What is family?

In 1936, Éamon de Valera sat down with his wife Jane O'Flanagan Sinéad Ní Fhlannagáin of 26 years [together L] and conjured up a vision for Ireland as a New 1937 Constitution which would sever the final apron strings attaching the 26 counties to the United Kingdom. It's an interesting document because it sees certain 'truths' to be self-evident, which a majority of the citizenry today would give at least a bit of side-eye: "special position" of the Catholic Church Really?  But it was also pragmatic and did its best to be culturally inclusive. The reason Home Education was explicitly allowed in Article 42 was to not frighten the Protestant horses so much that they sent their middle-class chaps to boarding school in England . . . and they never came back to fill the ranks of the professions. In other ways Éamon and Sinéad endorsed frankly unhinged fantasies where what Ireland should be [comely maidens dancing at the cross-roads etc.] was at considerable odds with what Ireland actually be like [Angela's Ashes etc.]. 

In 1972, "special position" of the Catholic Church was put aside but we still have Article 44: "The State acknowledges that the homage of public worship is due to Almighty God. It shall hold His Name in reverence, and shall respect and honour religion". Only one god, though, and check the pronouns.

We're due to have another referendum on 8th March 2024 to unpack some more of Éamon and Sinéad's 1930s certainties and replace their words with something that acknowledges 2020s realities in the state we inhabit. This year its Article 41 and its ideas about the family.  The Family is Top Dog in É&S's Ireland: they decide on the children's education in Article 42, for example. The State just ponies up the resources for this to happen "provide other educational facilities or institutions with due regard, however, for the rights of parents". But the Family in the Ideal Ireland was 1 man married to 1 woman with innumerable children. Well we've dealt with part of that by freeing the Gays legalizing same-sex marriage in 2015. But there are so many edge cases yet. Families without children, families with only one parent, multi-generational households, co-habiting BFFs. 

So the First Q on the referendum is asking whether we want to add "The State recognises the Family, whether founded on marriage or on other durable relationships, yada yada". WTF? The durable relationships are neither defined, nor designated. Senior lawyers are gleefully rubbing their wigs together contemplating years of litigation to bed this woolly aspiration into case law. But I guess at least it opens the door to other models of families than were dreamed of in 1937. Tá, so? Married families are still given Top Dog status, though "The State pledges itself to guard with special care the institution of Marriage, on which the Family is founded, and to protect it against attack.” Some are more equal than others.

The second Q attempts to deal with one of the most egregious anachronisms left in the Constitution. Sinéad never had to go to work because, even when he was in gaol or fund-raising in the USA, there was enough money to allow her to deliver 7 children in 12 years, then feed them, clothe them, and teach them manners without having to take in someone else's laundry to make it possible. This part of the referendum seeks to delete

Article 41.2.1 “In particular, the State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved.”
Article 41.2.2 “The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.”

Hey hey bring it On! Only dinosaurs (TyrannoPatriarchus rex etc.) want to keep women bacon-and-cabbaging in the kitchen or reddening the front doorstep or changing diapers when they could be out fuelling the economy or fulfilling their dreams or inspiring us all to Citius, Altius, Fortius. But, the government has decided to simplify the É&S vision of  bosom-in-the-floral-pinnie to "one who cares" and replace 41.2.1 & 41.2.2 with this ghastly kludge:

“The State recognises that the provision of care, by members of a family to one another by reason of the bonds that exist among them, gives to Society a support without which the common good cannot be achieved, and shall strive to support such provision.”

Much steam has been blown off about the retreat from endeavour to ensure to strive to support but that's moot, because, since 1937, to the nearest whole number, zero money has been allocated to offset the reality of mothers being obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour outside then home. Unless you count child benefit at €140 / month / child - that's just over €4.50 a day.  The average family roof-over-head payments [not incl heat, food, transport, clothing, insurance fripperies] are currently €1,000 /month. 

And nobody troubled to ask those in need of care [not all of whom are inarticulate blobs to be patronized] what they wanted out of the process. Indeed, The Beloved had to bug out of a referendum-explainer zoom-call convened by The Carers of Ireland. Too many people moaning on about the crappy, ambiguous language that finished up on the ballot paper rather than making peace with the artificial Nil / Tá binary and deciding how to vote.

