Things that strike me

Okay. O2 are going to screw me for data charges today because I used data roaming on my phone. Meanwhile, my hotel has wifi which is a) going to cost me money and b) not letting me access any of my email servers. Nor can I get to Skype or twitter.

Not impressed. At least I have some sort of an internet connection. I’m going to see if I can get pay as you go internet from one of the mobile providers here. Surely it has to be possible.

Together with some of the people grouped together via Photowalk.ie, I was in Trim County Meath yesterday and was fortunate enough to have a guided tour of the castle. It was fascinating.

I’ve long been of the opinion that living in a castle without underfloor heating was probably no great sign of luxury; but the added details about smells, toilets and lice and not washing [very often/at all] have sort of rammed home the idea that any aspirations to being Eowyn in the Lord of the Rings really isn’t attractive.

Trim is a very pretty town. It was a bit weird driving to it though, turning off the M3 was like falling through the back of the wardrobe in the Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe the way the weather went from spring to winter almost instantaneously. Given the snow I had to endure on the way back, winter spread his vicious wings rather successfully.

Until today, I would have said that the most scared I’ve ever been driving was trying to do a hill start on a mountain in France with a 45 degree gradient. It freaked me out big time.

Today, however, I got to drive home in very heavy snow along backroads from Trim to the M3 and it was frightening. It was dark. When it’s dark you’ve two options, dips – which doesn’t show you very much of the road ahead – or full headlights which reflect straught back off the snow that’s teeming down in front of you. The best you can hope for is that there’s a car in front of you because their rear lights are enough to light the snow from behind and reduce the reflection.

When that car is not there, even if it is only for 10 kilometres it is not nice.

I hated it.

Last night I wandered into Vicar Street to see Midlake play. They were fantastic. Up front.

Of course, I had no idea what to expect since I hadn’t really searched on Youtube for them, depending only on the tracks that sit on my iPod. On stage, they are a lot heavier than their CDs would suggest. They have a lot of beards. I didn’t actually expect that. And they have an awful lot of guitars. A serious lot of guitars. Some nice guitars too. A lovely, lovely Guild acoustic.

They played, as far as I can see, pretty much everything off two albums; The Courage of Others and Trials of van Occupanther. I love Roscoe. They played a killer version of Roscoe. Killer enough for me to wish it was on Youtube somewhere. Oh look, it is. Amazon is not mentioning a live DVD either. Pity.

I’ve had a look at their concert dates; it’s looking for a trip to Lyon in April. I don’tthink I’ll be able to get to London for Thursday night.

Pity. I’d have gone again tonight if I could. They were better than the Pixies.

are different. Might as well face it. So stop being surprised when they do different stuff to you.

This week was illuminating. Someone told me JLS were playing in the O2 in January or February next year. I do not know who JLS are. The response I got was also illuminating. I must have heard one of their songs; it’s on the radio all the time.

This is me. When I am driving I listen to Radio WnB’s iPod which plays songs that I like ad infinitum. For example, currently it is playing Delerium a lot. And Skye. I like Skye. She has nice cheerful songs. I particularly like Love Show at the moment; it makes me think I might actually tell someone I love them. But that aside. I hate being made defensive because I don’t know what the latest and greatest pop song is. Jesus I’ve never known. I found a thread on boards.ie during the week about whether people would go to concerts on their own. I have always gone to concerts on my own, since I was in college on the grounds that very often, no one wanted to go to the odd esoteric gigs I wanted to go to and frankly, “cos I’ll be on my own” has never been an adequate excuse for doing stuff.

And yet, for a lot of people, apparently it is.

Someone told me today my life was very complicated. And that I made it so. With the benefit of some consideration, I don’t believe my life is complicated at all. There are some simple facts about it that are not the stuff of storybooks but I don’t know anyone whose life is bereft of simple facts that lack somewhat in the happy ever after front. No, my life is simple and I know it. Maybe I have a different definition of complicated.

So for the record I listen to RadioIO Chill if I am listening to the radio at all. I particularly like it through the wifi on the iPhone as it means I don’t have to tether the laptop to the stereo speakers. They don’t play JLS. Nor do they play too many ads and their DJs shut up.

I like this, right?

So Deirdre de Burca walked as well as George Lee earlier in the week. Are they any loss? You’d have to wonder. You’d really have to wonder. George Lee – best known for depressing economics reports on RTE. Deirdre de Burca, best known for losing her deposit at the last European elections.

How have they changed your life? At all?

I was walking past the Palais des Thés on Wicklow Street in Dublin. I was rather surprised to see it there; hadn’t realised it had opened but was quite happy to discover it had. Despite being a nation of teadrinkers, Ireland is a lousy place to buy tea from. I have historically spent a lot of money in Le Palais in Lyon, and also in La Compagnie Anglaise des Thés in Paris.

