Hello I'm Bob

At last! VIBE is about to land in UCD. We, the VIBE community, have been expecting the big bird to land there in 2017 and 2018 because they undertook to bat her down in 2016. When I organised the 2014 meeting, there was, and is, only me to carry it forward. My head of department insisted that I form a committee to help with the logistics but tbh the schedule of committee meetings imposed another, largely unproductive, layer of things that I had to organise. And The Institute contributed bugger-all except the use of a vacation-empty lecture theatre: didn't even stump up a round of tea-and-coffee without I pay for it . . . and I made the flapjacks myself. I suspect the UCD cyclical no-VIBE no-VIBE vibe was/is because there are three Professors of Bioinformatics or Molecular Evolution all with international, not to say stellar, reputations. Organizing a mere international meeting is a low priority and so falls between [three] chairs.

Whatever; I am looking forward to Being There on Friday 22nd March because these are the people I've been teaching; collaborating with; employed by, for the last 30 years. It is a racing certainty that I'll be the oldest person there but I'm not expecting to be recognised. That's because my academic career has been earth-bound rather than stellar but also because of the rapid turn-over of Effectives in any scientific field. There will be Young Turks who were in short pants at the last VIBE meeting in 2016 who are now at the top of their game putting the final gloss on their PhD thesis. They will never know as much about their research field as when they write The End on the last page of that PhD thesis and take it off the the printer. I imagine that, with at least three research groups [to match the three Profs], there is critical mass and synergy in UCD so every there knows everyone else. But let's hope the hosts are not too cliquey and inward-looking: us boondock binfos need to feel welcome.

👁 kneed a name badge on my left tit [there is a sign language joke] with Bob Scientist  in large print and The Institute in slightly smaller font underneath. To the nearest whole number nobody else will think to perform this courtesy for other delegates. You need to be able to casually scope out to whom you are talking: you had a really interesting talk with them 3 years ago; but who in heck are they? Last meeting I went to [nit VIBE], name badges were supplied on an A6 card (with the programme on reverse) on a lanyard to dangle just above everyone's toolbox [same joke] - not the best way to promote neutral social information gathering if you have to stare are folks' groin to work out who they are.. I certainly don't expect people to know my name and I intend to quiz the youngsters closely about their research presentations. That being the appropriate role for a olde codger Senior Scientist.

I got into rant mode here [not sorry] because of a clever not to say life-saving improvement in non-verbal comms in operating theatres. This simple hack was invented by anaesthetist Dr Rob Hackett - put your name and role  Rob anaesthetist in large letters on the front of your surgical scrubs cap! That way you know how to unambiguoisly address the other people in the room - none of whose faces you can see properly. That might make the difference between getting a clamp on in time or just-too-late-sorry. This may remind you of the courtesy of wearing a Hello MY Name Is name badge - and introducing yourself to patients - before carrying out a medical procedure on the patient's body.

How to run a meeting

At The Institute we take roll-call for every class, a practice which seems wildly disrespectful to someone from the university sector. But the management insists on a roll-call for the teaching staff on the 1st September each year: we all have to line up outside HR and sign a book to indicate that we are back from Barbados or Ballyhack and are available for work. The ritual reminds me of signing a condolence book, so it's a little bit like being present at your own funeral. But by asking for dispensation and pleading CPD [continuous personal development] and completing a green LOA [leave of absence] form, I was able to avoid that networking opportunity and go to Dublin for a much more valuable one. 1st September was the date fixed by the TCD lab of Aoife McLysaght [prev], a noted Woman in Science for the 2016 VIBE [2013 - 2014 - 2015] meeting.

VIBE is my annual family gathering, when the 200 or so people engaged in research in molecular evolution and genomics in Ireland get a chance to showcase their work and hang out over tea & biscuits or coffee & croissants as the host's budget allows. Actually, we have a tradition of showcasing the work of our students rather than hearing another highly polished talk from the principal investigators PIs who lead each lab. Last year, for example, I asked one of my final year undergraduate students to present her research on dolphin Tursiops truncatus immunity which triggered the most active discussion of the day - win! for her. This year, we heard the presentation of work by a second-year Summer intern who had turned up something interesting in the McLysaght lab - win! too. Nice also because I first met AMcL as a scorching Summer intern in 1996. This year, the whole meeting was organised by the post-graduate students in the McLysaght lab which was another nice example of empowering rather than infantilising the young.

I got up at 0500hrs to breakfast at leisure, do a little light bloggin' and catch the bus to Dublin. I had a great day, taking notes on all the talks (ever hunting ideas for new research projects for our final year cohort), nattering in the tea breaks and being asked to chair the last talks session of the day. 2014 was the second time I'd hosted the meeting. In ?2005?, when I was working in St. Vincent's Hospital, my graduate student and I organised the VIBE meeting.  It was easy, I asked Ger L-R, the amazingly competent executive administrator to book the room and call down tea & coffee. I mentioned sandwiches for lunch and she gave me a choice of two external companies: cheap&cheerful or pretentious&dear. St Vincent's was badly placed for getting lunch quickly and cheaply. A free lunch raised the bar for subsequent VIBEs. We also persuaded one of the speakers at a just prior genomics meeting up the road in UCD to hang out in Dublin for an extra day and give us a key-note talk. That was also a first for VIBE.

The key-note in 2016 was Prof Laurence Hurst from U. Bath in England. Back when I was working in a hot-shot SFI-funded lab at the turn of the century, Hurst was one of the rivals to watch. He could turn out papers that made you mutter "B'gad Whistler, I wish I'd said that" but I'm sure he felt the same about us. Hurst hasn't lost his touch and gave a stonking talk outlining a new layer of constraint on the sequence of protein coding genes. As Hurst said "if you retain one thing from my talk today, remember ESE" [exonic splicing enhancer] there's a lot of them about and they have to be accommodated.

What else did I learn about how to run a meeting?

• let the the students chair the sessions
• make sure that the wheel-chair access toilets are unlocked [shame]
• it is not a disabled toilet!
• make sure that family (youngsters from the host lab) circulate the biscuits
• this makes things fatter easier for everyone and so good manners
• gets the youth thanks & eye-contact with their potential next employer
• how difficult is it to print legible name badges?
• wear the goddam badge! not everyone can remember who you are
• include affiliation
• long-standing note to self: Bring Own Name Badge
• apply oil to the doors / seats so that people can leave talks discretely

Next year VIBE is across town in UCD.  Time after that to go down the country again.

Flag-waving

Who knows where the page-views come from?  Since January last year The Blob has attracted 25,000ish PVs of 470ish posts. I recognise that some of these articles are of less than universal interest and should sink beneath the rough and unforgiving waves of the interweb, but I am bemused when something rather trivial or whimsical that I've written attracts a clatter of attention. I've thundered about things so much more important than Vexillology, the science of flags, although I have had a few things to say on that colourful subject:

• Nordic cross (quiz!)
• Herring Salad [SE+NO]
• Mountain markers
• Дніпропетровськ [Ukreire]
• Vimy Ridge
• Saluting the flag
• Kiwi Koru S.Cross
• Ozzie Flags 
• Shackleton
• Stars and bars
• St Piran of Kernow 
• Y Wladfa Gymreig
• La Bandera Asturiana
• Cabo Verde
• International students
• Shandon catenary
• Split, Croatia
• Macedonia
• More Macedon
• Γαλανόλευκη [GK blue and white
• Portugal = Mayo
• Calatrava, Order of

So I was surprised when one of these old pieces recently made a bit of a spike in the page-view logs. That set me off investigating down an interweb rabbit-hole until I popped up in another VIBE: "the new website of Vexillology Ireland : Brateolaíocht Éireann published by the Genealogical Society of Ireland".  I say another VIBE, because the real VIBE is my own professional society the Virtual Institute of Bioinformatics and Evolution.  Google agrees and puts The Binf above An Bratach, indeed Google puts a Mullingar Tattoo-parlour above the Irish Vexillologists.  But of course your mileage may vary at www.google.mars  because google thinks it knows what you want and will deliver those hits first. Maybe there is a games console supplier in Ukraine called VIBE but that will only be google-apparent to people in Kiev.

