepipe, brushes and power-washers and started to clean years of gunk from the top of the tunnel.  

I haven't been totally remiss from cleaning what I can reach with a 3.6m long-handled brush. It's a lot like the nun's instructions for bathing in a shift "first you wash up as far as possible, then you wash down as far as possible; then you wash possible". As our tunnel is 13m over the hoops, I've never been able to wash possible on my own. One time many years ago, The Boy and I tied ropes to the 4 corners of a very old foam-rubber-stuffed floor cushion, waited for a good wet day and did push-me-pull-you back and forth along the length of the tunnel. It was really difficult to clean the high-points over the hoops because the cushion would slide inexorably down into the inter-hoop troughs. You can see the contrast [above L] when K got his head higher than the tunnel top and applied a proper industrial window-cleaner's brush with skill and vim: L.L. after his attention to detail; L.R. awaiting his ministrations. 

And here is K himself advising me that the plastic will soon be clean enough to see, not only the hill on the far side of the valley, but the pixel sheep that dot its flanks. And it was so. More light brings out the best in the look-and-feel of the tunnel. But it must also be acknowledged that The Beloved and Dau.II (who was visiting) really cleared the decks inside, so that the boys could have a clean sweep at the task. Imagine how red would be our faces if K tripped over a lawn chair or a bag of potting compost while staring fixedly upwards as he pounded his brush against the interior dust-layer.  The prognosis seems to be that we are good for another year . . . and another. Until we have a dramatic event like Darwinday 2014 which tore the plastic from its moorings.  As a manifestation of good faith in old plastic, one reason for washing the stuff, while it is still spread out and taut, is that it will defo get reused / recycled if we decide to go with new.

Having clear as glass plastic is a mixed blessing. Wood pigeons Columba palumbus are hardly the smartest beasts on two wings. Yesterday I disturbed one in the tunnel and it flew up in a flap - WHUMPHing in to the plastic . . . repeatedly until I seized it with both hands and showed it the door. Not unlike our testosteropsychotic window thumping blackbird; maybe it's something in the water hereabouts? One reason that we might have a random pigeon lost in tunnel is that it is The Year of the Pigeon. Our trees, which usually support a couple of pair, are hosting a couple of dozen pair in 2022. Who knows why?

Trash: 2014 Organic: 2010

I wrote last year about walking the county road with Dau.II, her friend and three bin-bags. We were encouraged by An Taisce and our tree-hugging friends to pick other people's rubbish out of the local ditches, drains and roadside verges. Actually it was a couple of weeks later in April last year and that made the work a good bit harder because the grass and nettles were well up: both obscuring the rubbish and making it harder and wetter to pick up.  Yesterday was The Day Appointed but I was all for giving it a miss.  We're busy with the lambs and the attendant civil engineering works and I still wanted to tidy up a few sceacha (Crataegus monogyna).  But the */!@%$! chainsaw wouldn't start, so mid-morning I trekked off to visit Rene my favorite bricoleur down in St Mullins to see what he could do.  Under his attention, the saw came back to life and we sat awhile having a cup of tea talking round the houses about food-labelling and fish-farming.

We've all long been aware of the difference between Irish Smoked Salmon (sourced who knows where but smoked in Ireland) and Smoked Irish Salmon (grown in Ireland but smoked who knows where).  Rene showed me an empty package of  Smoked Irish Salmon : organically farmed mild oak smoked salmon. On the back, the product claims to be Smoked Irish Organic Salmon (Salmo salar) slices. He knows a lot about fish-farming having started the first eel (Anguilla anguilla) farm in the Netherlands a generation ago and he has an idea about what corners are necessary to cut if you want to supply one of the big UK margin-slashing supermarket chains.  He was also a bit bamboozled by the Euroleaf symbol (see right) which appeared under the bar code. But maybe that's because he hasn't got out much these last four years: "From 1 July 2010, the use of the EU organic logo is compulsory for organic pre-packaged food produced within the European Union."  He maintained that the only thing organic about the product was the saw-dust used to smoke it.  Which, if you read the brown text above, could well be true in the weasel-word tradition that makes a marketable distinction between Irish Smoked Salmon and Smoked Irish Salmon. But the documentation on places where the Euroleaf may be displayed suggest that this hypothesis cannot hold up - and I quote:
Can the logo be used on packaging material of the following products?

• Sardines in organic olive oil: NO
• Organic salmon: YES
• Wine made with organic grapes: NO
• Soup made of organic vegetables: YES
• Wool from organic sheep: NO
• Milk from a dairy farm in conversion period: NO 
• Other organic animal products, where only national rules exist (rabbits, snails, deers, etc.): NO
• Pet food: NO 

Clear? As organic mud! But do we really care whether the farmed salmon or the fish-meal they ate or the lice that they shed into the surrounding water or indeed mild oak sawdust is organic if the stuff has accumulated serious and unnecessary planet-sapping shipping miles between being gaffed in Ireland and smoked in Scotland? Local trumps organic.

By the time I returned, The Beloved and O'Manch had been out for an hour and picked the road clean well into the neighbouring county.  All I was able to contribute was an old tire that I'd picked out of the verge the previous afternoon on the way home and the wing of my own car which I had retrieved from a ditch in another part of the county a few days after my argument with that same ditch. TB & O'M had found another two tires and a couple of bagfuls of miscellaneous jetsam.  After a bowl of soup we went to the village hall to compare notes with the other trash-pickers and have a community cup of tea and some buns.  This annual ritual is worth doing, not only to meet the neighbours, scarf down some free food and clean up our own back-yard but also to discourage the next person who wants to fire something out of the car-window.  If the hedges are already festooned with detritus, it is marginally easier to do the wrong thing.

