Peat and Peat Cutting by Ian D. Rotherham

Day One (DDRD 996): July 24, 2020

I bought this book in a bookstore in Belfast, Ireland, in November of 2010. I was visiting my eldest son, who was doing a study abroad semester at Queen's...University, is it? Seems like it was College when he / I was there, but I don't trust my memory. ANYway...it was a little bookshop, and it was there that I discovered Stuart Neville's most excellent first novel The Ghosts of Belfast. And then I spotted this lovely item. Of course I had to buy it. My son had quite a laugh at me, and then just to add insult to injury, the bookseller himself laughed at me. I guess people think it's a little odd to be interested in Peat. And / or Peat Cutting. 

I've been meaning to get around to reading this ever since, but for some reason it never became an urgent need, so here I am, nearly a decade later. I checked to see if it was still available, hoping that it was now selling for thousands of dollars on the collectors' market, but found that even though Amazon U.S.A. has never heard of it, Amazon U.K. has, and offers it as a Kindle Edition for £7.19, and as a Paperback from £17.96 (1 Used from £24.10, 2 New from £17.96). A disappointment, but still, I paid a mere £5.99 for my copy, so you can see that that was a very wise investment.

It's a mere 64 pages from first page to last, the text itself is from page 4 to page 60, and there are quite a few pictures...some of which are full page illustrations. So I am probably not going to need 5 days (UNTIL DDRD 1000!) to finish it off, but we'll see how it goes. Who knows, perhaps the intricacies of the Peat World will be so intriguing that I will find myself reading a mere 12 pages per day and pondering on them deeply for several hours afterwards.

Let's see, shall we?

And...it took a mere 12 minutes to read the first 12 pages. But I stopped myself there, thinking that (1) I was just going to enjoy my leisurely stroll through the bogs for the next five days and (2) I have been going at it for 995 days with only one break for an emergency room stay, so maybe a little low pressure zone is called for? Not that I feel that I need it, but still.

At any rate, I stopped. It's quite possible that I'll go back for more later today, or that tomorrow I will not stop. We'll just have to see about that, won't we. I'm fairly sure that I could knock this book out in an hour today if I so desired. 

But (3), I did just get Antkind (by Charlie Kaufman) from the library, and since (A) it is 720 pages long and (B) I only have 14 days to read it, I'm thinking I'll need to push hard on that one...I've read 100 pages already (in part thanks to the generous sample Amazon allows on Kindle...something like 70 pages!), but that still means a 44.3 pages per day average, so I might need the extra minutes which would normally be devoted to my Daily Devotional Reading.

ANYway...the first 12 pages...which were actually only about 4 1/2 pages, what with the Table of Contents and lots of pictures ...were quite enjoyable. In fact, I feel the need to point out two specific bits:

Bit 1: Ian (may I call you Ian?) refers to the fact that peat was used for baths and in health spas, and notes that "For the right price you could be immersed in hot peat and have electric currents passed through you, or you might even opt for the hot rectal peat douche." I repeat: Hot Rectal Peat Douche. If that is not the perfect name for a punk rock band, then I don't know what is.

Bit 2: When people were not packing hot peat up their asses, they often used it to heat their homes or places of business. Ian (...?) tells us that "Famous cottage fires and particularly those in old inns burnt continuously for decades or even centuries." I've heard of the eternal lights in churches (is that just a Lutheran thing? or is it ecumenical?), but never in a non-parochial setting.

So there's that.

I'm actually looking forward to reading more of this. Is it too soon to suggest that it could make for a quite interesting movie? Imagine the possibilities of a documentary...just extrapolating scenarios from Bit 1 and Bit 2. But I will probably wait until tomorrow to read more here. And do some hard time with Charlie Kaufman.

By the way...at some point I am going to have to make at least one Peat Pun, so let's get this over with right from the get-go: 

If I were going to write a review of this book, it would be entitled "For Peat's Sake." 

If I ever write a documentary script for this book, it will be entitled, "For the Love of Peat."

Oh, wait a minute...that might be it. For some reason I thought there would be so many more. Well, time will tell.

Also...I am 97% sure that this

is the bookstore from whence came Peat and Peat Cutting...though I don't think it had such a gaudy facade back in the day. I didn't remember the store until I Googled Queen's College, Ireland (and Google chastised me immediately, noting that I should be looking for Queen's UNIVERSITY), then hit the NEARBY button and typed BOOKSTORE, I got this

and saw the proximity of No Alibis to the UNIVERSITY...and simultaneously remembered the name of the bookstore. So, yes. 97%. Perhaps even 98.6%. I just thought you should know.


