This might not seem all that important, but I did it not because I like sunflowers – they’re nice in Plants Versus Zombies – but as far as I am aware, you can’t eat them – I did it because of a project going in the UK at the moment. It’s part sponsored by the Manchester Music of Science, via their Science Festival, and it is called the Turing Sunflower experiment. I found out about it because I’m studying maths.

If you have sunflowers, I’d encourage you to get involved as well. Scientific advances, small or big, are generally a good thing.

In other news, I bought more strawberry plants again today. I was in Homebase, theoretically buying stuff to plant things in, peat, earth, compost mix, whatever it’s called. I’ve already used it all and sent the back to the bin so can’t check, but I somehow bought more strawberries too. And sunflower seeds but you know about that already. When I came home, I did some repotting. I still have some pots to clear out but I am also very stiff so am not killing myself in the garden. I have a strawberry addiction problem – I’m almost certainly going to do better this year than last year (I think I got 8 strawberries last year – there is potential for at least 40 this year), but I don’t know how much. I repotted a few plants that are already flowering which isn’t really ideal (I think – I have absolutely no idea one way or the other) but I was late getting stuff sorted as the garden was in last place behind house move and college study lately.

I can’t really afford to extend the garden much more; my key objective is that it continues to be reasonably portable. But I would like to grow more stuff. I’d like another shot at wild garlic, for example. And if there are other fruit things I can grow in pots, that I might use for breakfast, that would be good too.

One of the things I noticed on the buying front – and this is almost certainly because I was in Homebase is that Jamie Oliver has a fairly decent range of Grow Your Own stuff. Ranges like this make small time gardening for people like me accessible. It’s not a huge mystery when there are bog simple instructions on the side of a pot.

Aside from the sunflowers, the only other item in the garden not there for the purposes of being eaten is a rose. I bought it last year; it didn’t flower, but nor did it kill itself in the garden of the last house (its two brethren did) and this year, it looks like it will flower.

This makes me smile. Not as much as going to the garden, picking fresh strawberries and eating them for breakfast did last year, but still…it’s good.

This is a wave from Couminole Strand. I know it as being near where the Ranga wrecked, and featuring in “possibly some few waves from Dinglesurf’s surf reports” I was there last weekend, and I took a lot of photographs. I loved it.

Why do I live in Dublin again?

I drove roughly 850km last weekend. I may be crazy.

but it was worth it. It was so worth it.

The price of me going to Brittany for a few days is that Brittany crops up a lot in my mind for a while afterwards.

Okay.

This is where I was 7 days ago. the photograph was taken from a beach called La Torche which is one of the more reputed surfing, and now kitesurfing also, beaches in Brittany. It is one of my favourite places in the world, it along with the Pointe du Raz. You’re looking at this photograph because for some strange reason, the house on the extreme left of the photograph is my dream house.

I suspect it could be very stormy during the winter, mind.

This is Mathsjam and in Dublin it turns up at Against the Grain on a street which I believe is called Wexford Street, although at the risk of outing myself as still a blow in, I’ve never been entirely sure of the lines between South Great Georges Street, Aungier Street, Camden Street and Wexford Street. This is near Whelans though so Wexford Street is probably a good bet.

This street blindness is a nuisance when arguing with Dublin Bus’s Real Time Passenger Information though. I have some difficulty identifying the nearest bus stop if I don’t know its number. Back with Mathsjam.

Mathsjam is where you can go to spend time solving maths puzzles. They take many forms. For example, on Tuesday I did battle with origami, a balance puzzle and looked at some professor with an inordinate interest in the number of times guests shook hands at a dinner party. It was the best fun I’ve had in a bar for a long time.

Mathsjam also uses twitter very effectively – there is a hashtag which gets busy enough on mathsjam nights needless to mention – you can search for #mathsjam and you’ll find a lot of puzzles coming your way. I am still stumped by this one which I picked up on Wednesday morning.

I’ve always liked maths puzzles. I think a lot of people do because books like Ian Stewart’s Cabinets of Curiosities would not sell as well as they do otherwise. But like a lot of people, I’ve liked them in isolation; in the same way as liking maths was something I did in isolation. Maths doesn’t have to be onerous, and it doesn’t have to be boring or hard. I think it gets a very bad rep from how it is sold in schools which is a pity because logic underpins Sudoku, for example, one of the more popular  It underpins a lot of how the world works today and a reasonable understanding of elements of it is always called for.

Mathsjam goes someway towards making maths a social activity even if you are not a mathematician. I don’t think this is a bad thing per se because it broadens your way of looking at things and this is good. It means you have access to different tools for solving problems. I learned stuff on Tuesday night that just wouldn’t have occurred to me and I wish something like this had been around when I was 16 or 17.

If you’re interested in Mathsjam, it takes place on the 2nd last Tuesday of the month in Dublin and Belfast in Ireland – and if you’re interested anywhere else, you can look at setting one up (if I were to move out of Dublin I would certainly look at doing this). It is running in about 20 cities in the UK and four other cities outside the UK and Ireland. It is completely voluntary and informal

The Dublin Mathsjam Facebook page is here.

Today’s viewing, not shown by any television channel this side of the Shannon, included The Dish. It is an absolutely wonderful movie about Parkes Observatory in Australia, which provided most of the live pictures from the moon landings.

It is a fascinating movie on several levels. It has a wonderful humorous script featuring one of my favourite comic moments in cinema. It makes a radio telescope the star of a movie about moon landings. It has some stellar performances from amongst others, Sam Neill. And when I watch it, tears run down my face.

The Dish reminds you that while putting a man on the moon is an unequalled endeavour in humanity’s efforts, equally, there are a lot of unsung heros making small parts of that story possible.