My people My People

On St John's Day 2022, I broke out of the confines of Coronarama and drove across country to the University of Limerick UL to attend the 1st VIBE [Virtual Institute of Bioinformatics and Evolution] meeting after the lockdowns and disruptions of the pandemic. I've been involved in these events from the very beginning in 2002; and played myne host on two occasions 2006 and 2014. That June day in '22 started off with great promise as I sauntered across country in Summer sunshine but the weather turn cold with showers by tea-time and my voyage home was less exuberant. The weather was a pathetic fallacy of how I felt inside.

When I started "analyzing DNA and protein sequences" in 1990 that was the definition of Bioinformatics and our small lab in Dublin was really at the cutting edge. The sequences which I was analyzing were drawn from databases which were tiny by today's standards and I was expected to curate them carefully to eliminate sequencing duplicates and minor genetic variants but retain cases where two or more genes had accumulated changes after duplication from a common ancestor. My first paper considered all 45 genes that were then available for the fungus Aspergillus nidulans. I read every paper associated with each of those genes. In those days it cost ~€1 to sequence one DNA basepair. 20 years later the price was 10 million times cheaper.

And ten years later at the 2022 VIBE, The Effectives were a) 40 years younger than me and b) cranking through datasets which were 40 million times larger. Obvs, these young turks were not reading all the relevant papers, let alone with care and attention. And the analysis hinged on using "pipelines" of concatenated software, some of which they'd acquired off the shelf and some were hundreds of lines of Python all their own work. I had a nice nostalgic lunch with a couple of other crumblies and I did chat to some of the youngsters. But at the end of the day, driving home in the drizzle, I quoted Tennyson "

. . . The old order changeth, yielding place to new,

And God fulfils Himself in many ways,

Lest one good custom should corrupt the world . . .

and resolved to find myself an iceflow rather than going to the next VIBE. So I missed 2023 at QUB Belfast and 2024 NUIGalway but didn't miss missing them. 

In early 2025,  word went out that VIBE was coming full circle back to TCD to celebrate 25 years of sharing ideas about sequences and evolution in Ireland.

• Dublin is a lot more easy of access than Limerick, Belfast or Galway
• I got me bus-pass
• I'd been sort of supervising [by zoom and email] one of the TCD Effectives who might be presenting her work
• Having been at TCD man and boy, I know where all the t'ilets are - not unimportant for an old chap
• They promised a free lunch and there was hope for some merch

I had a great time. There were a few people of my generation, and several of the next generation with whom I'd worked back in the day. And I got to meet 'my' Effective as she stood by 'our' poster. I could follow many of the talks in the morning session - because they were talking more about evolution and less about pipelines. Some of them made me think and/or question my certainties. All in all, a pretty good day.

But come 5 o'clock I was done. I'd been awake for 12 hours. The afternoon session was leaning towards the software end of our field and I was lost at the second or third slide of each prez. But I had an Exit Strategy which was to go out to dinner with Dau.I and Dau.II. We went sub-continental and it was biryani dahlicious. They gave me a bed for the night and I went home by train into Storm Bram the next morning. Midmorning on a weekday Heuston Station is very quiet, and I was able to find a seat to wait my train. A while back Irish Rail installed a public piano in the station concourse and a young bloke was tinkling away on it to pass the time. But the tannoy called the Cork train and he left and nobody took cudgels to the keyboard. There was no Christmas Music which was a relief and a blessing and I had a rather good ear-book.

Reproducing the code

Yesterday, Friday, I got up, tea'd up, spruced up because I was Countryboy Going To Dublin for the 'annual' VIBE symposium. I, wearing my 2014 VIBE organiser hat,  had sent out a call to everyone to remember their name badge, so I had a chance of remembering who they were:

Goodo, looking forward. No registration means no name-badges so could everyone remember to bring one? from their last conference?  Just as a courtesy to confused old buffers and total newbies.
Thanks, Bob
The previous (2016) organiser added a note:
And/or a roll of blank stickers that people can just write their name onto. 
To which the the 2019 organiser replied.
Great; please bring one.
Clearly some people are more invested in the Science than interpersonal signalling. And IMO, a roll of stickers is A Bad Idea because they are not designed to stick to jumpers and it invites useless contributions as shown [R]: Bubba? Who he? Who his boss? Which is his poster? What group is he affiliated with? Should I get concerned when he brings out a banjo?

The presentations were wide-ranging and all interesting, even those that were whoof totally over my head. Molecular sequence analysis is amazingly ambitious, seeming to keep up the precipitous drop in the cost of generating the primary sequence data. My report of VIBE 2013 noted that analytical throughput increased 4000x-fold in a decade while the co$t per DNA base had fallen by a factor of 10 million in 20 years. In the early 00s, I was tasked with determining if certain classes of genes [those switched on in the cells of the heart, liver and lights] were clustered in the human genome, which had just been released into the public domain. I learned to program in Perl, robbed code from my fellow workers at the genomics, hacked it to do my bidding, learned how to display data graphically using the GD add-in and presented my progress regularly at the lab-meetings. It was a challenge, it was hard work, it was great fun and eventually my mates started robbing my GD code to use for their own projects. A small part of my work-flow was getting a program to work - my first binfo boss used to say "that's just a simple Fortran program, take you ten minutes" which was orders-of-magnitude true: it took maybe 90 minutes. But it took the rest of the day, and sometimes the rest of the week to be confident that the results spat out were true and meaningful. I won't say I was a programming god, but I could do the work even if I still don't feel comfortable with associative arrays.

The first talk on Friday was an over-my-head job: Research and Clinical Applications of Fully Reproducible Containerised Workflow Architecture. Dang, but that could mean anything at all to an old code-kludger like me. Even though I didn't recognise the names of any of the software tools - they having been developed over the last 7 or 8 years since I fell away from the coal-face of science and went back to teaching down the country - I followed with admiration the aspiration. Reproducibility is the key!  It's like using Latin names to talk to Hungarian ornithologists. IF you build a pipeline to integrate a wild variety of disparate but relevant data so that you can develop predictors or therapies or a cure for colon cancer THEN you really need it to be reproducible in Hungary or next year. 

