Category Archives: life in general

If I am honest

If I am honest, I had this idea aqround Christmas that I would start a five minute a day blogging habit. How hard could it be?

Well I didn’t manage to do it so make of that what you will.

Anyway, we are into the second half of the year, we have also passed the Point of No Return and the days are getting shorter again. It will be a while before we notice, but yes, it is coming. We have turned the year.

I still haven’t made it to Ireland. I have a flight in a couple of weeks’ time, and you know, I am slightly more optimistic that I will be on a plane that day. My parents are hopeful too. This ticket is with Ryanair, it’s a bit ironic because I have an Aer Lingus ticket that has been rescheduled about 7 times. Currently it is scheduled for August.

I just wish Ireland had been able to sort out the vaccination regulations a bit earlier than 19 July. It’s been over a year and a half and all I see coming out of the political parties at the moment is how great the canvas in South Dublin is. Dudes, some of us working on your behalf in foreign climes could have come home 2 months ago if you accepted any sort of proof of vaccination and did not insist on quarantine even for vaccinated people. I’ll travel in July but I gotto say, looking at how things are going in Britain I am nervous it might be my last chance for a while. Ireland is horrifically vulnerable to stupidity in Westminster and today, it does not sound particularly bright there.

So yeah.

The other thing that I have come to realise is that I absolutely hate – with a passion unequalled – home working. The whole lockdown thing, staying at home, not really a problem. I must have 100 books to read, I definitely have a shit load of tapestry canvases, I paint and in March, I bought a piano and have a tonne of sheet music (I am learning Libertango and Una Mattina at the moment). Staying at home, not a problem.

Working at home, a problem. And I am lucky. I had a table, a spare screen and a separate room to put it into. At least I had 12 months ago anyway, prior to that I didn’t. But Work takes over. There’s no real border between work and home life. The end of work becomes blurred. If you work in an operational job, there is always something to do. I’ll Just Do This and then I’ll go to bed and 3 hours later you have cleared down some stuff, you’re exhausted and you have to get up. You could say I need more discipline. Possibly. But more people around me need it too and that is all I will comment on that matter.

Being able to work from home comfortably is a privilege. A lot of people worked at their kitchen table. I’m happy if it made them happen but it’s not a long term solution for anyway. I want to be back in my office where also, hopefully, the number of video conferences will drop. I want people to stop thinking their priorities for me are higher than my own. People should consider whether their needs are so critical it is worth causing undue stress to one of their colleagues.

I hope this period is almost over. I have been flu jabbing most years for the last 15 or 20. I don’t care if I have to get a booster every year against this godforsaken virus just so I can leave home and go to work like a normal person. Ahem.

As to what I achieved since all this: mini diploma in crisis management. I moved house internationally. I bought a load of books and art supplies, I obtained 120 box sets of Pablo and Supracolor coloured pencils – a big objective. I bought a piano. I bought a load of notebooks. I started writing memoirs. I completed two crochet doilies and at least one tapestry. I made one loaf of bread but it was not sourdough. I survived and to be honest, I think that’s the most I can say.

It is now I am finding it hard. LIke, we are so close, so close to normality. This is when all the saved up stress will start leaking out. It’s like, when you go on holiday and immediately get sick.

A lot changed in my life. Some of those changes were not good changes. The other destruction of my work life balance, the fact that now, plans I have for out of hours education are absolutely in trouble because balancing my time will take months to fix, along with the expectation management that has to go with it.

But against that. I’m lucky. Family is waiting for me and for the first time in over a year, we are optimistic. The other changes will come, because I will make it happen./

Christmas lights

The traffic has started flowing again after the expiry of the overnight curfew. I shall miss the curfew to be honest; it has made the nights lovely and quiet. But I shall not miss the reason for the curfew and show me someone who will.

It’s 23 December; in the background, Michael McDonald is singing the Wexford Carol, and later, it will segue to some one of Michael Bublé’s Christmas numbers. For this year, that album has been quite the discovery.

Under normal circumstances, I would not by typing this; no, I would be chasing around, tidying stuff up so the place wasn’t a complete mess when I got back in January and in an hour’s time I’d be making my way to the airport to get a flight back to Dublin. But that’s not happening. Sorry Aer Lingus but I guess you are not totally surprised. I’ve rescheduled for March. For the first time in my life I will not be spending Christmas in Ireland.

