That I don’t say no often enough. I’m not sure how valuable this knowledge is, but such is life.

When I appear invisible, I appear invisible to everyone. I’d like to be able to create groups based on whether I’m up for being interrupted by them or not.

I think FaceBook (which I hate and which, the last time I checked didn’t bother saving chats anyway) does this. I’d appreciate it if the proper chat services did.

I feel the need to comment on this piece for various reasons.

This all sounds great:

We may be at the bottom of the EU list when it comes to numbers of pupils learning a foreign language, but we are top of the EU list when it comes to the range of languages on offer in our schools. Nineteen European Union languages in total are taught somewhere in England and Wales, and that doesn’t include Mandarin, Japanese, Arabic, Russian or Urdu, which are not EU languages but which are taught in many British schools.

But it absolutely has to be seen in the context of

The figures are even more dire at A-level; fewer than 5% of all A-level entrants sat a language exam last year. This explains why there is such a small pool of graduates able to speak a foreign language, and why foreign companies moving to Britain get frustrated.

From the same article.

Disclaimer: I speak fluent French and German and have pretty fluent Irish and some smatterings of Italian and Spanish and can read some Dutch. I am biased. I would take the view that it doesn’t matter if you’re offering 19 languages in British schools if 5% of your school leavers are taking a language exam at school leaving stage. The countries that do well in foreign languages do well because they specialise in a handful. Eight or nine in the case of German.

Language teaching is politically fraught and the UK and Ireland, by merit of being native English speakers which is the number 1 second language taught in the world, have gotten away without putting the effort in.

Nothing to do with less talent and most people with an interest in languages would agree. The issue relates to motivation.

This lack of twitter means I’m getting great stuff done here.

Anyway I am sitting in a sunny kitchen which will not be mine for the rest of my life – I know this already – and am pondering ways to get what I want which is a nice house, with a decent kitchen from IKEA (seriously) and a nice workspace and I have realised that one of my key cribs about living in Ireland is we do as little as we can get away with. And then we try to convince ourselves that it’s enough.

I’m in a three bedroomed semiD house. It came with fitted furniture in the box room which was a drag for me because if it hadn’t, it would have been cleared out to make My room. I have a bedroom but past experience has taught me that’s lunacy to try and use that as an office as well as a sleeping area. In other words, keep the computer out of the bedroom, there’s a good girl.

Most Irish houses are not built with the idea that someone might need a home office and our insane tendency – which is dissipating admittedly – to judge house sizes by the numbers of bedrooms they have rather than their actual floorspace area – means that offices are rarely considered as a vital part of a house. I hate this idea.

I was looking at these things yesterday. Apparently they are seriously pricy but that’s fine. I can’t afford a garden to put one in yet either so I can look but not touch.

I want a nice house. I’m trying to figure out how to get it and to do that, I need to figure out what I really want from it. Workspace. Storage. Nice kitchen. I wouldn’t want all these things 15 years ago. I was happy with “enough”. But I’ve lived in a lot of places and in some respects, enough in Ireland isn’t really enough.I know I have to make compromises but still.

Anyway.

Basically I think the problem is it’s easy to slip into a rhythm of life and only later do you realise it wasn’t what you really wanted. I remember about 8 years ago a mortgage lender in AIB told me his days were filled with people who had taken out mortgages in their early twenties frantically looking for equity releases to go off and travel because they had done the right thing when they were young except it wasn’t really the right thing for them.

If there’s a moral to this, it’s that although I feel screwed over by what happened in Ireland for the last 8 years in the property market, it’s that I still think that stepping away from it was the right thing. I have a lot of beauty in my life and for that I am thankful.

One of the things that has irritated me about the Irish property market is that there have been discussions on who could and who should be able to buy property to live in. It’s frustrating in a way because it implies some sort of a value judgment on how there are some people who deserve good stuff and some who don’t. And that good stuff seems to be defined on the basis of economic merit.

