I love Brittany – most people who know me, know this. But it has to take some rare form of crazy to go there for just 2 days. I needed to take photographs of different but familiar things. It’s the easiest place to go. I’m not going to talk about photography though; I’m going to talk about what it was like to drive there on Saturday night in particular.

I have done a reasonable amount of driving in France, and around Brittany in particular. If I’m there for longer than a day I typically hire a car. Somehow, however, I’d never managed to drive in the conditions I was driving in on Saturday. It was dark, and more to the point, it was teeming with rain. I was driving on the RN165, which is a dual carriageway. I was travelling west to Quimper.

When I say the weather was atrocious, I am not understating how heavy the rain was. But here’s the thing. It was the single worst journey I have ever driven.

I like France. I love Brittany. But road markings there are pitifully bad. The exit signs are white and blindingly reflective. They make the road disappear for a while when you are approaching one. There are no cats eyes and the road markings, the white lines are impossible to see. There were stretches of that road where I honestly had trouble identifying what, if any lane, I was in. I just couldn’t see the road.

France is – on a certain level – trying very hard to improve its fairly abysmal road safety record. Sarkozy I think claims to have halved the fatal accident rate. But they could do a whole lot to improve things on the road markings front. Edge of road markings and centre line markings are impossible to see when it is dark and raining. The exit signs really should be a non-white colour so as not to be blinding and not to be impossible to read.

On the plus side, off the main road, nearly ever village appears to have a 30kph zone. All the school areas are 30kph, for example.

One other thing to note: Quimper has more roundabouts than any other city I have ever been in, including Limerick.

I picked up a new one last week. I was in Pure Magic in Clontarf and they had some copies of Stance and Stance always comes armed with a DVD. Here’s the trailer which turned up on Youtube. I saw bits of this in Pure Magic so picked it up and took it home to watch. The Stance DVDs have a couple of different films on them but the one we’re interested in right now is Um Barco Nas Ondas, which is a 25 minute film of waveriding in the Cape Verde Islands off the coast of West Africa. I’ve known they exist for years but have never been down there. It featured four waveriders, 2 of whom I was already familiar with thanks to another kite DVD about 9 years ago, namely Tuva Jensen (I want a haircut like hers) and Bertrand Fleury, and two names which are new to me, namely Mitu Monteiro and Camille Juban. It’s about this latter I’m going to write.

Camille Juban is a windsurfer and it was a couple of clips what he was getting up to which caught my interest. I don’t get to see much windsurfing lately – I no longer track the PWA on Eurosport because to be honest I get overwhelmed with all the television channels we have and practically never watch it. I caught a little bit of it on the PWA’s live stream last year and did idly consider that it would be worth picking up again if they got a bigger picture going. I never quite got around to checking out the schedule do. I’d never heard of Camille Juban as a result and this is a pity. He makes me want to windsurf again.

Yes, again. Not that many people know this but I used to windsurf, a very long time ago. Waveriding as a windsurfer looks like a lot more fun than it does with a kite. And that film made me want to try again.

I’m serious unfit but I am thinking that this year at least I am going to try and get to a PWA event (as well as an ASP event – angling for France this year if it fits in with everyone else, and some kite event although there is a big event coming to Ireland this year so….).

One of today’s tasks is to go looking at PWA dates and kite dates. Meanwhile, the ASP are on the Australian Gold Coast at the moment – the live streams started this morning but I haven’t had a chance to review them yet.

Today’s viewing, not shown by any television channel this side of the Shannon, included The Dish. It is an absolutely wonderful movie about Parkes Observatory in Australia, which provided most of the live pictures from the moon landings.

It is a fascinating movie on several levels. It has a wonderful humorous script featuring one of my favourite comic moments in cinema. It makes a radio telescope the star of a movie about moon landings. It has some stellar performances from amongst others, Sam Neill. And when I watch it, tears run down my face.

The Dish reminds you that while putting a man on the moon is an unequalled endeavour in humanity’s efforts, equally, there are a lot of unsung heros making small parts of that story possible.

I have also been perusing house for sale ads. And apartment ones. Mostly, today I know that I would like to slap a lot of people responsible for laying out houses in this country. They just aren’t fit for purpose.

This is really putting me off the idea of buying a house at the moment. The simple fact is there are lots of houses but the overwhelming majority of them for sale at the moment are horrible in some shape or form. This house, today it was the cupboard under the stairs, frequently it is the garden, more often than not, the kitchen. Mostly it’s the kitchen.

I looked at two bedroomed houses in Swords today; and realised that while they had several good features, none of the kitchens allowed for both a washing machine and a dishwasher. Some sad pathetic losers would probably say that if I am living on my own I wouldn’t need a dishwasher but he can get right lost because it’s not up to him to decide; it’s up to me.

