L'esprit du sentier

I've had occasion to mention L'esprit d'escalier - the wit of the stairs: all the clever things you could have said as you walk downstairs after the interview. I've also learned to be more circumspect in how I address people. Engage brain before opening mouth as my father used to say. For example, when we first bought our farrrm in the Summer of '96, I was often to be found leaning on the gate not working at making the place presentable. I used to pass the time of day with folks who'd walk up the lane. Back then, it was mostly neighbours and locals, taking the air of an evening as a pretext for scoping out the blow-ins. My standard gambit was often "Are you going far?". Word filtered back that I should be more careful because this question had been heard as Where do you think you are going? As if I was questioning their right to walk up the lane as their fathers and foremothers had done since the foundation of the state.

That was in hindsight a rather willful, somewhat racist, misunderstanding of my words and intentions. Since the turn of the 21stC, fewer and fewer local people walk anywhere, let alone up the 1-in-10 slope of the lane, so the people I meet are generally hill-walkers and ramblers from further afield. I still use Are you going far? because it's neutral but slightly more loaded / interesting than "Nice day". Those who fancy a chat, stand and deliver; those who don't, walk on past. Lips are more pursey, and steps more furtive during the lockdown perhaps because hardly any of these walkers live within 5km of the place they parked their car, let alone 2-3km further up the hill. Rules is Rules but outdoor exercise with or without mask sure beats damaging your mental health locked up with your housemates.

Saturday, like Friday and Sunday, was a brilliant sunny Spring day with a hint of breeze to prevent over-heating. Who wouldn't want to walk up our hill to watch the crows a-courting and boost the old vitamin-D? As I crossed the lane to count the sheep's legs [if it's not a multiple of 4, there's something wrong] I saw a party of small people ploughing up hill. As they drew abreast of our gate, I greeted them and, close-up, noticed that as well as three adult women and 4 sub-teen children, they had a dog with them.

Self: That dog should be on a leash
Woman: "That dog" is 16 years old, and lives on a farm
Stunned: You can see where I'm coming from?
Woman:  You can see where I'm coming from!
and turned her back on me with a toss of her head, carrying on up my lane.

 What's with my insistence about dogs on leads? On a city street, perhaps; but on a beach? or out in the country? Where else can Bonzo be free to run? Well nowhere near [our] sheep, for starters. This was explained to me by a fellow sheep farmer 2 years ago. Michael lives on the other side of the mountain up another lane, which also serves as an access route for hill-walkers. He is getting cumulatively aggravated by walkers with dogs, and gets short and sharp if he sees them on his property - including the hillside - without a leash. But he added that, while dogs chasing sheep is obviously a wrong-doing, the smell of strange dogs and the yapping, yipping, barking and greeting of strange dogs gives sheep a frisson of terror - adrenalin, cortisol, elevated BP [that wd be vasopressin], maybe oxytocin - which does their condition no good. And acknowledging that sheep are not all of the brightest, such sounds and smells even from invisible dogs can send the whole flock of them off on a run which can result in broken limbs and other material damage. It is, for example, lambing [oxytocin] season. It's a problem in Kerry [and everywhere] with a suggestion that pandemicitis is driving all sorts of [nice but] ignorant people with their wholly untrained dogs out onto the hills. The rules in Kerry [and everywhere] are "He pointed out that dogs, whether on leads or not, are NEVER allowed on the walks but now, more than ever, given the stress dogs can have on farm animals, people must obey this rule."

After two, partly sleepless, nights my considered L'esprit du sentier response to Mrs Flounce and her old farm dog wavers between:

Self: No I don't know where you're coming from, but if you give me your address I'll visit you and have my sheep graze your lawn.
or
Self: Well have a nice walk; I hope you find your manners up there.

Sun Ten Dec Bit Bob

 Here we go:

• I've been following the Tally Ho Project for at least 3 years.
• Leo was hosted initially by Raul & Darlene fellow boat-builders and sailors
• Sorry to report Darlene recently pegged out
• "Fair winds and following seas"
• Labneh & Za'atar via MeFi
• DifferentDrummer the Penguin by Werner Herzog 
• Inside a Japanese mallet factory
•  ♬ ♪ ♫ ♩
• Maren Morris - Tall Guys
• 
  
• Poker Joker paradox
• Drone: chimney stack inspection for demolition [spalling R] 
• The 15 Minute city "explained" by Jago Hazzard
• Now, I have been cross about people walking up our lane through sheep country, with leash-less dogs.
• some children need a leash also
  
• and of course there's Fenton "Jesus Christ" FenTon!
  

Here come the grockles

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

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

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

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

Caedite Piceas

I said we happy few yomped up our hill for reasons. Those reasons being that The Common was to be scored a second time for its [ecological] quality. Quality here bears only a faint resemblance to the Metaphysics of Quality in a Robert Pirsig / Phaedrus / ZAMM sense. We, The Commoners, have been incentivized over the last 5 years to recognise Value in The Common . . . beyond sending a certified copy of our entry in the Land Registry on to the EU and thereby drawing down whatever subsidy, headage or grant was currently applicable. 