I've been there, and I've been caught with my pants down. Maybe 15 years ago, I was working in St. Vincent's before it became SVUH the University Hospital. The colon cancer people had generated a noisy multivariate dataset and asked me to see if there was any signal there. I had a word with my pal Aedin [prev] before she went all ad Astra and to Harvard on us. She was the local ADE-4 guru and with her help I beat the colon cancer data into submission. I was skeptical about the results I'd generated; not because they were wrong, but because they explained so little of the variation in the data. I sent the analysis up the line, with my skeptical warning, and Team Colon were delighted because TOP2A, a known actor in the development of colon cancer, bobbed to the top of the roiling mess of data, you could see it there, barely visible, awash with statistical noise, but top of the heap of over expressed genes. The project wasn't written up immediately: the bloke who'd done the original analysis finished his rotation, his boss moved to a different hospital and her boss was too busy saving lives. I moved to a different institution too. Four years later, I got a call to redo the analysis because the paper was finally ready for launch and they were checking through their pipeline; and the graphics I'd generated were kinda ugly.

Well it was a freaking nightmare. The computer on which I'd done the original analysis had been left in StVs as obsolete. ADE-4 had been totally re-written, and was reluctant to install on the new computer. I couldn't remember how to get it to work and Aedin was 5,000km away in Harvard rather than up the road in UCD. I knuckled down and did what I was asked but that's when my hair-loss started. TOP2A was still tops, which was a relief, and the paper was published. If it was left to me, it would have been written off  rather than written up - but then my scientific publication record is woeful. Even with the same people and precisely the same data, reproducibility was a hard slog.

The small world connection here is that the presenter of the Containerised Workflow Architecture talk yesterday answers to the same boss as the boss-boss-boss I was serving in 2005 and 2009. In the intervening years, the quality and esp. the quantity of the data has gone up and up. By using containers in your workflow you can let collaborators and rivals replicate your findings and run precisely comparable analyses of their own. The science will be reproducible and we'll be nearer to eliminating colon cancer.  All good until a senior scientist at Friday's VIBE asked - what happens if there is a mistake in your code; will everyone be replicating that error?

Hmmmm! As Osric has it: A hit, a very palpable hit. Later in the day, I was talking to a handful of MSc students who'd come up from Galway for the meeting but missed the first talk. They are a useful mix of biologists and coders and I said that I'd been part of a similar group when their boss had moved from mathematical physics to biological sequence analysis and helped me with my Perl scripting. I hoped they were sharing their expertise and propping each other up. And I gave them an executive summary of the first (Containerised Workflow Architecture) talk of the day which they'd missed and emphasised the critical replicating that error question. Don't do what we used to do, I said, if you are all robbing each other's code there's a good chance that errors will propagate through the lab. If we use computers [and especially fancy pipelines of interconnected software] to find out something new, nifty and important then someone else should rewrite as much of the code as possible from scratch. There are a hundred different ways of computing any reasonably complicated analysis, if you have two independently generated solutions and they agree then your confidence in the result is more than doubled.  Ain't gonna happen though, everyone wants their own apple to polish.

The Infrastructure Guy

tl;dr: there are plenty enough farmers, rentiers,
publicans and teachers in the Oireachtas. We need
more scientists! A proper gander at the Seanad elections

We can't all be centre-forward. Someone else has to hoof the ball up-field or make the final cross for Messi to walk-it-in. But the culture we endure privileges the one over the other to a quite absurd degree. CEOs award themselves 20x the wages of the janitor; the surgeon is getting 5x more than the scrub nurse. 

25 years ago, I had a candid talk with Ken Wolfe = then just the fellow in the office next door; rather than Fellow of the Royal Society. He was almost always the smartest person in the room [MultiBloboPrev]. Whereas I was a second-rate [but not fifth rate!] kinda guy. I didn't want to win prizes but I was rather good at setting things up so that others could be their Best Selves. I was, I believed, a good post-doc: given a task I'd plug away at it creatively and with diligence until it was done. Six months later - scutter me pink, lads - Wolfe landed one of the first monster grants from Science Foundation Ireland and, taking me at my own estimation, offered me a seat at the table. Some really smart people [from Spain, France, Canada, USA & Ireland] landed posts as they were advertised under that grant.

One of the New Hires was a rocket scientist theoretical physicist called Kevin Byrne [R] who was ear-marked to be SYS$OP, managing the hardware for us all, as well as pushing the frontiers on his own project. The Boss had an arm-waving vision for a graphical tool for comparing complete genomes: both an archive and a tool for studying the evolution of related organisms. Over the next couple of years, from not knowing how to spell DNA, young Kevin implemented that idea, adding bells and whistles and extra features if they seemed to have utility. Or if The Boss had woken up screaming at 0300hrs with another of his brilliant insights. 

That lab was a wonderful experience. A dozen people from widely different backgrounds [hmmm, maybe a bit whiter than the global average; maybe a bit more spectral], with different tool-kits, all working on separate but related projects making sense of the fresh minted human genome [other genomes were available]. Kevin was present - always ready to pause and listen; suggest a solution; share a fragment of code; ready to say I've no idea . . . but also leave it with me, I'll find out. He could no more blag a bullshit answer than he could refuse to offer a helping hand.

The following May, the whole lab decamped for Cork to present our stuff at the 2002 VIBE meeting. That's when everyone in the molecular evolution / computational biology community in Ireland gets together to compare notes, set up collaborations and eat pizza. A block booking was made for the early morning train to Cork. There was a mild commotion when Kevin bailed out at Port Laoise and went back to Dublin. It turned out that he was moon-lighting for Fianna Fáil developing and maintaining one of the first effective political web-sites. The country was three weeks out from the 2002 General Election, the party web-server had blown a gasket and nobody at FF central office was able to make it go again. With their website fixed, Fianna Fáil went on to comprehensively win the election! And Kevin came down to Cork the following day to make his prez for VIBE.

Some time later I was in the pub with Kevin and asked him "Politics can be a worthy [and often thankless] task; but why [for heaven's sake] Fianna Fáil ?". Kevin was quite open: "When I was at school and then college, I really believed in Europe and all the positive, inclusive, diversity-affirming, opportunity-providing aspirations of the EU". Taking the long view, he asked himself which was the most effective political star to which he could hitch his wagon. FF was the answer, and Kevin signed up to make the tea, knock on doors and create the website. I've been teasing him since as the next Taoiseach but three because I knew him to be pragmatic, honest, loyal and clever. We need all those qualities in our leaders.

At last, Kevin Byrne has made his move! After three decades of crunching numbers in academia, and briefly in in dot.com business, and always always in the engine-room of politics [what do people want? what makes them tick? how best to achieve that?] my friend is running for the Seanad to take & hold one of the three seats allocated to The University of Dublin aka Trinity College, our shared Alma Mater. #1 No better man! Vote early and vote often. My ballot and some poll puffs have arrived at Caislean Blob:

Spelinge

Last Thursday of August was the 2015 VIBE meeting held in Dublin City U.  Last year The Institute hosted this annual meeting of the Virtual Institute for Bioinformatics and Evolution because the year before in Galway, I had loudly volunteered to make it happen. Hosting a national meeting was one of the criteria that got me promoted from Assistant Lecturer to a higher payscale; indeed I was personally congratulated on the event by our President. The organisers of VIBE 2015 did away with the poster session and substituted it with a section between coffee and lunch of flash-5 talks.  This is a five minute opportunity for a young researcher to lay out their stall of preliminary data for feedback from the community.  I was delighted that one of my final-year students presented the results of her project work supplemented by a 12 week work-placement in my old lab in TCD. She has some interesting findings that give us a hypothesis to test and it's all about marine mammals which are, if not exactly cuddly, at least recognisable by everyone in the room.  Lots of feedback, therefore: almost certainly more than if she'd been required to stand by her poster through all the coffee breaks.  I thought that flash-5 talks were a radical and positive change in the workings of the conference but it turned out that the poster-session was cancelled because a different conference elsewhere on the DCU campus had commandeered all the poster-display boards.

