Things that strike me

Last night I went to the beach because it was windy and I figured I’d meet some friends. Which I did. Because I’m a kitepark bum who can at least launch and land kites, I tend to do that, since I’m not down there with my own (Dolly was busy and I am a nervous driver).

I’d one failure. Mainly it failed because someone either hadn’t pumped his leading edge properly or it had a leak. I don’t care what the cause was. Either way, it bent and doubled back on me when I lifted it to launch it. When I say I got completely covered in sand, I mean every single part of me was covered in the stuff. And it was damp, sticky and salty. It stuck to me.

So I’ve one piece of advice. If you want someone to launch your kite, make sure the leading edge is inflated adequately. Cos frankly I don’t like answering questions that go

Jesus what happened to you?

I mean, I was only walking on the beach.

Stability. The freedom to put the number on my house up in the lovely blue numbering that the French use. The freedom to paint the walls white. Hang pictures. Know that I won’t be moving soon. Sunshine. Sunshine and wind. No one demanding stuff of me.

More time to do things I want to do as opposed to doing things other people want me to do for them. Time to go get flying lessons (that’s going to happen this year). Maybe some hang gliding or paragliding lessons. Time to play the piano. Space for a piano. More time to relax. Less time spoken for. When does anyone have time to watch Discovery Channel?

Somewhere I left control behind. I really need to find it back.

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

I have this playlist on my iPod with the following songs on it:

1. Rain (Acoustic)  – Samantha James
2. Come Through (Acoustic) Samantha James
3. Divinere – Ludovico Einaudi
4. Mad about You – Hooverphonic
5. Club Montepulciano – Hooverphonic
6. Breathe (PC Synergy’s Mellifluous Mix) – Crystal Stafford
7. Innocente – Delerium/Leigh Nashs
8. Love Show – Skye
9. Habla Con Hella – Alberto Iglesias

It’s all kind of downtempo/glass of red wine in front of the fire type music.

Anyone want to add suggestions? Obviously having picked up a Suzanne Vega album last night I’ll throw in Left of Centre as well.

Enda Kenny survived his confidence motion today. There are rumours that there were 6 votes in it. There were 70 people voting.

While you can’t argue with him winning – this is the choice of the Fine Gael Parliamentary party’s choice – there is the more than inconvenient issue that a lot of people who vote in elections do not apprecate the finer points of Enda Kenny, leader of Fine Gael. They do not believe he is competent to be Taoiseach. At all. And so, by and large, he gets low personal approval ratings, and in the 2007 which the media were practically handing to him on a plate, he lost out to Fianna Fail and whoever they could bribe into government with them.

There’s this huge desire for change in Ireland. Massive. We’ve had enough of Fianna Fail. We really think that they need a period in opposition. A lot of people even think they should all be thrown in jail which might even be a bit extreme. But when it comes down to it, people look at Fianna Fail, and then they look at Fine Gael under Enda Kenny, and they have Doubts with a capital D.

And Fine Gael are unwilling to recognise this. Enda Kenny, he may be nice, he may be a good organiser, but you know, so are the nuns individually but you wouldn’t necessarily vote too many of them in to run the country. They might, however, make a better fist of it than Enda Kenny does running Fine Gael.

The objective of a political leader should be to make his/her party as palatable to the greatest number of people as possible. Enda Kenny is failing to do this. When plaudits are being lined up for him, it’s mentioned he undid the damage of the previous leadership. Got back 20 of the 21 seats they had lost. That’s good, but it’s not good enough. Meanwhile, Fianna Fail are winning adequate numbers of seats to remain in some semblance of power. This despite Bertie Ahern. This despite what seems like daily scandals.

After 2007, there should have been one clear indication to the powers that be in Fine Gael. Enda Kenny is not enough of an electoral asset to win elections. And the party is not adequately bright enough to understand this.

You can see this in the response of some of their members on politics.ie. Enda Kenny winning this leadership battle will do his ratings good. People will see that he is tough. Can get the numbers when it counts.

They don’t appear to understand that what people see is not Enda Kenny being good. It is Fine Gael being collectively stupid.

If I were in Fine Gael – and I am not – I would take a few of the senior people aside and explain some quiet truths. Enda Kenny is an electoral liability as leader. He may well be a very good representative for the people of Mayo, but the point remains, it’s not enough. The party lacks vision. They are reactionary. Their young and upcoming stars are boring. Simon Coveney. They lack credibility and ideas. The people are not interested. Fine Gael, it appears, are not attached enough to the reality of people’s lives.

There has been an attempt to dress up the leadership issues in Fine Gael as a rural/urban divide. The problem is it is not. The point which Fine Gael will have to address is the wider electorate do not want Enda Kenny. Not because he is from the west, but because he just doesn’t inspire confidence. Being from Mayo is not a cause of that, no matter how much you’d like to dress it up.

Fine Gael are not selling a vision of Ireland that anyone wants to buy. They’re not even selling themselves as a party beyond “We’re not Fianna Fail”. What sort of an offering is that?

The tragedy for Fine Gael, however, is not so much that Richard Bruton will not be their next leader barring unusual events. It is that even if he was, it probably wouldn’t change too much.

If there are realists in Fine Gael – and there has to be – the painful truth is the party needs major re-invention and the current senior names in it are not capable of delivering.

In the meantime. Fianna Fail, despite spectacular problems, are stumbling along in far better health than they should be given that Brian Cowen is their leader and Taoiseach and presiding over political and budgetary poor management that is historic in its extent.

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.