I looked at apartments as well. We built bloody loads of them. Acres and acres of apartments. They are still over priced and I couldn’t see one in Dublin 9 that was designed for anyone to live in. This is the 21st Century. Having the kitchen open onto the living room is the stuff of saps and it is all too common in this city.

I am angry about this. All that can be said is that in fact, I didn’t buy a house I didn’t like and wouldn’t want to live in.

I understand why, despite the utter antipathy towards it by most planners, most people want to build their own houses, one off, designed so that they have usable rooms, usable kitchens and usable gardens. I don’t know what planet some of our planners live on but FFS, the apartments should have been shot down before they ever got built.

Yours, curmudgeonly.

I did actually start MST121 with the Open University on my path to a degree in maths and statistics. So far I like it, so far I am having some issues time managing because coincidentally, work has been very busy. I am successfully getting out to my knit night on a Thursday night and I’ve had some bits and pieces in the social engagement front in the last few weeks. And I need a little more sleep. But it’s going okay and I am happy with it.

If you know me online at all, you’ll know that my twitter posting, boards.ie and propertypin.com postings have fallen off a cliff. There are a couple of reasons for this.

1. boards.ie – not taking that many photographs so not much to offer to the photography forum. That being said, this year’s photography yearbook launched last night and I was there and it is, as usual, wonderful. It is in aid of the Santa Strike Force and without wanting to sound like a fangirl of any description, I heard Tom Murphy speak about some of the charities that the SSF from boards.ie supports and it is massively inspirational.
2. thepropertypin.com – the population there has changed and being honest, has shifted rather too far to the right for my liking. I haven’t very much to say there; the property market is still not healthy; the economy is operating on two levels and I have too many other interests to be analysing that to death.
3. twitter – victim to other things that I’m doing in the evening. You might occasionally see the occasional post via my phone but that’s it.

Theoretically I was supposed to post some progress on the maths front over on the treasalynch.com site. I haven’t had time and I regret that because I’m also interested in data visualisation stuff – this was a key contributor to my decision to do a maths and stats course next and the plan was to get some stuff out there.

So that’s all simmering away in the background and I’m skimping on the posting. Sorry

I have some free time approaching over Christmas so with any luck there will be some changes in the silence and we’ll be back to normal.

In the meantime, here is part of the B-minor concerto by JN Hummel which is my big music discovery for the year and I love it.

Here are some hints to make things more effective:

1. Pixellated photographs give a very bad impression. It says “This person is not professional”. It warns me not to bother looking.
2. If you load 19 photographs to daft, myhome or property, and 18 of them are of the neighbourhood, eg, if you are trying to move an apartment in Grand Canal Square and most of the photographs are of the canal, the river, the cranes, the Grand Canal Theatre, the o2 and the basin of water, and, God forbid, Boland’s Mill, and none are of the interior of the property, this gives a very bad impression. It says “the apartment is really, really poor and was furnished from an estate sale from a house that was emptied in 1973″. If you then insist on rent of 1900E on top of providing no pictures of the interior of the property, then sorry, it warns me not to bother looking.
3. If you are trying to rent a property, provide picture hooks but don’t foist your taste in pictures on me. I”m going to be blunt here – every apartment I have seen with other people’s choice in pictures hanging on the tastefully decorated walls for the classily appointed executive apartment have been completely offensive in their inoffensiveness. I have pictures of my own. I like to hang them. Get Rid Of Yours if you are trying to get the place rented. Give me picture hooks instead.
4. Just because your mortgage is 1899E per month doesn’t mean that your apartment will get 1900E on the rental market.
5. Include useful photographs of the rooms. I don’t need to see what the expensive duvet cover you got in Brown Thomas looks like because I will not be sleeping under it. I do need some impression of how big the room is, so can I have a picture of the room, and not just the bed. Likewise, I really don’t care how expensive the sink in the bathroom is, just show me the bathroom as a whole.
6. Don’t lie about the storage. Estate agents do not appear to understand what “ample” storage actually means. It is not, for example, a single wardrobe in a double room.

These are just some hints from a weary customer.

Anyway, today’s leaflet drop relates to jobs initiatives and for one reason and another, it irritates me.

Firstly, some time ago, the government announced a pension levy whereby 0.6% of the capital in most private pension funds would simply be taken and “used for jobs creation”. I consider this theft and what’s more, it’s causing me to seriously question the wisdom of providing for my old age if it’s all just going to be stolen from me by the time I get to retire. The age at which I will retire has also been increased such that if I’m lucky I’ll be able to retire at the age of 68.

Anyway, I let my local TD know that I considered it poor form on the part of the Labour party to stand over the taking of money from people’s pension funds and was told “no one said it would be easy and anyway, it’s for jobs creation”. Subtext, I’m over moaning.

