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.

Joel Parkinson eventually won the final against Mick Fanning. I’d have loved to see Mick Fanning win so I’m feeling a bit better about having at least gone to sleep. Sad fact is, in reality, I wasn’t actually asleep.

I also started and finished two books yesterday. That’s the most reading I’ve done in one day in a very, very long time. I think the last time I did that stretch of reading was the day the last Harry Potter book came out which is a while. The second book was The Mango Orchard which is, incidentally, a lovely story.

Also, incredible as it may seem, I have two mosquito bites in their favourite zones, my legs, and in particular, a direct hit on my ankles.

As a result it’s 10 to 12 I haven’t had breakfast yet, and the world feels a little cloudy even though the sun is trying to make a break out. I have Dancetrax or some such on. The energy is not pouring into my arms. In an ideal scenario, I’ll get breakfast eaten and possibly go to the swimming pool. I’m not sure it’s open (about to check) because it probably would do a lot of good for my muscles.

I tend to do better on regular rhythms, like breakfast at around a breakfasty time, dinner at [now] and something else somewhere between 6 and 8. Both yesterday and today that is gone to hell.

This morning I did battle with a recalcitrant Apple third generation iPod Nano. It went white screen. I googled for help. I did everything up and including resetting the wretched pile of metal back to factory settings which on a 3G supposed mobile broadband connection is not the stuff of seconds, and gave up. I had conversations with my friends that involved the words “only solution = hammer” and “probably best to buy a new one, wonder how much does it cost”, and five minutes later, it magically worked.

I’m a rational human being. But that suggests some form of sentience on the part of the thing and I’m not sure I like this. As it is the third pile of Apple electronics that I have had to reset to factory settings in the space of a month, I am not sure I want to buy any more of their electronics. #

That being said, right now, the Melali/Drifter Sessions movie is running on my own iPod classic here beside me, and really all you can say bad about it is that video drains the battery of the machine something woeful. But I don’t care. It seriously beats football which is what is on the television.

In other terribly exciting news, the crochet laced skirt is going really badly at the moment. I have followed the instructions; I cannot find any mistakes since the last lot of loop increases, and yet still, somehow, there was a mistake at row 10, 3rd iteration. For those of you who really don’t care about crochet, please skip the rest of this story. This skirt is beautiful. It is now about 8 inches long which is about one third/one quarter of the way through. It is being crocheted on uberfine 2ply crochet cotton which is no longer available. I have already done something in the region of 60 rows of very, very fine crochet work. I have estimated that when the skirt is finished, it will have at least a quarter of a million stitches in it. Every row takes about 30 minutes. I estimate there are another 50 rows or so to go. We are not talking about a small piece of work at all. The thoughts of having to rip back any of it is soul destroying not least when you cannot find out what is wrong with it. So I have decided – on this occasion – to cheat and insert an extra loop at the end of the previous row. It will be gorgeous when it’s done but I really don’t know if I want to do this ever again. Ever.

In other news, I have been looking at surfboards. There are a bunch of key requirements. 1) it should be longish because I am tall and not necessarily light 2) it should be pink or aquamarine. I have found three surfboards that appear to fill the requirements so depending on my huge amount of motivation on Good Friday, I will wander down to Lahinch to have a look at them. I will bring the camera because the camera demands Atlantic visits every once in a while. In particularly, it wants a trip to Doolin at high tide before they start to wreck the Crab Island break down there.

This is looking east on the Old Head of Kinsale, before you get to the golf club, the one that’s just In My Way.

Not too far away from there is a pub called, I think, The Speckled Door, and I had lunch there last Tuesday. It was a stunning day – I’d gone to meet family there and we’d been on the beach in Garrettstown. I think I’d bought a bodyboard the day before, but because of some stupid sports injury I wasn’t really in any shape to use it, much to my disgust. It was, you see, a beautiful day. Bright, sharp warm sunlight. We do not get anything like it in Dublin.

We sat outside for lunch and in the course of the conversation, I voiced the view that anyone who lived in Cork was pretty lucky. I meant Cork on the coast, of course, but…even so. The sky was a million shades of blue and despite my efforts, there is not much I could do to reflect that in the photograph, because realistically, it’s not just the colours; it’s the scale. Blues as far as the eye can see. My sister, having listened to the 22 carat envy in my voice suggested I consider moving home.