It means that my knit group now assess yarn purchases in terms of whether it is as much money as Treasa would spend or somewhat less bankrupting. I have 100g of the stuff, it’s a dead simple pattern called “cast on as many stitches as you think you want and then sock stitch your way through the yarn until you’ve just enough left to cast off”. I estimate it will be finished in February some time, the way things are going. But already the colours are looking very attractive and I will find some mountain to call it after at some stage.

Reads did indeed have scientific calculators, including mainly ones acceptable to assorted exam authorities. I bought a Casio one because they were deemed to be “good” in all the reviews I read. What made this one attractive though was that it was pink.

I’d have killed for a pink scientific calculator when I was in school. Instead I had to make do with brushed steel from the local coop shop.

Things are so much better now than they were in the 1980s. At least we have pink calculators.

While she was perusing the glitter, I was perusing a very dangerous section of the shop, namely, the cookie cutter section. I don’t often bake because I really don’t often have the time.  But I like pretty things, and pretty things involve, for example, pink two heart cookie cutters, aeroplane cookie cutters and assorted related. I got those ones in the fantastic kitchen shop on Oliver Plunkett Street in Cork. Somehow, I’d never quite managed to uhem, check out Kitchen Complements’ collection of cookie cutters. This was rectified yesterday. All for the sake of glitter. I now have a few stars (pretty), and a palm tree. I pondered assorted leaf selections but talked myself out of them in favour of the under water collection. The next time I make cookies, I am cutting them in the shape of little lobsters. I think there’s a lot to be said for lobster shaped biscuits myself.

In addition, I bought a few new stackable mixing bowls, to fit into the three I already have and love. This means I had to go into the corner cupboard to see how I was going to arrange stuff. [insert rant about kitchen again but you know that already].

All told, Kitchen Complements did nicely out of me. I successfully did not buy a Bodum red handmixer but that’s only because it cost nearly 80E – like what the hell – and anyway I have a servicable white Kenwood one which cost about half the price if not less. I will probably get the red one at some stage because I love beautiful things. But not today.

The shopping centre itself is not universally loved and yet it is generally very busy. It has a massive range of stores from huge chains to small independent shops. Some of the chains are quirky. In Ireland we have nothing at all like Natures et Decouvertes, for example, which is a bit like an Innovations catalogue gone nuts. And to know what that means, I suppose you have to be of an age.

One of the shops where I always, always do damage is La Compagnie Anglaise des Thés. For a nation of tea drinkers we in Ireland are pretty useless at it. The choice is Barrys or Lyons and of those two, the better tasting is unquestionably Barrys. The supermarkets sell a range of other teas but few of them have any significant market share.

Dublin has at least one specialist tea shop – Le Palais des Thés on Wicklow Street which tellingly is a French chain. They are terrific. There used to be one in the Powerscourt Centre called Matchabar – they had really nice things as well, and I have also bought tea at a stall in Dun Laoghaire which I’m pretty sure is connected to Kingfisher Teas.

The whole idea of a small tea shop in most reasonable sized towns doesn’t exist here however; for all that we are generally placed 1 or 2 in the teadrinking stakes.

Back in Paris, they have lots of these little tea shops and my favourite is the above mentoned Compagnie Anglaise des Thés. It’s not just because of the smell wafting out the door as you pass it (this is how I usually find it in the maze that is Forum). It’s not the huge range of teas. It’s the fact that if you go in to buy one thing, one lousy hundred grams of Turon black tea which should cost about 6E at the most, somehow you come out having spent a lot more than 6 euro. This time I bought two new cups, lusted over 7 teapots, bought a few new strainers. And they weren’t done with me. They give you samples. Sometimes they don’t even tell you this. Or they have suggestions you might not have known about and suddenly you need 100g of Fuego as well, and that nice one with all the peach and caramel stuff.

It’s probably in my interest that they don’t do online sales or have a branch in Dublin. I have rather a lot of tea to go through now.

This is just a piece of art I based off a recent photograph taken in Clare. I wanted something to bring a little colour to this piece.

Via Lonely Planet’s twitter feed which Flipboard serves me on my iPad from time to time, I happened across this piece. It caught my attention because I know – to some extent – what it’s like to be able to express somethings in one language, but not another. It’s disorienting when the blanks are in your native language, and the gaps are filled by second and third languages. French, in my case, can be a holy terror for being more expressive for me than English.

I’m good on Age-otori – the art of looking worse after a haircut than before – it’s a common feature of having my hair cut in Dublin. Irish hairdressers just are not as good as their French counterparts. Mokita is another one. The truth everyone knows, but no one says. The elephant in the corner, in local parlance, you might say.

The one which hit me like a freight train, however, was Mamihlapinatapei. Even typing the word is a bit of a killer and I am having serious problems remembering it. I’m not good on Amerindian languages and this is from the Yagan language from Tierra del Fuega. Pretty remote to me, it must be said.

So sublimely contained that it’s apparently been named the world’s most succinct word by The Guinness Book of World Records. Wikipedia says it’s ‘a look shared by two people, each wishing that the other would initiate something that they both desire but which neither wants to [initiate]‘.

When you look at it rationally, logically, it seems so crazy. We both want something, but we neither of us want to start it. It seems so very sad in a way. I sometimes wonder how much societal norms has to do with that.

Buried not too far been the surface, however, is the memory of that look. It doesn’t come alone – it comes lined up with hope for company. And it leaves a bittersweet taste that pervades your mind for a very long time. And the heartbreaking thing about it – I think – is you often don’t recognise it until after it’s too late.

It’s nice to know that somewhere, someone, thought it was a concept worth labelling.  Most people in the world have probably been there.