In the best scheme of things, at 7 on a Friday, it usually takes about 15 minutes to get from my house to Saint Stephen’s Green carpark. It’s not my favourite carpark (actually do I even have a carpark I actively like in Dublin – probably not) but it’s handy enough for the National Concert Hall, I don’t have to figure out how to get to it indirectly because of the oneway system, and it probably doesn’t cost me too much time versus trying to find my way to the carpark at the Conrad.

So the National Concert Hall gigs on a Friday start at 8. I left hope at 10 past 7. Mostly, you’d think that’s more than adequate time to get to the National Concert Hall for 8pm.

I made it in the door of the National Concert Hall at 1 minute to 8. And this happened because I spent a lot of time on the south quays between Matt Talbot Bridge and O’Connell Bridge going nowhere. And that was after two frustrated drivers had tried to kill me on the Matt Talbot bridge by changing lanes in front of me without looking to see whether there was anyone actually in the lane already.

Initially I figured the cause was probably bridge works for the new bridge. It wasn’t.

The only explanation I can see was that someone had parked in front of a bar not too far from O’Connell Bridge, partially blocking one lane. It caused chaos back as far as the Matt Talbot Bridge. I’m sure they were facilitated by having the car right outside the pub they were darting in and out of but it caused chaos for many, many other drivers.

I’ve long been of the view that many of the problems with traffic in Dublin could be alleviated if drivers stopped doing things like this. When I was coming home from the National Concert Hall, having elected to avoid Dawson Street as it has works on it at the moment, Georges Street was a symphony of cars parked in clearways and on double yellow lines. They were parked in bus lanes as well but as it was after 10 o’clock, and most of the bus lanes are not 24 hours that might be probably slightly more forgivable.

I’m not a fan of clamping cars. I think it’s wrong but in any case, clamping is not a solution for people parked in the wrong place.

I used to live in Brussels and there was a bus I used to take to and from work that had a junction which was notoriously difficult for the buses to get around and which was a clearway/tow away zone. Some talented driver of a Volvo parked one day and the bus could not clear the junction. It was a tow away zone, as I said, and the car was taken away as soon as the tow truck arrived.

Maybe we need to consider this in Dublin at this stage. I’m sick of hearing people in Dublin criticise driving in other cities when Dublin is second only to Athens in my experience of poor driving in western European countries.

I had an email from UPC the other day informing me of contractual changes which would also include an increase in price of 7.92 in my package.

My package already cost 85.99, negotiated after a similar letter some time last year; not absolutely certain but I think it was in the last 12 months. At that point, it transpired that although I was under the illusion I was on a package, I wasn’t, and so I was being nicely charged for separate products.

At the time, I voiced some discontent that UPC, in writing to me to tell me they were charging me more money, had not thought to provide me with the information that if I changed to one of their bundle products I could save, oh it was about 30E at the time.

So, some calculation done, it appears my monthly charge from UPC would go from 85.99 to 93.51 but I could save 3.50 if I signed up for MyUPC. I believe I already have this but it’s irrelevant.

Currently, the top price available bundle that you can buy from UPC is 80E, one of the Horizon bundles. It is – according to the literature on UPC’s website – a faster broadband product with a greater download allowance. I can’t see the upload speed but I assume it’s at least 10Mb up if we have 150 down. ACtually I can’t even see what the products are at the moment because UPC’s site is not responding and unfortunately, when I tried to call them just now, I wound up on hold for their phones ringing 20 times. I do not have time for this unfortunately.

So again, I am asking – this time publicly – why can’t UPC, when they are writing to tell me they want more money, that I can also available of different more modern less expensive products.

I’m currently a full time student and 13E a month, over the course of a year long contract is quite a bit of money. It represents almost 2 months of a 80E a month contract for one thing.

UPC are looking for comments on their customer service at the moment.

Una Mullally wrote a piece for today’s Irish Times. It was called “The 60 Most Creative People in Ireland“.

I have some issues with it. Mainly encapsulated in this neat little disclaimer included as paragraph 6. Don’t worry if you missed it.

 don’t give out to me about a lot of these being Dublin-focussed. That’s where I live, so that’s where I interact with most creative stuff. SOZ LEITRIM, etc. Also, DECLARATION OF MULTIPLE INTERESTS: I do know some of these people, but that’s life, innit

Any writer worth their salt and having the guts to stand over what they are writing would not include any sentence along the lines of “Don’t give out to me because…” blah blah.

Either you can stand over it or you can’t and clearly, something titled “in Ireland” shouldn’t need to be defended with “and a lot of them are from Dublin because that’s where I live“. As for

I do know some of these people

Amazing.

I wonder what the overlap is.

Via various year end round ups, I happened on this piece:

Are wetsuits the burka for the cold water surfer girl?

It was written by a woman.

I spend a lot of time on cold water beaches, the sort of beaches that are cold water even in the summer. My one and only wetsuit choice is a 5mm minimum. I may go 6 this year if I can find one. I have spent time in this water. It. Gets. Cold.

But guess what, that cold is not targeted only at women. You know, on beaches where women are forced to cover over everything because It. Is. Bloody. Freezing. Men are forced to wear wetsuits too for the same reason.

Strange that.

This goes out to the two drivers who left my estate before me, plus a myriad other bunch of drivers I encountered on the road to work.

