Diaper doo, nappy two

I started riffing on diapers, intending to write everything I knew, but I was caught short and launched a partial product prematurely. But nappies have been in the statistical news. In July 2023, More or Less looked closely [9min] at the assertion that more adult diapers are sold in Japan than those for babies. Because this chimes with a narrative about the aging population, and shy-breeding among 20- and 30-somethings, in that country, this 'fact' has been widely propagated.

Japanese diaper production (incl exports, hoarding etc.)

Year	Baby	Adult
2018	1.60bn	0.16bn
2022	0.70bn	0.17bn

So that gives some ball-park numbers to suggest that incontinent Japanese weans are holding their own against ditto elders in a ratio of about 1 : 10. But Dr Landfill wants to factor in that baby diapers weigh [dry!!] ~18g while adult ditto come in at ~90g or 1 : 5. Nappies can absorb 20x their weight in liquid! Source "A new approach for assessing the absorption of disposable baby diapers and superabsorbent polymers: A comparative study" by Bachra et al. (2020). That's still a hella lot of organics going to landfill where they will fossilize until it becomes economic to mine the tips for aluminium drinks cans..

In June 2023 Sliced Bread [as L with Greg Foot] had a piece [29min] on reusable vs disposable nappies. The conceit of the series is to ask whether such-a-commodity is the best thing since sliced bread = SB or mere marketing bullshit BS. Often the answer is "it's not black-and-white" or "it depends". Having spent 60 years trying to push parents towards disposables, now there is a growing market in re-usable nappies.

Even here, tech has moved in. Back in our day, a nappy was a terrycloth cotton square. Cotton is rather less absorbent than help or bamboo fibre but more so that microfibre. That's a trade-off because the less absorbent materials dry quicker after washing. 

For a comparison baseline you need to know that in the 2.5 year period of birth to potty, the average infant will need 4,500 changes. 

If you're going re-usable, you need to upfront about £100 for a set of cotton diapers + £30 for a nappy-bucket to steep t'buggers until wash-day and a waterproof bag to keep them safe if you are out and about. But you can spend >£400 on well-marketed = marked-up designer nappies. And you've got to factor in the cost of washing a batch of 12-16 nappies every couple of days: at 30p for electric + 20p for metered water +30p for detergent. The all-in-cost for each change of re-usable nappy tops out at 15p a go.

Disposable nappies otoh is all about consumables rather than capital. They start at maybe 5p for an Aldi own-brand newborn size rising to 40p to put a toddler into Pampers. I suppose you should factor in the bin-charges cost of sending the one-use nappies off to landfill, but Sliced Bread didn't bother. Bottom line: re-usable nappies are about half the cost of disposables averaged over that birth-to-potty life-time.

There is a market for "eco" disposables at top-flight designer prices. But the Sliced Bread experts hold these to be a load of green-washing. They are not really better for the planet than other re-usables. The latter half of the podcast has a lot more to say about various measures of greenity and conscience-smiting for those who care about those things. Cripes, though, my memory of those diaper days is that it was work enough dealing with "leakage", Sudocrem, wet-wipes, clothes-lines, weather-watching . . . let alone "tsunamis" and "arm-pit jobs".

A dip in diapers

Turns out that there are twice as many diapers on The Blob as there are nappies. One way of characterising The Blob is "his entire life in 2 millions words or 4,000 anecdotes" because whatever I'm reporting on, I try to come at it from my own experience rather than rechurning links I am delivered by Metafilter. And having raised three (3) childer to continence, I've had to deal with a lot of diapers: on dit que a child will go through 4,000 diaper changes before they stop having accidents and start using the jacks on the reg'lar. 

When I was a nipper, diapers were made of terrycloth cotton towelling. When soiled, the solids made it down the t'ilet, the nappies were dumped in a bucket of dilute bleach until wash-day when they were rinsed, washed and hung out to dry. Sunlight, and a fresh breeze helped sanitize the white cotton squares, so baby rearing was a lot easier in the Summer. Winter or wet-weather added a world of pain to the housework: pain in the arse actually because when washing diapers is so time-consuming the carer was surely tempted to let the baby steep in its own fluid for a little longer. 

Disposable nappies came on the market in 1976 or 77 at the tail end of The Boy's years of incontinence. As we chose to live in and out of a Citroën Dyane for the Summer of 1977, disposable diapers were The Biz! You need a real secure lid for the nappy-bucket. We started the Summer in terry-cloth and then discovered loss-leader new-product-push disposables in Yorkshire: game changer.

To Be Cont.

Sublime [ob]scene

 When we first ever moved into the Blackstairs, I was bumbling along in a neighbour's car and we came round a corner to be presented with a most spectacular view of that range of hills dizzying up from the checkerboard of fields and hedges and tapering away to the southern horizon.
"That's a most spectacular view", I said.
"Where?", he said.
"Well, everywhere!".
I don't think he understood what The Blethering Incomer  - TBI - was going on about. Nevertheless, it still is spectacular in its own understated not-the-Andes way.

Surely it's worth preserving a view so affecting? And doing so at all scales in the fractal landscape. Not only thinking hard about the costs as well at the utility of wind-turbines and electricity pylons but also paying attention to the details of what is perched in the hedgerows:
Dunnocks Prunella modularis [✓]
Sandwich wrappers Slobbo vulgaris [χ]

The weekend of 22nd Feb 2025 was designated the ~20th memorial An Taisce Trash Pick. We've been doing this every Spring, with some of the neighbours, since our kids were tall enough to not fit in a trash bag. We established a territory along the 1km stretch of the [60km/h!] local road between "The Monument" and "The Wall" - both sides. Because both sides, it's nicer and more efficient to walk the walk with some else. Saturday was gorgeous: sun-shiny, crisp, fresh. t.b.h the road margins were quite clean and the secluded car-park at The Monument surprisingly clean. Maybe Broken Windows Theory is working? 

