A Muck Sweat

Hi. As I write this it is half past 5 in the morning and a beautiful peachy-orange sun is rising into a(nother) cloudless sky right outside the back door. It is going to be another scorcher peaking up into the 29º to 30º area. The Woman of the House is still very much enjoying them, ambling about in her shorts determined to get "at least some colour" into her legs while batting away the mozzies. I must admit, my appetite for heat is a tad jaded at this stage but you will not see me writing a word of complaint; you only have to look at the endless cold, wet, snowy, windy blog posts from about September to April to know that we get enough of the "other stuff" and our memories are raw.

Blue skies

My current state of health has added its own seasoning to this mix. I am messed up completely and unable to do a stroke of work. Those antibiotics in the previous post ran their course and finished this Monday and although they had given me a promising explosion of 'productive' coughing, a muck sweat or two, bursts of dead-tiredness that had me snatching 2 hour naps morning and afternoon, they did not seem to free up my lungs. Shortness of breath still has me leaning, gasping on a fence after the shortest walk or easiest job.

Young ducks discover the pond.

I was back to the doctor's on Tuesday to see what was progressing but, not only was the real doc still away, but the very competent nurse who saw me was away too, and a locum was taking the calls. Obviously this means telling the story all over again and, in this case finding the locum unwilling to do anything positive as my notes were still not back from Sligo Hospital. So, take it easy Mr Patient and none of that heavy lifting / mucking out now (kinda got that one, thanks) and come back and see us next week when another new medic will be on hand to tell you whether your notes are back yet.

So, another week for me of shirking round the place doing a lot of healing sleep, while for Elizabeth, the stock tasks made a bit more interesting by the heat. All the birds and animals need extra attention to their water supplies, shade sheets for their runs (and even freezer packs for some). There are buckets and tubs everywhere. Those young 'Appleyard' ducks have outgrown their big Tupperware "bath" and the Duck-Master General has invented for them a paddly pool made from a big blue plastic fruit-juice barrel split in half and propped at a jaunty angle. Filled with a hose, this gives them a nice depth of water for some total-immersion baptism malarkey, one at once, supervised by Mumma-Duck.

St John's Eve fire heap

The perceptive among you (and those not knocked sideways by an excessive need to sleep in the shade) will have noticed that this post is 2 days late. I don't know what happened to Tuesday. I'd been a bit short on stories going into the weekend but on Saturday (23rd), Bonfire Night had happened so I was looking good for the Tuesday, business as usual.

Arsonist #1 soon has a good blaze going

Regular readers will know that the only day we can legally light bonfires in (Republic of ) Ireland is 23rd June, St. John's Eve, one of these Christian-ised festival dates presumably derived from Mid Summer's Day. The Ladies are traditionally meant to engage in lots of leppin' about, singing and dancing, while we blokes go in more for the feats of strength and athletic (cough) stuff. There was jumping through the fire and, I guess, the odd drink was taken.

Tha Appleyards get a new pond

There is also a fair amount of the 'warding off bad spirits' stuff. I read mention of a tall, herby plant which has the Irish name "hocusfian" (though I've not manged to find out what this is in English). Bonfire attendees would run round tapping their plant off as many folk as possible to pick up the bad vibes before throwing the plant in the fire. You could also pull up examples of all your most troublesome weeds and thrown them in which would ensure they were not so troublesome next year. Look out 'creeping buttercup', I say. I can see that working...hmmm..... the actual plant you throw into the fire would not trouble you again, I suppose.

January born lamb Tigger comes back from the butcher

In the morning, you could then scatter the ashes from the fire about your land to spread the good stuff about. If there was a new built dwelling in the village it was good to light the first ever fire in that hearth from the glowing embers of the St.John fire.

Apricot flan

Especially auspicious

Palatinate Smokies

Not that smokey when I took the picture.
Carsten at the loppers.

Friends of the Blog who were with me back in the house re-build days, may recall that when we were burning the old wood ripped out of the house, 'Sparks' (Main Builder and Project Manager) used to tease us that we were a couple of Roscommon Smokies. People from outside this county, when wishing to get at us, say that we are all traveller folk (as in Romanies, Gypsies etc, not as in Divine Comedy's 'Billy Bird'), who spend all our evenings sitting round the campfire and, so, always smell of bonfire smoke. Hence "Roscommon Smokies".

Of course, we wear this badge with pride and any visiting Help-X or other person who gets involved with any of our bonfires is quickly signed up. AB, last year, went home as a Paris Smokie. Our latest Help-X-er, Carsten is now a Palatinate Smokie after helping me burn a load of trimmings from a fallen hawthorn brought down by Storm Eleanor.