The most essential jobs done on a day to day basis in the city of Dublin – arguably – are the refuse collectors. That’s regardless of whether they are paid by a private operator or the local council. The fact is their service is completely essential to the functioning of the city. They are not, however, economically valued as such. They are working class and of a class that others feel shouldn’t necessarily aspire to being able to buy their own home. No one has ever come up with an adequate reason other than they shouldn’t be earning enough.

I’ve been throw those arguments a lot and they crop up a lot. Not just for houses. There are some people who shouldn’t be able to go on holidays to Spain (an argument in favour of reducing the old age pension – if they can afford to go to Spain, they have too much money).

Interestingly enough, I don’t see this as capitalist thinking but socialist thinking; and yet the people who come up with some of these comments would scream if you suggested they had anything in common with socialism.

But it does give some pause for consideration. Is this the sort of society we want to live in? I mean, one of the things that has annoyed me most about living in Ireland over the years is the inability of some Irish people to accept that other people see the world differently to them. So for example, I honestly believe that if someone wants a Rolls Royce and has spent 30 years saving for it, then they should be able to park it outside their house in Tallaght without some busybody questioning how they can afford it and commenting – because of prejudgment – that they get too much on the dole.

Irish people are bad at that. Very bad at applying their own prejudices to something they don’t know very much about and assuming they are right. This leads to big problems in stupid places like people giving advice to landlords on how to get rid of tenants “Just change the locks. It’s your house”. Ignorance parades and it is never learned from.

I’m not sure how we can change it. But ultimately, when you look at the whole question of the economic mess we are in, there are armies of people wandering around implying they know best how people should spend their money. And the only thing that counts is making money work to make money.

Well that’s fine. If I’d taken the advice of everyone to buy a house in the last 6 years I’d be down 100KE and living somewhere I never, ever wanted to live, ever. If I’d invested in bank shares, I’d have lost pretty much everything. Instead, my camera equipment is still worth something and not causing me headaches.

Society is not well served by people walking aroudn thinking they can decide who deserves a widescreen TV or not. I think part of it might be insecurity; an easy way of proving “hey, I did better than you, I have the X5 and the flatscreen television”. I’m just not sure it counts for much in the long term and it’s building a society on a culture of envy rather than growth.

It’s just, how do you change people’s attitudes? When they don’t even realise just how obnoxious their attitude is?

I’d like to live in a country where the weakest are supported without the richest looking askance on it. I’d like to live in a country where the rich are not allowed get away with daylight robbery until the nakedness really can’t be seen. We have an economy that has been screwed up not by the poor wanting a flatscreen television but by the rich for whom too much was not enough.

I’d like to live in a country where working class people are not judged for wanting to buy their own houses. Particularly since currently I live in a country where tenants are regularly screwed over. I’d like to live in a country where a) it’s socially acceptable to rent and where b) rents are reasonable. Right now, they are not and it will be years before things are sorted out here.

I feel sometimes like the family at the end of the Bodhranmakers by John B. That they’ve put everything into their local community and still, the prejudices of higher up make it more attractive to remove themselves. In the 50s it may well have been the church but the church I think was a vehicle for the judgemental attitudes of the Irish. Much as the church is dying out, to some extent, the attitudes are not.

I wonder why sometimes.

Twitter failwhale is on show this morning…it’s a bit annoying. I never knew I’d like that site and now it’s almost an essential part of my communications network. Given that I don’t really like FaceBook any more – that’s a bit unusual.

Anyway, via the badscience forum this morning, I discovered Horrible Histories. If you need a 3 minute low budget pick me up, it’s well worth a wander around. I had a 30 minute cruise around it and can recommend the Witchfinders Direct clip.

In other news, yesterday evening was just one of those Oh God evenings. I hate it when trivial stuff goes Oh God, but what can you do. When I was in France a few months ago I bought two bottles of flavoured syrup, lavender and rose. I have been using the lavender one on and off to add some extra flavouring to diet 7-up. It’s quite nice. Or, more to the point, it was. Yesterday when I was putting it in its corner next to the rose, I dropped it from a height of about 3 and a half feet.