Newton's cat-flap

On dit que; they say that Isaac Newton invented the cat-flap. He got fed up with his moggy, by name Spithead, blundering into the darkened room, when Newton was carrying out his optical experiments, by pushing open the door and flooding the room with light. The Great Man therefore cut a hole in the door and sealed both sides with black velvet which allowed Spithead in and out at will and in darkness. When Spithead had kittens Newton cut a smaller hole in the same door to facilitate them. This allowed Newton's pals to laugh at his naivety "For a clever chap, it's a  wonder how he manages to get his britches on the right way round most mornings".

<trigger> descriptions of self-inficted injury </trigger>

I was visiting with my pal Rene last weekend: I bring flapjacks, he makes tea, wat leuk, gezellig. I noticed that he had a huge partly healed dinge, about the size of a thumb-nail, on one of his fingers. Eeeeuw, that looks painful, I said, how did that happen?  Someone gave him a shiny new coffee-mug. As usual for breakfast he half-filled the cup with milk for his breakfast muesli and went out into the utility room to heat it up in the microwave. 2 minutes later, when he heard the >ping<, he went outside again, opened the microwave door and  grabbed the mug by the handle. The pain, the smell of burning and the sound of sizzle arrived in his head at more or less the same time. But he couldn't drop the cup because the melted flesh was stuck unto the handle. >!Yaroooo!<. The shiny new cup had a metallic glaze. Nobody claimed that Rene is stupid, he knows not to put metal in a microwave but he was on autopilot making breakfast and that theoretic knowledge wasn't allowed to surface.

Could have been worse.  A few years ago at the Home Education Network HEN annual gathering, one of the dads turned up with his arm in a surgical brace. Eeeeuw, that looks painful, I said, how did that happen?  Home Ed kids have nothing to do all day but play and one day his crew had decided to make and fly kites. Dad, who is a computer engineer working for IBM, was 'working form home'. The kite finds itself caught on some wires looping towards the house. Dad is called. He spends his whole life solving problems. The kids have tried throwing sticks and stones to dislodge the kite. He knows that the bamboos in the garden are not long enough, so he duct-tapes two together. Still he cannot reach high enough. Aha! The lopper from ALDI with extensible aluminium handle. But that is still clearly too short; so he goes to the garage to fetch is largest metal step-ladder. As he climbs the ladder, he pauses to admire the view . . . he notes the transformer [as R] on a distant electricity pole . . . speculates how many thousands of volts course through it . . . shakes his head and gets on with The Task. >!kaBOOM!< The next thing he remembers is waking up on his back in the dirt with a smell of burning. The pain came later. Ignoring the sub-conscious message from his sensible centres, he had contrived to use his body to short out the mains electricity supply to the house. With months of physiotherapy, he was hopeful that he'd get partial use of his left arm in due course. Moral: don't buy single-use clutter-bargains from ALDI?

Now me, I don't believe in napkins: who needs paper when you've got a sleeve to clean the crumbs off your face? A couple of years ago, the orange enamel kettle boiled over. Some goof-ball [probably me] had over filled it. It was wet on the bottom but the hot water was needed in the kitchen. Can't be having drips across the hallway so I sweppppt the kettle-bottom across the trouser of my up-lifted leg. It was like the old joke about Do not phone Paddy while he's doing the ironing. I had applied a thin layer of boiling water, under mild pressure, to my thigh. It is hard and undignified to get your trousers off in a hurry; hint: put kettle on floor first. In the end, not all of the skin peeled off, just the bit in the middle of the burn where the heat had penetrated deeper.

The race is not to the swift

Following on from my rant about the virtues of uncluttered web-design . . .

In 1992, it was a close race as to whether it was faster to communicate with the mainframe in TCD using a 300 bps acoustic coupler [example R] or get on my bike and cycle the intervening 10km. Now the pipes of the internet are fatter but the data that's getting pushed down the pipes is bigger too. My pal Rene's second-hand laptop was acting up when I went to visit last week and I was able to get it started in 'Safe Mode' so that at least they could back-up the data before they sent it in for some remedial doctoring. We were reflecting that a decent functional computer could be bought ready-to-go for about €1,000, which is about the same price that we paid for decent functional computers 30 years ago. Today's model is unimaginably faster and has 100,000x the storage capacity but costs the same.

Here's a sweet story from the early 90s about getting in touch quickly <not>. In 1994, the web was barely commercial and pretty slow but the telephone switch-boards in academic institutions could be slow also. The Regional Technical Colleges [which were rebranded later as Institutes of Technology] were strongly unionised and the union insisted that their chaps needed a proper lunch-break. In the middle of a working day in ~1994, my colleague Ken needed to call Dr Michelle Storrs in Tallaght RTC, so he dialled their switch-board. As the line rang and rang, he thought he'd find out if she had a direct line . . . using the internet. The result of this impromptu research project was the finding that there are a helluva lot of Michelles in Storrs, Connecticut!

Those were the preGoogle days when your enquiries on. say, Altavista would be wholly generic. Asking about dry-cleaners in Dublin would top-load you with hits from Dublin, California and Dublin, New Hampshire, because your geography wasn't embedded in the search and there were far more wired-up businesses in Dublin, America than in Boondocks, Ireland. Now Google guesses better what you probably want . . . but that can have a downside if you're trying to kick over the traces and go on an unNannied search across the universe of knowledge.

R♀thschilds

I know three things about the Rothschild family a) they were Jewish b) they were rich c) they made a killing on the market by being ahead of the posse with news of the outcome at Waterloo 1815. Only two of these facts are correct. I did also spend a year in school reading and writing a lot of 19thC European esp. British history, including a weighty biography of Benjamin Disraeli, so I was aware that Nathan Rothschild fronted his pal Disraeli £4,000,000 in 1875 to allow the British government to secure a controlling interest in the Suez Canal. 

