Lake run

The COVID-19 lockdown rulebook in Ireland says outside exercise must be within 2km of home, and suggests a maximum of an hour or so.

That rules out the hills (we call them mountains) which are just the other side of the lake, but the bridge over the lake at the bottom of our road is well within the limit.

Yesterday I ventured out along the lakeshore from the bridge - I figured that once off the road I was also off the radar as there are no dwellings or worn human routes that you intersect once away from the bridge, but instead a lot of mud. So I successfully made it around the Kings River end of the lake, fording the river (it was up to my waist) rather than swimming as the present level is high-ish and I am not a confident swimmer.

In the event, as I neared the bridge on my return, I did meet one family group and duly passed them with 2m separation.

I'm hoping the 2km limit will at least be extended come May 5th. Once on the mountains and away from human habitation, who cares about limits? Unless sheep are susceptible.

The Artful Dodger

Does anyone else, in this coronavirus lockdown that besets us, turn to Youtube videos? I happened to chance on Terry Wogan interviewing Jack Wild and Mark Lester together in 2012. What struck me was how different these two actors were. One question Terry asked was whether either of them ever watched the film now. Mark said yes, often. Jack responded saying Mark he was mad to!

The film "Oliver" left a lasting impression on me, as I explained in a previous post.  I have watched it several times since and would gladly watch it again on the big screen. It remains one of my all-time favourite films.

What I hadn't realised until I started Googling after watching that interview was... Jack Wild was born in September 1952, just a few months before me.  The film was released in September 1968 so allowing a few months both Jack and I were then 16 years of age.

Quoting from his obituary in The Guardian: Jack was a millionaire at 18 and an alcoholic by 21, has died after a long battle with oral cancer, aged 53. He was also a diabetic and a heavy smoker.  And I thought - how sad.

At least he himself reckoned, as told in It's A Dodger's Life: "I only wish I’d invested the money and not drank quite so much. But other than that I don’t think there is much else I’d change. And I did have a lot of fun. And I honour him for that honesty.

In contrast, once past youthful flings, Mark studied hard to become a professional osteopath and is still alive.  And I'm kind-of glad he still watches the film he starred in, because it makes me feel OK about loving it.

And where does that place me?

Bowling

I am supposed to be teaching woodwork to two boys (not mine!) in our home schooling group and figured it would be fun to introduce them to the lathe. But, hang on, shouldn't the teacher have some hands-on experience first? Hence Bowl One and Bowl Two. The First Bowl was from a solid block of well seasoned beech from a tree on our own property.  The Last Bowl (I know that sounds a bit final but it was a lot of work and just now I can't countenance doing it again. Maybe, like after eating a big meal, the passage of time might change my mind) was more challenging. It was loosely inspired by this Youtube clip. Click here for some more examples of what the maestros achieve.

Here's some of my progress in pictures...

First plan your work, then work your plan!

After thicknessing my timber stock (ash and sapele) to a constant thickness of ~ 18mm, and then ripping the planks to widths per my plan, cutting the segments had to be done very precisely and our saw bench rose to the challenge, although some of my joints are not as tight as I would have liked. I regret I didn't think of making a photo record until I was past this stage.

Each piece cross cut at 18 degrees either end, then assembled and clamped.
 The completed first and second ring in foreground.

A large hose-clip binds the pieces together

The ten pieces held together on adhesive tape

The rings then stacked, glued and clamped

All glued, big steps inside to smooth out! 

The outside - with some of the tape remaining

Sacrificial MDF glued on top to hold the face plate,
and how I lined the plate with the bowl centre

On the lathe at last!