I find it's easier to do the work without getting judgemental, let alone going mental, about it. When we finished, I sent an ironic comment to our local participants
"Best in show?? One flimsy brimful bag of used nappies".
Someone else responded with a suggestion about what punishment shd be meted out on the nappy perps [parents, I guess, not the incontinent infant]. But I demur: Once upon a time, the local authority collected everyone's trash as a public good. Then some bright spark decided that the process would be more efficient if put out to tender and Private Enterprises could compete to get the best value for the community. Competition worked well for making paperclips so cheap you could throw them away. The effect has been to have 3 competing trash collections running on the same streets in Tramore where one did the job before. And left all kinds of marginalised folk deciding that they couldn't afford both nappies and €600/yr to dispose of them.

As well as paying for the dump fees, An Taisce provides a stipend for tea and cookies in the village hall. I guess so we can all get together and congratulate ourselves for not being the kind of person who would fire a Lucozade bottle out of a car-window. After tea and chat, we went round the back of the hall to photo-op The Heap:

In case you're concerned, I c a r e f u l l y transferred 'my' nappies into a fit-for-purpose robust black bin bag, whc I have ◎ed. I turned my back on the trash, and there was the view which Michael Way thought made it worth the 50km trip from Wexford to teach drama to kids in the lee of Mt Leinster:

You cannot meaningfully have the spectacular view without cleaning up the foreground.

Binning the gays

Last week was R&G week at The Institute [prev] and widely across the country. It used to be called Rag Week when [medical] students would take a week off from learning the names of bone nodules and spill out on the streets for a bit of a jape joust [R]. Because they were students, some of them would get hammered and forget that they were meant to be raising money for cancer research. Over time the student body seemed to forget the charitable heart of the events and concentrate on the get hammered. I suppose rebranding it as Raise & Give week hopes to redress the imbalance. Good luck with that! But the consequence was that there were very few regular classes and several extra-curricular happenings. Truth to tell, everyone probably learns more, as well as having a better time, when the Syllabus and the Learning Outcomes are off-stage.

Fr'instance, I got to attend a two hour session on the ABCs of LGBTQ+ run by a registered charity called ShoutOut - it's tiny: two salaries and a handful of volunteers with a board of directors in the background.  It's kind of woeful that, with a student body the size of  Nenagh or Gorey, and two Equality salaries, and Athena Swan certification, The Institute needs to buy in expertise from outside. Then again, ShoutOut does this all the time and have their patter sorted and are therefore more experienced. To be fair I did attend a useful and interesting Internal workshop on Pronouns 18 months ago. That was also kind of woeful in that only six [6!] people turned up including both the Equality Officers. As I said then, LGBTQ+ ain't going to make like Levis and fade away; so it is worth investing in getting the facts and attitudes correct.

So what did I learn?

• That you really should go to one of these workshops (I gave already) 
• Then you'd know the difference between LGB [preference] and T [identity]
• That I hadn't heard of most of the celebrities who were somewhere on the BLT spectrum
• Q.Francis Brennan, who he? A.sexual
• That Malta has by far the most progressive BLT legislation in the EU - while also being super-Catholic and paradoxically patriarchal wrt the status of women
• Queer is now the widely accepted inclusive umbrella term for BLT
• Gay is used for /by women (as is 'lads')
• Bisexuals are, evidence-based and objectively, more troubled mentally but are proportionately under-serviced by the state. The Man has got as far as accepting and resourcing G & L but is blanking other sections of the BLT community as, currently, a bridge too far. The sands are shifting, Gramps, and bisexuals will get more fair dues as you drop judgemental and try compassionate.
• We were invited to list our senses of identity; as a prelude to talking about Gender Identity
• I R European, evolutionary biologist, anglophone
• BLTs tend to identify as BLT . . . rather than Irish, Liverpool, dancer, driver or dog-lover
• Many people identify as '[grand]parent'. No adults identify as 'child' even if they are primary carer of elders
• Gender Identity is about your internal clock
• Gender Expression is about external appearance / how you are judged / viewed
• Sex at birth defines the pronouns and is the first question asked about a new-born
• AMAB - assigned male at birth is currently the best option especially if you identify as Male and look the part
• Significant discordance among {assigned, identity and expression} spells a world of trouble ahead
• Trans[gender] = 1% are those who experience this discord. Cisgender is the 99% rest of us.
• BLT - sexual preference is a different, independent, axis to how you are/feel about yourself
• People start to identify as their [assigned?] gender more or less when they get out of nappies - aged 3-4. No pants gives a chance to compare notes and start the process of appropriate social assimilation to whatever are the local norms.
• It is vanishingly unlikely that Trans kids start the same journey at the same time. It is therefore invidious to treat the coming out of Trans folk (as teens or twentisomethings, say)  as an event that just happened in a rush. Let alone that it is a [fashion] choice and so flippable backable.
• In the maternity hospitals of Ireland there are just two boxes M [__] and F [__]
• 98.3% of neonates fit obviously and easily into one or other box - it just takes a peek down there. Or a karyotype can be quickly done to count the XX XY chromosomes
• But 17 per 1,000 live births are intersex: there is some discrepancy in the arrangement of the external genitalia or other sex-defining characteristics - clitoromegaly, cryptorchidism, Kleinfelters XXY [list with N = 35 variations]
• How come you/I don't know anyone who is intersex?
• Because it is routine to carry out routine cosmetic genital surgery before the child leaves the maternity hospital. Usually The Man does trim and tuck to make a hole, because a pole is more work.
• Because it is routine to carry out routine cosmetic genital surgery before the child leaves the maternity hospital WTF! We're not talking circumcision here. Ditto to polydactyly.

. . . I am too shocked to continue. But last night I dreamt about CGS, so I clearly need to further process what I heard Tuesday

Tramp tramp tramp

Today 18 May 2024 was the Saturday picked for The Blackstairs Challenge, an up hill and down dale yomp that has been an annual fixture at Castle Blob since our long-flown daughters were tots. They missed a few pandemic years, despite hill-walking being the least covidy social activity known to epidemiologists. Just like last year, I set out my stall, about ⅓ of the way along the 33 km route.