My tax bill is gone up by at least 4K a year since 2006 and my disposable cash is vanishing. Not only that, because I don’t have a mortgage but do have a job no one ways for my accommodation. If I were unemployed, the government would be paying the interest on my mortgage for a year, or my rent. In any case, they are also looking at possible debt forgiveness for people who uhem, something something. Negative equity/heavily endebted. RTE Frontline had an argument on the subject last night. I didn’t watch it. I don’t have a television but this is the sort of thing that had the potention to make me rather angry.

So, today, leaflet drop from the Labour Party about jobs, and the need to create sustainable jobs. I’m not sure what the Labour Party considers to be sustainable jobs but I have some doubts that they actually know.

About the only one that looks even remotely promising relates to cuts in VAT to aid the tourism sector. The tourism sector has the potential to generate positive income for the country. This is actually important. Whether it will work or not is open to debate – getting people into the country isn’t necessarily VAT dependent but the country does have a perception problem. Expensive to get here, and expensive to holiday here.

I suspect a key improvement would be to reduce the overall cost of life here; this would benefit both tourists and the locals. I’m not sure VAT reductions will work directly on this respect.

Next up. 2000 jobs in a 30 million euro national retrofit plan. There’s a problem here – these jobs aren’t going to generate any export/invisible export income. It’s part of the Labour Green Jobs plan, something which I’m sure the Green Party would want to claim, except 30 million is kind of paltry. It will apparently create 2,000 jobs for out of work construction workers.

Retrofit jobs are not generally long term options so I can’t really consider this one to be sustainable per se.

Next up, broadband for all. Apparently Pat Rabbitte has commited to ensuring that all parts of rural Ireland will have access to broadband. He talks about next generation broadband which I assume – because the document is not clear – he has something in mind like NGB currently offered by Eircom.

I don’t deal with eircom but when they were offering me NGB, it topped out at 8Mb, at a time I could get 30Mb out of UPC. There are serious, serious problems with broadband in Ireland, particularly relating to last mile copper. There is no indication as to how they plan to make this available and all told, the paragraph relating to this just comes across as political bluffery. Until Pat Rabbitte tells me what broadband speeds are involved, I’ll just ignore this.

The minimum wage. It got cut and that is not nice, this is true. However, the cost of living in Ireland – particularly the cost of accommodation – is way to high and I’d prefer it if the Labour Party addressed that rather than just the minimum wage. They increased it back up to 8.65. I’m not convinced this counts as a job creation measure.

Lending to small businesses is apparently a priority and there are a couple of things in place here.

1) partial loan guarantee. Apparently 400M guaranteed by the State allows 4500 companies to get additional credit which will create more than 8000 jobs. I have absolutely no idea how that’s supposed to work.

2) Microfinance fund to provide funding for small loans to start ups. A lot of our brightest wind up going to Silicon Valley because we don’t fund start ups effectively here. It’s a Europe wide issue to some extent. Microfinance is not going to be enough. He doesn’t put a number on this either which I think is regrettable. It would be interesting to know how much money is going in this direction. 30million is going to retrofitting. Start ups may well have a lot more promise for sustainable economic growth and employment, so I’d like to know more money is going that way than to additional insulation, for example.

3) State will pay suppliers within 15 days of receiving a valid invoice. This is laudable.

Okay. More construction jobs following 40million investment in schools program, which means a few more unemployed construction workers off the rolls but no sustainable jobs and no export income. What happens when that program is over then?

Training and internship places – 21,000 of them. This is all fine and dandy but if they’re not followed up with real jobs then I’m not sure how we’re going to benefit long term out of this.

And another 2,000 jobs on roads investment, this time 75million. So more jobs but not necessarily sustainable and not directly export related.

What all this looks like is sticking plaster economics. It will get some people off the Live Register, but few of them are sustainable and some of the infrastructure plans look a bit superficial.

I’d like to see more money going into research and development – not mentioned – and a figure put on the start up microfinance fund. We have key infrastructural issues but appear to be using infrastructure to reduce unemployment – there’s a heavy emphasis on jobs rather than wider economic benefit. I’d like to see a more indepth plan for education going forward because that is where we’re going to make some progress in the knowledge economy. We need broadband as well but as I’ve already noted, the platitudes on broadband are short on detail.

I don’t want to sit here and be negative about all this. Everyone in the country knows we need new jobs. I’m just not seeing any vision on what these jobs are going to be. We have an army of construction workers who need either more construction or monumental retraining. But the retraining on offer tends to be on the scale of Fas courses and I’m not sure they’re goign to cut it for the long term future.