Many stops and starts to re-position the tool rest

Smoothing 80, 120, 180, 320 finally 600 grit paper

The outside completed, and re-positioning the face plate

Getting through the sacrificial MDF lid

Cutting the inside wasn't so easy

Almost done cutting

Ready for sanding on the inside

The completed bowl

Bread of Angels

Candied Angelica

Did I already mention that in my childhood I had the use of part of my father's workshop in the "top garden"? Here I decimated old radios and TV sets and salvaged their parts and, over a period of years, constructed various projects including an oscilloscope, an audio sine-wave generator and an X-Y plotter. And I had a gramophone with an electric pickup that played only 78's and which used steel needles. I got my first 78 records from a second-hand shop "The Rocking Horse" just up the road from where we lived. And thus I was introduced to and got to love Rossini's overture to Guillaume Tell with its amazing portrayal of the storm. I also had a record of a man singing Caesar Franck's Panis Angelicus which tune has lurked at the back of my head and haunted me ever since, albeit mostly stifled because it was RC and my parents were ever so anti-RC. That was long before I discovered that my blog's namesake was a very devout RC.

Angelica is something quite different. My mother used it to decorate cakes so I got to taste it. It tastes like stalks steeped in sugar. A kind of sweet version of celery. Why would you put that on cakes?

Continuing with my recent theme of child musicians I came across Michael Verschuere. Quite a different cup of tea from Aksel Rykkvin but nevertheless I was moved by his rendition of Panis Angelicus.  But even richer than his singing is his expression when it was over - the joy in his face:

Michael Verschuere's joy having just sung Panis Angelicus

Bless all the dear children
In Thy tender care
And fit them for heaven
To live with Thee there

Cell-phones rule OK?

Everyone now-a-days has a cell-phone. We sit down to dinner, are together in the lounge or in church, and out come the cell-phones. Never mind talking - it's easier to chat even when in the same room. I have a Pixel-2 and I love it. I can video chat with my daughter in Australia or son in Alaska. It is my watch, calendar, camera, GPS enabled map, music and video player and recorder, calculator, internet browser - and then there are apps and games. No need for an encyclopedia - hardly any need of prayer for guidance - Google does it all! It does so much more than being a portable 'phone. And I take great care of it. But of course you know all this because you, too, have a cell-phone. Even if you think yourself computer-illiterate. You probably pay for data too - and by the time you add up the cost of the phone and the service charges you are likely paying out a considerable sum per year for the privilege.

Not only that, I've been to Africa where many folk are poor, living in one room hovels, rarely able to afford more than beans and rice to eat. And yet they all have cell-phones.

Hand in hand with the internet, the ubiquitous cell-phone is an unprecedented invention, a miracle of modern technology, a paradigm changer. And yet most folk are very hum-drum about it and seemingly take the whole show for granted, indeed communication with friends and access to the internet has more or less become a universal inalienable right. We soon complain when we lose connectivity for any reason. A big truck took down our overhead fibre feed a couple of days back and it hasn't been fixed yet (it is Easter weekend) - but J has kindly jerry-rigged a feed from a property we own up the road to keep our insatiable appetite fed.

I am reminded of the little maiden's globe in Phantastes. This book is a bit like the Bible in that the imagery is vivid and beautiful but often hard to interpret. Indeed I am not at all sure that an exact interpretation is intended.

She came along singing and dancing, happy as a child, though she seemed almost a woman. In her hands--now in one, now in another--she carried a small globe, bright and clear as the purest crystal. This seemed at once her plaything and her greatest treasure. At one moment, you would have thought her utterly careless of it, and at another, overwhelmed with anxiety for its safety. But I believe she was taking care of it all the time, perhaps not least when least occupied about it.

The protagonist Anodos narrates... I put out both my hands and laid hold of it. It began to sound as before. The sound rapidly increased, till it grew a low tempest of harmony, and the globe trembled, and quivered, and throbbed between my hands. I had not the heart to pull it away from the maiden, though I held it in spite of her attempts to take it from me; yes, I shame to say, in spite of her prayers, and, at last, her tears. The music went on growing in, intensity and complication of tones, and the globe vibrated and heaved; till at last it burst in our hands, and a black vapour broke upwards from out of it; then turned, as if blown sideways, and enveloped the maiden, hiding even the shadow in its blackness. She held fast the fragments, which I abandoned, and fled from me into the forest in the direction whence she had come, wailing like a child, and crying, 'You have broken my globe; my globe is broken--my globe is broken!'