I set up Bobby Buoy Boy to make sure that nobody took too many flapjacks.

There are stewards at The Off between 07:30 and 08:30 and the challengeers have to be through the checkpoint at the bottom of our valley by 13:00. We usually expect people therefore between ~09:30 and ~12:30 . . . and it was so: the first pair trotted past the gate at 09:23 in full metal lycra. Such people have no time for water and it wasn't until an hour later that the first dehydratees pulled into the yard to fill water-bottles . . . and sample the flapjacks: of which there were ~3 kg.  I think Wayfarers limit participants to 300, so not everyone gets a flapjack. 

It started off overcast with the peaks lost in cloud and reports were that the ground was right soggy above us. That's what happens when the gods deliver 9 months of continual rain. There are reports that spuds may be rationed later this year because the weather has been so much agin potatoes. 

One of the ironies was that, having promised water to ~300 strangers, the water pressure went all feeble on us in the last week or so. Then providentially Roy the Plumb rocked up Thursday lunch time, presumably to settle accounts, exactly a month after installing a new submersible pump and hydro-accessories. I almost hugged him and he was quite happy to put in an hour's pro bono to keep a customer happy. Turned out the water filter was all gunked up with bedding-in sediment. All it needed was a nail-brush and a few buckets of cool clear water. Now that I know what the problem is, I can rinse and repeat if symptoms recur.

By 11:30 the sun peeked between the clouds and the day shaped up for being a lot brighter. Not enough to dry out the ground for the walkers, but enough to put a spring in their step. The self-styled Roll Up came down the lane at 12:30 and that was it for another year.  Income: €5.60 [half the take for last year], one water-bottle with a 15c deposit, a half-used tube of lip balm. Zero tinkle-tissue, so that's a Win.

STOP PRESS: . . . and [14:00] a bottle of whiskey from Wayfarers. This is getting to be a tradition.

Update 15:30: Zero tinkle-tissue, so that's a Win one tinkle tissue, behind a dwarf wall in my yard. FFS: is there anything else I can do for these people? wash out their garbage bin? change their infant's nappies? Next year there will be signage to our compost heap, then I won't need to clean up after "adults".

Christmas Spirit

Jaysus, it's that time of year again, when we used to celebrate the Birth of Our Lord and now we pay tribute to St. Mammon. I've been invited to four work-related Christmas parties already and have managed to slip out of three of them without causing offense. There is a time in your career when it is A Good Thing to participate in these events. A healthy atmosphere at work hinges almost entirely on the esprit de corps of the workers and this is boosted if everyone gets wasted together once or twice a year. Showing face as a good sport makes it a little less likely that your character will be dismembered behind your back by The Viper. I've suggested before that the faux-jolly aspects of work-place Secret Santa aka Kris Kingle can be ameliorated by cruelty as when a group of Finns presented a scythe to a lonely and socially awkward colleague. Numberphile's Hannah Fry at least has an algorithm for making the SS / KK strictly anonymous.

A while ago in the run-up to Christmas, I was talking to the lady-what-washes-the-bottles when we met on the corridor an hour before classes started. She gets up at 0500hrs every workday morning to get ahead with the day before she wakes her 3 sons an hour later. She's not the sort to fob the chaps off with an energy bar or a bit of toast to set them up for a day's book-l'arning. She's also not the type to go flaithulach at Christmas. Indeed she and her siblings have agreed to throw in €10 for each of the kids [N = 8 at the moment] in the next generation, so that each one can get something substantive rather than a bundle of tat that is no good for child or planet. This year, her youngest threw a bit of spanner in the works. Turns out that one of his Aunties volunteers with the Simon Community in Galway, where they have 17 homeless children among families on their hands this Christmas. As well as bringing them in for a proper Christmas dinner, Simon likes to get each child a token Christmas present, so that they have something to unwrap after dinner. Young Master Plongeur, aged 7-and-three-quarters, asked his Mum if he could give €10 of his Xmas loot to the folks in Galway: "That way one child over there will be sorted". His Mum was surprised and a little proud and said that she'd stump up the cost of sending the cash. Then the little blaggard put the screws on his older brothers to follow his example; so they had €30 in the pot.

But it didn't stop there, because his teacher heard about the scheme and got him to say what he'd done to his class-mates. Even they were impressed. I say even they because the young feller has a bit of a speech impediment and the other chaps would normally only acknowledge his existence when flushing his head down the toilets. At the end of of his spiel, he turned to his teacher and asked her if she'd ask the other members of staff if they'd like to contribute to the fund "It's only a tenner. Miss". The upshot and bottom line is that, through the generous heart and dauntless determination of a small-small chap from Wexford, the Galway chapter of the Simon Community has got the Christmas present angle now fully covered and can put €170 towards nappies, sleeping bags or hot soup. Why am I blinking? . . . it must be dusty in here.

Of course, lots of people are generous to the homeless at Christmas [via tywkiwdbi] via reddit] where there is lots of on-point commentary from the homeless. "Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little" [prev on quote attribution]. And from homeless we may shift to adoption: girl presents adoption papers to her beloved step-father; and girl petitions foster parents for same.

Speed limits will be observed

I was wailing on about the final stages of gestation for Dau.II's to become a competent driver. On Monday last . . . just in time for tea, the key L → N fledging happened after a leisurely cruise around the mean streets of SW Waterford City. She had clocked up the mandatory 12 hours of lessons from a licensed instructor while still living in Cork in 2021. That should be enough to cover a) indicator + mirrors + clutch + handbrake b) getting going on a hill without stalling c) L-hand reverse round suburban corner d) 3-point turn e) general line maintenance e) not dawdling f) not lurching, gear-grinding. Thereafter, as much practice as you can get with parents should be able to smooth the experience out; internalize some of the muscle memory; and learn by not doing what other drivers do. 

