Repeal the 8th

Gorse to our North glowing in the morning
sun.

Any Irish person of around Elizabeth's age will tell you a similar story of the Irish education system's attempts to teach them all the Irish language. Irish schooling is famously identical throughout the land. There is only one 'examinations board' so every child from Cork to Donegal and from Galway to Dublin learns exactly the same syllabus from the same books and takes identical exams on identical dates and at the same times.

Apple Blossom

In the case of the Irish language which was taught very badly, in a dry and dusty fashion, 'by rote' and using some dire text books, this meant that those same people all have the same memories of hating having to learn Irish which they saw as a dead language and of no relevance to their 'modern'  70s and 80s lives. The main target of this loathing was a story of the life of one 'Peig Sayers' who lived a life of poverty, cold, damp and outright misery on a then almost uninhabited (and now uninhabited) lump of rock off the West coast, called Blasket Island.

More blossom

Elizabeth has shared many memories of having to read 'Peig' with many people she has met over the years since. It is like we Brits remembering how "bad" school dinners were. I have since read the book myself (in English, of course) and I can see what they mean.

That keyhole bed all restored and ready for use again.

Peig herself was allegedly quite a wonderful lady, a gripping and entertaining story teller much called upon locally for evening socials. She was old and blind by the time she came to 'tell all' and I have been told that the telling would have been well spiced up and peppered with 'naughty' bits, racy asides, dodgy anecdotes and other fun. Sadly she dictated it to a stodgy brother who wrote it all down but then only submitted a very clean, wholesome version for publication.

Hostas by the pond. The rather odd perspective because we are
looking down at a blue sky reflected in the water. 

Worse, says Elizabeth, was that Peig lived through all the "interesting" bits of recent Irish history including the Land War, the 1916 Rising, the War of Independence, the Civil War, the establishment of the Irish Free State AND the establishment, finally, of the Republic of Ireland WITHOUT MENTIONING ANY OF THEM. How, asks Elizabeth, did her 'story' ever become the Education Dept's choice of the best possible book in Irish about those times?

'Repeal the 8th' voting paperwork

But hey, Peig Schmeg. Where am I going with all this? Only here. Heaven forbid anyone is reading this in a hundred more years time and researching how life was for a newly arrived smallholder trying to get his head round Irish ways, and wondering how I failed to mention that the country went through two really traumatic, historic events at the time. In May 2015 there was a Referendum aimed (successfully) at changing the Constitution to allow same-sex marriage and this month there is to be another on a thorny abortion issue currently enshrined in the 8th Amendment of the document. .

Guinea Fowl

If you want to know what it is all about, then much has been discussed and printed on the subject and it would be quite wrong of me to pretend to be unbiased or knowledgeable. Suffice to say it is a deeply entrenched issue which has split the country and not on political party lines - it has divided families and friends and made people question long-held views. A lot of the divisions are (according to polling) between  young and old, city folk and rural dwellers, male and female, religious and not and rich and poor. Probably enough said on this one. The vote is on May 25th. Anxious moments as we wait for the day and the count.

Sometimes this is all you get when a duck is taken. Some flat
grass by the fence and a few feathers.

Meanwhile, I am sad to report that our fox came back and quietly took our final female duck. This happened at about 8:30 pm by which time the Guineas were tucked up in bed, so did not raise an alarm shout. Only when I went to shepherd home the ducks, did I spot the loss, and then, when I went searching I found the tell-tale flattened grass and a few feathers by the fence. We now have just 2 adult drakes, so no eggs for the moment, but we have 3 ducklings doing very well in the nursery and 12 eggs in the incubator. We'll be back.

Chinese style pork ribs. 

I have moved the fox trap down to that place on the fence and baited it but we've had that thing 2 months now and all it has ever caught is chickens and cats. I do not hold out much hope. Worse, I was out walking the dogs today and got chatting to old friend of the blog, Mike the Cows, who was fixing a fence down the road. He'd been topping off (mowing) rushes in a field down there and had 'flushed out' a group of 3 adult foxes with his noise and clatter. Also, he knew of a fox earth with a vixen and cubs "just below" a near neighbour's house. 4 adult foxes and some cubs, all within a mile of the place!

