Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
It's like mini jet lag, isn't it? When we lose the hour. Because I was going to get up at 6 o'clock this morning, which would have meant I was getting up at 5 o'clock this morning. And then I thought twice. I said, you can't be getting up at 5 o'clock in the morning. Who do you think you are, Ian Dempsey? So I got up at 7 o'clock, which is really 6 o'clock. How are you? After all that. Yeah.
Well, the good thing about it, the positive is that it's brighter in the evenings, which means we can get out and do things. Now, I've been threatening for a long time to do the garden. Jenny got two raised beds about eight years ago. And... It was great. The man left us with rocket and scallions and beetroot. And I think there were some herbs or herbs, as they say in America.
And for that summer, it was brilliant. Would you like a salad for your tea, dear? And you'd walk out and you'd pick the salad leaves and you'd make a salad. And you'd think you were living the good life. People of a certain age will know what I'm talking about there. Felicity Kendall. I had a little teenage crush on her. Anyway, and then the raised beds just remained idle, barren for a long time.
Then we got rid of one of the raised beds. Now we've only one raised bed left. And over the years then, I was talking to your man Mick Kelly from G.I.Y. Waterford. Grow it yourself. He has a great story. about buying garlic in a supermarket and thinking, I can do that.
Chapter 2: What gardening project does Ray embark on?
I can grow that garlic. And he did. And now he has a little industry down there in Mordaford, a number of books. And he's encouraging us all to grow it yourself. And he'd be in and he'd be talking to us and he'd say, you can do it, Ray. You can do it. And he'd set me up at little pots and little bags of seeds and I'd head off home. thinking, yes, I can do it. Never did. I don't know why.
I think there's a mystery around going things. I didn't think I was capable. And, you know, I do a lot of stuff. So I don't know why I didn't think... I wasn't capable when it came to gardening. Or I didn't think I was capable when it came to gardening. You know what I mean. Anyway, Saturday, sunny day. And I thought to myself, looking out, I'm going to sow seeds. I'm going to plant something.
I'm going to grow something that I can eat. And I was guilted into going out into the garden by nobody other than myself. But first I had to go and get some seeds. And I read his book, which is a great book. And he sings the praises of the cucumber. Now, if you ever saw a cucumber seed, it is minuscule. And from that little seed comes a cucumber plant.
And from that plant can come up to 10 cucumbers. It is miraculous what nature can do. From this tiny minuscule seed, you can get 10 full-sized cucumbers. Yes. You can slice them and dice them and pickle them and do all sorts of things with them. So I thought, yes, yes, I'll have a bit of that. A bit of cucumber. Potatoes, you can get early, whatever, sprouting, early something potatoes.
I'll have a bit of that. And then I went for some broad beans, some scallions, because they have a place in my heart from my childhood. Going down to Pages for scallions. Then coming home, chopping them up, putting them between two slices of white bread. Yummity, yummity, yummity. And then I bought a little rocket plant and just to be really ambitious, a little blueberry bush.
And I went out and I de-weeded the raised bed and I planted. I planted them all. The scallions, the potatoes, the cucumber, the broad beans, the rocket and the blueberries. And because we're in a world now, well, I'm in a world now of Instagram, I had to do the... I had to film it. And it's up there on Instagram. It's the speeded up version. And some great music from Flea as well.
Flea, the bass player from the Red Hot Chili Peppers. He has a new jazz-ish album. Anyway, so I did that on Saturday and now it's just sit back and wait. And the way they're telling us that the world is going to hell in a handcart, I've been eating it. I've been eating it and I'm working from home and then we'll have the food out the back and we'll never have to leave.
We won't be able to leave because we won't have any petrol or energy or anything. They're comparing it to COVID. I think that's catastrophizing the situation. It won't be like COVID. Don't scare the people. Don't do that. And he's talking again up in his big airplane. It's like, it is funny. It is a bit funny. People on every morning trying to make sense of what this man is doing.
It doesn't make sense, you see. That's all. It doesn't make sense. Well, I suppose there's an honesty about him saying, I want the oil. We all knew that. That's why these things happen. These wars happen. It's probably about resources. And Trump said, yeah, I want the oil. That's what I want. And anybody who opposes me on this is stupid.
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Chapter 3: How does Ray feel about his gardening journey?
That's basically it. That's about only himself. Anyway, move on from that and The Rat and the Crow. This is a brilliant story. Well, it's not that brilliant. It's an okay story. It's an observation. It's not even a story. But last Friday I went down to collect Tom driving back up from the school and I spotted something in the middle of the road and there was a ninja rat
And there was an injured rat and a crow. And the crow was pecking and pulling and taunting the rat and dancing around it. And it was pulling at his tail and then it would peck it and then it would fly off a little bit and then it would strut back in and peck it again. And I said, Tom, film that, film that. I thought suddenly we were in a wildlife documentary.
I was David Attenborough and Tom was my trusty camera person. And we did it. And it was, I always thought as a child watching those wildlife documentaries that why don't they step in? You know, when the cheetah got the gazelle and the poor gazelle was injured on the ground. And why didn't the camera people and David Attenborough step in and said, leave that poor gazelle alone.
Mr. Cheetah, leave it alone. And then, of course, somebody would say to you, well, that's nature. That's what happens. You can't intervene. So we didn't intervene. And I don't know how it panned out because we had to move on. There were cars behind us eventually. The rat and the crow. I did a bit of research on it. And usually the crow comes out on top.
You know, it's a variation on those superhero chats that people have in pubs or used to have in pubs. Who would win? Superman versus Batman. Who would win? A crow versus a rat. Well, it turns out that the crow would win. And it's not the way we see rats because everyone squirms. A lot of people squirm, you know, when they think of rats or see a rat. I had a pet rat at college.
I don't know if I told you this before, but it was a white Norwegian albino rat. So a white rat with pink eyes. And the reason we had rats at college was to prove that reward works. You can change behaviour by rewarding a rat. And similarly, you can do it with humans as well. So they had this thing called a Skinner box, named after a great behaviourist called Skinner.
And it was a sort of a, how to say, a foot and a half by a foot and a half box. And in it, it had hoops and levers and little funnels and marbles. And then it had a little hole. And through that little hole, you could feed the rat.
pellets of food so you'd tap the little box beside the hole and the rat would come over and you'd give it a pellet of food and then if it did something remotely that you wanted it to do say if it nosed the marble you'd tap it again and reward it and by doing that you could shape the rat's behaviour and by the end of it it was quite not miraculous but you know it was spectacular how you could train the rat to do the full obstacle course
of going through the loop, pushing the marble down the funnel, pressing the lever. You could train it to do that within a few weeks by just rewarding it. Anyway, and I used to hold that rat and I used to stroke that rat. I called it chicken for some... You know, when you're that age, you think that's really funny, calling a rat chicken. And yet, if I see a rat in the wild, I sort of squirm.
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