I have a tile floor in my kitchen. The bottle was glass. I say was because it is in 1 million pieces now. There was lavender syrup all over the place including on my legs.

When I say syrup, I mean gloopy, very sticky stuff and getting stickier the more it’s in contact with open air. The way the bottle fell as well meant the syrup went one way and the glass  pretty much the other way. Normally I’d like to clear up the glass before I start cleaning up liquids but that was absolutely not an option last night because the syrup was very much on top of everything. It was going to have to be cleared before I did anything.

It’s a rotten substance to have to clear up. I will only say that. The excess just doesn’t mop up easily. Really. It doesn’t. So I went for the bucket and mop and had at it. Dinner was getting cold at this stage but to be honest, I hadn’t too much taste for it at this point either.

In filling buckets of soapy water and getting mops and the like, I slipped in front of the sink. I didn’t break anything, but it wasn’t a painless exercise either.

It’s not the most important thing that has happened to me lately, in fact I’ll have forgotten about it soon enough. But it was infuriating that yesterday evening was spent painfully cleaning up syrup that was supposed to remind me of a holiday.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the way we see ourselves is very often at variance at how other people see us.

At the heart of this are a bunch of unrelated remarks and comments that people have made to me about things I do that suggest to me I could do with a bit more self belief because how I see things I do and achieve is generally somewhat more negative than how other people see it.

Apparently I’m always off doing something. I wouldn’t ever say I’m great at it – my main talent appears to be photography – but I’m game to try stuff I want to try for the most part.

I have never really realised how this differs to some of the people around me until they say things. Like, they wouldn’t plan holidays around certain activities. Holidays are for doing nothing. Holidays for me are opportunities to do things I don’t necessarily get to do here. Photographs of the south of France. You can’t do that in Dublin. Kitesurfing in Brazil. Ditto. Seriously, compare Jericoacoara to Dollymount and call a choice.

One of the things that stuns me is that I do stuff on my own. Call it necessity or whatever, but when it boils down to something I want to do, and the choice is do it on my own or not do it at all, I’ll always just feck off and do it.

Some people have found this difficult to believe because they can’t do it. I’ve friends who can’t/won’t go to the cinema on their own. Concerts. Sports. I’ll freely admit that I won’t go kitesurfing on my own and anyway, I can’t go climbing on my own. But travelling, checking stuff out, trying things…I can somewhere summon up the courage to go and walk among strangers and give it a shot.

Part of this is because by and large, strangers have always been very good to me. Mostly, I don’t worry about things. I lost my purse in the airport in Charles de Gaulle once. I got it back completely intact. When I am travelling alone, I always find people to talk to. When I decide I am going to try something, there are usually other people there. Wherever I land, there is always someone that I fit in with. If I look back over the years, there have been people who’ve stopped to check I’m okay if my car is at the side of the road (taking a phone call). Other people who are travelling who have suggestions and ideas for things I may not have known to try. Other people who have things in common with me. I can remember sitting in a café in Locronan in Brittany counting rolls of film (yes, once upon a time…) and a Swiss man coming up to me to tell me he had a Canon A1 and what was I shooting and he was travelling with his wife. They had sold up everything when he retired and were travelling around Europe in a campervan.

One of my friends who went travelling, but not alone, said she noticed the the people who travelled alone always got on fine. To some extent, they often did better than she did because they were alone and therefore more likely to get talking to strangers and find out about things whereas she and her friend were more introverted because they had each other for company.

It’s an interesting observation, all the more so because it matches my experience. When I don’t travel alone, I don’t tend to get talking to so many people. It’s almost introverted. I’m not sure whether that is cultural or not as it typically happens more when I am travelling with mainly Irish people and less when I am travelling with mainly French people.

That all being said, every once in a while I settle down and think I must be very boring altogether. I don’t go out much at night – I find it boring and also, very tiring. I prefer doing stuff by daylight. One of the things I love about life now is that I can do it that way.

