Anyway I missed it on Sunday owing to poor organisation on my part, so I made a point of getting entertainment.ie to send me a reminder so that I didn’t miss it today. It was awe-inspiring television. It is the sort of television that I wish I’d seen about physics and astronomy when I was 15 years old. The only thing I can remember about astronomy in any detail from when I was a child was a piece in a Christmas annual linked to a television program on RTE or Network 2 or something directed at people a bit too old for Bosco and a bit too young for the Nine O’Clock News. I don’t remember much about it although I think Hilary Orpen and Pat Butler were amongst the presenters. Anyway, one Christmas, the annual was purchased and it had a piece on Voyager 1 and Voyager 2.

Both of these space craft are still in existance, and against all expectation, they are both still communicating back to the home planet. Brian Cox got to go and see one of the transmissions coming in from – I think – Voyager I.

What got me were several things. Yes, I’d love to see the Aurora Borealis. I spent some time in Finland when I was 26 years old, not a lot of time, but some. The wrong time of the year to see any Aurora Borealis. And I remember seeing an eclipse here in Dublin about a year later – I was working for one of the banks at the time, so yeah, it wasn’t that long after the trip to Finland. And I still remember the wonder with which I watched the space shuttle streak across the sky a few months ago. It was amazing.

We are very lucky sometimes.  I like to keep remembering that when I see bad news. Really, when you strip out the financial system, we live in an amazing place.

This program covered a lot of the globe. Norway. India. Death Valley and Chile, which I visited via television a few weeks ago looking at deserts with the History Channel. When you live in a city that’s strung up on economic problems it can be too easy to forget about the world out there.

The other thing is, sometimes there’s very good, even great, television to be watched. It’s just finding out about it can be tough enough sometimes. This is why I love the whole idea of video on demand.

I’ve a bunch of watersports DVDs that I have, some of which came free with magazines and some of which I bought. Apart from the Whitelines snowboarding one which was average, I really like all of them, because they are pure escapism. When you’re sitting in a freezing cold Dublin, there’s a lot to be said for dragging out a Cabrinha DVD and watching Andre Philip ripping it up in Antigua, or the guys on Escape from Pressure ripping it up all over the world including the one place I really want to go which is the Cocos Islands. In the sunshine. You could be negative and feel jealous or you could be positive and say feckit, I’m going to go there.

If people have surf/windsurf/kitesurf DVDs that they got free from the front of magazines that are functioning as coasters, gathering dust that they don’t want any more, send them my way. I’ll more than make use of them. Don’t really care how old they are provided they are predominantly action and not so much interview. The best surf DVD I own is probably the Customs DVD that came “free” with the Billabong Odyssey DVD. Yeah, the big waves were cool but still….

A soft landing is nothing of the kind…it means that prices don’t correct rationally, and it is only a conduit for suggesting to people that in fact, it will all be okay when they wonder about the wisdom of what they have done.

The point is, property in this country is disproportionately costed vis a vis available salary income. That cannot continue, and unless it falls significantly or we suddenly have massive salary inflation, we are in an unhealthy position.

Property market matching salary growth is highly unlikely. We’re lucky to scrabble 3% a year out of IBEC in national wage discussions – the employers do not want to pay out any more money in salaries than they can get away with and if they could cut it, they would. So the only other mechanism for getting a more reasonable balance between average salaries and house prices is for the latter to fall.

I have listened to a lot of people buying houses both to live in, to get their foot on the ladder and for investment purposes claiming “it’ll be a great pension” and “property can’t fall” and “things are different in Ireland”.

I don’t see them, who by their profligacy with borrowed money pushed house prices into this position, thinking of those they priced out of the market now. I do see them making some patronising remarks to those who do consider this insanity and unviable in the long run. Why should I have any sympathy at all for them if they lose out because of their own actions? Apparently no one forced them to get into that position.

The property market needs to come into some kind of balance. The idea that we can continually manufacture money out of nowhere to sell houses to each other despite not making money out of anything much else needs to be killed right now. As far as I’m concerned if we had a decent correction three years ago when it should have happened, we wouldn’t now be in a position where it looks increasingly like an elastic band is about to snap.

I don’t get up in the morning hoping a property crash will happen so as to wipe the smiles off smug property owners. I get up knowing that every day those property prices don’t correct, the closer we are to major economic problems, because the longer it goes on, the more they will correct by. People with vested interests know that a major correction will be very very serious. They have now reached the point where they are very afraid that the turn is coming. From what I can see, most of the talk of a “soft landing” is based on wishful thinking more than anything. From what I can see, they seem to predicate on inflation matching price growth. Unfortunately, that would be fine if average house prices didn’t happen be over ten times average salaries.