In different times and an adjacent country, I had 6 lessons in the Summer after I turned 17, + a final lesson from the same instructor immediately before I took the test in December. In that sense mandating 12 lessons is a bit overkill. I got my Massachusetts licence by showing my UK ditto and sitting a 10 question MCQ with a pass-mark of 7/10; it was easy to clock 100% and I was let out on the roads of North America.

Dau.II was insured to drive The Grape in February 2023 and immediately registered to take her test in Waterford asap. It took 40 weeks to get to the head of the line - hence the gestation metaphor. Having been assigned a date 4 weeks out, she contacted a highly recommended Tramore instructor and booked two hours with him to ascertain how far apart were her skill-set and the test's requirements. Not far, it turned out but only in The Grape! It was back to nappies in his car. But several times we managed the logistics of getting herself from Dublin; The Grape from the Home Place; and Damian in from Tramore . . . all to assemble in Woodie's car-park on the Cork Rd in Waterford. This is clearly The Place to change students in Waterford; there are always a handful of driving school vehicles.

We were all relieved (although not really surprised) that she passed. You cd take a fail on the chin if that didn't put you at the end of a 9 month wait-list. [WTF!]. When she came out smiling and waving her pass cert, I was very happy that taking the protocol seriously and not stinting the car-miles had paid off. We agreed that I'd drive home, while she txtd her news to a longish list of frends'n'relashuns. As we left town, she got her face out of the phone to say "You should be in 5th gear, no?" which she followed up with "I'm a peer now, innit?, I can tell you these things."

Gotta say, that when she was starting to drive, I was known to flinch as she skimmed the bushes coming round a country corner; and to wince when the gears crunched. But gotta say gotta say that I never worried about her going too fast: from the beginning she always notes and obeys the posted speed limits. It's restful and saves money. Other drivers please note.

Some old Compostella feet hands have been known to say When the road finishes, the Camino continues. Dau.II, smug in her pass, said something like 

"Once you've passed the test, the life-long learning begins".

102 Crystals

I'm not sure why I haven't written about David Crystal, Britain's favorite linguist, before this Summer. I've read a number of his books: he wears his erudition lightly but his stuff isn't lightweight. Then in the last couple of weeks, I've compared another book about language to my penultimate Borrowbox audiobook. I pronounced Crystal's The Story of English in 100 Words to be original and best. We've met his son Ben Crystal, actor and producer, using his best Shagespian voice. 

Here [L] they are father & son, appropriately enough in the Globe theatre in London. David was born 6th July 1941, so I hope he gets a big cake and a bit of a knees up to celebrate this weekend. For someone who is even older than me, he seems to be right truly down with the hood, and up to date with the English language as she is spoke. In that sense he is, like Gretchen McCulloch, very much a descriptivist, celebrating how people actually express themselves, rather than a proscriptivist, nit-picking and tsking about how the young of today should be speaking.

As he acknowledges in the preface, he wouldn't be the first to adopt the trope of 100 Xs to summarise Y; and in doing so he has been as idiosyncratic as a publisher and his agent will allow an old chap rich in experience with the uses of English. With some rhetorical flourish, the First Word /100 "roe"  is chosen because it is arguably the first word in English where the artifact on which it was written has survived to the present day. That artifact is an astragalus from a roe deer [pic L] found in a cremation urn at the post-Roman settlement of Venta Icenorum near Norwich. The other bones in the urn were identified as coming from sheep. Someone thought it would be helpful to carve the runes for raïhan = "of the roe". Perhaps the urn contains the remains of a chap called Raï, and this was an ironic reminder of how he got his name.

The Last Word in Crystal's book is "Twittersphere" which, given that Twitter was still in nappies when the book was being written [published 2011], is as up-to-date as can be. He has chosen 98 other words to cover the span of the language over the 1,560 years between the two coinages:

• 5. out 
• 10. What! - as in what ho! rather than the interrogative what? 
• Hwæt. we Gâr-Dena in geâr-dagum 
• þeod-cyninga þrym gefrãnon
• Beowulf
• 15. arse - because we're Eurses rather than USAsses
• 20. skirt - not [quite] the same as shirt
• 25. wicked  - whose meaning changed from bad to good
• 30. royal  - a triple with regal and kingly
• 35. gaggle - collective noun
• 40. de[b]t - Latinized by acquiring the rogue b [debitum]
• 45. skunk - one of several words borrowed from folk displaced by colonists
• 50. billion = 10^9 or 10^12 ?
• 55. polite
• 60. species - naming of parts in the natural world adds a lot of words to the dictionary
• 65. lunch . . . or dinner? lunch-money for the dinner-lady
• 70. schmooze - via la yiddish
• 75. DNA - is a very short 'word' for a very long molecule
• 80. Watergate - and all the subsequent other -gates 
• 85. Alzheimer's - is an eponym
• 90. bagonize - the anxiety to which we are prey while waiting at the luggage carousel
• 95. jazz - named as the word of the [20th] century
• 99. unfriend - the 2009 word of the year.

There you have it, one man's choice. Your wordage will vary, but at least this list is coherent. Another bonus is that the book is read by author. And that author is sensitive to the medium being the message, so he's compensated for what doesn't translate well from the page and used the sound-track in ways that are impossible on paper - win-win!
hh

Found Soup

About 35 years ago, as a reasonably young scientist and ridiculously young father, I was invited to give a paper at a conference in Sicily. It seemed like a good idea at the time to set off for the event in a tiny sky-blue Citroen Dyane . . . with my partner and our infant son . . . and her brother and his guitar . . . and a tent and a bucket for nappies. The Citroen was a real work-horse, the last production-line car that came with a crank-handle to start it if the battery was flat. It also had a roof made of rubberised canvas that could be rolled back to make the world’s least sexy convertible. This clearly advantageous attribute for travelling through France and Italy in the height of summer was somewhat off-set when it was slashed by vandals two days before we left Dublin. But, nothing daunted, we made a temporary repair by sewing up the slashes and sticking a roll of Fablon self-adhesive plastic on top with the intention of buying a second-hand roof from a breakers yard somewhere in France. We had neither time nor money to get a new replacement. As it happened, we never fixed the roof, as our gimcrack solution worked fine in all but the most torrential downpours and we had a bucket to catch the drips.