I'm amazed we are doing as well as we are. Till next time, then.

Butchery and Buildery

Saturday saw us back involved in the butchering of pigs, specifically the split carcasses of two full grown sows for our friends Sue and Rob. These girls were actually the mums of the piglets we moved in an earlier post and the  helped catch and load on Wednesday evening (Sept 2nd). I find I love this work and thoroughly enjoy taking pride in trying to produce good looking cuts of meat, presentable racks of rib, sheets of spare rib and in knowing my way round a carcass. I should quickly add that I am no expert but I am learning fast with every side I cut up, so I was delighted to be invited over to help out.

Rob, I know, would have loved to have been there and wants to get involved in the next one, but this time, the issues loading the animals last week pushed the butchery back into a week when he had already booked on a flight home to visit Mum, so he missed it and just had to watch the pictures go up on Facebook. He'll be back for the sausage making though and for the onward processing of all the many joints which ended up in buckets of brine or dry salt cure.

A spot of belladonna to cure what ails ye?

He will also be there for the eating. I was joking with JD Bob about Sue's bulging freezer and he was rubbing his hands with glee and joking that "there'll be some ate-ing in that house this winter! The pan'll be frying!...." Thanks then Sue, for letting us 'play'. Being full grown sows they were HUGE compared to our little 6-month old Berkshire gilts. We think about 60 kg a side, so nearly a quarter ton of meat. We actually had to cut all the legs (except one for dry cure) into several pieces just to make manageable joints for cooking for three appetites. I now find myself looking at pictures of carcasses and starting to plan where I would make my cuts and where I'd saw through bones.

Old Arklow pottery

We were also able to get back into the buildering in a small way, a lovely nostagic job to take us right back to our own demolition-ing of 2011/12. No names, locations or pack-drill on this one as it is rightly someone else's story to tell and those who need to know are already enjoying the Facebook feed and pics, but I hope the owner of this tale will not mind me telling our little sub-tale of treasures found and historic interest. This is an old property bought by a family of friends we know just across the county boundary, which they will 'do up' over the coming months (years?) but which they bought, like we did, in an abandoned state still well stocked with old "stuff" - furniture, crockery, cutlery and so on.

A government pamphlet on coping with a nuclear
accident from the 60s and a pack of pills to help
with radiation sickness from year 2002.

The place was formerly owned by a little old lady who lived to over a hundred (she eventually died in a nursing home) but who seemed to have kept everything, certainly Birthday and Christmas cards, letters and notes going back decades, hand-written, pre-decimal financial records and the like. Now Lizzie, you will know, LOVES her history and gets expecially fascinated by the history of the ordinary people, rather than Kings, Queens and politicians, so this was like treasure trove to her, a veritable gold mine.

An old but intact clay pipe and this lovely
brass hand-bell were among the finds.

The friends invited us over to help with some of the early stages once they had gained access and for Liz that meant a chance to root through the 'stuff' a bit while clearing what she described as "30 years of old clothes and mouldy rugs" out towards a fire pit they had going. I was put to work lump-hammering render off the outside of what is now beautiful stonework, which will be properly pointed up with old fashioned lime-mortar (the lump hammer does less damage to the stone faces than would an electric 'kango' hammer-drill). Liz carried big rubbish out, barrowed the shovel-up smaller stuff out, and dived in to rescue interesting finds with the daughter of the house.

