8 Kilogrammes

The iconic Ben Bulben seen from the ward windows

We're still here and feeling very grateful for the huge out-pourings of support and get well messages especially all over Twitter and Facebook.Also the ones called in to Elizabeth from friends, rels and people around our superb village. (She brings me a check list each day and calls them out to me. It's great!) They're all much appreciated and make me feel very cared for and looked after. Thank You.

That big screen in my "private" room (OK,
single bed bay) which became the place to watch
the World Cup England game

This end, I am behaving myself, taking all the meds and willingly submitting to all the treatments and investigations, so I am recovering fast enough for the doctor but slowly by my own normal standards for just a 'cold' or a 'man flu'. They all tell me that a pneumonia is another whole species of 'sick' and I now believe them. My thing was the accumulation of fluids on the lungs and in the tissues generally (mainly the ankles due to gravity). I am here 8 days and have lost 8 kg now, which is a whole new lease of life on the breathing.

Telemetry

As I go through the recovery phase, I also move around the place and gain and lose technological gear. At my most wired, when first in here, I counted 15 lines and wires including the 10 leads connected to my chest and extremities from the heart monitor, the oxygen or nebuliser line, oxygen saturation to a handy finger tip, blood pressure, fancy spiral "push" for my diuretics, etc. I get some of these tests still but that is at the periodic nurse's rounds.

The 'Airvo' oxygen pump.

I am now in the 6-bed, lower intensity bay and have just one machine 'permanently' connected to me, that being the "Airvo", supplier of heated and wetted oxygen to my nose. This is a fine piece of kit now that I have the heat turned down. When the nurses first gave it to me it was a hot afternoon and I just wanted to go lie down on some cold concrete or something. The air-con was on, so my bod was comfortable, but then I got this 'desert' wind coming into my nose, heating my head up and making me sweat into the pillow.

Hospital jewelry. My drip line

Ah well, we put up with it, and it was only the next day when I happened to comment, that one of the nurses said "Oh, you don't have to have it THAT hot, let me turn it down a few degrees!" Bliss. The only other brush with new tech lately was when I was done CT scan. This is a fancy-pants X-ray machine shaped like a thin flat do-nut which they slide you through. The X-ray 'gun' or receiver whizzes round your chest as you slide, 'salami slicing' an image which is then much more useful diagnostically than a straight chest X-ray.

I will hear nothing bad about the food, which has been
excellent throughout.

So, pretty much it is all going well and I can't imagine I will be  in here too long. There is only one question I would LOVE the answer to and I don't think I will ever get that one due to the total lack of engagement with the docs for 6 years. How did this huge "aggressive" pneumonia creep up on me so sneakily. In the morning I felt as right as rain and was actually doing 3 hours of heavy work (beef muck) without a bother on me. 3 hours later, early evening, I suddenly couldn't walk 30 yard without leaning on a fence gasping for breath. It is as if something hit a trigger point and just let go, like a modern car deciding to pre-emptively slow you down to 56 mph because it has detected a brake-bulb blown. Whoa! You need to get some help.

Sorry about the pics in this one - taken on the Android so not of the usual quality.

A Million Hens but No Eggs?

This very late cousin of "The Bishop" dahlia sneaks a few
flowers out before the first frost.

As I put out the 'Sold Out' sign on the egg Honesty Box again, I rue the bad timing that had me starting those sales just as, it seemed to me, the egg production dried up. I go round each morning and collect 2 or 3 duck eggs from the ever-reliable Khaki Campbells and then, at the moment, pick up the very sporadic 1-3 hen eggs through the day from the various hidey holes.

An unidentified fungus from the front lawn. 

We are knee deep in young chickens at present. We must have around 30 chickens total but regular readers will know that 26 of these are still deciding whether to shout cock-a-doodle-doo or to lay an egg. The old guard are currently on go-slow, presumably due to the weather.

Egg production stats.

It is not, in fact, as bad as it seems. Way back when we first came over, I used to haunt various Internet discussion groups on the subject of keeping chickens (Fowl.IE was one) and someone on there suggested we all keep score on our egg laying. I have done so ever since. I can see from these data that the current situation is by no means unprecedented and the current year is probably the best yet.

