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.

The weather is sort of funny at the moment – it’s been really warm, last night, meaning I couldn’t sleep, and really cold now, meaning I wish I was asleep. It’s been close and not close, wet, sunny and grey, sometimes all at the same time. It leaves me feeling slightly jaded.

This music leaves me feelign a lot better though; I don’t know why. I came across Didier Squiban when he was accompanying Yann Fanch Kemener, Brittany’s answer to Iarla O Lionaird and something about his playing got to me so when I saw a solo album in FNAC in Brussels about 12 years ago, I bought it; no argument. I’ve loved it since. Not all of his things appeal to me – he has a tendency to experimental jazz – but the trilogy of Molene/Porz Gwen and one other album the name of which escapes me is absolutely gorgeous, and sometimes…it’s just what I need. Like today with its psycho season adjusting weather.

When I spoke to someone afterwards about the experience, he said, more or less “you know, it’s even worse if you’re not the one driving it”. That really says it all. It’s a narrowish road on which meeting other traffic really is not to be countenanced. It’s sheer on one side – which changes – most of the way down. There are parts of it that you can’t actually see the road more than 20m ahead, less in some cases – but you can see the landscape a few hundred metres below you. The bad part about going up is the realisation that you’re going to have to come down too.

I’m sort of scared of heights. I can handle some heights, but not others. I’m not, for example, scared of flying, I just find it incredibly unforgiveably boring, and every time they ban something else you can’t bring on a plan, it gets ever more boring. When I started climbing, my instructor warned other instructors “has height issues”. I do, sort of. What I have more issue with is falling. So I can handle being at the top of a skyscraper if I’m pretty sure I’m not going to fall. On the climbing front, it’s not the height that gets me any more, it’s the lack of fitness. I can scale to the top of the 11 metre wall on routes that I’m fit enough for without the height thing getting in the way.

The roads around Achill, the ones that are on the edge of cliffs, for example, if they had a one foot high little wall thing, I’d feel quite a lot less…nervous…about driving them.

I didn’t stay long on the top of the mountain. It was blowing a gale and I was mindful that almost the first thing you have to face is a section of road that has a turn to the right out of your view for quite a while – which means you feel like you’re about to drive off the side of the mountain – and the wind didn’t really help. I just wanted to be back down really.

The really bad thing about it is that if the weather had cooperated – it didn’t – I’d probably have done some bouldering with one of my mates in Achill.

There’s some really odd irony about that really.

• trip to beautician for painful stuff
• bake olive cake
• cut up mangos and freeze the cut up pieces
• dinner
• weave the ends on the cardigan and wash and shape it
• proofread a document for a friend
• close look at iPhone App development tools
• reinstall Java development tools on the computer
• change sheets on bed.
• wash sheets from bed
• more work on lace skirt at crochet group who’ve forgotten I exist it’s so long since I’ve been there
• find pattern for baby blanket and start said baby blanket for cousin’s baby due soon.
• order yarn for second cardigan

Stuff I got done

• trip to beautician for painful stuff
• dinner
• olive cake
• proofread document
• weave ends on cardigan.

Apparently now I look shattered.

On the baby blanket front it looks like I need 5 times as much yarn as I have in baby yarn stash. As I tend not to make stuff for babies, this is inexperience speaking on the baby yarn front. It’s a nice pastelly orange colour but…short about 1000 metres. Which has the bad part of suggesting the blanket could take forever and five days to make.

The olive cake turned out okay I think. The olives and the rashers floated to the bottom, but the thing rose and hasnt yet collapsed. The mangos are glaring at me. They will head freezerwards tomorrow instead.

I understand why I am shattered so much lately however. When you get in from work and you’ve to face into that list of stuff to do, and don’t even barely make half of it…you have two problems. The pressure mounts and The amount of stuff to be done mounts. I didn’t make it to a climbing wall or a swimming pool that ever was since last Monday.

I don’t know when I am supposed to find time. I really don’t.

I used to see the van the odd time as well because he lived in Santry which I tended to pass quite frequently visiting friends, on the way to DCU and on the way into town occasionally. Came as a shock to me to find out he was missing yesterday. You always hope that you know…someone missing will turn up. Alan turned up today, apparently. He won’t be coming back.

I don’t know any of Alan’s family. I have a lot of sympathy for them. Unforeseen and complicated losses are very, very hard to swallow. For the windsurfing community in Ireland in particularly he is going to be a massive loss. When I started windsurfing, he pretty much was windsurfing in Dublin, and the shop in the ship in Ringsend was a little Mecca, an escape from the city. A point of freedom. I loved the smell in there; I loved the colours of the sails, loved looking at the boards. And I thought Alan was a great guy with the guts to do what he believed in and what he wanted.

When I came home, I had breakfast and argued the toss with myself about going climbing. I didn’t sleep very well which means I was tired. And I overdid it when I did climbing. Sure I made progress – and I was really happy about that – but the idea was not to push myself over the limit today and go swimming later; that has not happened, will not happen.

Since then I have surfed the internet, listened to music, started reading a book and procrastinated about a) going shopping (nixed) b) going back to a doily project that I wrecked last night on the grounds that if I did, I could perhaps get it finished tonight.

On the plus side I’m listening to a terrific album which I bought yesterday having heard bits of it on internet radio. I know there is a load of music out there that I’d love if I only knew about it. Poem by Delirium is one of those discoveries – I don’t know when it was released but it wasn’t five minutes ago anyway.