Some of this the friends did not want, so we have it, but other bits we are cleaning up for them to create a mini-museum display of treasures from the house. Mazy will be amused to know that Liz has therefore spent her afternoon up to her armpits in brown sauce and brasso (the sauce is the perfect combination of sticky and acid for "marinading" the tarnish off metal cuttlery; rinse, dry, elbow grease and polish. Bob's your Uncle). There was a small collection of silver and silver-ish cuttlery and a lovely brass hand-bell. There was an intact old clay-pipe and a broken one. There was a small amount of surviving pottery from the Arklow pottery, Ireland's "Staffordshire" back in the day. There were assorted bottles of booze - rum, armagnac, whiskey and others. All the family drugs were there including, we noted, a belladonna based one for stomach problems which we guess has been superceded by now (!). The drugs have, of course, been safely parceled up for sensible disposal.

Brush cutting long grass in autumn here has you discovering
stashes of free-range eggs - these are 16 guinea fowl eggs

One of the most fascinating things from my point of view was a government pamphlet posted out to all the citizens in the 60s explaining the new threat of nuclear accident and fall-out. The one Liz found is specifically aimed at farmers (I assume there was an urban version) and how they should go about protecting stock, crops and grass from the effects of fall out. With it she also found a government issued pack of Potassium Iodate tablets against radiation sickness but we have looked both items up and the tablets are much more recent. They were issued in 2002 after a political scandal when one TD (Irish MP) was accusing another of not having done anything about protecting the public etc etc..... The pills are use by 2005 so must be among the last things our old lady stashed away for safe keeping.

Our water station for the "Ros Go Run" half marathon. 

The only other thing to report is our involvement, once again, in setting up a watering-point for the thirsty (half) marathon runners of the 'Ros Go Run' fun-run. The runners lope past our front gate almost at the end of their efforts, in the 12th mile, so we set up a table and bottled water which we can pass to them as they whizz by, not breaking their stride (or they are happy to stop and chat for a rest if they are almost done in!). Last year the planners had badly timed the run so that it clashed with a run in the nearby big town (Westport, I recall) so they were disappointed to only get 67 runners and were hoping for more this year. We were ready. I do not yet know what went wrong with this but on the day there was a tiny turn-out, with only 21 runners doing the course and, because there were almost as many water-stations round the course as runners, I only actually gave out 6 cups of water. I suppose it is quite possible that the organisers will call it a day and there may not be a 'Ros Go Run' next year. We did our bit, anyway.

Back to Skool

Never one to sit around for too long without an 'improving book' in her hand, Liz has hunted down an on-line History course to study. Readers who know Liz at all with know that she thrives on such stuff, immersing herself in pains-taking study, sweating on essay deadlines and agonizing over how well she would do in exams (generally much better than she will admit to beforehand). She did her Open University degree like this , back in the day, graduating in year 2000 (with a 1st with distinction, no less!) and since then doing an MA course and various units of Law and of Business Administration.

This one, I have to say, is no such serious high-falutin' stuff and will not end up in a qualification; it is a bit of fun with weekly quizzes and, as Liz says "a pat on the back" and a certificate if you finish the course. It grips you for just 6 hours or so a week, as opposed to the 20-odd of Open University and has been created by a University of Virginia professor, Philip Zelikow, one of the History experts appointed to the 911 Commission charged with ascertaining why USA had arrived at the events of 911.

The course is called "The Modern World; Global History since 1760". Now, I'm no History scholar so bear with me while I sum up, paraphrasing Liz's 'precis' (and allowing her to read this before it gets too set in concrete). This is world history from early Industrial Revolution onward, so includes the early pre-steam power, pre mill machinery stuff like seed drills and the increases in agricultural production. It includes a lot of social change around revolutions in France (Egalité, Fraternité etc), in the USA (no taxation without representation!) and includes a lot of stuff around Europeans going global, empire building and moving around to settle in far flung parts.

There are changes in how power is generated and used (men, slaves, levers, donkeys and so on, through to burning of fossil fuels) and massive changes to society - from Village/Manor based society where your own existence might be perilous (One cut, one infection with flu might be your lot) but the village tended to be solid, changing to a situation where you, personally, might be more secure but the villages and small communities waxed and waned more with increased mobility. Subsistence farming was replaced by a system where you could produce excess to sell.

Anyway, there it is. Liz is bubbling with it. Wish her luck.