 Money was tight so we worked out that the cheapest way to get to Calais was to catch the Larne to Stranraer ferry even though that required a drive of 200 km in the wrong direction. Clearly we were time-rich if cash-poor. We stopped in London to visit the Italian State Tourist Board to pick up some maps and found that they had just started a cunning plan to encourage motorists to visit their country. You could obtain heavily subsidised petrol vouchers if you bought them with a currency other than Lire in a place other than Italy and they would redeem unused vouchers less a 30% handling fee when you returned home. The back of an envelope was quickly mobilised and we bought just enough vouchers to take us the length of Italy and back.

 France was great but Italy was marvellous: it was hot and the air smelt of pine-trees; we swam in the luke-warm sea; bread and olives cost half nothing, the cheese wasn’t red (or indeed white) cheddar and the wine was red (or indeed white) and plentiful. The conference went well and so, mission accomplished, we headed north and for home.

Now here’s a funny thing; the nearer we got to the border the more anxious the people at petrol stations were to talk to us although, for all we understood, they might have been discussing Wittgenstein or the World Cup. We stopped several times so as to maximise the amount of cheap Italian petrol we had on board when we hit France and had to start paying ready money for it. At the end of a long day, it was nearly dark, the border was in sight, and high in that alpine pass was the Last Chance Café and Garage. We hadn’t eaten properly since breakfast having long since spent the last of our Lire but we were still in credit for petrol. When she saw the plates on the car, the lady who operated the pump addressed us in English because she’d once been a Welsh girl from Pontypridd who had married the chip-shop and followed him home to Piedmont. She shed light on the earnest but opaque conversations that we’d induced in her competitors back down the road because she offered to buy, for cash, any spare petrol vouchers we might have, as she could turn a modest profit on them through the State Tourist Board. She also suggested that we might like to walk up to the café and spend some of that cash because, late as it was, she had a tureen of minestrone made hot and thick according to her mother-in-law’s recipe, and if the child didn’t fancy that then she’d sort out something else for him.

 Found money is all very well but found soup trumps it in spades. As you hear, I’m still talking about that soup more than half a lifetime later.

NotSundayMisc 8

Loscoe 30 years ago

I don't think anyone would put Loscoe forward as the prettiest village in England. When coal measures were discovered nearby, the weaving and farming community saw a huge increase in population as miners and the families moved near to the pit-heads where they worked. The last pit closed in 1970 when it was no longer turning a profit for the owners. In addition to the mining a large oval hole in the ground was excavated to service a brick-making facility, but this business was also closed in 1971.  The convenient hole in the ground was licenced for landfill shortly thereafter, initially for inert waste and hard-core but later for 50 tons/day of domestic waste as well. Domestic waste was/is any old shite that householders don't want anymore.  Disposable diapers, for example, appeared in Britain in 1976 just after The Boy was born and we were able to discard the bucket of steeping cloth nappies.  Chicken carcases, vegetable peelings, unfinished plates, old paint tines, plastic, lawn-mowings: if it would fit in the bin it was destined for landfill.  The onlt way this has changed in the last 40 years is that we have increased the amount and diversity of our trash.

The local council knew there was a problem with gas seepage in the mid 1980s as cracklines appeared on the surface associated with dead grass. They also recorded an increase in soil temperature as a) methanogenic bacteria converted solid/soiled organic matter into methane CH₄ and b) methanotrophic bacteria scarfed up the methane and made a living that way. Methanogens are present in the rumen of cows and in the digestive system of mammals in general. They allow young men to set fire to their farts.  Methane is a potent greenhouse gas and it is being driven up by cow belches as more and more land is given over to feedlots for McDonalds; but bovine contributions are in the ha'oenny place compared to termite farts as they digest wood in what remains of tropical rain-forests. Despite the landfill, its smells and flies, the county council allowed more houses to be built around the site in the 1970s.

Late March 1986 saw a depression over the Peak District, the atmospheric pressure dropped precipitously 29 hPa over the night of 23/24th March. This effectively sucked residual methane, and other gases, from the depths of the landfill.  This gas took the line of least resistance migrating through fissures in the rock, old mining adits and any pipes it encountered. 51 Clark Avenue was, unbeknown to its inhabitants, sitting on a pool of methane which the freak weather drew up into the house until it was ignited by the pilot light of the central heating system.  Nobody died but the house was reduced to chips and the people were seriously injured in the explosion. Since then, efforts have been made to vent landfill and on modern sites you often see little chimneys burning with a blue flame. Occasionally, the methane is collected and converted into natural gas for industrial re-use but usually this is deemed to be not economic. In Loscoe's case, the microbes are generating about 50 cu.m of methane per hour but this is mixed with carbon dioxide and other gases, such a mix needs further processing before it is useful so it is flared off into the stratosphere. Despite lots of new legislation, it was 2011 before the first successful prosecution for negligence in gas management at a landfill site.

Where there's muck, there's brass

Have I told you about fatbergs? I have, begodde! We were down for lunch on the Wexford Coast on Sunday and very nice it was too. It was sharp and sunny outside with the Kerragh Islands on the horizon black beyond a greeny sea. I was glad we could sit beside a roaring log-fire rather than garnering virtue [and yet more plastic buoys, rope and fish-boxes that I really have a use for] with a walk along the beach. As householders myne hoste and I were comparing notes about storm damage and house-keeping. It seems that a few months ago, their foul-water pipe backed-up from a sclerotic clot of congealed fat. They hadn't been as obsessively careful as us about washing greasy plates and pans in the kitchen sink and the residue had come back to bite them. For a variety of reasons, he elected to clear the pipe chemically rather than mechanically and dumped a load of hot sodium hydroxide / caustic soda / lye / NaOH down the kitchen sink and left the room. It was okay in this sense - that the water started to flow again. But he hasn't done a colonoscopy yet to estimate when he should buy the next packet of NaOH. Basically what's happening down there is that the Na⁺ and the fat are making soap which, as you know is water soluble. If you could get a really good marketing team in place, you could do this on an industrial scale with matter from fta-clogged pipes and sell the soap under a brand-name like Flush!. Well it's a better name than Enema - the soap that cleans the darkest places.