Farming Bund the ICMSA won't be buying a pig-in-a-poke but seek clarity on "Durable relationships" in the context of farm succession. Guest v Guest dragged the issue to the UK Supreme Court [prev].

Stats Blip

I've no idea how many people read The Blob on the regular. To the nearest whole number per post, zero readers make a comment. Blogger/blogspot, the barely supported platform which hosts The Blob pretends to gather data on traffic and make these available to owners / clients but these stats are frankly, in two words, in credible. Take last year: I can believe that me and a couple of hundred yous are having 7½ mins of daily fun . . . but not that '000s of, like, people tuned in during Aug and Sep and then drifted off back to titktok. I figure it must be scraper bots:

Heck, I don't have many legs to stand on in complaining about Blogspot comms. The Blob pays €0 = nothing for the privilege of over-sharing.

Comment-bots are an intermittent thing. "Nadia Adams" and "Anna Greens" recently left a flurry of nine (9!) urgent comments on a Blob about Storm Jocelyn. 

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These intrusions appear in my Social Gmailbox, so I know they're there; but are rare enough that I can carefully delete them one-by-one. You're on your own if you want to follow Anna and Nadia to an emporium of cheap revels, soy sauce and wizz.

The other thing I've been freeloading on for many years (longer than Blogspot, that's for sure) is Anu Garg's AWAD feed. A-Word-A-Day has been delivering M-F what it says on the tin for 30 years! In addition, he sends out a digest of accumulated comments every weekend. The traffic is not entirely one way: occasionally I'll have something to say by return and very occasionally these comments finish up in the AWAD digest which gets send out to ~350,000 subscribers. In 2015, I won a prize for comment-of-the-week. Last week of Jan'24, the AWAD theme was eponyms; and readers were invited to submit their own favorites of that genre. The Blob has had rather a lot to say on the subject and I clipped some of my copy and sent that in. Thus

• Chisholm, noun. A billion³ = 10²⁷ = the number of “Prochlorococcus”, the world’s most abundant organism, in the ocean. Named for Penny Chisholm, their discoverer. Sometimes called a Chisillion to match billion, trillion ...”There are about seven chisillion cells in an adult human body.”
• Hopkins Ratio, noun. The amount by which office space was/is diminished for female faculty members. Named for Nancy Hopkins who documented the discrepancy at MIT in the 1990s. “The Hopkins Ratio is just one example of pervasive, insidious, unconscious sexism”.
• Finally, Gabriela, a heartwarming and inspiring story of a teenager who, despite coming from a “vocational school” and an immigrant background, discovered that she was as good as anyone else in the room ... indeed, on the planet.

2 out of those 3 links are Blob-cites and there was (at last, a pageview spike has a rational explanation) a blip in Blob-views:

It looks like the excess views were almost exclusively focused on my posts about Penny and Gabriela.  I hope that will have been edutaining for those who clicked through; but suspect that many will have felt blatted by TMI and gone back to TikTok.

Nus 25 Bef 2024

May I present . . .

• Roisín Murphy laments the passing of cluttery shops
• Clove-hitch; the farmer's friend 
  
• Autoshenanigans clocks the receding Suffolk coastline S of Lowestoft
• Erosion prev: Norfolk -- S. Wexford
• Before Napier's logs there was Jost Bürgi
• Fake fossil exposed by Valentina Rossi [R] at UCC 
• Felling out an ash tree with axe and cross-cut.
• Outclimbing Parkinson's
• Old Hall - living together 
• Pensioners against Putin, Dublin chapter.
  
• Seamus Lynch RSA busts a truck tach faker on the M50
• Gardiner Bros can dance
• Cloned
• Making hand-made pots at Shanagarry.
  

gf

Bath Publishing

I've surprised myself by not actually getting Blobercised about the shameful gaslighting and ruination of local Post Office managers across the water. Not until January-too-late did I find a hook in the coincidence of ICL on the periphery of my own life. I guess the itch of my indignation was eased by posts across on Metafilter 2023 - 2020. Sometimes Metafilter comments are from people who actually know what they are talking about.  That something is rotten in the state of POmark has been known since at least 2009 when Private Eye started flagging it [7 page 9,000 word PDF] on the regular.  But corporate and politcal and main-stream journalistic inertia allowed each egregious case to get washed away without any song-and-dance.