Then much later in the book he meets the little maiden again, and she recounts:

You broke my globe. Yet I thank you. Perhaps I owe you many thanks for breaking it. I took the
pieces, all black, and wet with crying over them, to the Fairy Queen. There was no music and no light in them now. But she took them from me, and laid them aside; and made me go to sleep in a great hall of white, with black pillars, and many red curtains. When I woke in the morning, I went to her, hoping to have my globe again, whole and sound; but she sent me away without it, and I have not seen it since. Nor do I care for it now. I have something so much better. I do not need the globe to play to me; for I can sing. I could not sing at all before. Now I go about everywhere through Fairy Land, singing till my heart is like to break, just like my globe, for very joy at my own songs. And wherever I go, my songs do good, and deliver people. And now I have delivered you, and I am so happy.

Perhaps if there was an EMP, like the solar storm of 1859, that put out all telecommunications and rendered cell-phone virtually useless, we might learn to sing. And, singing, put the world to rights.

What does it take?

When there is unresolved disagreement with an otherwise respected colleague, when there is estrangement from a loved one, when there is imagined ostracisation, when one person believes that "God has said" and another opposes it - what does it take to reconcile them, to restore trust and relationship? When God seems distant and irrelevant, when strong prayers go unanswered for years, when pleas for God to reveal himself hit brazen heavens, what does it take to convince us
that truly He heals all our diseases? Although I will not give up asking.

In a post of many years previous I described my relationship with my father, he being of few but memorable words. I always respected him and many of my principles by which I live are founded on his input. But then I did this community thing, and he after my mother died did his thing, and we drifted apart. I in Northern Ireland with very little liberty to travel having given all for the common. He, having moved in and become part of another family in an arrangement that I may never comprehend but one in which he also had given all for another common. We met once. Somehow I had managed a trip to the UK. I knocked on this family's front door in Old Alresford. It was clear that I was not welcome but I forced my way in and was able to sit with my father for a little while. His love for me was evident although stifled and he gave me some money, but the whole episode was strangely surreal.  He died not long after and to my shame to this day I do not know the details of how and why. In his will he left me the contents of his workshop and I still treasure the little I was able to redeem from this. He had already given away the rest of his estate. What would it have taken to completely restore our relationship with him to what it was when I was a child?

What does it take, or what will it take, for those powerful words "Well done, good and faithful servant" to apply to me? To stand secure on that Rock? To know no shadow of doubt, to know the warmth of His presence, to know total shalom peace? What does it take for any man to say "my Lord and my God"?

The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa

Talking about agonisingly beautiful I was reminded of the amazing sculpture "The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa". It is almost too beautiful, too perfect, for perfection and beauty go hand in hand.  Teresa of Ávila lived in the 1500's and the sculpture by Gian Lorenzo Bernini is meant to represent her experience of religious ecstasy in her encounter with the angel and she described it as follows:

I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron's point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it. The soul is satisfied now with nothing less than God. The pain is not bodily, but spiritual; though the body has its share in it. It is a caressing of love so sweet which now takes place between the soul and God, that I pray God of His goodness to make him experience it who may think that I am lying.

I suppose it was a vision. I do not think I have ever had a vision unless the angel on the chimney stack beyond my childhood bedroom window counts. I do have dreams, some very vivid. But what was its source? She and doubtless my Catholic friends claim it was God. Fundamentalist Christians might say it was the devil. Or was it a very fertile imagination fueled by her closeted lifestyle and possibly too much cheese the night before.

We have very little understanding of the human brain. The E&T magazine quotes theoretical physicist Dr Michio Kaku as saying the human brain has 100 billion neurons, each neuron connected to 10,000 other neurons. Sitting on your shoulders is the most complicated object in the known universe. Some say that religious experiences (and dreams) are 'only' an artefact of the brain's inner workings, a sort of side effect.

Pain accentuates beauty. Rather like basking in a hot shower after returning from a long, arduous and cold run. Pain and its resulting suffering and endurance, then, are too oft despised gifts without which we would become wimps. 