If I had a billion to play with, instead of playing with Live Register numbers, I’d start funding third level college more effectively for part-timers. Allow people to work part time for four years while taking high level fast tracking courses in the area of IT. Sponsor people to do this, if you like. And those courses would have to be targetted – I’m not talking about a dozen or so media studies courses – I’m thinking media studies courses beefed up with serious software engineering, for example.

I’d put around 400Million euro into a start up fund. I’m not sure who I’d get to run it – I don’t think we really have the expertise here. And I’d put 30million towards sponsoring ideas out of secondary school students. They have some ideas and it’s where microfinance might be useful.

If you get people generating ideas at a young age and foster those ideas, and foster the idea that failing is not an utter disaster, you might get our brightest to stay here, and we might get our own venture capital culture going too.

These are all ideas and their objective is to build for the future, not hide the mistakes of the past.

this was growing in my garden. In fact, it stopped growing in my garden today.

It was very lovely by the way. I really, really liked it.

You’ll find those lovely hoodies in the Animal shop as far as I remember. I can’t remember what street it was on but it’s on the way towards Fistral as far as I remember.

So.

I was in Newquay recently. If you’re a Sky Television fan or you read any of the more self-righteous newspapers in the UK like the Daily Mail, you’ll have heard of Newquay. It is a den of iniquity. It is the subject of horrified but delighted (for the ratings, you understand) television programs about what a den of iniquity. Parents in Dublin worry about their younglings going to the disco in Wesley. Parents in the UK have near heart attacks about their younglings going to Newquay for a week with their friends, to celebrate the end of college year, school year or any useful excuse you can think of. It is also – or so it would seem – the hen and stag party capital of the UK. Maybe it’s because you don’t need to change your money going to Cornwall where as Latvia, Estonia, Romania and Ireland have the nerve not to use sterling. I don’t know. The population of the place is 20,000 normally. In the summer that swells to 100.000 and at the weekends, it looks like 90% of them are grown men and women dressed in rather stupid costumes.

Put like that, you’d really have to figure the parents don’t have much to worry about. It’s the ones trolling around dressed as Oompa Lumpas to celebrate the idea of getting married that are a bit more worrying to say the least.

Newquay town is, how shall I put it, a challenging town. It has three or four lovely beaches in the town – all of which are surfable, and one of which is probably the top surf beach in the UK. It has most of the UK surf industry. It could be an absolute gem of a town but somehow, the words that line up to describe it are “kip”, “tacky” and “culture clash between faded 1920s glory and Newquay Uncovered”. It really has some gorgeous turn of the century hotels. Many of the houses are really pretty. The main street has very little going for it except Boots stays open late and the Bank Street Bar and Grill was the only place I found that I liked eating in. There are countless amusement arcades – I mean countless. It’s definitely more than five. And one street is full of night clubs. They do loads of foam parties. And two pound drinks on a Thursday night.

I know we’ve a few tacky seaside towns in Ireland (Tramore would be a good example) but they are twobit in comparison to Newquay. Seriously. We do not qualify in Seaside Town Tackiness.

I spoke to several taxi drivers over the course of the time I was there and got the feeling that they’d like to drop the whole tackiness side of things and concentrate on family tourism. If they never saw another stag party they wouldn’t care. One of them told me that during the summer in particular, the police seriously had their work cut out for them.

This then is the public frace of Newquay. Tacky. Kippy. Full of people drinking an awful lot on a Saturday night. I wasn’t up when the clubs closed but in the five days I was there I heard of one mugging so I imagine the place is not without its problems alright. I think it would be fantastic if the relevant council could just kill off Newquay’s attraction for the party/stag/hen visitor sector because if you scrape beneath the surface there are some really nice bits. All the surfing for example. Great surf beaches. Great surf shops. Empty.

Watergate Bay is 2 miles away. It is one of the most beautiful beaches I have ever seen. You pass it on the way to Newquay from the airport and if the sun is shining and there are three or four Flexifoil kites in the air, it comes across as just magical. Fistral Beach is unquestionably beautiful, with an iconic hotel overlooking it from a headland. Even the town beaches are golden sanded heavens. If you can forget about the tacky bit of town (hard, I’ll grant you), and concentrate on the turn of the century hotels and the beaches (and not think about all the steps to get there), and if you skip the town centre on a Friday and Saturday night, you probably couldn’t ask for better.

It has a beautiful links golf course which looks out over Fistral Bay. It is ten miles from Truro which has one of the most beautiful cathedrals in the world and which is a far prettier town in itself (albeit without the beaches). It’s very hard to completely trash the place over the tacky side of life when you walk through some beautiful flowering hedges on the cliff tops near Fistral, when you climb up to the Cornish Cross near south Fistral at sunset.

It’s just, one person dressed as an oompa lumpa reminds you that a lot of people don’t go there for the beauty, but for the tack and the foam and the two pound drinks.

I wish it weren’t so.