One of the White Hats in this sorry tale is Nick Wallis, who (in 2010!) was a local radio talk-show host who started to talk to Sub-Postmanagers about the ruination of their lives and blog about it. He published a book about his, and their journey, for the Christmas market in . . . 2021. The title couldn't be more explicit: The Great Post Office Scandal: The fight to expose a multimillion pound IT disaster which put innocent people in jail. If you want a 1 hour exec summary Wallis was interviewed by James "LBC" O'Brien [whom bloboprev] on the latter's Full Disclosure channel. Hislop at Private Eye and Wallis are extremely magnanimous about someone else (ITV docudrama on the telly over Christmas 2023) removing the final chip from the dams of inertia and obfuscation and release a national tsunami of outrage.

For my money, the worst actors, the Blackest Hats are worn by any and all the high profile pols and journos who are talking large now having been too busy to care about injustice for . . . get this . . . 25 years: since the first prosecutions of PO employees started happening through perjury, gaslighting and the perverse incentives of corporate bonuses.

Anyway, I was googling around Nick Wallis after hearing his book getting a glowing rec from Rory Stewart on his TRIP podcast. And came across The people who published The Great Post Office Scandal who are Bath Publishing. They were a micro WFH company with a niche market in legal text-books: "Employment Tribunal Remedies Handbook" - "Contamination, Pollution & the Planning Process: A Practitioner's Guide" that sort of thing. Wallis was hawking his book about and had it rejected 9 times by risk-averse publishers. But Bath Publishing took an Entrepreneurial plunge on it. I hope they, and Wallis, make a lorra money. I also found a card, an envelope and a stamp and sent them a This is Just to Say [whc bloboprev] tribute:

You have published   for which          we wish you
the plum             you were probably  champagne delicious
going bad in         risking            not too sweet
the postbox          a court case       and so cold

Sprakkar

Because of a comment by Icelandophile Professor Batty, and subsequent to-fro, I've gone deep on Eliza Reid, who will cease being Forsetafrú = First Lady this summer after two terms. I've been reading her The Secrets of the Sprakkar: Iceland’s Extraordinary Women and How They Are Changing the World (1922). It's a deep dive into Europe's most equal society through the voices of not-men who have shaped and benefitted from that playing field - still bumpy but A Lot flatter than, say, Ireland's - let alone Iranland!  

Reid, who grew up in rural Ontario, apparently met her Icelandic husband Guðni Jóhannesson on a blind-date  . . . in Oxford, when they were both there as students. He came home and soon landed a faculty position in University of Iceland. He's a 20thC historian who had articulate and sensible things to say about The Cod Wars with UK and the Banking Collapse. When the long-term President finally retired in 2016 then fans-friends-and-relations urged Guðni to run for the office and he won the election quite convincingly. His bookish, entrepreneurial wife thus became First Lady and a reluctant fashion-icon - she didn't stop shopping in charity shops just because she had to attend state banquets around the World. She also famously penned an OpEd for the NYT basically saying "ég er ekki handtaska mannsins míns" = I am not my husband's handbag. In other words, the partner of the powerful [man] may be the power behind the throne and is, for sure, not a decorative cipher.

The book is Reid's homage to the women of her adopted country; and she carried out her research at farms, quaysides, C-suites and saunas. One of her informants shared an obscure word which appears six times in the eddas: Sprakki = an extraordinary woman; plural Sprakkar. It became a shoo-in to incorporate the word into the title of her book. Contrary to Reid's assertions in some of her many interviews and pieces-to-camera, Icelandic is not the only European language to have a respectful, slightly frightening, noun describing any class of woman. Irish has cailleach for starters. Jenni Nuttall has logged a long list of ♀-pejoratives in English. None of which I'll repeat here because there's quite enough slaggin' of women when they don't conform to door-mat.

Sprakkar has an essay about Cap'n Dóra Unnarsdóttir, [R - be very afraid] a fish-whisperer who conjures cod from the wild Atlantic. She sat her Ship Captain's exam in 2012 filling the sea-boots of her father and grandfather before her. She suffered through a period of ribbing by the other fishermen, but that was replaced by respeck when she reliably reached her quotas quicker than they did  . . . and slagged back when they teased her.