So, on Feb 14 last year, they were supplying Thé des Amants for tasters and to get the punters in. I hadn’t tried it before – I tended to get other slightly sweeter teas, plus an annual dose of Number 25, the Christmas tea. I liked this a lot, so I bought some. A few weeks later, I bought some more and now, it’s unusual that you’ll walk in my house and not find some available. It, and Number 25 are my two favourite teas at the moment.

The shop is wonderful. It’s a haven from the rest of the busy cluttered and mainly boring shops around the place. Even when it’s busy. And the guy who runs it is wonderful, lovely and friendly.

Sometimes I wonder if we’ve forgotten what it is like to be nice to people. Not just people selling stuff in shops, but people in general.

Anyway, I was back in there again during the week and once more enjoyed some superb customer service. I know that one of my friends was looking for something in there lately and found them very helpful too.

So, one year after having discovered they are here, want to say again that Palais des Thés is one of my favourite shops in the city.

To be honest, I never thought that George Lee had made a particularly wise move when he decided to move from being RTE’s economics correspondant to being a FG candidate in Dublin south. I have some sympathy that he found this out the hard way, by trying.

The political arena in Ireland is not always the most edifying. It’s not, in my view, the most effective way of getting things. I know we’re supposed to have consensus politics and all that but it’s never struck me as being consensus, and more about points scoring. I don’t think there’s  a place for too many intelligent people who have better things to be doing than political manoeuvring. The net result is we wind up with politicians who are good at posturing and manouevring. They are not necessarily any good at getting stuff done, the sort of stuff that benefits the country.

I’d find that incredibly wearing to be honest. That being said, this is not necessarily news to anyone, so if you’re going to give it a shot, you really shouldn’t be unaware of the pitfalls. I have no idea what Fine Gael intended to do with George Lee when they got him, but you’d have to assume it was more than “nothing”.

I have no idea what George Lee reckoned he was going to do when he got in to the Dail seeing as Fine Gael were somewhat uneffective in opposition (actually I’d suggest they’re plain useless as opposition parties go) and to make any changes you need a modicum of power.

What I do know is that the people of Dublin South have another election coming at them, at some stage. That’s unfair. And that Fine Gael seem to have not really managed this effectively on their side. And that RTE have asked George Lee a few tough questions.

But nothing much is going to change and you’d have to ask yourself, what was it all for. I don’t know. The bad part is we’re reminded once again just how pitiful Fine Gael are in opposition at the moment. Michael Noonan raimeised on yesterday about how all of the opinion polls were within the margin of error for statistical purposes. Funny how good they are on polls but how less good on basic economics, re, house prices and their impact on the economy in the past.

Fianna Fail are carefully going about losing elections hand over fist. Fine Gael seem hell bent on enabling them to win even when Fianna Fail are trying their damndest to lose. No one seems to want to run this country.

God knows why.

I have a lot on my mind today, so instead of doing what I usually do which is run to the climbing wall and wear myself out, I booked a piano room in Waltons. I used to play the piano a lot, and it frequently helps me to get some clarity of thought. I need that clarity right now.

When I say I used to play the piano a lot, it’s worth noting that those days ended 10 years ago. Now, I just type a lot. My fingers are fluent in querty but not in CDEFGABC. Which in a way is heartbreaking. Today, I knew I was going to be doing alot of improvising, and the odd bit of playing – you oughta hear my version of The Foggy Dew (it’s special) followed by my version of Newborn by Muse (it’s terrible. I played bits by Evanescence, Ashley MacIsaac and Keane as well, and ended up with lots of bits by Winds And Breezes (c).

My fingers hurt after the exercise. The hammer action on the piano was a bit heavier than I’m used to – it’s a German piano and in very decent nick which is always useful in a piano room, but it’s not my piano and it’ll never be my piano and I woudln’t have chosen to buy one were I buying a piano in the morning. I want to buy a piano, I just have nowhere to put it.

I don’t know what I want to play any more. When I was 17 years old, I only wanted to play Grieg and Rachmaninov. I’ve a pile of piano music, lots by Chopin, some by Beethoven, Saint Saens, and the aforementioned boys Grieg and Rach. I have loved Rachmaninov II since I was pretty small although Saint-Saens V is my current favourite piano concerto. I’ve a book of music by Didier Squiban as well which I suspect I could learn to play in short order if I only played the piano more regularly. But I like some of the rock stuff as well – I reckon with a little confidence and a bit more competence I could shake the foundations of a building with Newborn, with Bring Me to Life. I still wouldn’t mind being able to play some Astor Piazolla. But unlike how things were when I was a teenager, the lines of communication between my ears, my mind and my fingers are somewhat broken.