Our hill, you see, is an increasingly rare example of Dry Heath: an intermediate ecological stage where full succession to dark forest is checked by the activities of shepherds and their sheep. Winter on the hill is not a place to fatten sheep: the pickings are slim and the weather can kill even without the drama of a three week blizzard. But during a long Irish Summer, the sheep can chomp through the heather while the in-bye fields are left ungrazed for hay. They also relish tree saplings and so these 'climax' species never get tall enough to shade out the under-storey . . . so Dry Heath.

The score for each Common in the currently favoured scheme for transferring money to farmers has been devised and revised by ecologists employed by The Department of Ag. They have devised an algorithm which identifies Good Things [heather, tormentil, larks] and Bad Things [erosion, bracken, invasive trees]. Things which are useless for sheep-farming, like bogs, might nevertheless score well in the Algorithm. All the features, appropriately weighted, are tallied up into a Score out of 10. Some elements of the scoring can be abstracted from a pass of The Satellite but most of them require boots on the ground. 

Incentives must be seen to have worked (or what's the point?) and that means at least two trips by The Man to each commonage in the country: once for baseline and once after the interventions. Because Ireland is a leaky place, word came down from on high that our Common would be scored on such-a-date and that the score might be improved if a) we cleared trash and b) extirpated any and all Sitka spruce Picea sitchensis which have seeded downwind of the recently felled 40 year old Sitka plantation. That might was carrying a lot of water and only 6 of us heeded the call to do something about it.

The Holy Year Cross (1950) was restored by The Faithful in 2017. For years after, the Cross was surrounded by elements familiar on any building site: a disintegrating bag of builder's sand, several ditto plastic buckets, baulks of timberr and containers for water. When four of us arrived, with trash-bags, at the summit, we found that The Faithful had been, sometime over the last tuthree years, to tidy up the job. We turned away, not too disappointed, intending to cut Sitka on the way downhill to meet the rest of Team Clean as they worked their slash-hooks up and away from the road. 

But 40m from the Cross I stumbled over two fence-posts and a raffle of rebar, electrical-wire and chain-link fence. The only thing for it was to pick it all up and de-Calvary (I was still clearly in ✞ mode) it to the waiting 4x4s. I did not break a leg or sustain significant damage on this potentially dangerous, un-stewarded handicapped cross-county yomp but I didn't pause to cut Sitka either.

The following Saturday, I went back up the hill on me ownio to make a final 🪓Sitka🪓pass. I'd rather hug trees than fell them but there is a place for selective management; like when Kiwi Sean came through our micro-forest in 2022 for some judicious thinning. I delighted to see several [native to Ireland] mountain ash Sorbus aucuparia and even some willow Salix spp getting their heads up through the heather. That's a consequence of running a limited number of sheep on the hill . . . and keeping Bob the Axe on a tight leash.

Post title references: Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius. From the chilling instructions by Papal Legate Arnaud Amaury at the massacre of Béziers 22 July 1209.

Dog watch

After lurking for many years, and finding loadsa blob-fodder, I finally subbed up with Metafilter in 2020 and started to make some contributions on the site. MeFi has its own conventions and dynamic but leans old, white, left and US. And every MeFite seems to have a high-maintenance dog or a cat at home: so many questions about how to treat the persistent smell of pet-vomit on bed-clothes! I dunno, I don't come straight to bed in my wellies after working in a shit-strewn field. But loads of people seem to give [their] dog's feet a "clean pass" between outdoors and on the sofa. There was a post recently, framed thus  The Mountain Dogs follows two beloved golden retrievers, Sampson and Baylor, as they climb to the summit of the Pinnacle Trail in Stowe, Vermont each day without their owners. It attracted a couple of dozen comments, all but one of them approving the freedom accorded to these dogs and their owners.

Before that nay-say, I'd drafted my own counter-blast to free-roaming dogs in public spaces . . . but then deleted it and moved on. It seemed a bit gratuitous to rain on the parade of dewy-eyed cynophilia just because I've had a few adverse experiences with uncontrolled dogs. But The Blob? - that's a different matter; this is my parade. So I'll share here my unposted MeFi comment:

Another county heard from?  My son and I spent part of the afternoon of Christmas Eve 2003 burying what was left of my father-in-law's [LR] pet goat [LL] which had been savaged to death by two dogs from across the road.  The owners of those dogs presumably believed that their dogs would never do anything like that. We own about 300m of a lane, and the fields on either side, which goes up past our home to a extensive area of upland commonage which we are delighted to share with walkers, ramblers, bird-watchers. We also own sheep; it unsettles them to smell strange dogs and they definitely don't like playing chase with any dogs. In Ireland there is a dog attack on livestock on average every day. So I ask people with loose dogs on my property to please keep them on a leash. About a third of the time I am invited to fuck off.