In the corridors of power, one force is the FKA Félag Kvenna í Atvinnulífinu (Association of Women Business Leaders). Which is still smaller than it should be. But one of Reid's informants shared that, a fortnight after the FKA had named her Business Woman of the Year, her company had finally made her EVP. Corporations can be shamed by irony?

As it happens The Blob has tribbed Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, the first elected female head of state. That Sprakki ᛋᛒᚱᛅᚴᚴᛁ was elected in 1980 and was re-elected as President 3 subsequent times. Setting a precedent for what women could do and what a whole country could do about gender equality. That election was the cake that had been baking for five years since the 1975 Women's Work Stoppage, which forced everyone to see that changing diapers, gutting fish, telling at banks, typing letters was a) not much fun b) essential. Men referred to that day later as L o n g Friday.

You may not have the dedication to read through Secrets of the Sprakkar but you can catch a flavour of Eliza Reid's voice in a 06 May 2022 talk at Seattle's National Nordic Museum or on 09 May 2023 at the Montclair Literary Festival. It is a significant meta-point that on these two different occasions she is thriftily wearing the same dress - HeadOfState WAGs please copy.  Natch she done a TEDx: in whc she TMIs the initial blind-date. And look out for Eliza Reid's new murder-mystery. And Iceland still means Grindavík in my sources of anxiety.

I mentioned at the top that The President of Iceland is stepping down this Summer and elections are set for the Spring. What next for the retiring head of state? Here is one possibility: hooking up with his twin brother separated at birth to do a two-hander called Some Geezer fed my Geyser: an investigation into the state of Icelandic gastronomy presented by Guðni Rosenthal and Phil Jóhannesson:

Spirit of Place

Que vengan los peregrinos! Not everyone who walks to Canterbury, or Rome, or Jerusalem is a believer. But such pilgrims are likely to be changed by [getting off the sofa, leaving the daily and] going. It's a bit like people with an OU degree: it's often worth biding a while to talk with those who've been there, done that. My book about Santiago and the process of pilgrimage remains [ahem!] unpublished. As they say, though: "When the walking stops, the Camino continues".

Over the last tuthree years, I've been sitting on my sofa watching two men, once-and-future-pilgrims, getting physical with, and making their mark upon, the unforgiving terroir of a mountain in Piedmont. It turns out to be quite close to the Franco-Italian borrrder, where we were graciously - miraculously - sustained with Found Soup in 1978. 

• Martijn Doolaard is a graphic designer and film-maker from Amsterdam with two Long-distance bike trips [A'dam-Singapore; Vancouver - Patagonia] behind him. [TMI about his prev life]
• Fr. Johannes Schwarz is a diocesan Catholic priest from Austria. He walked from home to Santiago as a chap in 1998, then from home to Jerusalem - and back. Fr.J. also has a photographer's eye so, as well as chasuble and pyx, he toted a GoPro along The Way.

These two men washed up on different sides of an inaccessible mountain in the Italian Alps. Both chose to restore tumble-down stone buildings clinging to the side of the mountainside by their finger-nails. Both decided to document the process of transformation [internal, external] in the medium in their tool-kit. Both have established successful YouTube channels by doing stuff the hard way. Both were helped to YT-click-fame by the attention of Kirsten Dirksen who takes a film-crew to aspirant sustainability steaders and asks them to explain themselves: Johannes [05 Dec 2021] and Martijn [01 Nov 2021].

I have a couple of things to say about The Hard Way - informed by 25 years experience of chopping water and hauling wood. We spent the month of July 1996 camping out on our newly acquired property: with hand-tools, two wheel-barrows and a sack-truck. It was fine, we were putting manners on the place while finding trades-folks to do the skilled work. Doran-the-Well lived at the other end of the townland and he came to see how close he could get his drill-rig to the house. Which was not close enough: because the original farm-gate required too tight a turn for his mobile derrick to get in the yard. But, his BiL was Nolan-the-Digger [bloboprev] and he could surely open up that ditch . . . next Saturday, maybe? Not only could the digger move rocks impossible to shift with hand-tools; it also moved a lorra regular dirt and could scart off the bushes from the top of a ditch with a single comprehensive sweep. I didn't stop using a wheel-barrow but I did thereafter book a day from The Digger when heavy lifting was required.