The after-lunch chat shifted slightly from cleaning out fatbergs to monetizing them - but not as soap but rather as bio-diesel. Argent Energy from the English Midlands is actively scavenging fat-bergs, and heating them in a huge vat - remember that these slug-like tangles can weigh in at 10 tonnes or more. The wet-wipes, sanitary towels, hair, dental-floss and nappies (who would throw a diaper down the t'ilet? What were they thinking?) all sink to the bottom or float to the top and the now liquid grease can be run out of a spigot at the base of the vat. Like pressing olives, you could have first run extra virgin diesel and them squeeeeze the mass until it yields the last drop of discoloured goop.  When the hot liquid cools, I'm guessing that like chicken stock, the fat floats to the top and the water-soluble proteinaceous soup sinks. I was making soupe aux choux over the weekend, for example, and the liquid cooked out from the belly of pork cooled into a rich brown gelatinous stock covered by a layer of pure pork fat.

The Argent plant in Ellesmere Port near Liverpool can recover 25%-40% by weight of oil from fatberg and has a production capacity of nearly 100,000 tonnes of the good stuff each year. Previous to their enterprise, fatbergs were a hazardous, noxious waste product that was burned or land-filled. Now it's getting a second lease of life in a repurposed form before it goes up to make carbon footprint in the sky.  Argent has a regular order of 30 tonnes a week from one [large] sewage treatment plant in Birmingham. There are 9,000 such places in Britain.  I hope it works out for all parties.

Generations

I didn’t meet my grand-daughter until she was fully ten weeks old.  Her parents live in a different country and it took a while for them to decide what colour passport would go best with her bootees.  But eventually this Mohammad  came to our mountain and we gazed with a certain silent astonishment at each other.  But there’s no point in making strange with strangers, you just have to wade in and introduce yourself, bring them into the warmth and make them feel comfortable.  That’s good manners and that’s foundation of all amicable relationships.

Grand-mothers of my acquaintance, both actual and anticipatory, seem to be wholly engaged with both the idea and the reality of their station but us Seanathreacha play harder to get.  Plain incredulity and bemusement about the situation plays a part in this but it’s also driven by the cultural norms whereby Irish men, even new men, don’t really do child rearing.  Of course they change nappies now, pour cereal for the breakfast, and stay at home all evening while Herself goes out to her reading circle.  But they never really step fully into the responsibilities of managing self, household and dependent children sustainably and all at once.  They make the excuse that, as men, they are not equipped for multi-tasking.  Looking after a couple of children for a few hours is apparently so all-consuming, that matching the odd socks, washing the dishes, clearing the bedroom floor of lego and feeding the dog have to be put on hold.

But being  a grandfather makes allowance for this pathetic blokey inadequacy.  You’re no longer expected carry out the heavy-lifting of child-rearing: you get all golden moments and leave the awkward, sordid and difficult to the child’s parents.  That’s what I’m hoping for anyway.  And we of the previous generation have a duty to provide an alternative view of what’s normal, permissible or desirable.  It’s roughly true that recession and boom flop back and forth in time with the generations.  So my parents, growing up in the hungry 30s, inculcated in me a recognition of the value of thrift and education.  The young parents of today (Hrumph!) never knew that sort of deprivation so can’t grasp why virtue should accrue to a clean plate and think nothing of spending as much on lunch as I got for my first weekly pay-packet.

But here’s the extraordinary thing: when The Child was a couple of months old, my boy took the family’s latest addition to visit his own great-grandmother.  This redoubtable old lady powered through the 100 year ribbon a couple of weeks before the meeting: blind for the last ten years and a little drifty at times – especially after a small Friday glass of Bailey’s – but still clearly with us.  A hundred years ago, the world was a much simpler and less technological place, where much of what we now take for granted was only admissible in science fiction. Folks a hundred years from now will look back on our nifty technology as crude and makeshift.  But in all things that matter - courage, being funny, intolerance, kindness, and deceit – we will be recognisably the same. So youngsters need way-marks on their journey and with five generations simultaneously on the planet there’s lots of possible role models and alternative viewpoints as my grand-daughter sets out on her pilgrimage of grace.

 Each generation believes they are creating something anew but each is reacting to the mistakes of their parents.  This see-saw effect tends to put alternate generations on the same side of the play-ground.  So there’s hope that we’ll be good friends: I’ll push her pram for the next few years and she’ll push my bath-chair later on, and whoever is pushing we’ll be roaring with laughter at the same jokes.

NotSundayMisc V

Family life

A recent RTE book club drive was pushing Séamas O'Reilly's memoir Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? to the front again - it was first published in 2021. NPR reviews. I was surprised to find that the ratio of copies : reserves was favorable (214 : 42) on the Irish Library system and so ordered up a dead tree copy for myself. The book was favorably reviewed by the Guardian when it came out - as it should: O'Reilly is a regular columnist for The Sunday Guardian Observer. I hope sales get a boost, but with so many copies in libraries across the country that may not happen. 

As young Séamas was not quite 6 y.o. when the event of the title unfolded, he recognises that his trauma was less legs-from-under-him than for his older siblings, let alone his widowed father. So it's okay to play it for larfs against the back-ground of grief. Then again, whatever the hierarchy of grief, there were several months as a pre-teen that he was reduced to a barely functioning wreck by anxiety and insomnia. That was (miraculously) driven into a corner by an impromptu session of lively lovely Mammy related anecdotes visited upon the tween child by three of her friends who heard he was in the same hospital as they were.