The what was left of phrase is indicative of the the mess The Boy and I faced when we pulled away the tarpaulin which Pat had dragged over his caprine pal. We never found the fourth leg, for example. On the way home from our grisly task, we speculated that we could identify the culprits by finding that missing tibia outside the back-door of one of the neighbour's homes. Of course, Pat didn't make a report, let alone a complaint, because thet wouldn't be neighbourly.

And let me add that, although we didn't have mammalian house-pets when I was growing up, I am not anti-dog. I offer a picture of Rashers-the-dog on our front stoop in May 2009 - 3½ years before she fell ill and was killed at home by the vet. <snif!>

Grab your bags - it's Sunday

Misc stuff:

• BBC More or Less asks about numbers . . . of Irish Pubs [whc prev]
• Shagsper's b'day 
• Dialectical Scotch.
• How's your Switzerdeutsch? Ladder making in Sattel, CH
• Felled trees bring brook trout Salvelinus fontinalis
• Making a rabbit deterrent catapult.
• USA: CO vs WY
• Dogs on leash near sheep FFS please [cw: dead lamb]
• Blob's been there before [cw: ill manners]
  
• Deer getting a hair-cut
• I'll never complain about our blackbird again 
  
• UK readers: Sainsbury is likely ripping you off
  

WOFFAL!

For months and months, I've had a book lurk unread in my Borrowbox reading list. Finally, a week ago, I brought 21st Century Yokel [2017] by Tom "never 'eard of 'im" Cox into play and it was a treat. He was born in the same year as Caitlin Moran [prev] and had a similar early career trajectory: working-class kid from Up North with a good ear and zeitgeist taste gets job as mainstream music journalist in London. They've branched out on different paths since then, but are both still writing and still lol funny. Tom Cox has a good dozen books out and about.

Cox [as R on a Devon cliff] found the pace and prices of late 20thC London a bit much and went upstakes to the country, first in Norfolk and then to Devon. He reflects in one chapter about the richness and variety of landscape to be found in such a small island as "Great" Britain. It ranks 9th after Honshu, ahead of Ellesmere. The coast of Devon and Cornwall is all cliffs, storms and sandy bays [much like Costa na Déise] while East Anglia is is a pancake haunted by fogs, and getting eaten away through erosion [bloboprev].

Cox embraces the fractal nature of landscape, asserting that there is a life-times interest and engagement to be had in the square mile surrounding his home outside Totnes. Indeed any square-mile, if you live nearby and pay attention. It's like Louis Agassiz spending the Summer vacation working his way across his back yard. We don't need to go to Bali or Iguazu for The Amazing: head to the nearest hedgerow be small.

The interface between domestic and wild in Cox's world is his cats. He's written a tuthree whole books about them. One chapter of Yokel tells how one of his cats was savaged by an off-leash dog and needed two operations and days of veterinary care to survive. The [enormous] vet bills were mostly covered through a crowd-funder organised by his fan-base. "wollen sie ewig leben?", it's not for me to judge how folks spend their own money.

21stC Yokel was published by Unbound, a cunning publishing venture which laid off the risk by crowd-funding the books they accepted for publication. It worked extremely well for Cox, who had a) track record b) loyal and extensive fan base. And his next handful of books were published by the same venture. For other authors, not so much. Unbound went into administration in 2025, 14 years after launch, owing royalties to multiple dependent authors. One of the directors John "QI" Mitchinson [whom prev] acquired the assets of the bankruptcy to create Boundless. "Author Tom Cox, whose latest book Everything Will Swallow You was due to come out this Thursday, became suspicious after months of not having received payments he was owed." That's the thing with bankruptcy, incompetent or unlucky entrepreneurs get to cut their losses and walk away to start new ventures. Their suppliers, clients, customers just have to suck up the losses - counting themselves fortunate to get pennies in the pound of what they are owed. 

otoh!! Walter Scott's printing business went tits-up in 1825 owing £130,000. Scott undertook to write himself out of his debts and died doing it. But the creditors' investment was returned and we got Woodstock, The Fair Maid of Perth and Castle Dangerous.

Tom Cox has a Dad, Mick (not Michael) Cox whose antics make an excellent foil for some of the book's humor. His catch-phrase is “WATCH OUT FOR FUCKWITS AND LOONIES!" [WOFFAL] while his aphorisms, and peculiar certainties, are always delivered SHOUTING. Apparently, this ALL CAPS conceit was first used by John "Garp" Irving in A Prayer for Owen Meany [1989], which is the favorite book of Cox Sr. John Irving was making a lot of waves when we was living in New England in the early 1980s but I never got further than The World According to Garp [1978]. Owen Meany sounds like a rec to me and I've reserved a copy at the Library.