The first full talk of the day was a substantive piece of work by a DCU graduate student who is clearly going to go far - at least as far as Leeds because his boss is brain-draining from the country next month. But I wish someone would tell him about its vs it's because he got it wrong in the title slide of his talk and there are enough apostrophe nazis in the room and they notice these things and it makes them more critical of the work. It shouldn't matter but it does and it's better to learn the rules than annoy potential employers, grant-reviewers and paper-referees.  One of the many things I learned from Bob Tamarin, one of my mentors in graduate school, was that you wear a suit and tie to interviews . . . because it shows that you keen enough on the job to go through with such conventions.

Looking beneath the hood it's easy to find gross spelling errors which show that the authors couldn't be arsed to proof-read their manuscript. If you look for "psuedogene AND pseudogene" on Pubmed or Google Scholar you get hundreds of hits including one from Nature. If nobody on the team has picked up those errors then you should be double-plus skeptical that they've labelled the axes of their graphs correctly.  Years ago, I put together a list of these bloops as an exercise for learning how to use PubMed: lenght, developement, chromotin and chromasome are all wrong contra convention.

I've got a pal in Manchester who wrote The Book on Bioinformatics. It was almost more trouble than it was worth.  She wrote the book easily enough because she had been teaching a course on the subject for a few years and more or less transcribed her notes and illustrations.  The pain came in getting it published by an American company. She was a tiny bit on the unbending side as you probably have to be successful as a women in science: if you don't have some backbone, lesser blokes will gallop through you for a short-cut. It came down, at one point to a termination war: she wrote realise, they corrected to realize and she decorrected the proofs.  As the deadline approached, some idiot did a global-search-and-replace s/ise$/ize$/ and it went off to print; including the phrase "it is no good being wize after the event". If the bard himself couldn't be bothered to spell correctly, how come know-nothing copy editors feel they can do it better than the author?

Reimbursement

My Roomie at The Institute is running a meeting this week about nematodes as bioindicators. About 40 of the world's experts in environmental monitoring and sustainable soils with their attendant students (future experts in the field if we still have a planet) have come to Knock-na-bitheolaíocht for a few days networking and presenting their data and analyses. The meeting motored along, on time and well fed, and I dropped in and out to learn about stuff waaaay outside of my field. Someone had the bright idea of inviting an Institute alumnus, founder of Rockfield Ice Cream, to hand out free ice-creams to the delegates - they do weddings as well. I don't do ice-cream, so I was happy to give my voucher to one of our starvin' graduate students.

The first international conference I attended was in 1978 at Siracusa, Sicily. We threw a few things into our leaky old Citroen and drove 3000km across the continent to attend. When we arrived, we camped on the beach and the rest of my party swam, slept and ate pizza while I did science for 3 days. Then we packed up and drove all the way to the Netherlands for the next great leap forward. I didn't dream of getting someone to pay for my petrol and, as I was between jobs, it would have been difficult to identify a target for the invoice. It helped that there was no registration fee for the conference.

It's different now. I met my Roomie on the stairs as she ducked back to the office to photocopy the receipt for dinner the evening before the conference. Lots of delegates were planning to claim that as an allowable cost . . . but needed a receipt for their finance people. They all chipped in to pay the bill but the restaurant only uttered one receipt. I had an image of this same receipt for a few hundr€ds being presented across the free world for multiple payments but was assured that everyone would just claim their own share. The Institute has given up on such claims and give you a per diem if you're away from your desk for more than a certain number of hours. If you choose to dine on chips or out of a dumpster, then you can make a profit. You need to prove that you were away where you said you were, of course, but a copy of the programme is usually enough. After going to Galway to hang out with my mates in 2013, and claiming the per diem and the mileage, I was ahead in the wallet. I am honest (Honest!) but not so pedantically honest that I cause a headache for the accountants. Later that year, there was a meeting in Dublin. As there were a few penniless post-grads who were going as well, I piled them all into my car and drove the 80km to The Smoke to save The Institute 4 bus-fares. The students got to sing Science Songs in the back of my bus. But when I claimed for that, I was told "Duh! didn't you read Institute Policy that travel to Dublin must be carried out by bus or train". No I didn't and neither did my head of department nor the head of school both of whom were required to sign off on the claim. Filling in a form in triplicate is one thing but arguing over €20 is beneath my dignity, so I threw my claim in the bin and learned not to do any of that utilitarian greater good nonsense again.

I was in Dublin a couple of weeks ago to attend a talk given by a palomino - and went by bus. At the pub later, someone told a story about me and receipts that could have been true. In 2014, I organised the VIBE gig in The Institute. - we didn't have the ice-cream gimmick but I did manage to supply tea, a tonne of flapjacks and lunch. No registration fee, so I had to shake down some corporate sponsors for the sandwiches and canapés. The following week, one of my pals the delegates, asked me for proof that he had attended the event, so he could claim the rail-fare from Dublin. I sent him the group photo [above] and invited him to put a circle round his smiling face to convince his college's auditors. I've circled myself above, in case I forget I was there, as I had clearly forgotten my witty and subversive response from 3 years ago. You'll also notice that I have corralled all the delegates into a Y-chromosomeshape to protest the overwhelming hegemony of Men in Science . . . no I made that last bit up.

The Great Western Binfo

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Classes were cancelled at The Institute this last Friday for the Annual Open Day when we showcase the place and encourage school-children to do science and see that it could be both fun and interesting to do that science with us.  Several people asked me what I was contributing for Friday and my answer "Going to Galway" raised a few laughs. For me the only thing that is more important than a chance of pushing science at young people and young people at science is to attend the annual meeting of my professional association VIBE - the Virtual Institute of Bioinformatics and Evolution.  The 15th Nov 2013 meeting was held in NUIG.  The world of Irish Bioinformatics and Molecular Evolution has grown from a single lab in the mid 1980s to a very broad church today.  The students of that first lab are now full Professors with students of their own who recursively have students of their own who . . .  The topics covered in Galway on Friday were unimaginably wider, deeper and faster flowing than the sorts of data we were analysing back in the day.

The exponential increase in data and the power of the tools to analyse it is illustrated in the observation that my first 1992 paper in molecular evolution analysed 45 complete genes from one fungal species Aspergillus nidulans. I read every paper ever written about each of those genes. Ten years later, just before coming to do his PhD with us, my first student had completed a Master's degree in Ottawa by analysing 40 complete genomes in a similar way.  That was a ~4000 fold increase in the amount of data processed.  At about the same time as our Aspergillus paper, TCD won a contract to help sequence the very first chunk of a eukaryotic genome - Chromosome III from baker's yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae.  That contract was costed at 1 ecu/€ per DNA base.  This Friday I was told that the cost of sequencing was now $0.10c per megabase: a 10-million-fold decrease in the cost of generating primary data!