These things go in peaks and troughs. The total eggs produced in 2015 was 1639, 2016 was only 926 and this year we have 1563 so far and every chance of topping 2015's total by Dec 31st. Last year the hens laid fewer than 100 eggs per month from May right round to October even before half were wiped out by our fox attack in November. This year no months have seen hen eggs below 100 and we had 199 in May and 200 in August. Do not despair you poultry-watchers.

The late 'Oveja', bought-in ewe lamb.

Obviously we hope for a smart pick-up around Christmas as these new birds come of age and we are also upping the ante soon with our addition of 2 female Guinea Fowl. Also today, we have decided to increase the number of ducks so we have contacted friends Sue and Rob to arrange to bring them over half a dozen eggs to put in their incubator. These will be Khaki Campbell again though we may, at some point, look at a few more meaty birds - Muscovies for example.

Talking of 'meat' I noted in the previous post that our bought-in ewe lamb, 'Oveja' had come up ready, so we had booked her in for her final journey on Monday. I still hate these days - they feel like such a betrayal - but we have now done them enough that I am more confident that all the feared things that might go wrong, no longer scare me so much - Will we be able to catch the lambs? Will the trailer break? Will the car break down? Will the butcher reject them? Will the paperwork be OK? Will we be able to kiss them goodbye?

First 'fruits' - the offal, which you collect on D+1. Left to right
 here, kidneys still in their (suet) jackets, liver, heart and lungs.
The carcass hangs a week and will be collected next Monday.

We are now almost casual about it. I was determined this time not to drive Liz the usual amount of crazy with my pacing, worrying and drumming my fingers on the table. We shared a leisured tea/coffee, ran the sheep across to the race, separated and loaded our required 'cargo' (just Oveja), drove to Castlerea, unloaded and processed paperwork, swapped instructions with the butcher-guys and adjourned to nearby Benny's Deli for a croissant-based breakfast. Pride in a job well done.

We even 'got away with' that risk of having to drop your one sheep into the lonely empty 'lairage' pen where she would 'baa' piteously at you as you drove away - the pen had 6 ewe lambs already in it, so Oveja sprinted in there to be with her new 'friends'. Safety in numbers... for a while anyway. Today I picked up the offal but I did not see Joe, the slaughterman. I had asked him to check for me whether the lass was pregnant. When ewe lambs are run with their brothers past 5-6 months this can often happen and in our case it might give us an early indication that Oveja's brother 'Pedro' who we plan to keep as our breeding ram, is able for this job. Not very "nice", but one of those hard facts of life.

Village Calendar 2018

Meanwhile, Liz has created the next year's Village Calendar again based upon pictures from the 2016/7 "Lisacul 365" project, our photographic portrait of the 18 townlands as a 'Year in the Life'. Liz decided this time to mainly choose 'nature' pictures, so they are, I am proud to say, mainly mine. The calendar is a lovely thing and, this year, they are selling at only €5 (it was €10 last year) and going like hot cakes. Liz is looking at a 2nd print-run as the supply dwindles. If you want one (or more - they would be great stocking fillers) go to the village website - LisaculInfo.ie .

Hard to beat a good 'Cosyglo' fire. 

Liz's other main project at the moment, the Village Play, is also progressing. The group have been reading through various plays proposed by the 'boss' (Tom C) but have only had print-outs of olde-font play-scripts in PDF format to work with, so Liz has started typing these into her laptop so that they have a live version they can mess with as desired. The first (Her Step Husband by Larry Johnson) was over 30,000 words so it took her a while. To no avail, as it turned out - the players have now settled on 'Anyone Could Rob a Bank' by Tom Coffey (1960) and all the actors have now been cast, so Liz is going to have to get the laptop out again and fiddle another 20,000+ words into it. Ah well. Life is never easy for an Assistant Producer.

While we are on creative writing, I have just completed another week (my 3rd) as curator of the @SmallHolderIRL Twitter account, the 'voice of Irish small holders', if you like. I seem to go down OK on there and it suits my style of chattering and wittering. My Dad would have used the words "Happy" and "Garrulous", I expect, but hey, it works for me. I always get good feedback and also I get asked back to do it again so it can't all be bad.

This is not my picture, but may well have been 'my' buzzard.
Pic is by Michael Bell, who goes on Twitter as @learnnature
and was taken in Ballyleague (Co Roscommon). 