I am philosophical about this. I knew as far back as September, when I originally booked the Christmas flight home, that there was a great risk I would not be home for Christmas. I gambled but since I could reschedule the flight, I have not yet lost out financially anyway. Although…

One of the things that makes this harder are discussions about how terrible this is, and what a pity that is. You know, it’s hard but I have a choice to make here which is basically to get on with things and make a fabulous Christmas within the limits of the possible, or mourn it. It’s one year, hopefully. I chose to buy Christmas decorations and plan a Christmas menu. Who knows how it will turn out, but still…

If you know people who have decided not to travel for Christmas, given the times that are in it, don’t go on about how awful it is. It is a mark of overwhelming privilege that you can think this. It doesn’t have to be awful or great but you – or I – can make of it what we will and if you go down the “it’ll be awful” route or the “pity” route, well that reflects on you.

I’m writing this mostly because I need to get the message out that it can be okay, at the very least. I’m listening to stoic people talking about being stoic, and I am reading the words of miserable people talking about working all the time because what is the point.

I am sorry for these people. I understand it is hard. But on a scale of hardness, it doesn’t come close to being the hardest thing I have had to do this year. Again, if it is the hardest thing you have to do all year, trust me, you have not done badly. Some people did not get to go to family funerals and those are one shot opportunities. I live not far from Porte de Namur metro station and a lot of people sleep in that station. If there is anyone left in the western world who does not know someone who got Covid 19 and the fear that must go with that at the moment, then, god are you lucky.

2020 has been, to all intents and purposes, a traincrash of a year on many levels and while there is light at the end of the tunnel on some fronts, it is likely that 2021 brings the hope of better rather than the delivery of better in the short term. I don’t want to wallow in the traincrashiness of it. I want to sit in my living room, take pleasure in my Christmas tree which, today, was lit before the Christmas lights on Avenue de la Toison d’Or. I might sign up for Disney Plus and watch Fantasia, several times. I was reminded of it last night because no one recognised The Sorcerer’s Apprentice on University Challenge and I feel like seeing it again. I shall listen to Leontyne Price singing O Holy Night. I shall not listen to the Pogues singing Fairytale of New York.

This year is different, and I am building the Christmas I can rather than the Christmas that would be if I just abdicated and said how awful it is. There will be next year.

2020, being as it is, has also brought interesting things. I watched Newgrange’s sunrise on Sunday last; the weather was helpfully clear and yes, we saw the dagger of light. The way that passageway lit up was glorious. I don’t know how much you’d really see that of a normal year since normally, there are people in there. I think this year offered a very unique opportunity to experience Newgrange, sitting in Brussels, and the weather cooperated. I tend to see 20 December as my personal New Year’s Eve rather than 31 December. It’s the day the northern hemisphere starts to tilt back towards the daylight and we can look forward to a few seconds more each day. Of course, the downside of that is Twitter fills up with “grand stretch” memes but fine. Let people have their smiles.

I learned, mostly courtesy of Brexit and recent history in the US that there is very little so bad that someone cannot possibly make it worse for other people in some way. At the moment, I am thinking of the army of truckers stuck in South East England where a combination of preChristmas, Covid19 being apparently out of control in the UK and preBrexit has led to thousands of mostly men being stuck broadly in the middle of nowhere. Some people might cynically point at it in an abstract manner and talk about how Brexit will be. But that misses the very human impact on these worker’s lives. You might like the finer things from your local good supermarket, or your amazon orders but they don’t get to you without goods traffic moving and right now it is not.

Somewhat apocryphally, Michael Bublé is singing I’ll be Home for Christmas, which, although written for another time and event, is appropriate for a lot of people, but I, at least, am not in a lorry cab in Kent.

It’s ten past 7 on Christmas Eve Eve. It’s now fairly clear I won’t get my other wish, namely a white Christmas; even the few snowflakes promised for New Year’s Eve aren’t looking good this year. But there is a 1000 piece jigsaw, a sewing machine and if they aren’t sold out, possibly an overlocker to make new clothes for 2021. I will be in regular contact with friends and family. All told, I have a lot to be thankful, and maybe one of the biggest one is that I can take a step back, and say, this Christmas will be different but it will still be a day of hope for the future.

Beyond

IMG_0753

Google tells me the walk I got in this evening “after” work was 3.2km which isn’t a bad walk; is more than I usually manage when I am coming home from work back in the recent past when going to work meant more than stepping into the living room. I need that walk and I hope, for the time being, we retain the freedom to walk.