If and when the crash comes, it will hurt. If, however, any political party dares to suggest we dig people out of the mess they got into because they didn’t have the cop on to understand that “what can go up can also come down”, particularly would be speculator/investor types, I will actually make sure that the life of any of their representatives who knocks on my door is miserable for 15 minutes. Representatives of Fine Gael in particular, after their recent FTB policy announcement should start trying to find out where I live in order to avoid me.

I am not sure what market sentiment is at the moment. I can only observe certain things. I observe, for example, that rents in parts of county Dublin now match rents in Dublin City. I can only observe that some properties in county Dubli match some in Dublin City purchase price wise. I can also only observe that some properties seem to be spending a fine amount of time on property websites which leads me to conclude that either 1) their estate agents are lazy about clearing sold property from the listings or 2) their estate agents are not managing to see the properties. I can also add that fewer and fewer people are telling me to buy property.

People who have bought houses that they are willing to live in for quite a few years I think are unworried. Those that bought houses or apartments expecting to trade up are most at risk of the problems caused by negative equity.

I own an iPhone. I buy most of my music from iTunes and yesterday I started digitising a couple of useful to have personal data on the phone rather than in the back of a notebook where I’d been noting stuff for 15 years or so. One of the big successes on the iPhone are applications – or iPhone apps as they’re more commonly known. Little ickle bits of software that are basically iPhone only. I just wonder if the age of interoperability is slowly dying. All my music is played through iTunes at the moment. Given you can’t read some of the older data formats, I wonder how that’s going to work out for me even in 10 years time. I still listen to music I heard first 10 years ago…but anything I bought on tape then I just can’t play any more.

I came across two reports that interested me today, both from Le Monde (note to self, Le Monde really is a hell of a lot better than pretty much every single Irish newspaper on the market). The first one related to market share for downloaded applications. Key information: Apple is the market leader but strangely enough, more to the benefit of the iPod Touch than the iPhone. In fact, the iPhone is nearly neck and neck with the Android and on average, three quarters of the applications downloaded for each of those two devices is free. The report covered two studies and the interesting thing about the second one, which seems to have concentrated on the financial side of things is that on average, Blackberry users spend more money on the applications that they download than do either the Apple or Android users.

The disappointing part of this is that I dont’ have a whole lot of information about the basis of the surveys that formed the basis of that report although the initial one which was carried out by one of Google’s companies  was based on a survey of around 900 people worldwide. It would be interesting to see what the feed back would be if the survey sample was ten times larger.

The second report related to the fact that Apple are suing HTC for patent infringement in Delaware. This interests me in light of what I said about the system lockin that appears to be appearing on mobile devices for the moment.

Up until 2006, property prices in Ireland were largely on an upward trajectory. So upward, in fact, that a lot of people could not actually afford to buy property. Anecdotally, there’s a stat floating around that said 40% of new builds in Ireland in 2006 went to investors. Meanwhile, as prices rose, first time buyers were left increasingly out of the market. To address this, banks introduced new lending criteria based on disposable income rather than salary multiples.They also upped the LTV and at the end of 2006, first time buyers were still increasingly unable to buy property.

As the chorus of voices pointing out that it was mathematically impossible for property to continue increasing in value exponentially grew louder, the counter claims suggested that we’d slow down and bump along in tune with inflation. Now that we have reached 2010, it’s been proven that the chorus of mathematicians are more in tune with reality than the chorus of, well, I don’t know what you’d call them. Wishful thinkers, possibly.

Now, 2010, we’ve a whole lot of other problems linked to insane bank lending practices which were even worse for commercial than they were for residential/specuvestors, one nationalised bank and a bunch of other banks being state supported via NAMA and an increasing number of mortgage repossession cases and arrears.

Nowhere have I seen anyone identify what we actually want. When I see all this bailing out, I suspect what people want is to avoid the following reality:

We borrowed too much and have to pay it back.

But that’s just a short term vision. In truth, the question is more “what are our housing requirements and how do we best fulfill them to the benefit of society?”

I don’t know the answer to that. I get the impression that people like feeling rich in a way that rising property prices made them feel wealthy; but this is not sustainable as we’ve already discovered, rather spectacularly. I get this impression based on the frantic efforts to NAMA-ise the residental hard done mortgage holders also.