Anyway, because I don’t have an overly high opinion of how I fit into the world, it’s really sweet when people come up and tell me that they think something I’ve done or achieved or said is extraordinary or changes their lives in some way. It matters to me a lot. Because I very often don’t see it as very special. It’s good to know I might occasionally be wrong about this.

Because I currently have an interest in matters regarding design and stuff, I took a trip out to IADT to have a look at their graduate show yesterday. I don’t usually have time to do these things but this year is a little bit different.

I enjoyed it. There are some very , very good film makers coming out of there; and some really nice graphic design stuff. One standout photographer and then for the most part, the fine art stuff left me complete bored silly.

It’s worth going along to exhibitions like this just to get a feel for how the visual arts industry is working at the moment. Also, young artists could do with a bit of support.

I have so much I want to write about lately that I just can’t get stuck in. However, saw something today that worried me a lot. It’s this report from the Irish Independent.

I’d like to inform the Irish Independent that just because AN Mortgagebroker says something doesn’t somehow magically make it news, but since Charlie Weston saw fit to write a piece on it, I’ll summarise. Karl Deeter reckons the big Irish banks (you know, the ones that you’re paying tax to bail out while enduring cuts in every single public service paltry though they are) are not lending enough to first time buyers.

I quote.

He added that a couple earning a salary of €25,000 each a year would only be able to get approval for a mortgage of €225,000 from BoI, and just €234,000 from AIB. This was because of tough lending criteria applied by the two big banks.

I need to put some stuff into context for you here. 225KE is oh, 4.5 times the joint salary here. Okay? Assuming a bog standard couple of one male and one female. In the event that we are talking about a couple where someone god forbid might want to have a kid or two, we are talking about a family unit which cannot afford to take time off to do so because otherwise, the mortgage becomes 9 times the salary of the primary income earner.

In the 1980s and as recently as the late 1990s, no bank would countenance giving a single income earlier more than about 3 times their salary. If you managed to get them to take a second salary into consideration – not guaranteed – they topped it out at 1.5-2 times the secondary salary.

But the same couple would qualify for a home loan of €400,000 from Haven, which is part of EBS Building Society.

I hope Karl Deeter is not suggesting that this is a good thing. This is 8 times the joint salary.

“On one hand, you could say AIB and BoI are engaged in more prudent lending but this isn’t the case The other banks are now lending prudently. It isn’t as if Permanent TSB and KBC Home- loans are doing reckless loans in 2010.

The other banks are not – in my opinion – lending prudently. They are lending far, far too much on a couple both of whom are on below average incomes.

I absolutely abhor the short sightedness of this. No couple should be looking at a loan that is 9 times a single income in this economic climate between the risk of job loss, reducing salaries. K

I am horrified by this. We have major economic problems in this country caused by excess credit and one of the media friendly mortgage brokers is complaining about the lack of credit, credit which is still far in excess of what was considered prudent in the days before banks HAD TO BE BAILED OUT. Does he want us to have to bail the bastards out again or something?

I’m locked out of my twitter account for 1 hour. This is all Tweetdeck’s fault. And probably mine.

I have a Twitter account. I have 8000 or so tweets on it. It is my personal account. For various reasons which I’ll save the masses, I have decided to set up a professional twitter account – the one that I will open to the public (then I will make the personal one private) – that will look good to various professional people.

You cannot log into two twitter accounts simultaneously via the web so, although I practically never use the damn thing because it has been memory hog, etc, etc. I decided to fire it up because apparently I can monitor several twitter accounts via it.

So I set up the new twitter account, started adding professional interest stuff to it and then wanted to set up Tweetdeck. It decided to reject my password on my primary account several times. Subsequent to that, twitter locked the account. Which is fine. Except I can’t get into the new one either. For some reason that I don’t understand. And I wasn’t done building lists on the new one, can’t access either twitter account and will have to do other stuff for an hour.

Damnation.

But I have a load of magazines to read from Easons so maybe I will do that instead.