Plastic tea bags... and last of the summer wine

Grape harvest in Andalucia, Spain. A loaded trailer full of the fruits of the vine, destined to be bottled under the labels of Monastrell, Syrah or Merlot.

My notebook is so full of reminders about interesting facts, events and exotic trivia for this week's column, that it will be a hodgepodge of paragraphs hopping from one thing to another.

In Africa, where there are lions and leopards present, farmers paint eyes on the backsides of their cattle. The eyes face the predators when the cattle are in stalls for the night and their unblinking stare deters them. Similarly, if you come upon a bear, the best tactic is not to run, but to look it straight in the eye, and it will often back off.

Soft plastic can't be recycled here in Ireland, except the specially marked biodegradable brands. Recyclers are forced to spend time extracting plastic bags from recyclable household plastic before sending it for processing. Double whammy. Would it be less expensive for our government to instal soft plastic processors rather than paying for recyclers' time to remove it?

My wife dug up Barry's tea bags in our garden which had gone into it with household-waste compost two years ago. I've praised Barry's Tea in this column before, for its flavour.

However, the knowledge that their tea bags are made with unrecyclable plastics forces us to use another brand. Two years ago, Barrys said they would stop using plastic, but Uplift, People Powered Change, informed me in August 2020 that this hadn't yet happened. Barry said some time ago that they are testing a biodegradable covering. Let's hope they provide a solution soon. 

Mr Trump's playsheet of responding to criticism by making himself the victim has created precedents worldwide. Dominic Cummins in the UK presented himself as a victim of the press and now Mr Hogan, here in Ireland, says he's a victim of the Taoiseach and Tánaiste. Surely, Ireland is a victim of Mr Hogan, in that his elitist action resulted in the State losing a key position in the EU parliament.

Tubridy spoke on RTÉ about seeing two jackdaws attack and eviscerate a sick pigeon on his lawn. They actually decapitated it. A gory tale.

An Englishman who has decided to abandon the UK and become a citizen and resident of Ireland rescued a hedgehog that had been struck by a car and brought it to a vet who kindly dosed it for free, but it died anyway. John Nichol has rescued many ailing animals in his time. He is an ardent bird-watcher and was worried about the effect of the recent extreme storms on a small colony of sand martins nesting on a sand cliff at Garretstown, near Kinsale. Happily, the birds survived, probably by going to the farthest reaches of the burrows.

A columnist in the West Cork People, a paper grown exponentially in interest and diversity over recent years, tells us that goats make 15 grams of Vitamin C , the equivalent of 300 oranges from what they ingest daily. Humans can't do that. They have the ability to make much more if attacked by a virus.

Worker wasps are dying now, but a brother-in-law tells me that upon opening his hives in Cork city, he found hundreds of dead wasps inside, these having been killed by the bees defending their honey.

Foxes are, apparently, especially partial to beetroot. A friend finds her beetroots decimated. I wish there were a better word than 'decimate', meaning one-in-ten. They eat 90% of the beetroots, mature and immature.

I don’t know if any of my readers who enjoy Shakespeare’s plays, poems and sonnets much care who wrote them. Various books by respected academics dispute his authorship in favour of prominent writers of the time, Jonson (Ben), Drayton, Kyd, Beaumont, Fletcher, etcetera. He points out that the author of the works "displays a high level of education and expertise in law, medicine, astronomy, falconry, Italy, France, courtly sports, literature, science and in at least five foreign languages".

Yet, Shakespeare left school at age 14, his father and his own daughters were illiterate. When the plague broke out in London in 1593, forcing the theatres to close, he turned to write poetry, with inimitable results.

The leaves on our beech trees are brown on the windward side, victims of the recently powerful south-westerlies. But leaves are now falling from the sheltered side too, and a number of people have remarked upon the early leaf fall this year.

A neighbour told me their cat brought three elephant hawk moth caterpillars, each as big as one's small finger, into the house, undamaged. They put the creatures back outside to find hibernation quarters, and pupate next year and grow wings.

Down this way, in West Cork, we see trailers loaded with barley grain catching the light of the sun. When the trailers are square and the light and the distance is right, they look like ingots.

In Spain, it’s the grape harvest, and the sight of a trailer full of black grapes is festive, even if the trailer is smaller than ours here.