But that’s not going to fix much. I think we need to look at the wider question of whether people should count their home as wealth at all? In principle I’m against a wealth tax but if people do see their home as a source of wealth while they are still living in it, then maybe it should be subject to a wealth tax. Can you imagine the speed at which property prices would have risen if every year you got charged more as property values rose?

The screams would have been audible from Mars.

On balance I’d like to be able to afford a three bedroomed property on my salary. It’s not unreasonable I think and is the sort of salary that would have afforded me more than a 3 bedroomed house in the past. But until recently all it afforded me was an apartment about 20 miles from where I work. A one bedroomed apartment.

But something else I’d like to see is a wholesale reform of how we handle various types of rental in this country. Our commercial leasing system appears to be opaque and weighted heavily against the customer, together with upwards only reviews, for example. Our residential tenancy legislation was updated in 2004, with howls of anguish from the landlord class but if you’re either a tenant or a landlord, it’s still rubbish. It takes months to get any disputes sorted out via the PRTB which is the responsible agency. Far too many tenants complain about unlawfully withheld damage deposits and far too many landlords expect properties to be handed back to them in better condition than they were handed over in the first place. Our reliance on furnished accommodation annoys me. I really don’t mind the idea of renting for my whole life but you know I’d like to replace the kitchen I have now. If I keep this place longer than a year I would be interested in replacing the kitchen and whereas it’s normal to negotiate things like this with landlords in France, Germany and Belgium, it’s almost unheard of here.

I don’t know.

Then I went on this.

although to be fair, I did it during the day. It’s about 50m high at the apex and it costs 6E which I have to say is not what I’d consider overly price (not compared to the price of a Coke in the Grand Café de Lyon.

This is what the Place Massena looks like from up there:

It will look more impressive when they get rid of the Carnaval seating, sometime next week.

After that, I took the elevator up to the top of Castle Hill. You don’t have to quote me on this but there used to be one hell of a castle up there, but it was gradually decommissioned after some peace accord or other. There is a sports zone up there that dogs are not allowed into in case they foul it up a bit. There is a cathedral that they are busily excavating. There are mosaics to die for and there are views of the Bay of Angels also worth dying for. I used to think that Nice would be kinda kitsh and touristy and frankly it probably is but you know, there’s a reason it’s popular. It’s actually a really good place to holiday.

I didn’t bother getting the elevator down so got to see the waterfall and the two cemetries.

That’s a bit of the waterfall.

For the two cemeteries, both of them hit me in different ways. When you walk into the Jewish cemetery, there are two urns on your right; one, according to an inscription, contains the ashes of four people who died in the gas chambers in Auschwitz. The inscription is a bit more blunt, in fact; it points out they were murdered. The second is particularly chilling. It says it holds soap made human fat from the concentration camps. I can’t remember the exact wording but…

That being said, when you see familiar psalms inscribed on the stones, you tend to wonder exactly what the main difference is….really.

I didn’t take any photographs in there; it felt all wrong. I’m not sure why; I don’t tend to have the same problems in Irish burial grounds for some reason. I mean I have a picture of Sean O’Riada’s gravestone somewhere taken when i was 13 and then there are all the Celtic crosses I’ve accumulated over the years. Anyway.

Next door was the Christian burial ground and that one reflects the feelings I have about France and Ireland in general. When it rains in France, it never seems quite as grim as when it rains in Ireland. I put this down to the fact that most of the stone in Ireland is grey limestone and most of the stone in France is yellow sandstone. For some reason, the graveyard in Nice is distinctly cheerier than any graveyard I’ve ever been in in Ireland, despite the fact that like all graveyards in Ireland, it’s basically full of dead people. And the most ornate monuments I’ve ever seen anywhere, including Pere Lachaise. There are some seriously wealthy people buried in there.

[I didn't see the notice about photographs until I was leaving. oh dear. Usually I see these things before I get in]

It did get me thinking though. I don’t actually want to be buried per se when I die. I find the idea a bit ick, to be honest; don’t like the idea of rotting away into nothing. I’m all for cremation and then scatterings to the four winds, preferably on a beach somewhere at the moment, given my love of the sea and for real kudos anyone doing the scattering might do it at the Pointe du Raz in Brittany. I am not sure I want to be dead for a long while yet; if only one thing I want to come back to Nice in many years’ time.

