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Advice
Yesterday
Guys, I'd like your advice on this.
I have reason to stop at a certain B&B next week. I won't be doing so, because if friends of mine aren't welcome, I'm not welcome.
But should I tell them that or let their bigotry fade into it's own history?
I'm reluctant to give them an opportunity to play the victim.
Boredom And Maps Are Bad Bedfellows
4 Days Ago
The Devil makes work for idle hands, they say.
Once or twice today I had a bit of a lull. And I was surrounded by maps, and, well, routes started to be plotted. There's a certain pleasure in poring over maps, plotting routes. Pondering all the myriad ways of getting from A to B, and trying to find one that's never been done, or to find the most interesting way of doing it.
Have you ever read a brilliant novel, and got so engrossed in it that you don't consciously see letters and words on the paper, you just see the images, and colours, and events happening in your mind? Maps are like that if you have a good one. You see a cliff, not a jaggedy line that *represents* a cliff. You're off on a voyage before you know it. But I digress.
So, first the boredom. Then the maps. Then, if you're unlucky, the temptation.
And before you know it you've got half a mind to do the Mournes Seven Sevens Challenge...to climb each peak in the Mournes >700metres, in about 10-12 hours.
Trailtrekker had *nothing* on that.
And, almost like an omen, the most recent map has downgraded one of those peaks to less than 700m now. So it's the SIX sevens, and six sevens =_____?
42, of course!
And as if that wasn't enough temptation, I then found out they've brought the Mourne Wall Challenge back this year, for the first time in thirty years...
If people keep making snowballs like this, I'm gonna end up firing them. 
Now that's just not on
Last Week
Now I'm a 
kinda guy. I don't lose my temper or start fights about politics, or football, or anything, really.
But I do love my weekend Irish Times. It's a proper newspaper. The old-school type of newspaper that weighs half a ton and employs a horticultural columnist who actually writes her own copy AND knows what she's talking about. This is a rarity.
The weekend Irish Timeses were stolen from the shop. That I can deal with. But when they offered me a free Daily Mail instead, I felt violated.
<quavery lip>
The weird old source of the day
Last Week
The Journal of Thomas Dinely, 1861.
Dinely is an Englishman who was travelling in Ireland.
The guy who edited this journal is just downright cruel. After a passage where Dinely describes a lake overflowing with enormous fish, especially trout, it simply says:
[Here follows a statement about the fish called Sargus, which is unfit to print.]
COME ON! You can't just leave us hanging like that.
Now I'm going to have to spend hours finding out what's so filthy and obscene about the 17th Century Sargus fish.
By Jove, It's Like Looking In A Mirror!
2 Weeks Ago
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Dublin Penny Journal!
The DPJ ran for five wonderful years in the 1830s. It's a magazine so broad in scope that you don't really find its like today. Any content was fair game, as long as it was informative or entertaining. I have been thumbing through the whole collection today, and the realisation hit me like a thunderbolt: it was a hootoo of the 1830s!
Just have a look at a few selected article titles.
- How to know a good horse
- Fossil Deer
- Expediency of attending to the eyelashes (!)
- Extraordinary caverns near Kilkenny
- The effects of fear
- Advantages and disadvantages of matrimony
- Making wines from fruits of native growth
- Ancient Irish trumpets
- Mulhern, the Irish conjuror
This stuff is fascinating! 
PS - take note, guys. Make sure your night caps are made of netting or linen. Some people wear ones of wool or worsted, which is "a most pernicious and injurious habit". Dr Flanagan said so in 1837!
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KB
Last posted: 10 Hours Ago