The soundtrack to my walk was a new podcast release from Above & Beyond. I like their Group Therapy podcast and I always used to listen to it when I used to go running. It’s quite the change since I spent the day listening to Brahms piano concertos and Sibelius symphonies in between conference calls.

The photo above is from the last trip which was Iceland in January. I wanted to go back in September but I suspect it might be September 2021 at this point. There is so much uncertain in this world at the moment.

Apart from going for a walk, nothing really all that exciting happened. There was almost no traffic, and no delivery of a USB splitter happened (oh please, let that come soon). I didn’t notice any ambulances today, which is 2 less than yesterday, and the buses went by less than every half an hour. Every day is Sunday. Every day is Sunday.

Except it isn’t. Mostly because 5 out of every 7 days, my living room is also my office so I have not yet taken the opportunity to set up a container garden on my terrace and my plans to take over the world are set aside. There is work to be done. I do a spot of stargazing each evening – maybe I should order a telescope online since pondering the night sky is one of the few freedoms I have. But this too shall pass, as there is rain, and even a little snow, forecast for the weekend. This will block the beautiful evening and night skies that I have enjoyed the last few days. And there’s the space station, of course.

I’m going to point at this by Annie West. She told me the other day that yes, she would sell prints of it and I am definitely in the market for one. I’ve also been looking at other prints by artists I like – Iraville for example, and tubidu. Apart from the stuff I paint/draw myself, there is something uplifting about art. So yes, I am thinking about ordering some art for myself. We need things of beauty in our lives now.

Yesterday was International Women’s Day

My social media sources flooded with IWD, with promotions, with hashtags, with exhortations to talk about the inspirational women in your career who helped you along the way. 

I am not a fan of Women’s Day. Its existence reminds me that women are systematically discriminated against and expected to accept whatever small crumbs come our way. There is always some chorus of basses and tenors singing about the lack of a Men’s Day. (it is November 19th by the way; the fact that it appears not to be such a big deal speaks volumes about how much men care about it and campaign for it)

I wanted to think about the things that would make being a woman easier in today’s world. One of those things would be Not Being Embarrassed About Your Period. A sanitary towel or tampon falls out of your handbag? No big deal. 

Being on your period? No big deal. You have an accident? No big deal – it happens to us all. For my lifetime, though periods were handled as something to be hidden, something to be embarrassed about. When I look back at some of the men in my life, they could handle discussing contraception; they could not handle me having sleeping problems because my period was due in 2 days. 

Plus, as it happens today I accidentally flicked a sanitary towel out of my handbag while looking for a sketchbook. I’m now 46 so I don’t give a damn any more but I also know that for years, I would have been scarlet. 

So that’s one thing. 

I was also thinking about inspirations, and if I’m honest, one of the women who I wish was around when I was 18, 19, is Federica Mogherini. I think she’s great. But I don’t want to talk about her right now. I want to talk about someone completely different. 

I grew up in Ireland and I was born in the early 1970s. I spend a lot of time on Irish social media and I can tell you, young people today really have no concept of what Ireland was like back then. Reeling in the Years does not even come place. I want to sing the praises of one, unknown, not famous woman who changed my life in a very significant way in June 1980. I don’t even know if she is still alive. 

The rhythm of life in Ireland came with various rites of passage, of which the second major one after starting school at the age of 5, was, and remains for many people, the First Holy Communion. When I was a child, you got this in First Class. 

So at the age of 7 and a half, one Saturday in May,  I was clad in a short white frilly dress, wandered up the church, and got Communion for the first time. There was a sort of party in the school afterwards, at which my mother strictly ordered me not to even consider the idea of going near an orange, much less trying to peel it. Part of the deal with being in the Communion class was something altogether more secular. It was a school trip. 

We didn’t have many of those in school in Ireland when I was a child, certainly not in most of the small local schools in towns where both major employers had challenges from time to time. But the Communion class got to go away for a whole day. By tradition, it was a trip to Dublin Zoo. 

We lived 150 miles from Dublin Zoo, and the most logical way to get 80 or so 7 year olds to Dublin was to shepherd them onto a train into a reserved carriage, and have them picked up by bus in Heuston Station and then shipped out to the Phoenix Park to pay attention to the exotic animals we could not imagine. I had never been to Dublin and to be frank, I don’t think I had been on a bus before either. 