On the way down one of the locals followed me down the stairs and said he actually really wanted to get to know me. He wasn’t overly happy to hear I didn’t live in Nice and was skipping back home tomorrow. I like France. Most of the people here think I am 10 years younger than I am and evidently the red hair might have been a good idea too. I didn’t much like disappointing him either but there you have it.

From there I went down to the harbour wall where I knew from yesterday I’d find waves breaking up against the breakwaters. Today they were pretty spectacular.

Apparently this sounds like I packed an insane amount into the day.

All told I don’t think I did too badly this week between the train trip to the Alps, general wandering around the shops and the sea front yesterday and the Ferris Wheel, the gardens and the seashore again today.

I like Nice. It along with the Maori restaurant where I ate tonight and Tuesday night are back on my holiday plans. I may come in September if I have any money.

The group is expected to consist of Irish Banking Federation boss Pat Farrell, consumer advocate and founder of the askaboutmoney website, Brendan Burgess; and Paul Joyce of the Free Legal Aid Centres (FLAC).

If I had any power in Ireland – and I do not – I would rise up and scream against the inclusion of Brendan Burgess. And here’s why. I used to contribute to AskAboutMoney until it became clear that the site would not tolerate any discussion of the possibility that property prices might fall as well as rise. You have no idea just how distructive this is, particularly in 2005. I believe I even read posts by Brendan Burgess advocating the use of interest only mortgages in some cases – probably investor related – but interest only all the same.

Property prices can fall. They are currently at a level not seen in many places since about 2004 and in some places since about 2002. And they are still falling. And while they were rising in such a way as to be utterly unsustainable, the main consumer finance website in the country shut down discussion on property prices and how they could bite as well as feed.

Who do I write to to block Brendan Burgess getting involved in trying to help the people he signally failed to help before they got into trouble? I don’t care if he founded askaboutmoney. It didn’t exactly help on the upside.

This is from the Carneval parade. Yeah, you could get that close. They took a night off from it last night as witnessed by the fact that things are quiet.

Yesterday I took the train des Pignes from Nice to Digne-les-Bains. If you’ve read Les Miserables, you’ll have heard of this place. If you haven’t, then possibly not. At the start, a bishop who was truly a man of God in the way that few enough of the 18th century bishops were, gave Jean Valjean a second chance by shielding him from the police at the time after the theft of, I think, a candlestick. The bishop lived in Digne.

Digne is, I think, the county capital of Alpes Hautes Provence. I’ve never been there before. A few years ago I spent some time in Saint André les Alpes checking out the Gorge du Verdon, a criminally under-rated canyon – I’ve seen it described as Europe’s equivalent of the Grand Canyon. There’s a road around it that you can drive but which only appears on the departmental maps – you will not find it on the Michelin South of France map because it’s smaller than the average boreen. I think you’re only allowed drive around it in one direction too and the road is definitely narrower than the average Ring of Kerry. I had done the train trip through the mountains from Saint Andre to Nice the last time round, but that was during September and it was still basically summer. This time I’d a yen to see what it was like around there without the desire to drive around there as I wasn’t too sure what condition the roads might be in. The train journey is 35E odd return and it is slow. The trip to Digne takes a little over three hours. It’s one of those little local trains that I particularly associate with France and this one is special because it’s a narrow gauge (1 metre instead of 1.4 metres) and it is not operated by the SNCF, but by the Chemins de Fer de Provence.

Chemins de Fer de Provence used to have a very grand station in reasonably central Nice. I blogged about it in a past life; at the time, it was derelict with only pigeons inhabiting the innards of a building with a very fine and beautiful facade but little else to recommend it. You’d wonder how such dereliction could happen in a town as wealthy as Nice. The problem is no one is entirely sure what to do with it. Since I was last here, the main part of the building has been knocked to make way for a surface carpark – Nice needs the space – but thanks to the efforts of conservationists, the facade is still standing, unloved, unwanted. A woman I met on the bus today told me that a previous mayor had notions of using the site as a rather grander townhall – the current one is stuffed into a small building in old Nice and the cost of additional office accommodation is killing them. But nothing, she said, has been done, and everything takes ages.

Meanwhile, Chemins de Fer de Provence runs its local train service from a newer less interesting looking building about 100m away.

The train trip is hugely scenic. It is also very, very slow and yesterday it was very, very cold. When we got up to the mountains for real, there was 12-18 inches of snow lying around. For the most part, the roads were clear of snow but where it hadn’t been cleared…We don’t know how to handle snow in Ireland and what pitiful little driplets of it we get are pathetic.

The mountains are amazing, however, and coated in white are awe-inspiring in a way I just can’t describe.