I need to quickly add that these are not open bonfires like you would have in an English garden rubbish-burn. Open bonfires are illegal in this country except for on St John's Eve (23rd June). The argument for this seems to be mainly environmental and in order to try to stop wild-fires in the forestry and the turf bogs though it also contains a bit of Catholic rulers stamping down on the pagan festival celebrations.

Excelsis could not wait to get into the
kitchen.

It is rather odd that you are forced by this law to save all your prunings up through all the wet months where you'd be very unlikely to start a wild fire, till June when you well might. As we understand it you ARE allowed to put anything like this "up the chimney" which means burning it on the indoor fires or using a dustbin type incinerator. These latter are for sale widely and openly at hardware shops.

Carsten takes a turn at the bottle feeding.
Bábóg is 7 weeks old now.

So, we have carried on our wee visit by Carsten and got plenty done including all that cutting up of hawthorn trees. Mind you, rain stopped play today and we achieved only the shopping and a trip to the archery venue to reassemble all the club's 'stuff' which had been hidden up while the Castlerea musical theatre company took over the whole building to put on the musical show 'Titanic'. Cue all the old jokes about "I wonder how THAT ended" etc.

Elizabeth got a good rise out of this yeast bread. 

Sadly, we only have Carsten for the week. Tomorrow, all too soon, he moves on to the 2nd stage of his 3 month working tour of the Republic, heading for Achill Island (Co. Mayo) where he has a job cleaning bedrooms and making beds in a tourist-y hostel. The hostel requires he stay at least 4 weeks, so that uses up May for him. We wish him luck and have told him if he is ever passing this way again or stuck for a week's work he'd be welcome back any time. It is probably for the best if he carries on to new things and new places and gets a good look at Ireland but we will both miss him. Top bloke all together.

Under construction, Nigella's "Eggs in Purgatory". Eggs
poached in a spiced up mix of tinned tomato. Eggs have only
just gone in here, hence raw and transparent. 

On the Help-X, I now have a gap - at the moment the whole of May and June. The July and August applicants are falling over each other to get here. I am spoiled for choice. In May, though, I look like shearing my sheep single handed, or schmoozing up the Woman of the House again. Come on people. They will be good jobs and you will be excellently fed. Nobody has run off screaming yet, anyway.

Fried turkey eggs. Yes, I broke one yolk.

The Woman of the House has been enjoying the chance to try out old favourite recipes, explore some new ones and make good soup from left overs. We tried Nigella's "Eggs in Purgatory" - eggs poached in a spiced up mix of tinned tomato. Thank you recent visitor 'Toastie' (Sarah) for that tip. There was a neck of lamb stew. We had 'spanikopita' a Greek dish of spinach and Fetta cheese baked in filo pastry. I have a feeling this might normally be done with Ricotta cheese but the Head Chef is not currently around to ask. We have enjoyed roast duck.

The bottle nearly sucked flat.

The soups have included trad nettle soup (with fresh green nettle tops plus leek and potato) and then a leek, potato and bacon soup which was based on duck stock. Both delicious. There have also been, memorably a fruit-cake "tray bake" and gooey chocolate "Flump's Cake". Flump here is another excellent source of recipes who has been a friend of Elizabeth for ever.

Enough for this one, I guess. By the time I write again, Carsten will have departed. Safe journey, Buddy and enjoy the rest of your 'tour'. Perhaps we will see you again.

Hot Nuts?

We knew 'Tim' was sick, but did they need to drop him
outside the funeral parlour?

It was only  2 months ago (20 posts) that I was singing the praises of our ever trusty and reliable little Fiat Panda. How quickly things can change. 'Tim' seems to have taken exception to our plaudits and decided to stack up in very short order, a rake of problems which are starting to test our faith in 'him'. That's the contract, aul' fella. Stay reliable, good, cheap to run and free from faults and you are a 'keeper'; start turning all cantankerous on us and you get pensioned off.

It was a lovely (if hot) day so we decided to do a small job
in the front drive.... this turned into a couple of hours of
sweaty blackthorn-bashing.

The problems Tim decided to try our patience with were, in quick succession.....

The pale blue hatching shows the bit of 'view' which was
obscured by the blackthorn thicket. 