I haven’t lived in Cork for longer than 3 weeks since I was about 17. I’m not sure you could call it home. But I’m not sure you can call Dublin home either for all that I’ve been living here for the past near dozen years. And leaving aside the feeling that moving “home” meant moving closer to somewhere I could enjoy that scale of blue sky and light, the one thing that trashed through my consciousness was that I wasn’t really sure what home was any more. Paul Young would have you believe it’s wherever you lay your hat, and as someone who moved around, I’ve always called home where I happen to be living. I’m just not sure, despite my best efforts to create it, that Dublin is that place.

Beside me is a large black and white print of surfers in Garrettstown as it happens – when I was looking for a photograph to put in a big frame I’d somehow acquired, it was first choice over some stunning dawn shots taken in Skerries. The next large print I will do for myself is this one:

and again, it will be a fairly large print, to try and get some scale of the south coast Atlantic landscape into whatever house I happen to be sleeping in at any given time. Somehow, I still think I will be faking it.

We know it can from television; no-one who saw any of the coverage will ever forget what Hurricane Katrina did to New Orleans.

So, four years on, I’m sitting here in the kitchen, listening to ABC Far North Queensland, waiting for Yasi to arrive. According to Anna Bligh, premier of Queensland, it may be the biggest storm system in living memory to hit Queensland. When I left work at 6pm this evening, I was under the impression this was a Cat4 storm; about an hour later, the Bureau of Meteorology upgraded it Category 5. They don’t get bigger.

The eye of that storm is 100km across; the storm itself is 500km across. It is expected to make landfall somewhere around Cairns, possibly between Innisfail which got trashed in 2006 when Larry came ashore, and the southern edge of Cairns. Currently, mandatory evacuation is taking place all along the far north Queensland coast from Port Douglas down to Townsville, a section of coast about 400 km long.

The hospitals in Cairns, Cairns Base and Cairns Private Hospital, were both evacuated yesterday and the patients flown to hospital in Brisbane. Cairns Airport and Townsville Airport will close at 10am this morning. At least 300 schools are closed for the next few days. According to the authorities it will not be safe to be outside in the weather past lunch time.

The storm is due to cross the coast some time around midnight Australia time on 2nd February. In a bitchlike manner, this is just an hour after high tide. The tide is expected to be around 2m; the storm surge is currently expected to be another 2m on top of that again. They are not sure what the flooding extent will be because they’ve never had anything like this before.

The forecast winds for the storm are anything up to 320kph. For comparison, the Eurostar from London to Paris travels at around 300kph. I can’t actually conceive of that sort of wind speed.

For now, the Bureau of Meteorology has a radar station on Willis Island, and right around now, the eye of the storm is heading straight for that radar station. According to the BOM official on the morning news on ABC News FNQ, they are measuring windspeeds of 190km already.

If you’re in Ireland, the storm will probably cross the coast of northern Queensland at around 2-3pm tomorrow afternoon. Updated news on twitter via hashtag #tcyasi and via ABC FNQ. ABC News24 will come online over night but I can’t remember exactly at what time.

I always wanted to be the type of person who cooked from the herbs in her garden but the nomadic lifestyle I’ve been living tended to cause problems. Living in an apartment also really…well it might have been okay if the apartment had been designed differently. Our balcony was miles from the kitchen and had stupid, stupid 1 foot high steps out the French windows.. I hated that apartment, although I lived in it for 4 years (because moving was too much hassle and where I wanted to move to was too expensive). Anyway, when I arrived in Dublin 9 last year, the previous tenant had kindly left a few herb bags which had thyme, rosemary and some mint in. The mint promptly committed suicide but I cooked from the contents of the other bag from time to time and although I occasionally bought more mint plants, they were all suicidal and as a result, if I have a drug habit, it’s buying suicidal spearmint plants. I bought another 2 in Aldi today in the hope that they’ll be less suicidal.

So there are 9 new plants outside, in nice terracotta pots. I’m being given conflicting advice on what to do about them; I’m inclined to leave them outside and hope for the best on the grounds that if the winter kills them, I’ll just get more and reuse the pots. Anyway, now I’m the sort of person who cooks meals with herbs from her garden kept mobile JUST IN CASE and all I had to do was actually get the plants.

I also wanted to be the sort of person who went surfing occasionally. Although I am particularly bad and useless at it, it doesn’t stop me having a ball when I try. Hell I even body surf. And the sort of person who occasionally goes climbing? Me too. That sort of person who occasionally does swim training? Yep.

A lot of our lives seem to be caught up in aspiring to be someone else. I’m done with that, as far as possible. If I want to do things; I’ll generally give them a shot. There are – so far – only two things that I wanted to try that after some investigation I chose not to do. One is canyoneering because frankly, while I’ll do dangerous sports, the way in which you can die doing that is not top of my preferred ways to die, and the other is hang-gliding. I may yet give that a shot though.