After a gallimaufry of excellent talks through the day, and a rich and varied poster session over lunch where graduate students show-cased their latest work, we heard a key-note talk from John Greally now of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in NYC but a graduate of NUIG.  His Title "A feeling for digital organism" deliberately echoed the title of Barbara McClintock's biography. Greally started with an ex-tempore tribute to the organisers of, and contributors to, the day's events, saying that the breadth of interests, skills and experience in the room was a) extraordinary and b) had enormous potential for synergistic lift.  He wasn't flattering us as planet-brained rocket-scientists but as comparatively ordinary people who were holding a space regularly for interactions and hopefully collaborations among widely separated disciplines. Those remarks were immediately followed by a story about two of the stars in his group: a computer-illiterate "good pair of hands" and a somewhat geeky coding-whizz.  These two started by trading the secrets of their tool boxes: the one learning a bit of eppendorf-flipping and blaming-the-buffer and the other the rudiments of code.  This gave them a common syntax and some appreciation for what the other did.  The subsequent discussions were extraordinarily rich and productive.  Greally described the future sans peur et sans reproche biologist as "pipetting with one hand, programming with the other".

He went on to suggest a way to paddle up the biological data-deluge by citing his earlier paper on Astrogenomics.  When astronomers started to collect data digitally rather than by looking at distant objects with eyes or silver-nitrate cameras clapped to telescopes, they quickly found that they could generate galaxies of data in a single night.  Why not, he suggested, learn from the approaches, protocols, wrong-turnings and triumphs of the astronomers and perhaps use some of their tools and ideas on bio-data. He also urged us scientists to visit with Artists to help up our game in presenting data in visually appealing and so more readily understandable ways. After more in the same inspirational vein, I felt that even I could/should shift off my metaphorical sofa and start shoving some big science uphill especially if I was shoulder to shoulder with folks who each brought different tools and ways of seeing to the task.

At the end of that talk we were drained and inspired and looking forward to some liquid refreshment but there was one last item on the agenda - where to hold next year's meeting. After trying to remember who had been the least recent host, someone suggested we foist the task on the group that hadn't made it to this year's meeting.  After some further joshin' and slaggin' the silence began to be uncomfortable and everyone was looking resolutely at their feet, so I said "Dang it, I'll do next year". That suggestion was approved nem. con. and we all went to the bar.

Follow me down to The Institute which as everyone in the County now knows is

Mental Elf

Someone in Coolock branch library decided to condemn as "Worn Out" Joanna Cannon's 2019 book Breaking & Mending: A junior doctor’s stories of compassion & burnout. A local contact snagged it from the discard box and sent it down country to us. Its publication was subsidized by The Wellcome Collection in London, which also hosts an excerpt of the book if you can't find a copy in the library, like.

Cannon left school at 15 but went back to school and then medical school in her 30s because she wanted to work wit people, especially people troubled in their heads. 

I've set out my stall on how the HSE/NHS treat Mental Health as a poor relation. It's easier to get €millions for Cerebral Palsy or €50,000 for a kidney transplant, than to get sorted for bipolar or OCD. Breaking & Mending is clean and compelling reading but it ain't a textbook and Cannon no longer practices medicine, so some assertions and suggestions are allowed. One is that good mental health depends upon being part of a listening, caring, community. Another is that we are all at different positions on multiple spectra. An effective [listening, caring] community makes allowances for outliers [in whatever direction they outlie]. I never thought I'd say this, but maybe the bullying and slaggin' and compulsory gym of school is better for mental health than slopping about in the shallow warm dopamine soup of TikTok in your exclusive bedroom.

The last 20 years, we have been sold a bill of goods by the gods of FAANG [whc polyprevs] - everyone gets their own customized glove-fit echo-chamber. We no longer go out to the cinema and roar together in a waft of shared pheromones. Netflix distributes movies now. Lockdown kept kids from classrooms - but sucked into their customized devices. As social apes, we [most of us, that is, it being a spectrum] are not designed for being alone-with-a-phone. Maybe that's why youngsters go off the rails|: further from the average on the Axis of anxiety, self-harm, OCD, suicideation, depression, paranoia. Back in the day, the unhinged were recognised and accommodated in the community even as they were teased and bullied.

As if one person's story at the coalface of mental health were not enough, I Borrowboxed Will you Read this Please as an earbook. It is editted by Joanna Cannon and chapters a dozen tales told to a dozen British writers. There was a recruitment process, soliciting "mental health service users" to come forward to tell their stories. The "finalists" [there is a reality TV vibe here] were chosen to illuminate the variety of lives which generally go under our collective radar. Normal (2.3 kids, reasonably happy, car in the drive, holidays planned) families go about their normal lives oblivious of the handwashing or gender dysphoria next door. If you have gambling or bipolar or self-harm in your family that is quite enough without embracing the troubles of Others. But we really should a) care b) allocate resources to the Cinderella of the health services.

For the earbook, a dozen different reading voices have been recruited to the project. One nice conceit is that the income / royalties [if any!] are split 50:50 between each troubled person and the tale bearer.

A view from the basement

I was up in The Smoke on Thursday hangin' with my mates at the annual VIBE meeting. At one of the coffee breaks, a couple of mothers were comparing notes about the availability of schools in their area: it's headache because about 90% of primary schools are owned and operated by the Catholic church although paid for out of general taxation (and whatever they can soak out of the parents for enriching the educational experience). The Catholic schools give priority to Catholic families who live in the catchment area and protestant, muslim and agnostic tax-paying parents get the seats that are left, if any. Dilemma: Should the parents take out a second mortgage to pay for private school or spend hours in the car each week schlepping little Jimmy to a distant but right-on and inclusive Educate Together school? I said smugly that we hadn't that problem because our girls never went to school at all at all. To which the fair-enough response was "Well that is predicated on having at least one parent who wasn't working". My rejoinder was that if you live simple, you maybe don't need two salaries to put food on the table and shoes on the feet.  That was rather disingenuous because the major outgoing transaction in most family budgets in Ireland is money for roof. We are a long way from the situation 100 years ago in Rotterdam where I have been advised that in those days folks typically allocated 1/7th of their after-tax income to rent. One of The Beloved's sisters lived in London in the 1980s and bought a house in salubrious Chiswick, payments for which consumed all of His salary and half of Hers.

That was London. At the same time we bought a house in the NE of England in 1986: a rather run down 150 sq.m. red-brick terrace about 90 years old. We were not in the business of making a killing on the market so, of the 20-25 properties we viewed that Summer, we bought the second cheapest. The very cheapest had a hole in the roof and pigeons in the attic. Our gaff cost £21,000. Four years later, we moved back to Ireland and put our slightly improved and much loved home on the market. It fetched £56,000! We could have taken everyone's advice in '86 to buy the most expensive property we could afford - maybe £60K - and seen that more than double in price. But we didn't because we were thrifty and risk-averse. Back then we could live comfortably on one salary although for much of the time we were both earning and so salting away some extra cash for the future.

We thus acquired >!windfall!< a chunk money to put towards a home in Ireland. Not through hard work or canny practice - just by catching a wave of rising prices induced by various manipulations of the market by the economic policies of Margaret Thatcher. Tomorrow belonged to me. I was back at work last week and chatted to one of my office mates. He is trying to get the paper work sorted so that he can move his family to a bigger house in which each child has its own bedroom - a perfectly normal reasonable aspiration in today's Ireland. The new house is 399. That's casual code for €400,000 . . . for a 4 bed house in a crumby midlands town close to the centre of Ireland; albeit only a price-driving 80 km railway commute from Dublin. We bought a farm of land and 1/24th of a mountain for €77,000 20 years ago!