Anyway, Ireland of the 1980 had a bunch of limitations which meant I think the sole option for bus hire would have been CIE’s Dublin city bus service. So a double decker arrived to take us to the zoo. 

Most of the women I knew at that time were teachers, nuns or nurses. All of the teachers in my school were female. We knew the boys’ school for the Second Class and upwards (ie, older than us) had mostly male teachers but most of the men I knew at that time were mechanics, truck drivers, creamery managers or some such. 

We had the Veritas encyclopaedias and in the page describing the kind of jobs people could do, women had just 2 of the 8 jobs described; teacher and nurse. Every other job was a man’s job. People talk about how important role models are in the tech sector today, in politics, and the idea of ensuring that language isn’t exclusionary. Images can be very exclusionary. 

Anyway, back at Heuston Station, my all female cohort of teachers discovered something highly unusual about this bus. It was so extraordinary they made a point of pointing it to an army of 7 and 8 year olds who really only wanted to go to the zoo and see the penguins. 

The bus driver was a woman. It was, to be frank, unique in any of our experience. 

It is nearly 40 years since I made my Holy Communion, but I still think of that moment – almost a Kodak moment in my life; stamped on my memory – when I realised that if a woman wanted she could be a bus driver. That a bus driver did not have to be male. 

We talk about the importance of role models. I don’t know who that woman was but frankly, she made a massive change to my view of the world when I was 7. And the impact of that change on my life has been immeasurable. 

Anyway, I was busy, yesterday, on International Women’s Day and like I say, I just want periods not to be a subject of embarrassment or shame. But when we talk about inspiration and role models, we need kids to see them, not just teenagers, or early career researchers or students.  

Addicted to a feeling

I’m attempting (with some difficulty it must be admitted) to get addicted to a couple of feelings. Just two. They are

  1. the feeling of relief that comes with having a tidy kitchen before you go to bed; and
  2. the feeling of sanctimoniousness that comes with going swimming.

My kitchen has been in chaos for two days. It’s quite impressive because I don’t have much in my kitchen at the moment. Well over 90% of what I own by way of household kitcheny goodness is in storage in Ireland and that was about 50% of what was left after I went donating and recycling before leaving Dublin. But I’ve had broken nights so things…accumulated.

It’s all tidy now and I feel FANTASTIC. If I could bottle that feeling – but you know, I could get it every night if I only ensured that every night, instead of 5 out of 7 or 2 out of 7 on a really bad week, the ware was washed and the kitchen was basically ready for use the next morning.

It’s the same with the swimming. Mostly I attempt to have a swimming bag ready to go so I can decide to go at the drop of a hat. Currently that’s not the case here because after the last swim, which was basically fantastic, I discovered that the goggles were no longer keeping out water (bad goggles – they haven’t been used so often), and I need to replace a noseclip from the kitbag too.

I don’t want to wax on about how great swimming makes me feel because actually, I am swapping up to a 50m pool at the moment so there are moments of abject failure, and near drowning, usually around 45 minutes in, but in general, I feel better for having gone swimming than for not having gone swimming. There is no point in trying to bottle that feeling either; I can get it simply by going swimming.

So I’m trying to train my brain into getting addicted to those feelings so that I automatically clear the kitchen at some point before I go to bed, and that I have literally no way of talking my way out of picking up the kitbag and leaving the house. It is still better than most things that people get addicted to all the same.

 

Saturday mornings

I like those Saturday mornings where I wake early, and get up * reasonably * early and have a chance to ease into the day. I like doing it during the week as well but for some reason that’s not happening much lately.

Facebook has been begging me to install their mobile app on my phone for ages but I’m just not interested. I took twitter off my iPad and I’m getting close to pulling it off my phone although if I do that at least on the phone it will stay logged in on a browser. I get a lot of my news and quite a few interesting bits and pieces through Twitter – far more than I ever did through Facebook. But it is too easy to get hooked into reloading twitter all the time and that distracts me from being distracted by my own thoughts. Saturday morning’s get me back there sometimes.

I never feel all that great if I stay i bed late on a Saturday morning. Mostly I like to be up before 8 if possible, well before 9 at best. After that things start feeling not great. I feel behind, unrelaxed. Online social media often contributes to my still being in bed at 10am on a Saturday morning and it frustrates me.