Finally I am in between, currently, the various wild-life recording events to which I contribute, on the (Irish) National Bio-Diversity database. The bumblebee survey finishes at the end of October and we don't start the big bird-watch till the end of November. What I do in the meantime is input any sightings I see of anything note-worthy including roadkill. Exciting, then, to see my first buzzard since I've been here. I am not even sure it was a buzzard (though I thought so) - it was soaring in the blue sky with its wings held in a rather high 'V', so more like a harrier but it was against the sun, so I could only see the black silhouette. It was nice later that day to get a post by Liz re-sharing a pic taken by a guy (Michael Bell, who Tweets under the name @LearnNature ) who had photo'd 2 buzzards soaring over Ballyleague. That town is a good 50 minutes drive east from here, right over by the River Shannon, but I'd seen my buzzard at 10 am and he was making good speed over the ground, so it might just have been the same bird.

....And that is enough for now. Good Luck.

Pedro the Ram is in Love

The sloppy plum jam goes in for a re-try.

I knew even as I was posting those pics in the last blog story, of sloppy plum jam and typing. rather apologetically. that it would 'do', that it wouldn't. "Ah well", I said. "It'll get used up". I was just being lazy. A few days later a friend on Twitter's @smallholderIRL account was tut-tutting that it would spoil and I should boil it again, reduce it considerably and get it to set. True of course, so on Sunday morning, back it all went into the pan. I got a good 20% of the water/volume out of it, it went darker in colour and is now potted up properly. You can tilt the jars to 45 degrees and nothing moves.

Chinese pancakes. 

That turned out to be quite a busy 24 hours for me in the kitchen because, Friends of the Blog will remember, Lizzie's Birthday came round and in this house the Birthday Girl (or boy) gets to choose the stay in/go out, the menu and the chef-du-jour. We'll eat in, she decided, you are cooking and the menu is Chinese Crispy Duck and the pancakes, spring onion, cucumber and the rest.

Chinese pancakes.

That was an enjoyable challenge. I had never cooked duck this way before and certainly never made the little, thin pancakes which are not really pancakes at all. Well, not in the sense of pouring batter into a frying pan. They are, though, not available locally. You can get all manner of wraps and tortillas, pitta breads and poppadoms but not these (unless one of my readers knows different) so we were onto the Internet for one of those American accent 'how-to' videos.

Crispy duck should not need carving under that honey-glazed,
crisped skin. It should shred easily with a couple of forks.

They are great fun but a lot of faff and fiddling. You basically make a sticky-ish dough using flour, sugar and boiling water. You knead that gently like bread-dough, rest it and then roll it out like pastry to half a cm thick. You cut that into 3" discs with a biscuit cutter. Every other 'biscuit' is then brushed with sesame oil and they are stacked in pairs like little dough/oil sandwiches. The pairs are then rolled out "paper thin" (says the recipe - I got them pretty thin and about 6 inches diameter but I'm not so sure about the 'paper' aspect). Each thinned pair is then 'fried' with no oil in a hot frying pan, one and quarter minutes each side, so that they blister up like pitta bread.

Liz took this pic of the main event. 

My only way of timing 75 seconds was using the stop watch function on my olde phone and there were 20-odd pairs to fry, so I was there a good 45 minutes slapping them in and flipping them over. When you lift them off heat, you can open them a bit like a pitta bread and peel the two halves away from each other. You end up with a goodly stack of very thin, single-layer pancakes to either use straight away, or fridge over night or freeze for later.

Choc fudge brownie from local artisan baker, O'Hehir's of Sligo

The rest of the meal went very well too and was much appreciated by the 'audience'. The duck meat was tender enough (as it should be) to tease apart with a fork under that honey-glazed, crisped skin. I had shredded spring onions, cucumber and salad-peppers and Liz had already made, a few days ago, that lovely plum sauce. We had bought a special bottle of white wine. I did a starter of simply-cooked jumbo prawns with wedges of lemon and lime. 'Pud' was a choc fudge brownie from nearby artisan baker, O'Hehir's of Sligo. We'll call it a success. I was delighted to battle through the mountain of washing up and clearing away and to hand the space back to the Chief-Chef.

Where Lily goes (left) you will always find Pedro.