The dynasty grew out of a house on Judengaße at the nicer end of the ghetto in Frankfurt am Main when in 1770 Mayer Amschel Rothschild married Guttle Schnapper [R] and they had five sons. They also had five daughters, but they didn't count because the canny crabby patriarch deliberately excluded them from any share of his estate.  Amschel the oldest boy stayed at home; Salomon went to Vienna; Nathan to London; Calmann to Naples and Jacob to Paris. This is not to say that the girls of the family didn't do the counting as the money flowed and the bills of exchange were, well, exchanged. As well as the cooking, cleaning and child-rearing!

The Women of Rothschild: The Untold Story of the World's Most Famous Dynasty by Natalie Livingstone is an attempt to redress the invisibility of the women who were born into or married into the family. These two classes were often the same because, the patriarchy was really anxious not to dissipate the family fortunes through the dowries of outbreeders. Really they were like the Hapsburgs in their relentlessd endogamy. I don't think there's any evidence that serial inbreeding caused a lot of adverse medical conditions as rare recessive traits frothed up. Some of the Rothschilds were clinically depressed, and several of these killed themselves but that happens in other families even today.

What does not happen in other families is dying from septicaemia after circumcision as happened to poor wee René son of Leonora and Alphonse de Rothschild in 1861. Indeed, bris or no bris, young René would have been fine if he'd been born in 1961 at Peak Antibiotic. A similar tragedy happened to Rene's Gt Grandfather Nathan Meyer R., who got a boil on his bum which was lanced but never got better and he died of septicaemia in 1836 aged only 58. I have a frisson <yarrooo> of empathy on that because in 1961 I was at Peak Boil round my waistband on me bum and elsewhere. I think in 1961 Staphylococcus aureus would still yield to penicillin, or methicillin. It is now the SA in the dreaded MRSA.

I guess, from a scientific view, the most interesting of the women is Miriam Rothschild 1908-2005 who was the Gt Gt Grand-daughter of Nathan Meyer R. (1777-1836) of the boil. She inherited the flea collection of her father Charles (1877 - 1923) who couldn't tame the black dog and cut his throat in 1923. Flea collection? Yup, that would be around 260,000 specimens from nearly 1,000 species of Siphonaptera, 500 of which had been discovered and named by Charles. That included Xenopsylla cheopis, the vector of Bubonic plague [whc Prev]. Miriam [and George Hopkins] spent 30 years writing up the collection into a 6 volume illustrated catalogue. Miriam also contributed a bunch of science, compassion and common sense to the Wolfenden Report [bloboprev] on homosexuality and prostitution. That is certainly not the end of her manifold contributions to science and society. You should look her up - obit Guardian.

Brash-hammock

In 2007, my pal Rene made me an offer I couldn't refuse: N=800 10 year old trees at €1 a go. They were mostly oak Quercus robur, but included chestnut both sweet- Castanea sativa and horse- Aesculus hippocastanum. Ten year old trees are the divil to transplant because the windage is enormous but the root-ball is small. Our consultant forester Rissoles Hayes advised splitting the largest trees into a) poles and firewood b) root-ball for coppicing. But we took a chance on the 50 runtiest oaks and planted them "entire" and staked them up in the most sheltered part of the site. The rest were settled each in its mini-digger hole and firmed down in hope. That all filled a week of hard graft and about a third of the (1 acre = 0.4 hectare) site - between us and the loud silver barns of our downhill neighbour.

The following year, 2008, we bought whips of Scot's Pinus sylvestris, larch Larix europaeus, ash Fraxinus excelsior. An EU forestry grant may have been involved but the spade work was all in the family. And the year after that, 2009, we filled in the final third of the site with more, smaller, tractable, oaks. And did I mention that we fenced off the acre and planted a hedge up against it - hawthorn sceagh Crataegus monogyna, blackthorn draighean Prunus spinosa and hazel coll Corylus avellana. Over the next few years, whenever I came across a sapling in the wrong place, I transplanted it into the hedgerow:  ash and wild cherry gean Prunus avium; three more Scot's pines; holly Ilex aquifolium, and with no effort at all a couple of sycamores Acer pseudoplatanus have self-seeded.

Fast-forward 13-15 years, the trees have grown according to their propensity and the local competitive conditions. Just take the oaks which were planted on 2m centres in early 2009. Some of these are as tall as the house and 15cm across at the base while next door will be a runt 2m high and as thick as a broom handle. There are also plenty of standing dead of various sizes scattered through the wood. These 2009 oaks came from the same supplier and were quite possibly acorns from the same tree but natural selection has culled out the weak. "Natural selection" including a lot of luck: local variation in the soil; access to better sunlight; a beetle choosing this bark to chew rather than that.

At the tail end of Winter we called in another forestry consultant for an appraisal with a view to selective felling / thinning of this mixed mostly native woodland. Kiwi Sean arrived a few days later, complimented us for the woods ["oh La, I'm sure you say that to all your clients" taps with fan] and said he'd come back the following week as he expected a window in his day-job as a commercial estate forester. A banjaxed back (occupational hazard in the profession) and 3 months later, Sean rocked up on a Saturday in June. The gestalt of the woodland was quite different as everything was now in leaf, which made species identification easier and everything danker . . . and the midges were out. Some of the ash were leafless, these poor babies are standing dead from the ash die-back and almost all are visibly affected by the consequences of fungal infection.

Thinning is a minimax problem: if you leave everything in place the trees crowd each other out and fast growing ash or sycamore will shade out the slower growing oak. If you let too much sun reach the ground, you'll have a riot of bramble, nettle and struggling seedlings of all sorts and varieties.  Thinning is also a technical challenge because in a dense wood it is damaging and potentially dangerous to fell out trees in the normal notch and back-cut way. Sean does a neat line in chunking - making an oblique cut in the trunk at shoulder-height, so that the top of the tree falls down beside its own roots - rinse, repeat.

