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Here is a Christmas riddle for you: what's the connection between Jane Austen, Christmas dinner and Northern Ireland? Well by the 18th century, the Georgians had developed their own refined and tasteful Christmas celebrations. The plate settings were very much like what we have today, there they‘ve had knives and spoons and this is a new innovation: the fork. The whole thing would have been on a crisp linen tablecloth, and the Porto would have been poured into elegant glasses. But all this elegance was bought at a price.
And the price was paid by workers here on the shores of Ireland.
Well, it's slippy.
Yeah.
The production of both the linen and the glassware that graced the Georgian Christmas table needed vast quantities of the chemical soda. It was obtained from seaweed which was harvested and burnt to make blocks of soda known as kelp. Whole families used to be employed as kelp collectors rushing out barefoot at low tide to harvest this slimy stinking resource. You only had a few hours to gather the seaweed and the bad news is that it took 20 tons to make one ton of kelp.
Do you note it’s full?
Yeah! It‘s quite heavy.
Forty kilogram!
Well you…you are propelled along really by the weight of the stuff.
I prefer the harvesting to the carrying.
Yeah.
Here Thomas. There's some more.
Great, great.
Is the worst bit over?
No, no, you have another two days.
I guess it's over.
Ah…
Hey, give me a hand, I'll be stuck here forever.
So there is another whole part of the process.
Well, the next stage is to burn it up. We'll have to readjust it to the kelp, the ashes of the seaweed and that takes two days. So you'll have to be in attendance all day today, tomorrow and tonight, tomorrow and tomorrow night. Because that needs constant recks(照看，注意), the fire needs spread evenly around
Ok, so what exactly happens in there then...
Well that slowly burns, um... down to a sort of point like mass at the bottom (Yeah). Then you have to cool it off and it's …it’s very, very heavy. It's heavier than lead, becomes a solid mass. And then you break it up, you have to break it up with sledge hammers, and it's then carried to a store house, they have to get it in, out of the rain, ‘cause it's very soluble, as fast as possible.
Then it's brought to market.
That must be quite a big industry.
Massive coastal industry, we have these amazing descriptions on some paintings of, say, this part of the coast in every few hundred yards is a smoking kiln like this.
It's very greasy, isn't it? These guys and women must have got filthy.
Yes the smoke went into their pores and their faces were totally black, but after they finished the two days' burning, they went off to their sweat house. (like a sauna or something.) It's an Irish version of the sauna. But the girls who were working here were granted to sit in a seatless sweat house for three or four hours until they got all the soot and oil out of the pores.
They don't do this kind of process now presumably.
No, no, it's a long dead industry and...
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soluble adj. 1. That can be dissolved, especially easily dissolved: soluble fats. 可溶解的
2. Possible to solve or explain可解决的: soluble mysteries.
kiln n. Any of various ovens for hardening, burning, or drying substances such as grain, meal, or clay, especially a brick-lined oven used to bake or fire ceramics. 窑,炉
filthy adj. Covered or smeared with filth; disgustingly dirty. See synonyms at dirty 污秽的
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