I sometimes wonder how much of this is evidence that in fact, and in agreement with all appearances and a selection of calendars, I am getting old. Not so much the getting up early – because I mostly did that anyway – but the feeling that social media is not bringing so much to my life any more.

Saturday mornings bring the opportunity to relax a little, think about where I am in the world and what I want to do. They are always much better if I am not also trying to frantically catch up with things. There is pleasure – surprisingly enough – to be got from the sound of getting the washing machine done on time and listening to it going through its cycle early on a Saturday morning. It gives me a feeling of control. And relaxation because at least I don’t have to scrub the clothes thanks to technology.

I wonder sometimes – coloured a lot by what I read on line – how much time we devote to not being stressed, not being under pressure. Even our hobbies can add pressure by adding a time dimension to them – three of my local swimming pools close at 12 on a Sunday which puts you on a bit of a time table. The please on Saturday mornings for me is not being on that much of a timetable. Not needing to rush out the door.

I like Saturday mornings. Above and Beyond in the background. A leisurely breakfast and the knowledge that no bus I get on today will be the same as a sardine can fitted with a sauna.

I must buy all the things!!!!!

Someone posted a craft link to my Facebook feed the other day on how doing craft stuff and buying craft stuff were two separate hobbies. I totally understand this.

Yesterday, I bought some mechanical pencils. When I lived in Ireland, basically, if you wanted a mechanical pencil, it was a 0.5mm or a 0.7mm you got. And the choice in the cheap price range was a bit pathetic. This is why I tended to bulk buy mechanical pencils when I was out foreign. They had pretty pencils. They had good pencils like Uni Kuru Togas and Uni Shalakus. They were pretty, and they came in a nice range of colours and as 0.5s went, they tended to stay fairly pointy.

When I started drawing I realised that I needed something slightly finer again to deal with fur. I drew mice.

And evil looking kittens.

And I struggled to find anything finer, like that really nice 0.3 the guy on the Youtube video was using. I tore Dublin apart looking either for a clutch pencil that was nice and long (duh) or a 0.3. I eventually found a 0.35mm Faber Castell. For a long time, that was the only 0.3 pencil I had. I bought some class of a Japanese one in Delfonics in Paris once for a friend who liked particularly lethal stationery and spent months afterwards regretting not buying two.

We’re talking about 0.05mm here but the other problem with this is the lack of replacement leads.

Which brings us to yesterday. I discovered another stationery shop in Luxembourg a few weeks ago and yesterday, I got to go and Check It Out. It didn’t have Uni Kuru Togas (pity) but it did have a few Pentel Orenz in various sizes. I have coveted a Pentel Orenz for ages. I actually owned one (having picked it up in Delfonics in Paris a few weeks’ ago) but they had them in a lot of different sizes and colours. And they had other Pentels that I didn’t see too often. I’ve a bundle of Pentels in the mechanical pencil role but they are 0.5s and 0.7s.

You know, when you start drawing they keep telling you to, you know keep trying stuff till you find what you like. I have a lot of pencils both wood case and mechanical and clutch. I’m finding that I like different pencils for different things.

Anyway, my little eyes lit up, and I bought 2x 0.2s and 2x 0.3s. I was strong on the 0.7 and 0.5 front, even to the extent of not buying a 0.5 Pentel Graphgear which I sort of thought I didn’t have but rationalised it on the grounds that I had about 4 Kuru Togas and 5 Shalakus, all 0.5. And that wasn’t including all the other 0.7s (hello Faber Castell and Caran d’Ache). There’s a moratorium on a number of stationery items at the moment although it’s possible if they were selling Kuru Togas in anything other than a 0.5 I’d have capitulated.

Today then, I needed to find homes for these new pencils, the joy of my life, which which I would be drawing fur till the cows came home, metaphorically. I have seen no cows since I left Ireland. As part of that job I also did a census of boxes of mechanical pencil leads. I took the opportunity to tidy out the pencil section of my tool box (this means I didn’t deal with the fineliners) as well. From this experience I learned that I have a lot of 0.3mm mechanical pencils. Now, the one that was in my handbag pencil case has been causing trouble but because it was one of 3 Staedler Mars I’m not entirely sure whether it’s the same one that came out of my handbag pencil case (it’s a small case to impose discipline), these new ones which I got yesterday and the infamous Faber Castell 0.35 which I bought a few years ago from the only shop in Dublin which did, at the time, sell something that fine.