Sean found us two days work and said to call him back in two years time. 13 years is a little early to thin for pure oak stands, but the shading from the ash - which is doomed before maturity - and the fact that we asked made an early pass possible and no insane. Foresters play a long game: in 100 years time the several hundred oak trees now will be reduced to maybe 1 dozen mighty champions with long straight trunks [if we prune off the side branches as high as we can reach] too girthy to get both arms around. Our dark woodland is now attractively dappled in the sunlight where shading side branches and ugly trees next to handsome ones have been laid low and clearings are filled with logs and brash.

Kiwi has left the tidy up to us. I have the rest of the Summer to get "fire-wood" off the ground and into some variety of airy shelter so that the wood can shed about a third of its weight as evaporated water. It is much breezier out of the wood than in its own mossy shelter but I'd rather move light logs than heavy logs. I also have a more inclusive definition of what a log is. Foresters tend to treat anything smaller than their arm as brash and either push it through a chipper or leave it in the wood to recycle its nutrients. I, otoh, can get flaming utility out of something much thinner especially if it is conveniently straight [looking at you, ash] for stacking. Logs, especially small logs left in contact with the ground will soon enough be food for microbes rather than fuel for macrobes.  At the edge of one of the new clearings Kiwi had left a square of four ash "gonna be dead soon anyway, not worth my time and your money cutting down". I thought "pallet" or "bed-frame" and suspended four chunky straight logs horizontally from these trees. We then criss-crossed this base-line [about 50cm above the ground] with small branches for eventual burning. Really true long branches have been set aside for bean-poles or laundry props.

Rain!

We don't run a weather station Chez Blob, although gathering & tricking about with scads of data might be a good fit for obsessive me. We are blessed with data from 30km to the north by sharing a county with Alan O'Reilly at CarlowWeather. It's not quite the same weather because Mt Leinster rises between us, but O'Reilly keeps meticulous records, makes them available, and they are usually good enough. 

We collect rain-water because the plastic of the polytunnel is, like, waterproof and there's a feast of salad underneath. The N and S edges of the plastic bottom out into gutters [neatly levelled by Kamil and Rene last Summer] and rain is diverted thence to a pair of herring barrels at the SE and NW corners and a 1 tonne IBC inside the NE corner. The N side of the tunnel is about 500mm higher than the S and this allows us to quietly siphon water from "on high" to plants and buckets that little bit lower. Like everyone else in the count[r]y we had a good spill of rain on Mon 15th May which recharged all our containers . . . then nothing: for days, then weeks. It was like 2018 all over again when I wrote about 22 days without rain and nationwide hose-pipe bans.

After a week without rain we had distributed all our reserves and had to start pumping water from our bore-hole to service the lettuce and peas. After two weeks, the grass on the thin soil of the front yard was turning beige and umber. Dau.II announced that now would be a good time to clean out all our water containers and that involved disconnecting our two 1-tonne IBCs and going at the inside with a yard-brush. I could get inside the herring barrels [R] to give them a robust scrub and a touch of bleach. After an afternoon of heaving and rolling, everything was sparkling and sweet-smelling . . . and ready for more rain. 

I wasn't until Sat 10 June that we got any! After the droughty weeks it seemed like a lot and we took off all our clothes and danced to give thanks to the Great God Pluvium. On Sunday morning, The Beloved asked How much rain did we get yesterday? To which I replied If you wait a bit, I've just plumbed the depths of the herring barrels and need to do the calcs. The total catchment of the tunnel is 17m x 9m = 150 sq.m. or 1,500,000  sq.cm. Volume of an cylinder = π.r^2.depth

NW barrel: ⌀ 40cm was 35cm full = caught vol 43lt = 43,000 cc ; area served 375,000 sq.cm
 so rainfall 1.1mm
SE barrel ⌀ 50cm was 30cm full = caught vol 58lt = 58,000 cc ; area served 750,000 sq.cm
so rainfall 0.8mm

That seems scarcely credible and it's at variance with what O'Reilly recorded 30km North. But I had checked Met Eireann's rainfall radar at about lunchtime and it showed that we were between two belts of feeble rain moving SE to NW. I also checked out two wheelbarrows which had been left out through the 24 hours - they had but a few tablespoons of water in their downhill corners. So my best guess is that we had 1mm of rain on Saturday after getting nary a drip for 25 days.

“The rain it raineth on the just

And also on the unjust fella;

But chiefly on the just, because

The unjust hath the just’s umbrella.”[prev]

The white stuff

I was talking, yesterday, in a very elliptical way, about The Black Stuff which is the endearing colloquialism for The Guinness which many claim in Ireland's national dhrink. That's fair enough but a case could be made that the Irish anti-drink is milk bainne.  The Irish for white is bán, I used to believe in the same way that anglophones call orange the colour after orange the fruit that bán was the colour like milk. But one of the young-women-of-science with whom I'm working in Dublin this Summer is a gaelgoir from the Donegal (Dún na nGall to her) and she enquired of her aunt who is a scholar of antient Irish and told me bán comes from braon, a drop or blob. ANNyway, several years ago, I started to buy powered milk, maybe after we ditched our microwave oven and I could no longer make cocoa-on-milk without washing a saucepan.  I know we demonize Nestlé for promoting milk-powder in the third-world but I found that, in the Asia Market and other ethnic shops I could buy large or small quantities of Nido Full Cream Milk Powder in a tin.  My tool-shed now has rows of Nido tins full of bolts, nails, spanners and drill-bits. It works out at about €10/kg which compares favourably with what we have to pay for whole milk after your reconstitute the powder.  It gets a little cheaper if you buy bigger quantities. You buy it in 'Indian' shops because the women of the sub-continent use it to create Gulab Jamun which are sweet dumplings made by boiling milk to reduce it.