My colleague can do that because he already has equity in his existing house and by trading-up needs only pay for the differential. The new PhD graduate who will take my job when I retire in a few years time, could no more get finance for €400,000 than s/he could run to Kilkenny and back before classes. My generation has robbed her generation of the chance to live in a decent house despite having middle class academic aspirations like a room for each child or a scrap of garden to have a swing and a rabbit-hutch.

This was all brought into focus by hearing Fr Peter McVerry [on the Left as befitting and with an edgy urban background] on the wireless [again!] about homelessness in Ireland. He was being given air-time because, on Tuesday 6th Sept 2016 TONIGHT, RTE is putting out a documentary A view from the basement about his work with the Peter McVerry Trust. McVerry has spent the last 30+ years working stridently against homelessness and government indifference to the Dispossessed. His Trust has started building homes because nobody else is. Interviewer "Isn't that the Government's Job?". McVerry replied that he'd been on a fact-finding mission to Derry, North of the borrrder. The population of Derry is more or less 2% that of the Republic of Ireland and they have plans to complete 1,000 units of social housing this year.
Q. In 2015, across all the local authorities of RoI, how many S.H. units were built?
A. 74.
Q. What is the Irish for Shame?
A. náire

A view from the basement is a McVerry metaphor for modern Ireland. Imagine a fine red-brick Georgian house in Dublin, long since carved up into flats. The Man lives on the top floor. In the morning, he flings open the curtains to greet the day. The Summer sun is up, the breeze is shickering the leaves on the old apple tree at the bottom of the garden, the grass of the lawn is more green than can be easily imagined, the sun picks out the Fine Gael blue speedwell Veronica arvenis that makes the lawn seem greener still. There is dew on the grass but it only seems to rain at night. At the same time in the basement of the same house, a woman also opens her curtains. She is too far down to see the lawn or the apple-tree, her view is bounded by the whitewashed wall of the outhouse. It has rained overnight and there is 10 cm of standing water between her and the toilet.

The Man at the top of the house is everyone who has a job with a pension, who bought their home more than 20 years ago, whose children go to fee-paying schools and expect to go to university and expect Mammy and The Da to pay the fees and the rent when they leave home for college. The Man makes all the rules and regulations for everyone, assigns the tax-breaks, sets housing policy, runs the [independent] judiciary and the [independent] trade unions. According to the OECD, the top 10% in Ireland earn 7.4x the bottom 10%. This is marginally less iniquitous than the OECD average but that's still a LOT of inequality.

Knuttel gone

Back in the early 90s, before we acquired two more children, we had a social life. Our pal D was visiting from London and we all went into town on Saturday morning to get coffee and buns and check out whaaat's happenin'? It was a teeny bit more focussed for D because he wanted to check out the New Apollo Gallery in Duke Street for contemporary art. D was a very successful corporate lawyer [with a heart of gold!] and was acquiring a modest collection of paintings. The Beloved and D dove right in, pulling paintings out of bins and appraising those which were good enough to deserve hanging. The Arts Block is quite outside my wheelhouse, so I chatted in a desultory manner in front-of-shop with The Proprietor, hereinafter "cloaky-bollix", who was high camp self-consciously artistic in demeanour. I was able to establish that I was The Money -  ready to whip out the cheque-book if T.B. saw something she liked. Eventually, they came from out back with a medium sized oil: Still-life with aubergines by Graham Knuttel:

I cut a cheque [remember them?] and we came away with another item of stuff. D preferred Knuttel's pictures of gangster's and cooks and, although he bought nothing that Saturday, he acquired a good few Knuttels in that style. A few years later, Sylvester "Rocky" Stallone was shooting a film in Ireland and discovered Knuttel on one of his rest-days. Back home in Hollywood, he shared his find with Robert de Niro, Frank Sinatra and other celebs. Prices went up! Institutions [banks, colleges, galleries] jumped on the latest fad. Prices went UP! Those aubergines became our successful flutter on the Grand National: without knowing much, through happenstance, we turned out lucky. Nobody could have predicted the cultural collision of eggplants with Der Penis in Emoji-speak, for example. Perhaps this makes our acquisition even more valuable than Knuttel's fascist chef vibe.

Knuttel's dead now. From one of his supporting galleries an Obit. I guess our aubergines will have another brief spike in 'value' as cognoscenti twig that there will be no more new Knuttels to hang or hoard.

Dau.II was born in 1995; more or less bald but blonde round the edges. This was in stark contrast to her dark curly-haired older sister. A month later was their mother's birthday and I took time off work [I was the Director and Sole Employee of Binfo Ireland so I could] to rustle up a giftie. Heading for Bewley's for chocolates or coffee, I passed Cloaky-bollix's store front and, on impulse went in. I don't piffle about. About 10 minutes later I came out with two Madonna-and-childs by Rachel Strong who had recently broken up with Knuttel. Some people have seen her as Frida Kahlo to Knuttel as Diego Rivera. They clearly shared a palette and way-of-seeing as well as breakfast:

I thought it was clever-hilarious that these two views of motherhood were such a good match for our own two childer.

Arrangement in Grey and Gray

We have tried adulting, accommodation division, before. Last time [late Nov 2024] it was left to me to book a room in a hotel, I assumed there would be a bath-tub and was disappointed. Hotels are so eye-watering expensive that y'have to squeeeze them for value. And soaking in a hot bath is one way to Win. 

In mid-Jan we were short-noticed [as always by such events] by a funeral in Dublin. It turned out that the Talbot Hotel Stillorgan runs a Sunday special "dinner bed and breakfast for two @ €190". We could have done it cheaper: getting up in the dark, driving 160km, the last part of which would be in the rush-hour, finding somewhere to park. But we chose to adult it with Talbot. That meant driving up country on a sunny(ish) Sunday afternoon "hello trees, hello sky." The funeral mass was an 8 minute walk from the hotel, so we solved the parking problem also.

I wasn't going to get caught w/o tub a second time and was re-assured to see a🛁emoji in the small print of the Sunday Special. Gotta say that the corridors upstairs have a First Person Shooter vibe. The only coloured objects were a pair of fire extinguishers where the corridor jinks L and then abruptly R and then again left L. I noted that the extinguishers were of two different shapes/sizes. Do I feel any confidence that I would know how to operate either? I do not! I did notice quite a lot of small print but reading the instructions when things are hotting up seems too little too late. I guess the answer is run like buggery leave the premises as smartly as possible without promoting panic.

We dropped our bags, shook out our funereal duds, and repaired downstairs for our "free" dinner. Which was fine. We tipped based on the full value of the meal, not just the extras [dhrink!] for which we paid the servor. Then I drew my bath:

Which was A Task, equivalent to making a strange rental car Go. At home we have a bath with a plug, on a chain, and a hot tap and a cold tap. A child of seven can manage it. This child of seven-ty was Baffled @ Talbot. Clearly the silver disc at the bottom of the bath was the plug . . . but how to open /close the orifice? Wearing my BigBoy ManOfTheWolrd pants I recognised the top disk as a hot&cold mixer tap. _Eventually_ without calling Reception [✓]; but not without pulling the front of it clean off in my hand [χ] - ooops; I worked out that the middle disk was both the water inlet AND the plug-cover opener [quarter turn anti-clockwise does the trick]. Very stressy, I needed a long hot bath after my exertions. If you are wearing your Antonioni's BlowUp pants you'll see me reflected in the tap disk.