Meanwhile, new ram-lamb 'Pedro' is showing every sign of growing up and finding out what he is here for. We noticed him on Friday almost inseparable from our old ewe, Lily. He was close by her, sniffing her with his top lip extended (the way sheep do when the sniffing is 'amorous'), rubbing his nose and shoulders along her flanks and around her rump. All the other girls were abandoned as his focus increased so she was almost certainly coming on heat.

Then last thing at night, as I took the dogs for their last "comfort stop" patrol of the grounds, I am 99% sure I saw him mount her three times. It was dark and all I was looking at on the front lawn were silhouettes. I couldn't even swear it was Pedro and Lily I was seeing and the 'mount' was just a barely visible rising of the head and shoulders of one silhouette over the back of another but the next day Pedro had lost interest again. We are hopeful that he 'tupped' her and she is now pregnant and therefore back off heat. That would mean a possibility of lambs from Lily on 25th January, 5 months away. Watch this space.

We are enjoying the colours on some of this year's crop of hens.

If Pedro is, indeed, doing the business and things go as they did for Sue's ram 'Rambo' in 2015. Each ewe will come on heat in succession (in their own good time, of course) stimulated by the scent of a ram among them. He will fall madly in love with each in turn (nothing if not fickle!) and we might get lambs out of all four including first time Mum, last year's baby bred here, 'Rosie'. If Pedro can do all that without turning aggressive to me (or any other humans) he's a 'keeper'. Patience is the thing.

Finally, we are quite enjoying the colours of some of this year's batch of young hens. We think they may be the variety 'Marans' (as were Bubble and Squawk of yore) as the rooster, Gandalf, and our one layer-of-dark-brown-eggs, Miss Black, are. They are greys and silvers and are either 'barred' (dark bands running round the body across many feathers) or 'laced' (a dark margin on each individual feather). They are a delight to watch and to see scratching about or perching up on fences and gates. As long as they stay female and don't go off down the big-tail, tall neck, big 'cape' cock-a-doodle-doo, rooster route, they too are keepers.

Donaldina of the Trump-esque wig. 

One has caught our attention by growing the most ridiculous looking top-knot, which would make her at least part the Araucana breed. Reminiscent of the Leader of the Free World, she has been named "Donaldina".

Start harvesting spuds and clearing away the foliage here and
you are likely to find the odd stash of secretly laid eggs.

And that about wraps it up for this one. Good Luck now.

Pods and Poetry

Sheep after a shower. 

Friends of the Blog will know that we are both, separately, quite keen on the Social Media, veteran users of Facebook and Twitter and, more recently, receivers of that recent format "podcasts". Some of my readers are, I know, not well versed in these formats, so a quick description may help. Please bear in mind that I am not very good as a computer 'nerd' anyway and do not even own a smart-phone so I'd ask you to read these and smile indulgently if you know better and I have it all wrong. This is the blind leading the even blinder!

Dahlia. Some kind of 'Bishop' relative

Twitter is that fast-paced space where you can rattle in , using no more than 140 letters, what ever is in your head. Maybe a good thought has occurred or something amazing has happened, or you might be "re-tweeting" (sharing on) a good link or a picture that someone has put up. You collect as many followers as you feel the need for and people will follow you if what you are putting out pushes their buttons. I currently follow around 500 people and 500 follow me - not the same 500 but there is quite an overlap. I'd be a fairly minor user at this rate, mainly because I use Twitter from this computer under the stairs, so I can only get to it for small parts of the day in between activities in the real world. Twitter is mainly enjoyed by city types who can go round all day with smart phone in hand, walking into lamp posts etc.

The podcasts were originally a way of listening to bits of radio programmes which you had missed when they were first aired. Radio stations (like BBC Radio 4, particularly) would save the pieces digitally and you could go in much later and download them to your machine to listen to. More recently all manner of specialist media companies have sprung up just to do interviews for saving and releasing as pod casts (pods). This especially around the Donald Trump win and presidency and USA politics, but we have found plenty of other subjects on offer - Brexit, food, science and "how stuff works" and so on.

Cider apples looking promising. 

My most recent find, which actually came through Twitter, is a farming pod called Rock and Roll Farming. It has precious little to do with R+R bar the guitar-break introductory music. It is presented by one of my Twitter friends, Will Evans and he gets to interview for an hour all manner of farming great-and-good, plus people who have made a mark on the Social Media sphere; "famous" farm twitterers or people involved in big farming projects (Farm Safety campaigners, factory farming, experts on the current contentious area of badger culls against Bovine Tuberculosis and so on).