I have, however, done the climbing, the surfing, the windsurfing, the kitesurfing, the cableskiing, the whitewater rafting, the knitting, the mosaics, the crochet, the embroidery, the stained glass design, the jewellery design, the karting, the quadbiking (although someone else drove because frankly I really don’t like those things at all). I tried to do the paragliding but they were too busy. I drove around the Alps in a Mercedes (okay, so it was an A1 and I begged Hertz to find me a 207, but still – you have not lived until you have failed to do a hillstart 7 times on the side of a mountain in the south of France).

From the time I was about 18 to the time I was about 26, most of my life could be packed into a rucksack and a carryall. I did a lot of making do. I know that there’s a generation sees nothing wrong with that but still…Anyway, at 25 I moved to Brussels and a year in, I sort of figured I’d be staying around and there was nothing actually wrong with buying a book. That was the start of a beautiful affair with what I think is WH Smiths in Brussels. They sold books. I bought them. And then, also, the stereo in the apartment (a micro system) packed it in, and so I bought a replacement that was better than the one the landlord had got. And then I needed a fruitbowl.

A washing basket from Casa downstairs. Oh look, I need [a selection of kitchen stuff too]. Suddenly, all I owned wasn’t going to fit into a carry all because I had stopped making do.

Now, I look around and a lot of the stuff in this house, I own. No landlord has ever supplied me with a foodprocessor, a liquidiser or a handmixer. All these I have acquired. Because I have tried to hand beat egg whites and it scores highly on the torture scale. Why make do? You can buy a handblender for 20 E which is the cost of a CD or a book, all of which I have no difficulty in buying. Or, alternatively tell your mother you’re going to buy one, 8 days before CHristmas and get instructed to leave it until the January sales and then, mysteriously find one under the Christmas tree. That works too.

So now I’m the sort of person who cooks with herbs from her garden, recipes from a scary collection of cookbooks, with a collection of utensils and electrical doodahs some of which have been brought from France who also does all those sports [however badly] and gets photographs published in newspapers just because who has been to every continent except Antartica, all because instead of wanting to do it, she did it.

Now I want to be the sort of person who gets up at 6.20 to go swimming and if there is a chance that the frost is all over, I might just manage it. Fingers crossed.

So I booked tickets for myself and my sister and her husband and their son; they drove from Cork, and last night, off we went.

The gig was small and intimate and brilliant. And they played Lord Mayo so I was happy.

In comparison to the debacle that was Guns’n'Roses, they showed up on time, had good fun on stage, played superlatively, and left everyone happy at the end. Cost – 20E.

They don’t appear to play together all that often any more but if you get a chance…

go. That is all there is to be said. It was fantastic.

So I did it this morning and it has been an interesting experience. I have found bottles with little dolls in that I bought when I was about 11. One of them, I suspect I bought when I was 8 or 9. I think another was from a friend from Irish dancing class when I was about 9 as well. Do people actually keep things like this? Or is it just I who keeps hoarding all sorts of insignificant memory charms?

I found something completely unexpected too. It dates from my twentieth birthday and it was given to me as a good luck charm. With the benefit of hindsight, a few people have done this for me. One I know I passed on to someone else doing interpreting exams about 4 years ago; of the others, one unexpectedly turned up in my life (after a lot of housemoves and being so small as to be thought lost forever) last week – it was a tiny little model of a ladybird which I will photograph with the macro lens one of these days coming – and the other is a witch which also came into my life when I was 20. It was a birthday present…

When I was 19, I went to Germany to study technical translation as part of an Erasmus year. The weekend of my birthday I happened to be away with the Evangelishe Studentenkreis (I think that was the official title – time has dimmed my memory). I went with them because the university in question had a mentoring program in place and the student assigned to me – who had been in Ireland under the same Erasmus program – was a member of that particular group and they had some weekend planned in a place in Goslar and asked me to come along. They didn’t do this because I was particularly religious – I wasn’t anyway – but because she was a good friend and foreigners can be quite interesting. At the end of that, I was given a witch which I think had something to do with the tradition of the local area. The witch hung in my room on a notice board for years – and is now in a cupboard known as the “bottom drawer”; a cupboard where all my house stuff tends to accumulate between moving houses which I do from time to time because of the rental market in Dublin and the tendency of landlords to sell houses after a year or two or three or four. Anyway, while I was away, a cake was baked for me by one of the guys in my own Studentenheim. I really can’t remember – I’m not that close to my twentieth birthday party now – but I think it was a Black Forest gateau. It was a beautiful looking cake which he had clearly gone to a lot of trouble over. He was gutted when someone told him I was gone away from the weekend.