Title a reference to Whistler's Mother. Also: gray is darker than grey [prev].

Walking on water

I left Galway in the fore-noon after the VIBE meeting in NUIG, but not before walking down to the shore of Lough Corrib with my host and his two young sons. They live on the edge of the townland Gort na calaí which is really aptly named because the lake is edged with "callows" flat water meadows that flood in winter. Standing on a little quay at the edge a vast body of water watching the wind shiver the reeds was elementally evocative for me because when I was a chap we used to visit a cousin of my father's who lived on the shore of Lough Derg.  Just like the lads on Saturday, we used to peg rocks into the water to see who could make the biggest perLOOSH.  Unlike the lads, whose parents have a modern (but by no means over-developed) sense of health and safety, 50 years ago we used to get up really early in the morning and row out onto the lake.  The hills of Clare were without colour and silent in the distance and it was far too early for traffic so, without then being able to articulate such a thought, the sense of peace was a protective wall around us. I never read Swallows and Amazons because I lived it every Spring. That series of small-small adventures for unsupervised children begins when they discover a boat while on holiday and ask their mother if it's okay for them to sail out on the lake. Their mother sends a telegram to her husband, who is abroad with the Navy.  He telegrams back with the timeless wisdom "Better drowned than duffers, if not duffers won't drown".  That's more or less what my parents thought about the issues, insofar as they thought about it at all.  The sense of empowerment was easily worth whatever small risk attended such antics.  We never felt we could walk on water, it wasn't that sort of empowerment.  But we were put in a position (we put ourselves in a position) where we had to make decisions informed by the reality around us rather than 'learning' the correct response by being told what the answer was.

If you talk about that sort of thing with people today they will go on about how there weren't as many cars back then and certainly no pedophiles.  But I can assure you that there were no cars out on the lake i 1963 and all the local pedophiles (of which there was the usual number) were at least 1000m away and still asleep.

"Walking down to the lake-shore" with the two young chaps implies that they also were walking, but they weren't.  They hitched a ride in their father's canoe which has a little trolley for getting it the few hundred meters from home to the water. How cool is that? As a buggy it's not very convenient in a shopping mall but down country lane, it's The Thing.  Why would you need a little trolley for the canoe? Because that's how you get to work whenever the wind on the lake permits such traffic.  Now really, how cool is that?  Cool as Diva, that's how cool.

Except the Black hoggett

 Over on MetaFilter, there is a section where ppl can and do Ask questions and the community offer solutions. The Asks [a technical term] can be practical or peculiar but the responses must be on message and in good faith or they are likely to get deleted. There was a recent Ask about the experience and embrace of The Night. It has a bit of a "internet please do my home-work for me" vibe. But there were a number of nice responses from crepuscular and noctambulant MeFites. Like Paul Simon I'm a "hello darkness my old friend" sorta guy and have done dumbass things in tunnels and in bunkers [same link]. Spelunking is another, lesser, level of hazard; and it's no picnic at Sleat's Gill. The other example of finding comfort in the dark for me was when I barfed up a half kilo of undercooked cabbage in Sandymount 25 years ago.

But falsedmitri wasn't getting any of that from me. Rather I shared a part of my normal experience working as The Outdoor Man on our farmlet. I have found to my cost that, if sheep die [and they do!], it's Much better to find, and handle, them "fresh" rather than bloated buzzing and in bits.  Earlier this year The Beloved bought 4 lambs from a neighbour to keep flock numbers up to quota.  It seemed like a good idea at the time to include a pure black ewelet and three reg'lar Cheviots. They grew up together and are still quite stand-offish from the other older sheep in their new home.

My AskMefi answer: I "look the hill" on the regular counting the sheep, incl last thing at night. Sheep are just the perfick thing to count in the dark . . . except the black hoggett. She's often hard to locate in full daylight. Finding her (alert, on four good legs) in the shadows is a Win and a comfort. The very next morning I was out super early because a big front of rain was incommming - and who likes to BoPeep while soaking wet if it can be avoided? And I came up One short in the count. Dang!  But I heartened in twigging that BlackOne was the AWOL and it was more likely a hidden in plain sight than a expired in the bushes problem. And sure enough . . . there are two [2] sheep in this view:

Crap pixellated photo is only part of the perception problem.  Here's the clue:

It's like Antonioni's Blow-Up [1966] in which a professional photographer in London's swinging sixties may have found evidence of a murder in the background of one of his fashion pictures. If you haven't seen Blow-Up, you're missing something whoa weird.

Fiction

One way I try to keep my life simple is by reducing choice.

In my Borrowbox universe, I'm overwhelmed by all the books that are there for my reading pleasure, so I only browse the non-fiction section - and obvs leaning to science in that bin. That limits things to reality, rather than some infinite universes model of space and time. I confess to feeling a little smug about this adhesion to Truth, if not beauty. But I recognise that science has very little useful to say about the human condition or inter-personal relationships. Nevertheless, someone needs to shake me to insist "Read This Novel!". On foot of such orders, I read with advantage Small Things Like These and Station Eleven. More recently, I took on board that one of my binfo pals is married to a successful YA author AND that one of my MeFi para-pals is Charlie Stross the prolific Britse SF writer.

Trouble with prolific is that it gives me choice-collywobbles. Stross is about 60 years old and sixty books published. In mid-Feb, feeling that I had to put my toe in Strosswater ,I found that only one earbook was immediately available. No choice? Obliged to plunge! Accordingly, I loaded up  Empire Games  which is the first book in the third trilogy of his 9 volume Merchant Princes series. It is rather good: not dissimilar, in its post-Apocalyptic vibe, to Station Eleven. There is also resonance with Iain M. Banks [obitribute from 10 years ago] insofar as they both write loosely connected stories embedded in a coherent Universe which is quite different from ours.

The Merchant Princes new-normal is that the Earth hosts a large number of parallel universes which through accident and happenstance have gorn all two-roads diverged in a yellow wood on us. We/they only know about the para-historical timelines [tech term] because some people develop the ability to shift among them. We may be thankful that these spacetime travellers are able to bring their immediate baggage, including clothes, [Schwarznegger, we're looking-not-looking at you] with them as they jaunt [tech term] to the same place in a different universe. If that can be achieved, then ideas, tech and stuff can be transported in a way analagous to horizontal transfer of genes between species. As with horizontal transfer this can confer a benefit on the recipients - without causing a loss at the donor end. So it's not a zero-sum game - notwithstanding the possibility of unintended consequences and careful what you wish for. 

I liked Empire Games so much that I've put a Borrowbox lien on  Dark State , the next book in the series. I guess that's a recommendation, from me to you. PS sorry late launch today - made a PM/AM rookie error on the scheduler.

Grumpy the Cobbler

I mentioned earlier that I was no longer in the market for Hi-Tec brand walking boots. Corporate HQ must have shifted production to a different sweated-labour facility possibly in a different East Asian country. OR Finance showed that 3c a shoe could be added to the bottom line if the glue recipe was altered. Whatever the explanation, after a decade of believing in the quality of the brand, I had two pairs of shoes on the trot (2016 and 2024) fall apart on me. In 2016, I salvaged the laces to tie up tomatoes in the garden and landfilled the boots. 