I find those pods fascinating but I should hasten to say that I don't necessarily agree with or believe all the opinions stated and no more would Will expect me to. He comes at it from the point of view that the 'pro' and 'con' camps in each area (usually farmers and 'townies' but sometimes organic vs non-organic or other splits) need to talk to each other sensibly and respectfully till we find common ground. Will puts the question to them in a form like "what would you say to the non-farmers, to convince them that....." . Some of them, though, are dyed in the wool commercial boys, trained in all the corporate wisdom and only able to see that they can make a living IN the system. I don't know how they will ever  'convince' we small-holder, trying-to-be-organic and eco-friendly types. One big Lincs arable farmer, defending the use of Glyphosphate said (and I quote) that "Glyphosphate is the safest chemical in the world" (!!!!). Quite a claim and not one likely to win any admirers as a sound-byte. The badger-cull guy was also frustrating in his one-track only-solution argument. Ah well. They all have the same rights to express their views as I do and fair play to Will for putting it all 'out there'.

Stumpy's chicks growing fast

As an amusing aside to all this serious discussion, one of Will's other guests set a ball rolling which I have been having some fun with back in Twitter in the @SmallHolderIRL account where I do most of my rabbiting. This was a farmer who has since been all over Twitter but who started, jokingly, following a boozy pub night with some fellow farmers, deciding to 'tweet' about his farm life in Haiku format. He became @FarmingHaiku and tried to do a Haiku every day for about 18 months most of which, he says, were absolute rubbish.

For the unfamiliar, Haiku is a very short style of 'poem' where you try to express an idea or a high thought in only 17 syllables, across 3 lines in a 5-7-5 format. They do not need to rhyme. You are also meant to avoid similes and metaphor because you are all about simplicity and directness of expression. Metaphors would introduce another image between writer and poem. Besides, with only 17 syllables you'd barely have room. They suit Twitter as they are short.

Lovely Birthday lunch with Sue and Rob at the
Golden Eagle in Castlerea (Hester's). Barman even
wrote 'ROS' in the beer head to celebrate our county's
recent win in the Connaught GAA champs.

I decided to try a few within the small-holder account and quite a few people found them amusing and came back with Haiku(s) of their own. Some examples of mine, which are nothing special were...

Early morning hen. Tapping at the window pane. You HAD your breakfast!

Meet the need to knead. The dough alive in your hands. Baking smells to come.

Timed to perfection. Golden dome of bread is here. Warm from the oven

Loud farmyard noises. Clamouring for their breakfast. Morning livestock rounds

Getting a bit braver with the sourdough. This a date and pecan
wholemeal loaf (with rosemary and cinnamon).

All good clean fun, I guess. They are actually quite difficult to write or, more precisely, to pare down to the right number of syllables. You try it and see.

The Thousand Natural Shocks that Flesh is Heir to

80,000 kms of good rumpy-bumpy potholed Irish roads did for
the poor Panda's suspension. New shocks at the back and a wishbone
at the sharp end. €290 - ker-ching. Ah well. 

OK. The normal PC I use for this is at the 'doctors' (slow and old like it's owner; hopefully more fix-able!). This  is being typed on Liz's posher, newer and faster lap top which I am able to blag while she is out at knitting. The machine is, though, unfamiliar to me so if this blog posts has any howlers in it - typo's, missing pictures etc, then bear with me and I will try to fix them when I get the old familiar dog of a machine back, improved.

Shiny new wishbone drivers side front.

Also, little happening just now so I will keep this one fairly short. Main job today was to take the car round to the local tyre place and get new shocks fitted at the back and a wishbone at the front. Fiats are highly regarded here for the cheapness and ease of fitting of parts but even they will eventually wear suspension parts rumbling up and down our pot-holey, rippled roads.

Rain has stopped play in silage locally, but we heard a mower
going round a local field - we might be back on.

I'd noticed uneven tyre wear at the front and a "play in the suspension" rumble at low speed, so got it checked out up on the ramp at the tyre centre. Mr Fixer there declared play in a front wishbone and the upper bushes of both rear shocks very tired. Also recommended a tracking adjustment (after the new bits, obviously!).

Twitter stats for that @IrelandsFarmers account I steered
last week. You can see where I took over at the right hand
end of the graph. I did 3 times the traffic of the 3 weeks prior
combined. The boss was delighted!