1. Drinking fair amounts of radiator water, leading us to suspect a head gasket leak but we could manage that (we thought) as 2 litres every month or so was do-able. If you read the last post you'll know we came unstuck on a mission to Roscommon and had to be recovered back to Lough Glynn.
2. First turn of the key in the morning, you expect the healthy "whinny" of a starter motor spinning the engine over, followed by the 'vroom' of a successful fire-up. We had a sudden change to the 'thunk' of a servo cutting in, followed by silence. It became a lottery whether you'd get the whinny or the 'thunk'. That problem seems to have gone away by itself. 
3. With the possible water leak fixed by the addition of the modern version of 'Radweld' - it is called 'Blue Devil' and costs an arm and a leg per bottle, so we assume it is not just Radweld re-badged. Touch wood, it seems to be working - we were off on a test drive - an hour or two round Charlestown, Knock and Ballyhaunis. It seemed fine but then in Ballyhaunis we became aware of a worrying metal-on-metal grinding from the front left corner. This seemed to be at wheel-speed rather than anything engine related, so I guessed brake pads (worn down?), discs, wheel bearings, drive shafts etc. We stopped to inspect but then drove home carefully and every time we picked up speed it went away. I took the car down to local tyres/exhausts/brakes place, Keith Revin in Castlerea and they, today have confirmed my brakes thing, so we are into new discs and pads on both front corners. 
4. My 'Hot Nuts' title I will explain later.

It was St John's Eve, so we were allowed
 to burn the blackthorn branches. 

As a result of all this we have, as I said, started to distrust young 'Tim' and are quietly looking for a possible replacement. That is not easy in Ireland at the moment because, with the economy being banjaxed, everyone is hanging onto their old cars and not replacing them, so there are few good used cars on the market. We want to come up to a few years newer but with basically the same size and style of car; not necessarily a Panda. We are on 04 reg and worth about €1500 and we are looking for maybe an 09 or a 10 reg. We have a couple of local dealers looking on our behalf, both of whom sucked the ends of their pencils and muttered stuff about having to tap up their Dublin contacts. Dublin seems to be the place to go at present, if you are looking for a used car. Out here in the sticks it is a used-car desert. Obviously we could have done without this spend just now, but hey, cars do not last for ever and the Fiat has done 11 years and 7 of those were very good ones for us.

Meanwhile, the weather has been kind and 2 days back we found ourselves hungry for some heavy duty gardening. We decided to tackle a thicket of blackthorn growing just inside the gate on the left which was growing out from the hedge and obscuring our view from the front gate up under the larch trees. It was sweaty work but, being St John's Eve it was the only day it is legal in the Republic to have a bonfire, so we could look forward to a nice relax in the evening burning all that while cradling a cool beer or wine. We used the trailer as a big wheel barrow to move it all round to the East Field. A very pleasant afternoon's 'serious' gardening.

A chamomile lawn? Well, maybe not.

We are always amazed and delighted by the way that bits of ground, paddled to a brown, bare muddy oblivion during the 'wet season' manage to recover in spring, greening over and turning us back to respectable 'lawn'. This is generally good old grass but this year, for no reason we can see, the brown mess inside the goose orchard gate has come back as (I think) 'stinking chamomile' (Anthema cotula), the feathery leaved 'daisy' which we called "Stinking Mayweed" in Sussex. Now, I know this is not the real 'lawn chamomile' of Mary Wesley fame. That is a sport of this plant found and developed in the 30's called 'Treneague' which never goes above 6 inches and does not flower. These guys, if I did not mow them off, would easily top 24 inches and flower like mad, but I am enjoying the fact that I have a 'Chamomile Lawn' of sorts.

Male turkey, 'Tom' caught NOT displaying. Liz
jokes that it is like catching your Dad in his
pyjamas. 

In the birds dept we are not holding out much hope for the broody geese who are now through the likely times for the known-start-date eggs but with no apparent result. The Elderberry Buff too, seems to want to come off the eggs for an hour or more at a time, sometimes twice a day, for a dust bath and a wander about scratching. feeding, drinking. She is always back on them sitting tight by evening, so we can lock her up, but that seems a lot of not sitting to us for a successful incubation. The turkey eggs in the incubator, we don't know after the long power cut where we tried blankets and mugs of boiling water but we are not sure we kept them warm. Tom, our turkey cock has now relaxed here and does not spend all his waking hours in full display mode

Lovely mugs from our craft-genius neighbour, Carolyn. 

But those 'hot nuts', I hear you ask. Just an amusing ribald comment by a garage guy. The 'metal on metal' grinding noise at the front of the Fiat today turned out to be badly worn (maybe 'bare' would be a better word) brake pads which, even if you use the brakes a bare minimum will still get a lot hotter through friction than brake-pad on metal, on the short run to Castlerea. The keen young lad who stepped up to do the investigation rattled them off the wheel studs with his air-gun and then dropped the first one out of the socket into the palm of his hand.