Me and Johannes agree on the virtues {warms you thrice} of reducing firewood to billets and stacking them by hand. Chain saws are so bloody noisy you can't work away while listening to an ear-book. But, it's a good idea to leave felled timber at the cutting site [under rain-cover] for a few breezy months before moving the logs to the firewood processing place nearer the house. Wood gets lighter as the water blows off. Martijn does this, Johannes apparently not. Likewise no sane person will carry building stone up-hill if there's a choice but it's got to be possible to use gravity to help stones downhill that doesn't involve having gravity destroy your knees [as above R].

And further to the picture: building drystone walls is a doddle if the geochemistry generates parallel flat sides as above. If you have a choice don't settle in granite country, the stones are irregular, lumpy and too hard to shape with a hammer-tock or two. Ask me how I know!?

Vernacular architecture inhabits a known place and can build on [lit and fig] the lived experience of those who sojourn there. Johannes' gaff faces South and is tucked into the hill. So, like our place, the snow and frost burns away soon after the sun comes up. And he can see the prevailing wind thrashing the trees on the other side of the valley but not feel it. Martijn's place is, rather, exposed to the weather which can be darkly destructive [L tumbled solar panels] so high on the ridge. And, for him, the sun rises later and sets earlier so the snow lingers for days or weeks longer. Yet, these two steadings are only 1 km apart.

Like the underlying geology, the local micro-climate may make or break your rural dream homestead. Johannes is very conscious about microclimate for growing plants at the very edge of their ecological tolerance. Man, does he relish late season tomatoes and salad!

But I'm here to recommend Johannes' sub-channel One Year in the Life of a Part Time Hermit where he runs through 2023 with a 45m episode of every month. Usual fly-on-wall view of projects and general chopping wood, heaving rocks and weeding the veg-beds: gorgeous film of weather, sunsets, birbs and butterflies; minimal voice-over; informative on-screen notes [check the bot tight corner of screen for ID]. He had, or had at one point, left three holes [one shown R] in the render of the sunny side of his hermitage - so that the resident common wall lizards Podarcis muralis could bunk down at night. The Cave of St George for the teeny dragon!

But, as he warns in the short intro to the series, the last ten minutes of each video is a thoughtful under-stated ramble on religion, philosophy, history, science and the meaning of life. Here's part of what he has to say in May: So let me make this clear. I'm not a guru. I'm not a spiritual master. I'm not a person to aspire to meet or even talk to. You don't need me. You don't need to discern any secrets in my life or take me as an example. I am fundamentally like you – a man, a fallible man, a human. If you find any of the propositions in these videos helpful; if anything that is said rings true – or at least, if any of the questions do, it is not because I'm a source of wisdom. Jan - Feb - then you're on yer ownio. He's been putting them out at the rate of one episode a week since New Year.

18Feb24 - a great day

Some then and now; also misc sweepings

• What would you say you do here? 
• Office Space 1999
  
• Jarnail Singh 2023
• [R Jason "Skeptical" Beer KC]
  
• Extreme beachcombing - Forks, WA
• Frederic Raphael - how to be a tighter writer
• ♬ ♪ ♫ ♩
• Downtown
• Petula 1964
• Macklemore 2015
• Anitta 2018
• Merlin "Mycelium" Sheldrake [prev] talks mushroom to the UK parliamentary STEM committee. Stay for the hilarious bilingual joke at end. He's a Fun Guy to hang with. Full transcript.
• Beautiful film about fishing and community off the S coast of England.
• BBC: Fr. Mauro's pre-Columbian Mappa Mundi 1459
• cf. Hereford ~1300 
  
• In Dec 2023 the bots at the dreadful LinkedIn suggested you may like to follow Minster Simon "Short-pants" Harris. I declined. They now sound imperative "Bob, follow Simon Harris, Minister for Further & Higher Education, Research, Innovation & Science: 0 followers". Delighted that his acolyte-count has tumbled from 38K to zero.