As it happens, someone saw me come back and told him I was there, so stuff was done, and people were gathered, and another student that I knew from the Studentenheim produced a bottle of Sekt; Germany’s answer to champagne, or sparkling wine for my birthday. Needless to mention, I was somewhat overwhelmed by this – I never expected it. Someone stuck a 10 pfennig coin into the cork from the bottle of Sekt and gave it to me as a good luck token. Something to do with the cork from the bottle. Somehow, I kept that and found it today. I’m slightly stunned.

I found other stuff of course; amongst them a Fáinne and a Pioneer pin, both dating from when I was about 12. But the bottle top…that slightly floored me.

Property is something I have had an interest in for 10 years, since I lived here, in fact, and discovered that renting in Ireland for the long term was conceptually not known. My interest has been hampered by not being able to afford to buy property so instead, I patrol the internet fora explaining why this is not sustainable.

Ireland had 2 received truths, viz:

1. rent is dead money; and
2. property always goes up.

We know now that neither is really true. Rent is money paid for a service and the nominal value of property has been falling in Ireland for the last 3 years.

Last year I moved from a little town outside Dublin back into the city area for the simple reason that in a worst case scenario, I could pay the rent on my own for a while. Not desired, but not impossible. The house is in Dublin 9, on a couple of busroutes, near the gym, near the sea, not too far from work. In every way, it is ideal. The furniture provided by the landlord is comfortable, functional, and not too fashionable. By this I mean it will not date. I would actually buy the sofas myself because they are nice, comfortable and easy to keep clean. The house looks like my own, and not someone else’s because I have pictures hanging on the wall, the whole place doesn’t look like it was hit on by an interior decorator with impeccably good taste; I have a garden, and front private parking that I don’t have to worry about anyone else nicking. The rent compared very well to what I was paying in the stylish 4 year old apartment in North County Dublin that was never my own, never going to be my home and that I grew to hate by the time I got out.

Last week, my landlord informed me he wanted to put the house on the market. This was entirely unexpected as it was very clearly an investment property, and not a pseudo home bought “to live in but I’m working too far away” pad. For other reasons, too, this was unexpected, but it brought with it an offer which sweetened the pill somewhat.

People don’t know what to say to me. You see, 4 years ago they’d say things like “maybe you should consider buying” or “you know if you had bought, this wouldn’t happen”. But they cannot say this now beause if I had bought last year or four years ago or whenever, I’d be living somewhere I don’t want to live and in negative equity that I would have a great deal of difficulty in moving out of there. At least now, you know, I have freedom, the sort of freedom that is linked with working for a company that is also looking to downsize staff – imagine if I had a mortgage then.

Yes. It would be truly worrying and I wouldn’t be alone in that position either.

But I’m not going to be alone in my current position either which is landlords cashing in investment properties, eliminating their tenants so that they can sell their properties and cut their losses. Where’s the stability in that?

There’s nothing wrong with renting. Everywhere else I ever rented, apart from student halls in London had an element of security of tenure which doesn’t exist in Ireland. It’s not that the legislation isn’t there – it sort of is – it’s just the social view of renting is some completely unrealistic that it makes the Lord of the Rings look like an accurate depiction of history in the 9th century.

I have no doubt that my landlord has his good reasons for selling. I’ve had my good reasons for renting for the last 10 years. I never wanted to spend money on a property I didn’t really like and that’s served me well; I’ve wanted to live places that were near work and reasonably decent sized because smaller apartments in Ireland are hilariously poorly designed; and that’s served me well. However, because capital appreciation formed a major part of the business plans of a lot of landlords in Ireland, the supply side, while huge in numbers, is in a constant state of flux. I like the current house. There are two blackbirds living in the garden, the garden I didn’t have out in the sticks for the 4 years previous.

Most people involved in rental in France and Germany are in it for the long haul and that long haul can be 20 years or more. It is possible to form a home somewhere rented in these countries.

This house is the closest I have managed since I got here 10 years ago. It really is a pity that it isn’t home any more

The idea is to try and centralise as much of my web presence in a single starting point so that I have some fist of what’s going on. I have a fairly decent hosting package which I barely use but I’ve so many ideas and plans at this stage that I don’t know where to start. Tidying stuff up is a good call.

The new blog will be a bit different to this one. It will soak up all the economics/politics/technology related opinion pieces. What stays here will be purely personal.