This contented my parsimonious soul until I became head bottle-feeder of the three orphan ewe-lambs this May. This requires making up a helluva lot of bottles of reconstituted powdered milk, and going out to buy bagsful of it [L] in the local hardware stores.  Weirdly we have discovered that Lamlac in not available for sale in Co Waterford - presumably because there aren't any sheep down there.  The bags are €14-€15 for 5kg and are made up with at the rate of 200g/lt.  WTF!? it's 1/3rd the price of Nido.  So I think I won't be buying the human-consumption stuff much longer.  The difference is likely to be that Nido is milk with a dash of soya lecithin as an emulsifier, whereas Lamlac is a product: whey protein; palm & coconut oil [whichever is cheaper?]; hydrolysed wheat gluten; Calcium carbonate; Magnesium Oxide.  And "additives": vit A; vit D3; vit E; Fe 80mg; Zn 50mg; Mn 30mg; I 0.25mg; Se 0.2mg; Co 0.2mg. With the shameful amount of gluten in the mix, we can rest assured that none of the three orphan lambs has coeliac disease. So Lamlac looks like milk but 'tis a long way from milk is was r'ared.

I was down in St Mullins the other day and Rene was going on about the cost of 'breast-milk' in the supermarkets.  It took me a while to grasp that he was talking about SMA and similar mixtures for mixing up with water and putting into a bottle with variable amounts of leaching BPA or BPS and then feeding it to your mosssst presssscioussss. Now I knew that baby formula wasn't human breast-milk - I'm not simple - just as I know that lambs don't get sheep's milk.  But I was surprised at what it actually is:
Lactose (milk), vegetable oils including structured vegetable oil (palm, soya, sunflower and coconut in varying proportions), skimmed milk, whey protein concentrate enriched in alpha-lactalbumin (milk), emulsifier (soya lecithin), sodium citrate, magnesium chloride, calcium carbonate, long chain polyunsaturated fatty acids (AA, DHA), calcium chloride, potassium bicarbonate, potassium citrate, L-tyrosine, vitamin C, choline chloride, potassium hydroxide, calcium hydroxide, taurine, potassium chloride, inositol, ferrous sulphate, nucleotides (cytidine-, disodium uridine-, adenosine-, disodium guanosine-, disodium inosine-5’-monophosphate), zinc sulphate, L-tryptophan, L-carnitine, antioxidants (ascorbyl palmitate, tocopherol-rich extract), vitamin E, niacin, pantothenic acid, vitamin A, thiamin, copper sulphate, vitamin B6, riboflavin, vitamin D, folic acid, manganese sulphate, potassium iodide, vitamin K, biotin, sodium selenite, vitamin B12.
It reads like they've walked down the stock-shelves of the Institute's biochemistry lab and shook in something from every third bottle. Why would you, as a mother, want to horse all that wholly artificial crap down your baby's throat, when you are provided with two breasts which are shaped by 2 million years of evolution to deliver a far better product for a lot less than €12-€13/kg?  I can't follow my own logic here.  If Nido is milk and Lamlac costs less because it is made up from the sweepings of the world commodity markets, why does SMA come with a 20-30% premium?  Ladies, you have been sold a bill of goods! SMA is since 2012 a wholly-owned subsidiary of . . . Nestlé.

But Irish ladies have bought into this business model at truly frightening rates. While 75% of mothers will breast-feed their newborns at least once (huzzah *), by the time they leave the maternity wing only 45% are still doing so, this collapses to 14% at 60 days and only 1% at 6 months.  This is among the lowest rates in Europe: hence my quip about the white stuff being the anti-drink of Ireland.  But if you insist on using your breasts for some other purpose - filling your push-up bra "for the sexy lift & cleavage you love", perhaps? - at least consider saving a mort o' money and using Lamlac instead: my ewe-lambs are thriving on it. And wean them onto sheep nuts - far cheaper than granola.

(*) Sir Thomas Beecham: "In this life try everything once, except morris-dancing and incest".

Bouncing the polytunnel

Did I mention that we had a dump of snow last weekend? I did, in passing. It's true that fallen snow is, like ice-cream, mostly air - let's say it has a density of 10% of liquid/solid water. But that can still be a lorra weight it spread out across a large structure. An under-engineered flat roofed sports complex in Tralee collapsed at 06:00hrs during the recent orange snow and ice warning for the South of Ireland [Galway to Dublin downwards, not the 26 counties]. I'm sure the structural specs took data on 100 year snow events, adding 50% for safety, to determine the size of the trusses. It's a roof: you don't want to over-engineer it because you then have to up-spec the walls to carry the additional weight. There will be an enquiry, everyone will lawyer up, nobody will lose their jobs or be sanctioned. Not least because the structure was opened in 1977, so most of those responsible are dead in the 80s or older.

We have a relatable situation in the polytunnel which has a 9m x 17m = 150 sq.m. footprint, with say half of it sort of horizontal. Well. flat enough to hold snow as it falls. On the night 04/05 Jan, we got 9cm of snow. Which is about 10mm of rain equivalent, except that it stayed on the polytunnel roof rather than running away. That's less than a tonne [75sq.m x 10mm = 750kg] of extra weight up there but it l👁👁ked a lot more under the bulging plastic. That 's polythene, which ripped asunder at the height of  the Darwinday Storm of 2014 but is generally good for plastic deformation. We have a convenient length of 50mm ⌀ plastic pipe that can reach all areas on the inside of the plastic, so I put a robust rubber glove on the end of the pipe and, starting at the bottom, bounced some of the snow off the roof. Gotta get the rhythm, bro. Over the next tuthree days, I bounced a little more; until almost all the extra weight was on the ground. No Tralee here . . . this time

You can see the effect in the picture for 2 of the eight bays of the tunnel: a gurt hape of heavy snow on the ground and a clean-ish track on the plastic where the snow has scoured off the algae. You can also see one end of the 2014 Darwinday rip covered with fresh white Fablon® since the 2022 refurb by Rene and Kamil.