These coronavirus restrictions are a bit painful. We will not be overcome by evil, but will overcome evil with good. 

Tractor puncture

Some while ago our tractor was used to heap up a pile of wood and got a puncture in the front offside tire. It's a small tractor and not 4-wheel-drive, so the front wheels are not that large, but still larger than a car's. Using my bottle-jack I raised the front axle, put it on blocks and removed the wheel-nuts using a 1/2" socket wrench extended with some 1" square section steel I found in the barn. The intention was from someone to take the wheel to the tire shop in Blessington, but then the latest coronavirus restrictions put a stop to that. Which meant no tractor for however long...

I could have given into the rule of the virus at this point, but that's no way to act in an apocalypse. So this afternoon I set to work. I filled a large tub with water and verified that there was indeed a puncture - air was coming out around the valve which suggested there was an inner tube. And, bicycler that I am, I had the means to repair an inner tube. But I couldn't shift the outer tire. The internet reminded me that the outer gets stuck to the rim so I fixed up a 4"x2" lever and with that and a lump-hammer I managed to break the seal. It took an amazing amount of force. This had to be done both sides.

Next I needed tire levers. At the barn I found a 3' length of 2" x 1/2" steel bar which looked promising. First I ground the square-cut end to round off the sharp edges. I wanted to bend the last couple of inches - so I lit the Turboburn boiler a with a pile of dry hardwood chunks and had the fan at maximum, waited till yellow-hot embers, and stuck the bar in. After a while it came out red-hot and bent easily under lump hammer blows.  I also had a couple of pry bars as secondary tire levers.

Starting with the valve uppermost, and on the opposite side to the valve, I needed the full 3' length to get enough leverage to prise the rubber over the rim, but eventually I did it. Taking care not to hurt the inner tube.

With a couple of offcuts of 4"x4" timber under the tire to lift it above the rim, I extracted the inner tube. I found the puncture with my tub of water, and did the repair using a large patch about 1.5" diameter. Testing proved it was sound and there were no other leaks.

Now to push the inner into the outer with valve stem poking through the hole, and getting the outer tire back on again. Once again I needed the 3' bar in addition to my larger pry bar, but it went on and after filling with air (we have a compressor) I took it to the barn to reunite with the tractor. No problems there. Then I rode the tractor in triumph down to the woodshop to top up the air pressure  and Bob's your uncle. Tomorrow I shall go see if the tire has kept its pressure.

Which only goes to show that all manner of things one once thought were only for the professionals are actually possible with a bit of brain and a lot of grunt. And the internet for encouragement.

We shall not give into the virus.

Though he slay me, I will hope in him; yet I will argue my ways to his face.

I'm a grandfather (again)

New Bailey infant aka Joey

My Australian daughter K has finally produced. It had to be a C-section but both mother and baby girl are fine.  Hitherto we have referred to her as "Joey" and as of yet we have no official name, so you can see the tag merely says BAILEY. We were to visit sometime in May but the coronavirus has put a stop to that.

We are now told to stay at home - except shopping for food or brief exercise but no further than 2km. This we suppose is a radius not total distance. I've had to modify by usual run to comply, and longer weekend excursions are no longer possible.

We are not allowed to visit another dwelling, so we get to see our grandchildren or their parents only occasionally and outside at a suitable distance, which is kind of weird.

Our sub-group in the "courtyard", which is a dwelling joined to but separate from the main house where we are, has three children who leave their bikes and play things in the outside area common to our and their group, so one needs to keep a mental note of what belongs to which group for fear of accidentally touching it.

And yet no-one in any our four sub-groups have virus symptoms so all these precautions are probably technically unnecessary.  We have food and drink, and warmth, and a roof over our heads, for all of this we are very thankful knowing that there are many worldwide that are deprived, for example as in India at the moment.

So far there are oodles of small maintenance jobs on our property to keep me from idleness.

They said these stricter restrictions will be until Easter but it's looking like it might be longer. As to when long haul flights and entry into Australia become possible, who can say?