As a result of this exercise – I deliberately did not take any photographs, I have discovered that

  • the reason my tool box wouldn’t close was because it had LOADs of pencils in it. It’s still pushing it tightness wise but it looks less uck than it did this morning
  • I have enough pencil lead to open my own shop but surprisingly enough, the lead I am least well supplied in is 0.7 of any graphite grade. I have more 0.3, and 0.2 than I have of 0.7. I think this is linked to panic buying. IF you know every shop will have some variety of 0.7 then you don’t panic about it. Given that historically I’ve found it impossible to get either 0.3 and smaller pencils and associated lead, I clearly binge bought it any time I saw it.
  • My desk is nice when it’s tidy.
  • I also have a lot of international ink cartridges, colour blue (they were in the same drawer as the pencil lead supplies). I have no idea what to do with them; I have plenty of fountain pens, this is true, and many of them even take international cartridges (I have loads of Lamys too). But I really have no idea how I accumulated so many blue cartridges because I do not buy them. I’m pretty certain I did not ship them from Ireland. And while you tend to get a cartridge or two when you buy a cheap fountain pen (like 10E worth of neon colour plastic things), I still seem to have an order of magnitude more blue cartridges than can be reasonably explained by the number of dirt cheap plastic school kid fountain pens I have acquired in the last year.
  • If I had any guts I’d do something about the fineliner supply in my tool box but to be honest, I think one of the key issues there is the inability to differentiate between the “live” fineliner and the “spare fineliner because the wretched things go dry at the most inopportune times”.

Anyway, courtesy of this morning’s work, my pencil lead selection is currently tidy, and there is a moratorium on buying any pencil lead at all. Whatever I have, I need to work through and this includes the random colour lead I seem to have acquired as well. No more. Although, no wait, I am allowed get graphite when I run out of that. But we’re talking about an event sometime in the long term here.

I’m getting good at actively not buying any more cheap plastic fountain pens (I dread finding out about the colours of next year’s special edition Lamys). This at least is not adding to the orgy of blue ink in one of my stationery drawers.

I need to spend more time drawing. I did a dragon for Inktober the other day but I seem to lack the time to actually do anything major, any painting lately. I also started designing this year’s Christmas card – I’d apologise but the Christmas card designs tend to need to be done several times. I don’t have any of my large format watercolour paper with me so it gutted me this morning to do this, but I bought some. I have about 150 sheets of the stuff in Ireland. That aside, I think one of the key reasons I don’t draw much is that my desk suffers from Flat Surface Law Syndrome, the one that says No Flat Surface Remains Uncluttered for more than 5 seconds.

For weeks I’ve considered that a good solution to the lack of desk space would be buying more desk space but really, I think what I need are more shelves. It frustrates me that I can’t keep my home desk tidy when my work desk looks immaculate. I think it’s because my electricity bill does not travel to my work place. Things wind up on my desk though because there is no home for them.

There was a time I used to buy books and CDs. They did, in all fairness, take up more space.

Wandering through pages

I’m not entirely sure how but this popped up on my twitter feed this morning:

Alex Stubb wrote a piece for Finnair’s inflight magazine on the question of reading and the fact that he seemed to be doing less of it. I must confess I was a bit envious of his 4000 books. I cleared out a good lot last year when I was moving house, much to my sadness. What he said about the place of reading in his life resonated. I have been thinking about this on several fronts myself lately. I’ve recognised that I read far less than I did in the past. This despite the convenience of a Kindle which currently has a queue of about 200 books to read. The fact that I have not been reading much has not necessarily meant that I have stopped actually buying books.

So far this year, I have finished reading 12 books. This is about 8 more than usual lately and this is mostly because I decided to make a concerted effort to read more. I just haven’t formalised it in a 1+1+1 plan like Mr Stubb has. But I am inclined to follow his lead, or at least give it a shot. I’m not able to do 1 hour of exercise every day on the grounds that in theory, most weeks I go swimming 3 to 4 times and that’s a minimum 2 hour cut out of my day. I also feel that twitter absorbs a good deal of my time but not necessarily productively. So in addition to reviewing and rebuilding my reading habit, I’m also looking at chopping the number of accounts I follow on twitter.