We hazarded leaving the sheep [N = 15] in the 0.4 ha field adjacent to the tunnel and they've been getting a breakfast of sheep muesli and some rather tasty-smelling hay which we've had in reserve for the last few years [hey, thanks Syl!]. The sheep seem to be doing okay on such short commons.

Shucking chestnuts

🌰You know and I know that there are two sorts of chestnuts in these islands. Horse chestnuts = conkers Aesculus hippocastanum vs sweet chestnuts Castanea sativa. Don't be eating horse chestnut: it is loaded with aesculin a coumarin related toxin, not to mention getting all frothed up inside by the soapy saponins which are also present at high titre. They are both called chestnuts because a) nuts b) 'similar' palmate multilobed leaves. But the two species are about as far as they could be phylogenetically. A horse chestnut freshly blurfed from its shell is a gorgeous thing. 

🌰I've always been disappointed by fresh-fallen sweet chestnuts, though. The covering is much more offensively spiny - you have to be a bit previous in your attack to get ahead of squirrels - and the insides are, for me, always wizened husks or too small to bother with. Which is a bummer because I love marrons glacés or chestnuts roasting on an open fire or in any other form.

🌰In 2007 we planted a few hundred 10 y.o. oak and other trees courtesy of our pal Rene. In among that micro-forest were about a dozen Castanea sativa. Some of which were thinned by Sean the Forester in 2022. In Sept 2025, I was stravaiging through our wood when I found a tuthree sweet chestnuts on the ground. Inside was the usual disappointment. A month later under a different tree the leave litter was dense with fallen chestnuts in various states of undress. I shucked a bunch right there and then went back for a bucket to do my shucking in the warm and dry [R with old boot for scale]. I went back a couple of times and stopped when I had ~10lb = 4.5kg. Leaving some for wild loafers. I was amazed and delirah, especially after I cut a couple of small ones in half and chugged down the contents.

🌰According the Dau.II & the Internets, chestnuts will keep for a year if frozen or a month in the fridge. But this is not great advice. Chestnuts sweat through their shells and a bagful gets soggy in the fridge. And turn quickly furry if left out of the fridge. I triaged my horde and put 2x 500g of the biggest shiniest nuts in the freezer against Christmas stuffing. I also passed a 1° quality bag to La Torbellina my cookie neighbour. She scored the shells with a cross and boiled them with aniseed and lemon in the eSpanish way. Scoring and roasting is only sensible to process small amounts (for immediate consumption) because as the nuts cool, the inner membrane re-glues itself to the nut. 

🌰The last two bags, of 2° grade and smaller nuts, having lurked in the fridge for a week, were triaged, cut in half and boiled for 5 minutes. Six nuts had decided to make an attempt at sprouting-for-posterity, so I potted them out in sieved compost [before boiling!]. About 10% of the remainder were squidgy or discoloured within. Compost! Processing the hot nuts gives you the same sort of wet burns as Seville oranges when making marmalade. I found that the best shucking tool was two opposing thumbs: in ideal cases that popped the half nut out of shell and membrane. In other cases it was more of a struggle. I hope my thumb nails don't get infected from compacted matter; they were quite sore when I'd finished. The work-to-reward ratio is not as positive as for marmalade, but 8oz = 225g has been frozen against Christmas [see L], as well as the larger unshucked qnty already there.

🌰The smaller chestnuts looked suspiciously like filberts / hazel Corylus avellana, but these two species are in different families (as below). Castanea is sibling to beech Fagus sylvatica and oak Quercus robur in Family Fagaceae although their fruit look quite different. Which is a lesson in taxonomy: don't over-emphasize Obvs features, like palmate leaves, to determine evolutionary relationships.

English	Genus	Family
Alder	Alnus	Betulaceae
Birch	Betula	Betulaceae
Hornbeam	Carpinus	Betulaceae
Hazel	Corylus	Betulaceae
Chestnut	Castanea	Fagaceae
Beech	Fagus	Fagaceae
Oak	Quercus	Fagaceae
Hickory	Carya	Juglandaceae
Pecan	Carya	Juglandaceae
Walnut	Juglans	Juglandaceae

Ich Dein

Yesterday, [all my troubles seemed so far away] . . . I was writing about Covid front-liners. One of my colleagues at The Institute, who teaches something useful [as opposed to my thoughts on sphincters and the sympathetic nervous system] to our Pharm Tech students, announced that all of these young women are doing extra hours, volunteering in hospitals. You wouldn't call them bed-pan IV-drip front-line, I guess, but their work-places are going to be a miasma of aerocoronasol for 10 hours a shift. I had a little frisson of respeck: they may not know if insulin is smaller than the pancreas but they can keep steady and kind as they dole out the Ibuprofen.

I sent an e-mail to DPharma O'TamilNadu:
Hey Dr V, I was thinking of you just now as Front Line soldier in the fight against the virus and thought you deserved a feather in your cap: Ich Dein "I Serve" is the motto of the British Prince of Wales but it sounds like Eich Dyn = Your Man in Welsh. Good luck, keep your hands clean and get enough sleep. Hats off! Dr Bob

We've been shut-down in our Bunker for six days now. The Beloved went on a last grocery trip on Friday and when those salad leaves are gone, they're gone, as the radio Ad has it. Because I don't fancy washing lettuce in soapy water. But the wild garlic Allium ursinum is up in the top garden, so we'll be able to get our greens. My pal Rene [prev] came to fill his 50lt bowser with Knockroe Spring Water from our garden tap. He couldn't come in for tea, so we hung outside for an hour comparing notes about inventory.
You won't starve if you have 19 sheep
Have you drawn the dotted lines on the flanks of your donkey to show the butcher where to cut?
I won't be asking the butcher to do what I can do myself.
Absolutely, of course, we none of us want to consume limited community resources.