But I only had ~20 days [over 500 days] of use from 2024 pair, when I noticed that the sole was separating from the upper at the toe. The agéd shoe-mender on my way to The Institute closed during Coronarama, so I phoned the cobbler in another town in the next county.
"The toe of my boot is separating from the upper, can you fix and how long might it take?"
"If you drop 'em in today, I can do it in an hour"

But when I rocked up to the shop, he ripped back half the sole and said "This is not the toe separating from the upper, this will require a lot more work, I'll have to rip off the whole sole, clean out all this grass and mud, dry them out, re-glue the sole. The glue will smear on the upper so it won't look great. I can't do it today. It will cost €35. Your call." He wasn't going to help on the money vs utility math, whc fair enough. Nor was he going to bother with an opinion on brands except to say that to get good quality boots you need to spend at least €200 the pair. The tenor of his tone was that I was a complete gull to buy the sort of boots that sat between us on the counter. But I agreed to pay €35 and he agreed to fix.

There was more confrontation on the matter of when I would collect and pay for the boots. Next Tuesday wouldn't do. He had a pair of shoes in back that had been "next Tuesday"ing since before Christmas. I didn't get down on both knees but I did genuflect & swear on my mother's bones that I would return at 11:00 next Tuesday . . . with cash. Which I did, because protestants, even boot-gull protestants, can be punctual even if parking can be a nightmare. 

When I lived and worked in Dublin in the 1990s, I came to believe that people who worked in sub-Post Offices projected pissed-off pretty much all the time; which I found strange in someone who had chosen a public-facing profession. I developed a theory that, because subPOs were often hidden away at the back of other premises, the lack of natural daylight for the whole working day turned employees gruff&surly: they'd been full of spring flowers and sunshine earlier in their lives. "my" shoe-mender's premises have the same cave-vibe as the back of Greene's Bookshop on Clare Street D2 where I used to buy stamps 30 years ago.

But there's no such excuse for the mower guy, whom I supported for several years. Every . effing . time I brought him a lawn-mower or chain-saw needing fixed, his expert eye would instantly find something that showed I was a massive abuser of lawn-mowers and should not be trusted with kitchen scissors, let alone power tools. This went from being insightful and informative to wearingly predictable to a serious pain in the neck. It never seemed to dawn on him that, if I could maintain mowers, I wouldn't be troubling him with fistfuls of folding money every time we met.

I now go to Tom the Sawyer of Ballyteigelea. He's an interesting fellow who was born to be a farmer and that is indeed his day&night job; but Tom gets far more joy and fulfillment from tinkering with engines to make them Go. I have huge affection & respect for people who invent the self that are they are happiest to be. Tom can drop clues about chain-saw care and maintenance without making me feel an inadequate rube.

From behind the tin cup

Whoop whoop polemic warning. Where to start? there are a number of threads. When we were young and in college my sister's BF was enterprising enough to secure a summer job as a chamber maid in a Swedish hotel. Her reasoning must have been similar to mine when I went off to the Netherlands to grub my stake to go to graduate school in America. For me, without obvious skills, a place with a respectable minimum wage was better than home with no minimum wage at all at all. I spent 5 months working all the hours that were available and forcing the family to eat leaves to save enough money to pay a semester's fees. The English Chambermaid was working for the hotel because Summer was their busiest season and they needed extra staff who would fade away with the tourists at the end of September.  It worked well for both parties, it was a contract.  The hotel was under no illusions that cleaning hair clots from wash-hand basins and changing the sheets was a fulfilling and life-long career. They paid well enough to persuade an educated young woman to drudge for a higher purpose, like paying the rent and/or buying her round in college.

Fast forward a generation, Dau.I's BF was interviewing for a chamber-maid position in a fancy Dublin hotel and was asked if she was applying for work elsewhere. This was a few years ago when the recession was still biting, so she replied "Of course. I know that work is scarce, it takes time to set up an interview and I need to secure a job somewhere and soon."  "I'm sorry", replied the HR goon, "that's the end of the interview; we only hire people who are committed to this company and its ethos and work practice".  wtf? This is a company that expects total lifetime commitment from its employees but is still only prepared to pay the minimum wage and will weep crocodile tears when it has to let swathes of staff go at the next squeeze or restructuring. That strikes me as less a contract than the practice of a bully.

While we're on the hotel trade, I'll share an observation of a palomino who is an accomplished jazz musician. This woman makes a modest living doing gigs around the country and has worked and will work in numerous venues in Dublin and down the country. She finds that working in some hotels, like the Hibernian in Kilkenny [R looking continentally sophisticated on the one night in the year when it's comfortable to sit outside in the dark], is fun because the staff are happy, so service is better. But for her, sensitive soul that she is, it's more important that the vibe is better; then she plays better and everyone is happier. Other places are a penance, everyone is glum, the floor manager is barky and the toilets aren't clean.  I bet that's the sort of place Dau.I's BF was rejected from.

Last year, I had a tuthree smart, interesting and interested students working on my watch for their final year research projects. I had a bunch of sleepers as well, so the contrast was noticeable.  One of these lads came to me at the beginning of the year with the germ of an idea that he was interested in pursuing and, with a directional nudge or two from me, rattled through a chunk of independent and original research developing a protocol that has the potential to shave weeks of time and thousands of €€€s from the budget of certain key biotechnology projects. Ace! He's currently looking for work and in the course of an e-mail setting out a game plan for the task wrote "see what's going on and see if anything interests me and more importantly if they have any interest in me."  I'm afraid my shoulders slumped a little when I read this.  If we'd been in the same room I would have seized him by the lapels and given him a damned good shake shouting with each jolt "you . . . are . . . the . . . smartest . . . boy . . . in  . . . the . . . room: of course they will have an interest in you. They will be lucky to get someone who is so creative, determined and almost fatally modest". If you think of yourself as a beggar looking for change, employers will take you at your own estimation and consider you worthless.

My BF in graduate school was one of several people I've met who made me realise that I have a second-rate intellect;  not a sixth rate one, I know I'm not stupid but I know enough to recognise minds manifestly sharper, quicker and more committed than mine [my ambition genes were shot off in the war]. I graduated before her and went back to Europe and a modest career in science whose details are remorselessly getting filled in on The Blob. She took a long time to follow me out the door with her PhD [insecure supervisor, poor mentoring, poor health, bad luck]. She then started to apply for jobs and spent a few years being flown back and forth across the country for interview in places like Bismark, ND; UC Davis; FSU Tallahassee; New York NY. She never got the job and became convinced that a) the advertisement was required HR facade for a known internal candidate b) she was the token female interviewee to fulfill HR's equality requirements.  Eventually she stopped applying and went into avenues of science that weren't tenure-track. But along the way she got a lot of experience in interviews.

She got tired of being required to shill for herself to persuade a committee of slightly bored academics and the ferrety creature from HR (all complacent in the fact that their knees were firmly under the table of secure salary) that she really wanted to work in the Ecology School of Bogsville State. So she started turning the process on its head by announcing that this was the second interview she'd had that month, she was anxious to get her research going and could they please explain to her why she should come to Bogsville. This new approach didn't land her any job offers but it forced everyone in the room to re-evaluate what they stood for and what they had achieved. Throwing away the beggar's tin cup levelled the interview process so that there was a possibility of a mutually beneficial contract which would be good for science, good for the students, good for everybody's self-respect.  If you're deeply attached to the goddam cup, why not rap it sharply with a pencil so make sure the interview board is paying attention to the key points of your argument.