I read people moaning about the Irish economy and I’m starting to get weary of it. Ireland is not the worst off in the world. I’ve come to that conclusion. I’ve also come to the conclusion that people like extremes so that if we’re not the worst off, some observers want to drive us in that direction. And others don’t want to deal with reality. And I’m not overly sure what reality is any more anyway and eventually my brain starts to melt and I stop reading economics based sites for Ireland. And then I feel guilty about it because apparently I’m supposed to have an interest in all this and then feck it, life is too short and I will be dead at some point. Poverty stricken also but unfortunately the banks didn’t ask my advice when they lent ship loads of money to Bernard McNamara, Liam Carroll, Paddy Kelly and associated companies in the same industry. Basically I like enjoying life and reading the Sunday papers serves to depress me. End of.

The book I started reading I picked up in a second hand book sale in Howth about a year ago. It’s called The Ra Expeditions and it’s by Thor Heherdahl who also wrote a book called Kon-tiki which I may order from a second hand bookseller on amazon.co.uk along with a definitive book on crochet lace (how different can you get?) I like books about the history of exploration; and what’s interesting about this is that it was published before I was born. Someone was rich; the book is hardback and richly illustrated with colour photographs. It cost me €5 and it will be worth every cent if chapters 1-4 are anything to go by. What’s also interesting about the book is that the geopolitical framework of parts of the world have changed. I discovered this almost in passing – my knowledge of central-African geography lacks and in looking for Fort Lamy on a map I discovered that it had changed name in the intervening time. One of the things I planned to do in reading the book is plot on a google map the places that Heyerdahl went to in putting the Ra expeditions together.

But in addition to reading I’m looking at doing more work on a pineapple square – this is a piece of crochet in very fine thread (well i could do it in heavier yarn I suppose but I’d question why I’d want to…) which will probably inspire me to start a table cloth or something. I’m about 1/3 of the way through it and made a stupid mistake yesterday. It’s in the Harmony 300 Crochet stitches book which I suspect has been withdrawn because I couldn’t find it online too easily yesterday. Harmony have issued a whole lot of new knitting and crochet reference books. Unfortunately I don’t find the new ones as interesting as the two already own; the 300 and the 220. The problem is my head wants to do the crochet and my hands do not.

I wish tomorrow was still Sunday.

Good things I did this year

• moved house back into the city after threatening to do so for 3 years. I realise now that after 7 years in Swords, I didn’t really like living there very much.
• went kitesurfing once. I planned to go more often but then, when I did go, it was with Kristin Boese, a world champion.
• entertained two lots of foreign visitors.
• fulfilled ambition to go abseiling. Hated it.
• fulfilled idle curiosity to start learning to climb. Liked the indoor stuff a lot. This along with the house moving counts as the major success story of the year
• had one photograph published in the Irish Times
• won a motorsports photography competition
• courtesy of the motorsports photography competition fulfilled a childhood ambition to do racing driving lessons. I would probably better if I took just one more lesson.
• fulfilled life time ambition to start diving lessons, discovered they made me incredibly sick (it’s the chlorine) and abandoned it after two. Filed under the “at least I tried it and won’t die wondering” code.
• successfully avoided X-Factor
• got the boards.ie photography exhibition done.
• fulfilled lifetime ambition and went to Tarifa. I’ve wanted to go there since the windsurfing days which is almost 20 years now. What the hell was I doing?
• Split up with Vodafone.
• rebuilt a broken bridge.

I don’t much like the concept of New Year’s Resolutions. They seem to be very guilt inducing. Usually I focuse on one or two things that I want to do and try to get around to them at some stage. I’ve been generally quite good at this in the past but there’s a slight problem this year. With one sole exception, I’m not really sure what I want to mark 2010 with in general.

The one outstanding thing for 2010 which is linked to the climbing is to go ice climbing in London. My mother thinks I’m nuts. I think I’m nowhere near fit enough. I originally planned to go in January but that had to be shelved when it was clear that I wasn’t going to be fit enough by the end of December.  Apart from that I’d like to go to one of Kristin’s clinics, preferably the one in Cornwall as I would love to go to Cornwall anyway. This would be suitable. But the kitesurfing isn’t exactly new, in fairness.

So, for 2010, the list currently looks – more or less – like this

• go to London iceclimbing  just to try it once
• go to Cornwall for Kristin’s kitesurfing clinic.
• go kitesurfing more often.
• learn to make creme anglaise without it ever curdling. Currently I have a 30% success rate.

Stuff is going to happen in 2010 that I have zero control over. Anyone who knows me knows what that’s all about. I can only try to tweak it here and there when or if I get the opportunity.

EATF: someone’s reminded me I want to do flying lessons. Hmm.

1. racing driving lessons
2. climbing
3. Tarifa
4. boards.ie photography exhibition
5. moving house and living back in the city area rather than 10 miles out.
6. having fresh herbs growing in the garden.
7. having a garden dammit
8. two other personal things.

I tried diving lessons. They weren’t so successful. I have rope to make a rope mat as well – I haven’t worked out how to do the knot yet.

Although I’ve been insanely busy for the last 2 years, most of it, of late, appears to be under my control rather than anyone else’s so I don’t feel as hounded as I did 12 months ago.  That part is probably the coolest.

I value that day a lot. The darkness kills me and it’s the key reason I chose not to move to Finland in 1999 when I had the chance.