New tyres for the trailer (which has 2CV
wheels) have to come from my old chums,
2CV specialists ECAS in the UK. 

The shout of "OWWWW! They're flippin' ROASTing!" echoed round the garage and soon attracted all his colleagues over to try them out and join in the fun and banter. The lads were all impressed by the heat off them and, being the kind of place it is, they were all happily riffing on me having 'very hot nuts'. Ah well, maybe you had to be there. Anyway, the good news on that one is that they can get the replacement discs and pads by Monday and if I show up at 08:30-ish that will give the nuts a chance to cool down by the time they open (at 09:00) and they will sort me out as a first job for €125 all up. There's handy.

Radio Silence

4 'children' in a car.

Regular readers may have been wondering where we have gone - we have been in 'radio silence' due to having had visitors. It is almost a household policy that the internet is turned off so that we can concentrate on our guests (and them on us), and enjoy the fresh air, peace and countryside away from the glut of modern hi-tech "comms" devices. One visitor in particular, Mr Silverwood, was enjoying the extremely rare chance to go on holiday WITHOUT having to take his works laptop and to be on call. His company (used to be mine also) runs a very lean staffing set up and just expects you to be available 24/7 but had, on this occasion (his daughter's 16th birthday) reluctantly agreed to bring a bloke over from the UK to cover Mr S's role, so he was genuinely free.

2CV as logging tow truck.

So, yes, the Silverwoods descended, coming to us via taking Em-J out for a Birthday lunch; it's a fair old drive - 2 and a half hours from their place to Connemara and then 2 more hours Connemara to here to stay for 3 nights till they could return this (Monday) morning to collect her and take her home. The three nights give Liz the chance (which she LOVES), to be catering and hostessing for 7 and also meant we could include them all, more by luck than judgement, in some nicely geared 'entertainments'. Today, Monday, is the one official day when you can legally have a bonfire, in County Roscommon (it's all based around traditional celebration of the Summer Solstice and St John's Eve (23rd June into the 24th). This gets a bit mangled into "the weekend nearest" and we could see yesterday from the numerous plumes of smoke rising across our view North, that the 22nd was 'near enough'.

We had all around the 'farm' piles of cut branches left over from the logging, we have a perfectly good bonfire site in the middle of our East Field, we have a 2CV which has a roll back roof and seats that children can stand up on to look out of the roof, and we had 3 enthusiastic children keen to play and assorted adults who wanted to do something 'physical but brainless' as the perfect antidote to endless computer 'work'. A powerful combination! With grown ups assembling 'bunches' of branches and lashing them to the car's tow-hook, and more adults ensuring that mini-horses did not sneak out of the field while the 2CV and woodwork sneaked in, in a couple of hours we had all the wood gathered around the fire site. Horses and fire do not mix, we are told, so Charlotte and Carolyn rescued the horses to do a bit of lawn mowing back home while we 'played'.

Bee colony 'nucleus'

Meanwhile, I had received the long awaited email from the Two Marys to say that our 'nuke' of bees was ready for collection. Mrs Silverwood is as fascinated by bees as we are and quickly put in a bid that she and Mr S would drive me out to Drumshanbo to collect the bees. and Liz agreed to stay home and 'mind the smalls'. All we could do that night (Friday) was to bring them gently home and place the 'nuke' in the final hive position. It had to be left for 48 hours to settle down and to allow the bees, waking up on Saturday morning, to re-orientate themselves to the unfamiliar surroundings. We had to collect the 'nuke' at after 21:30 so that the bees would have gone to bed in Drumshanbo (and could be shut down) - we were positioning them in our place at more like half eleven at night, which is dusk here at this time of year!

Re-hiving the nuke frames

The bees then needed moving from the nuke to the proper hive on the Sunday and once again Mrs S volunteered to help, with Liz stepping aside. This went (sort of) OK but in our beginner-ish fumblings and non-use of the smoker we sent angry bees zooming off in all directions and unfortunately managed to get 2 members of our audience stung even though they were standing at quite a distance, Liz and our youngest niece, R. Useful lessons learned there! I am still un-stung, but it can only be a matter of time. Even the experts get stung on a regular basis.