Siblings? Well, yes, there were eleven (11) all told: the youngest barely out of nappies, the oldest almost old enough to vote, when Mrs O'Reilly died from metastatic breast cancer in 1992. They behaved a herd but each had their own stand-out individuality. "This could also have been a contributor to the frequent, horrible bouts of car-sickness which beset several of us, most especially Fionnuala and Dearbhaile, both so inclined to vomiting on road-trips that travelling with them was as precarious as cycling through a mine-field carrying a large, open vat of parmesan soup in your lap". My original post title was Normal Family Life but this paragraph only includes 2/3 (Mammy died; N = 11) of the data dissing 'Normal'. The other abnormal aspect of O'Reilly life in the 80s and 90s is that a small length of The Border [between RoI and NI] was their garden fence a few miles South of Derry.

They lived a short distance down a bohereen from the 'main' road from Derry to Lifford and Ballybofey. One fine day the customs post next door was blown up and chunks of the debris rained down in their back garden. Normalizing The Troubles is only really addressed in the penultimate chapter of the book. This is how it goes: Chapter 12 Notable Explosions, 1988 - 2005. After Daddy had his leg cut off . . . 

That's an example of dark Nordie humour. A few pages later it is revealed that Daddy was a late-diagnosed diabetic who peripheral circulation was fritzed by the disease. Daddy's leg was amputated to get ahead of the gangrene rather than, as implied, to tidy things up after his foot had been blown off in a terrorist outrage. Much hilarity was generated for the O'Reilly children when well-meaning visitors put their foot in it with an unfortunate turn of phrase. This memoir is littered with authentic voice turns of phrase which may be clichés in Derry but had me laughing out loud. You may do likewise. If you can't get the book, then I guess that authentic voice can be found in his journalism.

A brief cw: Mammy and Daddy O'Reilly were committed Catholics, not only regular Mass-goers but also fulfilling several key roles in the Catholic community. Mr O'Reilly collects priests like my friend Viv collects lesbians. He knows more priests, in Derry, Ireland and Wolrdwide, than I know, like, scientists. Several of these men have walk on parts in this memoir always doing good; although one is outed as an O'Reilly house-breaker [in a predictably play-it-for-larfs way]. But of the scandals and cover-ups which shook the church to its foundations over the last 25 years - not a word. That's fine; plenty pages on that elsewhere. 

Like, fr'inst, A Guest at the Feast by Colm Tóibín review which I returned to Borrowbox a fortnight ago. This is a collection of his published essays including his splendiferous LRB exposé of Rome Among the Flutterers: A few years later, on Easter Sunday, as I wandered around the inside of St Peter’s in Rome after Mass, I noticed vast numbers of bishops and cardinals, all in their regalia. Since the sun was shining, some of them had the most beautiful seminarians or young priests standing behind them holding yellow umbrellas over their heads. It was a sight for sore eyes.

A haaandbag?

We were over in England visiting family including my favourite 22 y.o strong woman Dau.I. Somehow, we fell to talking about handbags . . . as you do when getting in touch with your feminine side. I was going on about the over-specification of stuff, so that The Man could sell you two items where one generic item would do for two related purposes. My rucksack, older than Dau.I, has a main section, 33lt in extent with two side-pockets which can each take a 1 litre water-bottle, there are other parts but it is not really much more complicated than that.  15 years after I bought that, I announced my intention of going on my long walk through Spain.  My work-mates clubbed together to buy me a, then modern, ruck-sack that was a labyrinth of zips and Velcro and about 17 separate compartments. It was about as handy as Rowan Atkinson's multiple-zipped trousers.  It weighed 2x more than my old pack and so, in the final packing I took the lighter, older model.

ANNyway, Dau.I was talking about a pal of hers who, having acquired a baby, had bought a hospital/nappy/diaper bag which was full of dinky sections and compartments: for the nappies, the wipes, a spare Babygro, probably disposable gloves, a baby's juice bottle, mother's 15ml slug of gin etc. etc. She said that the most obviously handy thing was that the bag came with a tiny changing mat. Not as a changing mat, because it was really too tiny; but it was really suitable for sitting down on a wet seat while waiting for a bus. The upshot was that she went off to Amazon to see whether there was a hospital/nappy/diaper bag that would do for carrying six novels, a writer's notebook and the other hape-o-stuff that she lugs about on a daily basis.  You can imagine the outcome: for the next several weeks her interweb experience was seen through a gale of advertisements for gripe-water, baby-buggies, mobiles, pop-up books and all the paraphernalia that modern babies require/acquire. I had a similar experience last year with a ludicrous red toaster, which haunted my interweb for about a month.

Years ago, I was privileged to teach courses in molecular evolution and bioinformatics in Norway and Finland.  It was under the auspices of EMBnet, the European quango of which I was the Irish node.  The latest EMBnet wheeze was to print several hundred neoprene mouse-mats with a map of Europe and the EMBnet logo.  My Finnish minder asserted that these were really handy in Finland for sitting at bus-stops without freezing your arse off.  All very well for you, slim-hips, I thought, a sofa-pilot like me would need four mouse-mats and some duct-tape to hold them together. I really enjoyed teaching in Finland, the students had a very dark sense of humour that would often crack me up.

Talking about dark sense of humour, The Beloved was ear-wigging on our earlier conversation about nappy-bags and contingent advertisements. She suggested that the only way to get Amazon off your back was to look for books like "Grieving through miscarriage".  See how the Amazon algorithm deals with that!

Jocelyn Bell Burnell turns 70

Continuing an occasional series on inspirations (Lynn Margulis, Barbara McClintock) for young wimmin in science, let's celebrate Jocelyn Bell Burnell's 70th birthday which falls today.  JBB is perhaps the most widely discussed case of not getting a Nobel Prize which she could/should have shared with her supervisor Tony Hewish and his boss Martin Ryle for the discovery of pulsars. The wags dubbed 1974's the No-Bell Prize in Physics for "pioneering research in radio astrophysics".