Day Two (DDRD 997): July 25, 2020


A much more reasonable 22 minutes of reading time today to get to page 24. The print is very tiny.

Interesting stuff today on several counts: etymology, sociology, and David Bowie.

Etymology: Ian (...?) notes that both of the phrases "bogged down" and "putting on the dampers" originate in the world of Peat and Peat Cutting. The former is obvious, I suppose, but the latter refers to the fact that when you want to go to bed at night you'd put a wet bit of turf on the fire so that it would burn at a lower level. The wet bits were the dampers.

Sociology: peat was the fuel of the poor...because coal couldn't be (or at least wasn't) transported very far from the coastal regions and because there wasn't a whole lot of wood around. And cowshit was needed to fertilize the fields, so using it wasn't the best choice. (Funny detail: Ian (?) notes that the smell of burning cowshit was sweeter than you'd think it would be.

Bowie: There are a couple of references to the Norfolk Broads. You remember Bowie's "Life on Mars?" of course? Well, there's a line--

See the mice in their million hordes

From Ibiza to the Norfolk Broads

--which I never got before. (Not being English. Or even British.) Well, turns out that The Broads (as they are called) are a series of lakes which were formed by...wait for it...flooding the peat fields. Thus making some navigable waterways. 

So there you have it. Quite a nice little canter.

Day Three (DDRD 998): July 26, 2020

Today I was introduced to the hard facts about how to cut peat and what to cut it with...including the Fenland Beckett, which (once again) I thought would be a fine name for a band. Oddly enough, when I put those words into quotation marks and Googled them, there were only two hits:

And, as you can see, one of them is irrelevant, and the other is a reference to the book I'm reading. Taking away the quotation marks led to "About 502,000" hits...but none of the top twenty had anything to do with the Fenland Beckett, and I really didn't have it in me to continue looking after that. 

I also did an image search, and 11 of first 17 images were of Samuel Beckett. 

So obviously this tool for the cutting of peat is not a household term.

So there's that.


Day Four (DDRD 999): July 27, 2020

Read to page 48, and there were some quite interesting details. Who knew there was such variety when it came to peat cutting tools, for instance? Which reminds me, early on...maybe even on Day One...there was a reference to the fact that the Romans invented the iron shovel. Apparently shoves were made out of wood or bone (!) prior to the Romans. Also, there's another reference to people thinking that taking a peat bath was a good idea, and there was an advertisement (from Germany) which emphasized the fact that their peat was "radicao-active"...apparently high in radon...which was presumed to be a good thing. Hmpf. Also, there were experiments in making paper from peat, but apparently that didn't go very well.

So that's just about that. Tomorrow is the big day! You know, I haven't really thought about what I'll be reading next. I have plenty of things to choose from on hand, though, so I'll just wait and see what calls out to me.


Day Five (DDRD 1,000): July 28, 2020

Finished. Finito. Accompli. I didn't notice until almost the last page that this little book actually had a sewn binding. Man, those Europeans actually give a shit about quality.

The book ended on an interesting note--a brief discussion of the environmental consequences of peat cutting and the peat industry. Also some amazing pictures of women...not young ones, either...bent over with huge baskets of peat on their backs. One of them was knitting. Yowza.

So it only took me ten years to get around to it...and five days to read it. 

And that's it for my first 1,000 days of Daily Devotional Readings. 

I put a picture up on Facebook of the books I'd read during my first 1,000 days--

--and asked if anybody wanted to join me for the next 1,000. Didn't really expect an answer, but got one yes, one next time, and one can I read my own book of choice. I thought that last was pretty funny. I mean...I'm not the book police. Anyway...I thought I was going to read Leviathan next, which is what I mentioned in the FB post, but I actually don't seem to have a copy of it on hand. I looked at the ebook version the library had, thinking that might tide me over, but the format on it was shite...looked like it was written for a third grader, with maybe two paragraphs per page. So I'm thinking I will go for something else first and order a copy of Leviathan. That will give my cohort time to acquire a copy, too, if thon does not yet have one. (Yes, I am still reading Antkind. Hit the halfway point this morning around 3 am. Hmm? Yes, I do have shitty sleeping habits. Bad dreams. Mostly about teaching or my second ex-wife.) So I'm thinking that the thing to do Right Now (and by Right Now I mean tomorrow, DDRD 1,001) would be to read Milton Rokeach's The Three Christs of Ypsilanti, since (1) I'm interested in it, (2) I just watched the movie, (3) twice, (4) I have a copy from the library on hand, and (5) it's only 342 pages, so it wouldn't take too long to knock out.

But hey, that's tomorrow. Who knows what will happen between now and then?