One of my home-made gate-posts took the closures of this week as an excuse to fail. 20 years ago, we planted 100 larch Larix europaea whips in the top garden. A few survived and a tuthhree years later I planted the surviving 20 at the top of our farm in a narrow gut between a traditional stone wall and a sheep-proof fence. Maybe 6 years ago, one of these adolescent trees fell over in a storm. Straight, as thick as my thigh, and maybe 5m tall, it was too good for firewood. So the fattest 3m became a gatepost. My neighbour helpfully said it wouldn't last and I should have used steel . . . a week after I'd finished the project.  Well I got 6 years of re-purpose out of that latch trunk and now it's ready for up the chimney.
At least I was ''working from home" and could take steps to keep the gap sheep-proof.

Easter 2021

All coming together

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

Coder DoBro

My latest Borrowbox 👂earbook is Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World [Penguin 2019] by Clive Thompson, who writes for the NYT and Wired. It's read rather well by Rene Ruiz and is an interesting dive into TechBro culture and its sense of manifest destiny: the delusion that Silicon Valley is a meritocracy. All those white frat-boys who retired on their money before they turned 30 and believe that the $$$s showered down because of their unique native genius. There is a shiver of truth in that someone had to have the idea (and someone had to implement it in code) which changed how millions of people interact with the world.  But lots of .com millionaires were just adequate coders who were available when required . . . and prepared to pull a few all-nighters to prepare product for launch day.

So now we have a FAANG culture driven by Harvard and Stanford math-geek graduates - and their wannabees - who are complacent in their bubble, intolerant of difference, and profoundly ignorant about the real world. Facial recognition software that is excellent at distinguishing one spotty white face from another but flags all black faces as "gorilla". That sort of thing is a failure of imagination as well as ethics. It all your bros did the vom in Harvard Yard back in the day because they couldn't hold their liquor, then there is nobody to pull you up on the narrowness of your worldview. Foosball in the Google workplace? That seems a peculiarly adolescent perk to have fitted as standard.

Thompson unpicks this sense of entitlement with several compelling counter-examples. The most obvious one is the up-and-down history of women who code. The first ever coder was Ada Lovelace [1815 - 1852] after all and most of the early "computers" were women. The boys thought that the interesting stuff was the well 'ardware - voltmeters, vacuum-tubes, screwdrivers and left all that typing and card-punching to girls which became software. Of course, when it became apparent that coding was mentally challenging, fulfilling, fast-moving and, well, the point of all the hardware then the boys stopped disparaging and started displacing. Even today front-end, user interface is considered soft while back-end, server-side is where the real men hang out. Serial misogyny since 1948. Grace Hopper - Margaret Hamilton - Margaret Dayhoff - etc. etc.

Another nice story is about the foundation, by Rusty Justice and Lynn Parish of Bit Source in Pikeville, in the Kentucky rust belt. This gave the lie to the easy dismissal of [ex-]coal miners as burly, dusty, not-very-bright rednecks. If they were clever problem solvers, after all, they would surely be financial traders in NYC. Not so, coal miners do very little with a pick and shovel anymore. They operate, tune, fix, optimize really expensive and temperamental equipment in adverse circumstances where time is money - miners are problem solvers. Bit Source has been hiring and training them as programmers, architects, designers, managers, support technicians, and SCRUM masters and selling their skills and insights across the US including Wall Street. Once-upon-a-miners get to stay in Appalachia and earn good money solving other people's problems. "I'm the only one I know who speaks hillybilly and javascript" YT5mins.

A couple of times Thompson indicates the wrong-headed folly going to college to read computer science or math or physics in order to ease your path into retire-at-thirty territory. Upskilling in C, Java, Python, CSS, SQL will only give you tactical skills. And that market is systematically undercut by hardworking coders in Bangalore. You'd be better off, and have better fun if you go Arts Block for your undergrad: history; languages; exegesis of scripture or the world literature canon; philosophy [R who?] will teach you cogito ergo sum. It will also expose you to different ways of seeing and force you to acknowledge that there are several ways to skin a cat. You can learn Java later. Liberal arts encourages strategic rather than tactical. And heck, if you don't make a million from thinking big at least you'll have the perspective to accept that pursuit of money is deeply unsatisfying.

Coders: good stuff, recommended.

Sensei sensori

Seven years ago I drove in the dark through storm and flood to watch Jiro Dreams of Sushi - a documentary about Ono Jiro 小野 二郎 [family name first] who had been working in the restaurant trade for - - - 70 years. Here's a short tributary in which the master of the old school meets René Redzepi, the creator of Noma, a restaurant in Copenhagen [Sunday Supplement] that has twice been voted Restaurant of the Universe by the Inner Circle of Foodies. I'm not a foodie like Dau.II is  Foodie but on some level I recognise the parallels between lab-bench and counter-top. One common feature is the value of A Good Pair of Hands that person who can let their hands do the working without constantly thinking about what's going on. AGPoH is also important in drumming. I am the antithesis of AGPoH but I come closest to that state of being when I'm cooking: it's not reproducible but mmmmm is it good.

My Lockdown foodie book has been Hungry by Jeff Gordinier; its subtitle is Eating road-tripping and risking it all with Rene Redzepi the greatest chef in the World.  I'm not sure I would have gotten round to it if the loan period had been three weeks. I'm glad I was given the extra time, because it's an interesting saga about how a grown man with two children and a breaking marriage becomes a total groupie for an Albanian/Danish cook . . . and haemorrhages a lot of money to hang with his guru in Mexico, New York, Sydney, Norway and Denmark.