I used to have a college lecturer who voiced the fact that a concert pianist could play some crazy sequence of keys in a given period of time, and that it depended on muscle memory. I don’t have too much of that muscle memory left. The odd sequence of chords that is useful if you’re playing traditional Irish music. Megafail if you’re not. I didn’t even risk the classical party pieces, the one Mozart sonata and Beethoven stuckchen because frankly they weren’t going to be there.

I’d love to have a piano of my own, and you know, I could probably afford one if I wanted to. But I’ve nowhere to put it and question the wisdom of buying the long yarned for Kawaii baby grand when I just can’t really play any more.

Ronan Lyons has a piece on his blog which is worth a read even though it’s not really anything majorly new in terms of what anyone with an interest in the economic well-being of Ireland should be aware of. He has pointed out that we’re losing a generation of young men to unemployment and education.

The question is, what do you do about it? Well there are two problems. There’s the short term problem of the current lost boys, and then there’s the long term problem of future generations and what worries me is that efforts will be made to correct the short term problem – possibly – and that the longer term will get ignored.

We can’t sustain an army of construction workers to the extent that we did from about 2001-2006. Unfortunately because this industry allowed young people to stay closer to home rather than moving to the bigger cities, the jobs were seen as positive. They just weren’t sustainable. So with the best will in the world, a significant number of people – predominantly men will have to retrain and find an alternative activity.

What that would be is open to debate although as I’ve mentioned on other occasions, the Green Party would have you believe it’s environmentally related energy generation that’s a key option. I don’t know and I am not equipped to solve that problem right now.

I’m more interested in the lacunae in the education system that brought about this situation. We don’t do education well and the way we are doing it continues to disimprove. There are various reasons for this; some practical, some financial, some entrenchment in the old way of doing things.

We are weakening in basic skill sets in the way of literacy and numeracy. Craig Barret formerly CX Intel has highlighted maths and physics as key areas to sort out in this country. I utterly agree with him. Our tendancy to sort out failing maths standards is to make maths exams easier over the years, and we have had an Education Minister suggest that universities reduce their minimal maths requirements to include foundation maths, which, if you’ve seen the foundation maths syllabus, should highlight just how bad things must be at some levels.

Issues with numeracy don’t just start with foundation level maths though; they have their roots in how we approach education at the earlier stages. So we need to address how we teach at primary school so that it feeds effectively into secondary level, and likewise.

If I were to suggest something, it would be to reassess the entire school cycle. In some respects, it’s just not working any more.  The generalist approach to primary teaching continues too late in my view. I can’t object to it up to about 10 or 11, but from then on, we need to look at things like maths and science in more depth. The situation whereby we start languages at the age of 13 – for the most part – is ridiculous.

We need to look very hard then at the third level courses we offer. We’ve an overabundance of soft courses which we can’t really build an economy on. These need to be knifed. We don’t need a load of media studies courses for example. We need a certain amount more cross disciplinary study. We may have to look at extending the university cycle by one year to cater for that. I don’t think it’s a bad thing. We need to target funding for courses. Make it more attractive – and rewarding – for kids to do course that feed into building an economy. One of the things I never understood about the Irish economy for most of the past 10 years was why we valued construction so very highly (and paid it accordingly) but IT and science comparatively low (try getting research funding…).

But that being said, we need to recognise that not everyone is going to have an aptitude for high level science and research so we need to look at what skilled and semi=skilled jobs can be brought into Ireland; what we can generate ourselves and what can employ large numbers and pay them a reasonable salary. In the past, this has typically been manufacturing. We can’t depend on that alone. We can’t depend on call centres alone. And we need to provide an education system that feeds into that reality too.

I used to live in Germany. They had a tiered system whereby you did a particular stream depending on whether you were likely to hit university, technical college or other trades. It has the benefit in recognising that different aptitudes can be more suitable for different skillsets. I also used to live in France where they split up the school leaving exam streams in terms of subject aptitude. I see a certain value to that also.

This isn’t going to work if there isn’t a whole sale change in how we perceive education in this country. Put simply, we take it for granted and assume that we are entitled to an education that will get us a well paid job that makes us better off than the neighbours. That is unrealistic. Education is one of those things that gives you more the more you put into it but you wouldn’t know that from too many people I hear talking about their youngsters today.

If we get some of the top level stuff right, it should have a top down effect. I realise that China manufactures everything but it doesn’t have to be that way. If we get a few people generating ideas that can be created and manufactured here, we can use this to create jobs further on in the chain. Which will have other knock on effects in terms of support.

The thing is, a monumentally improved education system is key to this.

In the meantime, we need to look at the profile of young people losing jobs now and start moving them in a similar direction although possibly on a lesser scale.