Clear your car of snow. Properly.

Here’s the checklist.

1. Clear the windscreen.
2. Clear all the windows
3. Clear all the mirrors
4. Clear all the lights
5. Clear the bonnet.
6. Clear the roof because if you don’t, this might mean later that clearing the windscreen or the rear window was a waste of time.

I use a dustpan and brush which may or may not cause the occasional scratch but I can live with that. Said dustpan and brush is in the box in the car with the de-icer and the spare bottle of oil.

I feel sorry for men sometimes. They try and persuade women that they are modern, forward thinking people who do not treat women purely as eye candy and who don’t judge women just on a subjective value of beauty and then a supposedly grown up business magazine pulls an adolescent stunt like this. Bad and all as it is for women, it reduces men down to making decisions about business school based on the quotient of available beautiful women. I know most men are brighter than that.

Meanwhile, Harvard Business Review is writing a piece on the progress women have made in the workplace in the last 40 years.

ETA – 11 November – Business Week pulled this from their website. There’s a still a reference to it on their FaceBook admittedly but it looks as though a certain amount of of outrage got through.

One of the downsides of having moved house a few times is you accumulate a whole pile of paper and sometimes, it’s not that organised. I’m swimming in the stuff. Seriously. And I have been unmotivated to tackle it because I knew it was going to involve shredding stuff and I never seemed to own a shredder. I do now and I have now sorted back through all the paperwork so that it is in organised piles but not really organised in a brain friendly way.

I used to be very good at paperwork until I wound up living in Belgium in 1997, and then the amount of paper I had to deal with in my personal life skyrocketed. It’s now worse than it was then.

I’ve tried folders. I’ve tried expanding boxfiles. I used to keep things in neat envelopes but that really doesn’t scale up.

I shredded 25L (at least) of confetti today and it’s all waiting for me to dump in the bin. I’m probably still not finished. I don’t want this to happen again so as of 1 January, a new, very user friendly system is going to have to go into place. To make it work, it’s going to have to find a home.

I don’t know how to do this. I’m struggling with space issues as it is. Houses in Ireland – even the three bedroomed ones – are built on the assumption that no one actually owns very much apart from some clothes. Our houses are too small. And we’re too fast to tell people what they need. I was sitting up in the box room which doubles as my office. I keep important stuff in the office, the very good, and very expensive photography books that remind me I’m a photographer, somewhere, in my soul, my Open University text books.

Two of my bills are gone electronic. I’m reluctant to send my bankstatements electronic on the grounds that I still haven’t a mortgage and therefore expect to need to produce a few when push comes to shove. If I ever buy a house, something which seems to be decreasing in likelihood every day.

Post Christmas, I’ll probably start yet another ring binder which will include critical paperwork such as NCT certs, P60s and related stuff, and then take whatever new paperwork comes in. And I’ll try to keep control of it this time although it would help if I didn’t move house. Just, you know, for a year or two have a little stability.

When I came to Ireland in 1999, I was an ex-bureaucrat and I had a fairly decent fist on keeping my paperwork in order. Something has gone wrong here. I suspect part of it is linked to the lack of stability linked to having moved house several times. And part of it is the sheer volume of it I have – and this having gone digital on two key bills.

Receipts? I swim in them. Bills, letters, notifications. Things I don’t want to throw out without shredding them along with the practical difficulty of not currently owning a shredder. It is growing exponentially. I have an office which I am in the process of decluttering and it is scaring me to the extent that I will buy that shredder tomorrow and I will get some sort of control over it.

I’m just about to start another two Open University modules and one of the things I noted last year was the total absence of organisation for the last two. I don’t need that to happen again but in order to be organised about it this time, I really need to get some sort of control over all the stuff which is already disorganised. In this way I won’t go to Easons to buy A4 paper again for at least a year because guess how much of it I found buried under a pile of paper work linked to the last house move? Lots. And it’s not cheap paper either – it’s Clairefontaine which I don’t typically lose.

This isn’t me. Or,. more accurately, this did not used to be me, and I want the old me back. Maybe this is part of getting older but still…

But our lives are not really helped by the fact that the infrastructure we live in needs to be enhanced to organise all this stuff. I spent a lot of this afternoon questioning the possibility of rebooting my life, and I did, some of it. Every single digital art, Photoshop related magazine I have went to my recycling bin today. Oh I know it had to happen but listen, even having bought 5 Expedit shelving units since I arrived in this house I still don’t have enough storage. I just don’t. If I owned the house – which I don’t – I could possibly look at re-arranging thing (and buying more shelves) for more effective storage. But I can’t. I’d like to get rid of some of the furniture in this house (but I can’t).

So the alternative really was to declutter. Just get rid of stuff that I have no real emotional attachment to (like about 600E worth of digital art magazines, yes, let’s not go there) and try to avoid adding to the stuff I don’t care about so much (like digital art magazines).

I’ve a way to go before I’m finished – I’m going to bring a bunch of DVDs to the nearest charity shop (where they will need to sell them really cheaply I think to get any competition on how cheaply some of the older films are being sold for in HMV and Golden Discs these times). In the meantime, along with decluttering the physical side of my life, I’m trying to tidy up what’s going on in my head, sort out the plates I have spinning and see if I can achieve more with my time.