It's a genre in't it? Eat Pray Love was about a rich white woman who found that money can't buy everything anything that seems worth striving for. That went viral, was made into a film and made the author another fortune. Then there was Bill Buford's Heat [reviewed here as Heat Braise Shanks] where another Inner Circle journalist goes off to find himself in the white heat of someone else's kitchen. I'm ambivalent about these people. They can't keep their marriage on the rails but can career off in wild directions to find their true selves. otoh, why must we expect them to like the hand of cards dealt to them by fate and circumstance? Isn't it better to have an epiphany like Bill Bryson realising that he should have been born in Europe; or Niall Deacon parking sheep-farming to be a stone-mason? This is what you are likely to be presented with at Noma:

Call me conventional, but I think I'll stick to the traditional recipe for spotted dick.

René Redzepi is neat because he is clearly Out There when it come to giving something a Why not? whirl. Forget slavishly following in the footsteps of Escoffier and doing things because it's always been done this way.  Previously unexploited molluscs and crustaceans get air-freighted from Norway to be plated with ant confit and trout swim-bladders. The expense is "exclusive" and so the only way you and me are going to get a sniff is to sign up as a scullion. But bring your ladle, because you'll need to fight off a score of hungry wannabe plongeurs who would gladly fill your toque.  And Gordinier's book? It's okay, when you get past the self-pity and the eye-watering cost of pushing the foodie envelope.

Emma thaws

Jerry the Oil managed to get up the 300m of lane as soon as it was feasible on Tuesday night. We were a teeny bit anxious to get that done, even if it meant some extra shovelling, because when the thaw came in 2010, the lane went with it. On Friday night, as accurately forecast by the seers of Met Eireann, we had steady rain for about 12 hours. I was up at first light clearing the drain so that the snow melt could stay in the drain for the whole of its 300m journey to the county road.  That's just the lane-and-drain below us. Above there is 500 m of sunken lane that is still full of slobby snow drift which has been encouraged to melt by the warm rain. And melting is what it is doing.  After cleaning the drain, I held a 15 lt bucket under a step in the drain and filled it in about 3 seconds. That gives me a handle on how long the thaw will take. We are on our knees but cautiously optimistic that the thaw will continue in this steady enough fashion. In 2010, we were delivered 60mm of warm rain in a couple of hours which brought down a further 40mm of accumulated frozen water - 10% of the annual rainfall over a couple of night-time hours. That overwhelmed the culverts in the drain and spilled running water out into the roadbed . . . goodbye road.

I've always told people that snow packs at about 10% the density of water. My pal Rene wasn't about to take this ex cathedra pronouncement from Dr Bob; he went off and measured 10x10x10 cm cubes of snow and came up with nearer 15% - much denser compressed at the bottom of a drift than fresh fallen at the top. Here are some estimates of density from Patterson's Physics of Glaciers. That source helpfully points out that not all snow is the same. I'm confident (to perhaps 20%) about the volume of snow drift that needs to be cleared. That's a gently curved snake of snow 500m long 4m wide filled 3m deep. That may be a little high but snow-melt is running off the field also.  That all suggests [big print calculations L] that it will take a couple of days to clear. I have clambered and lurched up the lane to discover that there is no snow left on the mountain above us, but still plenty in sheltered spots where the eddies of the blizzard left it. While up there, I've tricked about with a shovel where it is possible to divert running water off the roadway and into the field drains. Having done all that can be done with hand-tools I am now cautiously optimistic. Soon enough we can get on with Spring chores and normal sleep.

Bananarama

Today, bananas! I was going to say that I never make banana bread but The Blob never lies. In 2017, I was apparently in the habit of buying cheap bananas and making loadsa banana-bread. So I never rarely make banana bread; and certainly not often enough to know what are the best proportions of bananas, eggs, butter, sugar & flour. And it depends on what you mean by "best" proportions. In any case, when my pal Rene came round with a generous hand of bananas and there was no room in the fruit basket, I had to look up a recipe and try my hand again. On the don't overthink principle, I picked the top result from oogling "banana bread BBC" and modified it by throwing in a handful of sultanas. It was fine.

On the are we going to measure or are we going to cook? principle, I started to ponder what were the allowable variations in putting together bananas, eggs, butter, sugar & flour and getting a loaf [rather than soup, or soap] at the end of the process. Obviously there must be a certain amount of leeway because one banana is as long as a [very short] piece of string and the weight of an egg hardly more precise. The most scientific way of addressing the problem would be to a) move next door to an orphanage or a direct provision centre and then b) make many loaves of BB each with subtle differences in the relative amounts of the ingredients. But anothher way is to stand on the aprons of giants and see what other people have tried; presumably with success if they have floated to the top of the oogleverse. I scraped the most oogly BB recipes from the BBC and 4 more celebrity-chef recipes to make it up to N = 10:

That's really noisy data, no? 1 - 4 eggs; 2 to 6 bananas etc. so we need to standardise the proportions:

That's much better: everything is now per egg and we can start to compare the different recipes. I suggest that there are two useful definitions of "best": a) uses up the most bananas b) the one which will most impress the in-laws when they drop in for their first post-covid  appearance. 

The a) is easy: the penultimate "6221" recipe requires six (6!) bananas; but you may need to buy a bigger tin because we're looking at 1.8Kg of cake! Failing that any of the recipes where the banana ratio maxes out at 2/eggs.

b) requires a bit more calculation. Impress the neighbours requires potlatch and potlatch requires rich. Rich requires more butter [proportional to flour]. That ratio appears in the R-most column; and clearly the BBC-brilliant recipe is the winner. As it happens, that's the recipe I chose to use of bananas, so win-win. Bit of a waste, because <burp> I scarfed down most of that banana bread before we got any visitors.