And so to bonfire night. We snuck ours in a bit early because the children had helped us build the fire, and would be gone at 08:00 on the morning of the 'proper day'. We lit the fire at about 7 pm on the Sunday (by which time, as I said, there were plumes of smoke all over our northern horizon and a plume of thick black smoke in our NW, we guess from the 'pub one' which happens at the crossroads in Kilmovee. Mrs S had bought chocolate digestives and marsh mallows (the kids here all grow up on something called 'smores' which are melted marshmallow squished between 2 biscuits. I had never heard of it. Liz thinks it might be a Girl-Guide campfire thing)

The fire here was made up of the long-since-dried out 'sneddings' (side branches) of black spruce and ash, so it burned fierce, hot and fast, driving us back but also keeping the mozzies and gnats at bay. When it calmed down a bit we threw in potatoes covered in tin foil and eventually a saucepan of beans, planning to have ourselves a picnic with coleslaw, but as we gathered the chairs, food and blankets around the dying embers, so too, the little biting horrors gathered in a huge cloud and soon had us gathering up our stuff and retreating indoors. Liz and Mrs S in particular seem to be very tasty to the local brand of midges and gnats - it must be in the family scent, CO2, skin and blood; I get driven crazy by them crawling over my scalp but I do not seem to get bitten.

Mrs S and Pirate the cat.

The cat 'Pirate' gets a stage closer to our being able to handle him/her and to get the poor thing to the vet. Mrs S made it her mission on this 'holiday' to try a bit of 'cat whispering', going out to meet him (I'm going with 'him' till proved wrong), whistling him up, calling him and then tempting him in with plates of food. He came up really close and later was confident enough to stay at his bowl while both niece R, and then I was able to pet him. He is not at all well, poor thing,

His eyes and ears are badly crusty and infected, he is very thin and when you stroke him you can feel lumps and scabs through the fur. His right eye, in particular, seems sunken and may be useless. Still, we are persisting with him. We are determined to get him to the stage where we can capture him into the cat basket and get vet Aoife to have a good look at him to see what he needs. Meanwhile, we may try to get some 'Spot On' anti-flea meds onto him.

Dublin Bay rose doing its thing.

So, now it is Monday morning and the guests are gone. We love them all madly and we love having them but we also love the peace and quiet which descends as they depart. Safe home you Silverwoods, and safe journey to Carraroe to collect Em-J and her friend Mohammed. We enjoyed our day of recovering, stripping beds, moving the futon back to the caravan, washing up, ironing (Liz) and mucking out geese (Me). Sorry this blog has been a bit of a long one, but we'll be back to normal now.

There is only one day in the year.........

My UK friends and readers may find this as hard to believe as we did when we first arrived here, but there is only one day in the year when you are allowed to have a bonfire to burn your garden waste, hedge clippings and so on. Bonfires and the burning of rubbish are illegal without a special licence which you'd have to apply for and get signed off by County Council officials, so tends to get used only rarely by big landscaping operations and farmers. This is no doubt for very good reasons to do with not starting bush-fires in the local forests and on the bogs, plus pollution. We are told that in the early days of this ban there was actually a spotter helicopter sent up to look for tell tale smoke columns.

I have to say that before we knew this, and while we were ripping all the old, wood-worm riddled timbers out of the house, we might have done a few bonfires. I also think it is one of those laws, of which there seem to be quite a few in Ireland, where nobody actually enforces them and there have never been any arrests or prosecutions. None the less we are wary of being the first test case so, now that we know, we are not doing any illegal burns.

There is one day of the year when you are allowed to light bonfires - Bonfire Night which here is obviously nothing to do with burning Catholics on November 5th! It is celebrated on June 23rd (this year, anyway) and is geared to the Summer Solstice and/or St John's Eve. We suspect it is another of these 'Hi-Jacked' ones which was being celebrated by the pre-Christian Irish and was then absorbed and 'civilised' by the early Christians into being all about St John.

It ends up meaning that even if the weather is vile and too windy for sensible fires, everyone ignores all the beautiful, windless days of early June and saves all their burn-able rubbish for the 23rd. We did this - for all those still days of May and June, the hedge cuttings in our East Field languished on the grass and because the horses would not risk prickling their lips near cut bramble, the grass and docks grew long and lush through them, so that when we came to want them today it was the devil an' all job to wrench them out of the thigh-high grass. It was also a bit windy so that in the UK I'd have been leaving the burn for a safer day, but we decided that down in the 'well' of the field between the tall trees of our 'Secret Garden' and the eastern boundary, we'd be safe enough. So it proved. We have now burned all the cuttings and managed not to start any forest fires.

Happy Bonfire Night, Irish style!