What struck me as surprising though was that the snow didn’t cover the whole mountain range. I know its nearly March but the weather happened to be better in Digne than it was in Nice yesterday. Digne; didn’t see much of it. It sits on a river which you get to spend a lot of time looking at when you are in the train. It seems to be not especially big as county towns go – certainly compared to Vannes or Quimper, or Metz which are other county towns/cities that I know. It is, however, in a beautiful if somewhat isolated location.

The train back was in the dark and I have to say it’s very unnerving coming through the snow in the dark.

I’d strongly recommend doing the trip but if you’re there during the summer, I’d recommend hiring a car more and driving around. There is more spectacular scenery to be seen beyond what the train has to offer. I will say this though – if that train line had not been built however many years ago it was built, I question whether we’d have tried to build it today. The mountainous terrain is not forgiving from an engineering point of view and I think from a road point of view, 4 or 5 passes were closed yesterday.

When I got back to Nice, latish, the Carnaval parade was running and I caught a fair whack of it. It was utterly colourful and really big fun. Really and truly, Saint Patrick’s Day is by no means in the same zone.

There was one hell of an atmosphere; and so unrestricted. Kids could go and play in the parade, and fire streamers at the participants – and they did – and people could dance amongst the participants. When you bear in mind the control they have over the parade in Dublin…it’s all curiously relaxed here. And they ran that parade several times this week. Could you imagine the parade in Dublin running every evening for an hour? There would be utter mayhem.

I sort of think, however, that the organisers of the Carnaval in Nice might be worth consulting in Dublin; in fact, a lot of things are done better in various parts of France than they are in Dublin and I think the key issue is probably funding. Nice Ville is picking up a lot of tab for this; the sort of tab that festivals in Dublin would kill for. Obviously Saint Patrick’s Festival is the big one in Dublin, but another example is the Festival of World Cultures in DLR. They’re generally stuck a bit for funds.

I think our priorities are screwed. We want everything as cheap as possible in some respects, particularly when taxes are funding what a lot of people consider non-essential. That being said, Ireland is full of stressed out people whose collective sole outlet appears to be alcohol and the south of France is full of funloving relaxed aliens.

That’s all by way of an aside for one of my later trashing living in Ireland pieces.

Anyway, today I spent at the beach and the beach in Nice is something else. It is bordered land side by the Promenade des Anglais so named because the English rich used to congregate there way back. It is on the edge of a huge bay called the Bay of Angels with the airport on one end and the commercial port on the other end. Do not ask me how long it is. What it is is one yuk beach. The sea is this glorious cyan colour that really couldn’t be natural, no, but the beach itself is nice and stony. That being said, what went through my head is that Dublin has these fantastic none stony beaches that don’t appear to form the centre of our thinking on amenity…

I think I need to go off and plan a future for Dublin that involves knocking down half of Sandymount and Clontarf to make a stunning promenade des future economic prospects or some such.

Tomorrow I haven’t yet decided what to do. I was going to get up at dawn and take pictures of the sunrise but frankly I am too tired.

Nice wasn’t my first choice of holiday location but it turned out to be difficult to get flights home from Fuerteventura. I chose Nice on the grounds that there was some chance the sun might be shining here; so far I’ve drawn a blank on this.

Nice…is an interesting mix. There are some very, very rich people around; it’s not that far from Cannes and Monaco but it also has the greatest number of homeless people on the streets I’ve ever seen. I remember once reading that California drew a lot of the homeless in America because the climate was such that they were less likely to die of extreme weather; I heard the same about the south of Portugal as well. Maybe it’s true for Nice too in French terms. The place is all done up for Carnival – I remember when the Catholic Church frowned on any partying after Shrove Tuesday but frankly they’re pretty much being told to go to hell. Nice has something like 2-3 weeks of Carnival due to end the end of next week. Right now…however, there are temporary seats and stages all over the place and apparently at around 9 tonight a parade of some discussion will happen. I’ll check it out tomorrow providing it is not raining.

Currently, the place is decorated with a huge Ferris wheel which I don’t remember from the last time I was here (although I must have walked past it) which looks lovely in the dark (even in the rain). I will probably give it a run tomorrow at some point, when it’s not dark though.

So I had ice-cream and Coca-Cola in the Grand Café de Lyon which cost a fortune – seriously 4.60 for the Coke – but which is one of those cultural things you need to do to remind yourself that things can be…worse somewhere else.

No photos yet. Tomorrow maybe.