I was quite impressed by the tracking machine - 4 laser/mirror contraptions get clamped one to each wheel rim and then the computer screen lights up with little graphics, diagrams and results for each wheel vertical-ness and horizontal toe-in. Modern cars apparently have adjustment on the back suspension as well as the front. Very cool. Ah well, I am €290 poorer but the car is safe and should see us through the next NCT, at least on that aspect.

I managed to get some statistics back for my week on the @IrelandsFarmers Twitter account. I knew I'd been busy and I was fairly sure the owners/bosses of the account would be delighted. I was and they were. Turns out you measure Twitter 'traffic' on 3 main criteria as well as how many posts you create, pictures you put up etc. These are "impressions" (where someone else clicks on your post to expand it or do other things with it (copy, follow links etc) - they create an impression of your post on their own screen. Secondly how many people 'like' it and 3rd, how many copy it on to all their followers (called "re-tweeting").

In the 28 days ending with my week, the account got a million impressions and over 500,000 of these were from my posts - they told me I got more in my week that in the 3 weeks prior. Not bad All the other graphs also show big peaks on the right hand end, my days - re-tweets, likes and replies. Some of the latter may be my own - Twitter only allows 140 characters. If you need more space you reply to your first tweet with the 2nd part of the anecdote and on and on. Some of mine went to 4 'replies' which were not really replies at all. I am quite proud of all this even though it probably confirms to all my own followers that I talk too much!

Baby George being minded by his 4 responsible adults.

The only other news is that the adult geese have finally brought the one baby gosling off the nest and started to show him off and show him around.

I'm saying "him" here; we have no idea really but for now he is Baby-George. I may have posted before that there were two. There are not and I don't think there ever were. I just miss-saw a 2nd between all the 6 legs in the nest.

When they go out for a sensible amount of time and I can shut the door on them safely I will get a chance to finally get in there and clean up, and throw out the failed eggs. Right. That's it for this lap-top post. I hope it all works.

Tweet Tweet

This little mite hatches yesterday (we think) and manages to get
out of the nest. We find him cheeping frantically and waddling
round the shed floor. Fear not, all ends well. 

A Birth is Announced! Best news, I expect, for this post is that we finally have a hatch of goose eggs, this a good 2 weeks after the "due date" for the original eggs (27th May). The reason for this is that the 3 Mum/Auntie geese keep leppin' in and out of the nest after #1 goes broody and the eggs you set get trampled. These will be more recent eggs. Our goose breeding is definitely chaotic.

Curator-ing the @IrelandsFarmers Twitter account

This little mite announced his presence with frantic loud cheeping you could hear across the yard even through the excited honking of 4 adult geese, He'd got out of the nest which means a 4-5 inch "fall" out of the former concrete cattle-trough in which they nest and was a bit lost running round the floor, not trying very well to get back into the nest. It could have ended badly. We had one gander one year so annoyed by the appearance of this new, noisy, scurrying "rat" that he grabbed it by a wing and threw it across the shed, badly damaging it.

But not THESE parents. They lower their necks and chunter at him encouragingly from close range so that he stands up to his full 4 inches of height and wobbles his head proudly. The gander (Gorgeous George) has amazed all of us by being even better a dad than the ladies are mums or aunts. They get distracted, he stays focused. All 4 would protect the little fella with their lives and get very excited and angry at anyone who comes near. That was my problem. If I needed to rescue him back to the nest I knew I would need the chainsaw helmet, gloves, a coat with thick sleeves and so on. A relief then at 6 pm ish to see him back in the nest and now accompanied by a sibling. I can sleep easy and undamaged! Wish the little ones luck.

The Hubbards at Day 5 are growing a-pace. They have lost the
spherical look and already have white wing feathers.

This, though, seems to have been a week where we have both "worked" for hours without actually achieving anything around the farm, not a stroke of weeding, mowing or tidying. For Liz there has been the normal working week plus all the politics to follow, both in the US (Comey's testimony to the Senators) and in the UK (May's snap election and subsequent need to get into bed with the DUP).