JBB was definitely a pioneer in the sense of a military engineer because the early part of of her PhD programme with Hewish required her to help whack hundreds of wooden posts into a 4 acre field outside Cambridge, then string wires from these posts so that they became the Interplanetary Scintillation Array which Hewish had dreamed up and secured funding for as a way to measure high-frequency fluctuations of radio sources - aka quasars - Out There.  Swinging a sledge-hammer was only the start of JBB's contribution to the project.  She was also required to scrutinize and analyse a hundred feet of computer printout generated each day. 

One day, she noticed a quarter-inch "bit of scruff" on the printout and thought it was interesting enough to tell Hewish about.  He said the scruff must be man-made and told her to ignore it and please stay focussed on her project. He was certainly focussed on the project: he had a hypothesis, he'd asked a cash-strapped British government for a mort o' money and he was using it to get the data to test that hypothesis.  There were deadlines to meet, a thesis to write and this was no time for side-lines.  But JBB just couldn't leave the bit of scruff, it was nagging at her,  so she went back to the printouts after hours when Hewish had gone home, and got out her ruler and saw that the scruff appeared regularly with a frequency of just under one blip per second.

What she had discovered was the first known pulsar, which later turned out to be a neutron star:  a dense gravitationally collapsed once-upon-a-star that crams the mass of our sun into an incredibly fast revolving sphere 10-20km across, emitting strong electromagnetic pulses as it turns.

In the summer before she came to Cambridge, JBB had held a Summer internship at the Jodrell Bank radio telescope near Manchester.  There, she had been required to do a lot of arithmetic because the main-frame computer in Manchester was always fritzing out or being used for other work. So she'd built up her math-muscle then as she built her red-meat muscle with the post driving. Soon enough, because she worked very hard and was diligent and mathematically competent, she discovered the second, third and fourth pulsars, and was able to convince Hewish that what she had discovered was much more interesting than what Hewish had been looking for.  It took them a lot more time to establish that these pulsing scruffs were genuinely Out There and not rogue signals from Pirate Radio, traversing earth-orbit satellites or sparks from an arc-welder down the road.  One of the top Soviet astronomers later sought her out at a meeting of the International Astronomical Union to say: "Miss Bell, you have made the greatest astronomical discovery of the twentieth century."

That was 1967, Miss Bell got married the next year and spent the next 20 years trudging round Britain as her husband was posted to one civil service job after another.  Each time they moved, after she had unpacked the tea-chests, sorted out a school for their son, located the shops and the laundrette then she looked around for a local job in astrophysics, because that's what she did; usually part-time, because that's all that was possible. In 1974, there was the No-Bell prize kerfuffle, which seemed to exercise everyone else a lot more than it did her.  Indeed she was delighted about the Nobel because it was the first recognition by that committee for her field of astronomical physics.

She has not been without honour, indeed without honours, in science. She's been given a string of medals and prizes including the quintessentially British CBE, DBE and FRS.  And she's been awarded 20 honorary degrees including one from Trinity College Dublin in 2008.  She spoke then about the brief intense joy (in the idyllic Arthurian Garde-Joyeuse sense) of knowing something that nobody else in the world knew, after she discovered the second pulsar.  Different part of the sky, different frequency, they couldn't both be a malfunctioning thermostat in the lab next door.  That internal satisfaction and hard-won conviction seems to have been much more important to her than the external trappings of recognition and, indeed, fame.

If she'd been a bloke, would she have had to wait more than 30 years between "the greatest astronomical discovery of the twentieth century" and getting a CBE or joining the Boy's Club as Fellow of the Royal Society?  If she'd been a bloke though, she wouldn't have had to put her career on free-wheel while she changed nappies and put plasters on small knees. Someone with less equanimity and more cynicism might suspect that she'd now become Jocelyn Bell Bandwagon as universities fall over themselves to give her honorary degrees.

The thing that far too few people acknowledge about JBB is her 30 year association with the (wonderful, empowering, facilitator of heroes) Open University: first as a tutor because she could do that while working part-time from home and much later as an inspirational Professor of Physics; infamously at the time doubling the number of such Chairs in Britain who had two X chromosomes..  She far more than doubled the number of teacher-researchers (rather than teacher-teachers) in her sector of the OU, because she believed that active researchers made better teachers.  There's much more to this woman than pulsars.

You don't have to be a rocket-scientist to succeed in science - the young Miss Bell failed her 11+ exam and so wasn't eligible for a free Grammar School place under RAB Butler's 1944 Education Act and she didn't get a 1st Class Honours degree from Glasgow.  Would her Upper 2nd Class Honours degree have anything to do with the fact that she was the only woman in a class of 50 taking Physics?  How about the fact that for two years, every time she entered the Physics lecture theatre she was greeted with hoots and cat-calls and coordinated foot-stamping?  Her response?  She learned quickly to control her blushing and got on with the physics.  The men who participated in this ritualised bullying, and not only in Glasgow, will also be about 70 now, and only a few of them will have joined the dinosaurs underground.

It helps if you have supportive parents who won't accept that at school boys do science-science and girls do domestic-science.  An inspiring science teacher also makes a huge difference - Henry Tillott in JBB's case.  You have to be prepared to work hard, with a pick-axe and wire-strippers if that's what it takes, or with a slide rule and deep maths if that is required.  Being at home with numbers and order-of-magnitude is useful: "I guess what I’m saying is, even in that first exam I had learnt to check that my answers seemed sensible, that when I came up with a numerical value, that it was reasonable, whatever reasonable means". You have to put in long hours . . . after the working day and at weekends if necessary.  You have to be able to park your certainties and see things with a fresh eye. You have to be agreeable . . . but not a push-over - some assertiveness training will help you hold your corner against authority figures when it matters.  OTOH, you don't have to treat kids and career as an either/or choice.  Juggling family and science is hard work but so is twirling a sledge-hammer.

Much more detail in a long interview.
The Blob's women in science: Florence Nightingale - Barbara McClintock - Maude Delap - Cliona O'Farrelly - Lynn Margulis - Rosalind Franklin - Jocelyn Bell Burnell