Potential fruit #1 : Cherries

Liz always stays up for the results and normally takes the day after as holiday to sleep and recover. This time she was denied the holiday by boss John who suddenly had a funeral to attend, so she had to go in "even if she slept for most of it". The office must be manned and the phones answered at least from 09:30 to 13:30, Mon-Fri. In the end she gave up on the  voting coverage at 03:30, slept a while, worked the morning, then caught up by sleeping from 3 till 6 pm. There's dedication.

My 'job' was to be 'Curator' of the @IrelandsFarmers Twitter account, the voice of Twitter-using Irish farming for the week from Monday morning (5th June) to Sunday evening, tomorrow. Most of my readers, I know, have nothing to do with Twitter even if they are regulars on Facebook. It is seen as too 'ephemeral', sound-byte-ish, fleeting and short lived. You post your comment of 140 characters max and if no-one's paying attention it vanishes down the screen quickly replaced by the next Tweet. It is seen as the medium of smart, office, city types clip-clopping across marble floors in their heels, their thumbs and noses glued to the ever-on expensive smart phones and 'tablets'. It is used by vacuous, brainless celebrities and, of course, Donald Trump

Potential fruit #2 :Plums

Stick with it, though, and you can find sensible, intelligent chatter within and between groups of like-minded souls, whether your thing is politics, news, Ireland or more specialist subjects like farming or even smallholdering. When this happens, someone will generally decide that the subject "needs an account" on Twitter so they set one up and start trawling for members to join them. In this case they give the helm of the account to a different person each week, the "Curator". Friends of the blog may recall that I have curated the @smallholderIRL account 3 times now and I love having the extra following (numbering thousands of people all round the world) for the week with whom to share my news, pictures, anecdotes and banter.

Potential fruit #3 : "Irish Peach" variety of apple

All well and good. Small Holdering is the home turf and I'd know a good few people on that group through Facebook or in real life. I am happy to go on that one and strut my stuff, reasonably confident of a sympathetic reception and not too much "trolling" (idiots who are just out to argue and spoil the chat). But then I was invited to curate the 'proper' farmers' one @IrelandsFarmers. I accepted but if I'm honest I was a bit nervous. How would they accept me, this wannabee farmer, blow-in, smallholder and a Brit besides?

Potential fruit #4 : (pea sized) Peaches

I needn't have worried - it has gone really well with 95% of the stuff getting favourable comment ('Likes' and 'Re-tweets') and only the odd one completely blanked or ignored. I have covered a good range of stuff - the holding here and its stock, equipment, activities as well as what I like to do when NOT farming and some anecdotes on disasters and triumphs. One post I was very pleased with had me showing that picture of the house circa 1900 alongside one of me sitting out front on the mini-horse and cart. As I go to press I have just looked in and that one has been seen by 6713 people, 93 have said they 'like' it and 16 have shared it on ("re-tweeted" it). I seem to have done OK and I am delighted. I have to hand the tiller back at 6pm tomorrow. It is quite tiring and you are tied to the PC (no smart-phone for me!) frequently so I will not be sad to finish but I guess the 'owner' will happily have me back when the rota comes round again.... next year, maybe.

A poor blackbird gets dismantled overnight
in the new kitchen. We suspect feline
involvement. 

What else have we been at? I was out at the archery coach's place  putting the cover back on our enormous "gala tent" (mini marquee) ready for the summer activities, helped only by the lady of the house (Niamh) and a friend (Karl, an Austrian lad). Hard work in quite a brisk wind but very enjoyable and, like the curating, good to get it done.

We do get to eat out sometimes!

For Liz tonight a "Mystery night out" for the Lisacul Players, the amateur dramatics group still a-glow from their very successful performance of "Cupid Wore Skirts" a few months back. They had no idea where they were being taken, only that they had to show up at the village cross-roads by quarter past 7 a bit glammed up. One of the lads was organising it and he was keeping very tight lipped. Small huddles of actors formed (plus Liz and Director Tom C) frantically trying to work it out from the time, the need for €20 as a share of the mini-bus hire and their knowledge of 'Derek' (organiser) where they might be bound. One actor was praying that he'd not take them anywhere with Country music - she can't abide that, she said.

Well. Now they know. I have just had a text from Liz to say they are at a place called "The Oarsman" in Carrick on Shannon. She will no doubt fill us all in on the standard of the place's catering and the presence or absence of good aul' boys slapping their thighs, plucking their banjos and shouting 'Yeeee Harrr!' Y'all have the biggest time now!