Two things led to the loss of reading from my life. I felt the loss of Terry Pratchett enormously. Additionally, I used to read a significant amount of children’s fiction and with Harry Potter, I seem to have tapped out of that lately. Most of what I have been reading of late has been non-fiction. I’ve just finished Motherfóclóir which is the better of the two books focused on using the Irish language which I read this year. I also finished Silk Road by Peter Frankopan which is a book I had been travelling with for some time. More frivolously I have started reading Calvin and Hobbes again. But I have also drawn heavily on the field of science and genetics for escape.

I have a massive reading queue, and it is hard to know what to start with. I have some frivolous German stuff, and a classic of travel writing by Heinrich Boll lined up. In a way, I feel a bit overwhelmed by the number of books both on my kindle and on my Amazon wishlist and I wonder if that perhaps, contributes to the paralysis I sometimes now feel about reading. Like I have a lot of books to get through.

Mostly recently acquired are the memoirs of a US interpreter which I expect to be relatively easy to read, and apart from that, I have been journeying with Empire of the Word by Nicholas Ostler for some time. I think it is sometimes more difficult to make progress through very in-depth, long books on kindles. We lack the visual evidence of progress; the movement of the bookmark through the pages. I regret that and somehow, I need to be practical as well.

What I lack at the moment is a way into fiction. The last piece of fiction that I read that truly took my life by the scruff of the neck and pulled me out of reality – and it was a re-read – was Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. I have another of his other books to hand but I have somehow not found a route into them.  In a way, I think for years I was sated by the escapism guaranteed by a visit to the Discworld but I don’t think Terry Pratchett would appreciate the idea that he had spoilt me for other books.

I need to get involved in a little exploration. Just as soon as I’ve read a few more of these books I have lined up for the last 5 to 10 years.

 

 

 

Generation Emigration and the Irish Abroad

I’m not entirely sure when but at some stage during the last recession, the Irish Times started running a regular feature called Generation Emigration.

I was living in Ireland at the time, as I did for all of that recession, and I was mildly annoyed with them. Firstly, this was hardly the first generation to have emigrated in mass numbers and the previous lot were less than 10 years previous. I emigrated in 1994. A lot of people I know did. And secondly, emigration can either be mourned, but you’ll be more successful if you see it as an opportunity and an adventure rather than a complete imposition.

I’ve no doubt the Irish Times did this because it paid them to do so but having read a bunch of the pieces, I found it all mildly depressing, and perhaps that was the angle they were aiming for. They’ve since renamed the section The Irish Abroad which I suppose is a little less depressing.

I don’t know that it was the label Generation Emigration that made it depression. It’s just I read enough pieces talking about people missing home that even though I was in Ireland, I was starting to climb the walls, and then when you got the pieces about people who had decided to Come Home it was really depressing.

I did all this. I did the emigrating in 1994, and I did the Coming Home in 1999. One of the things I knew then and still know now is that having lived elsewhere changes you and there will always be things that you miss. Certainly, Lidl and Aldi alleviated a lot of those things over time and eventually Tesco started stocking couscous as well. But nowhere in Dublin did hot chocolate like they do in Italy and only in that small village in Germany where I was working for a year could you get that really nice Mohnkuche. The years after coming home from Brussels were spent desperately missing street waffles. And I couldn’t get a decent haircut for love nor money.

The biggest problem when I emigrated the first time was tea. You couldn’t get that very easily at all or at least, you were stuck with Liptons Yellow Label which is the equivalent of hell for the discerning tea drinker; that is to say, someone for whom Barrys is the top level of tea. But there wasn’t much else. When I got back though, there were lots of things. Stroopwaffel (Lidl helps now and again), Parma Ham (took a few years but everyone eventually caught up), Butter with salt crystals (take a bow, and quite a bit of money, Marks and Spencer). Your horizons broaden and then, when you go back, they narrow again a little. I read a lot of pieces from people coming home that just made no sense to me because they focused very much on how everything was going to be perfect in Ireland this time. There never seemed to be any consideration given to the idea that in fact, being away changes people and well, with it, comes a little bit of longing. Of homesickness for a bunch of different homes.

Emigration now is different. I emigrated again last November. When I left the first time, I wrote lots of letters. Now, we have email, Skype, Whatsapp, Facebook. Phone calls don’t cost a fortune any more either. Ryanair makes a lot of journeys a lot easier and a great deal less expensive. Aer Lingus have seriously upped their range of routes. It’s all, in practical terms, far easier than it used to be.

It’s just, for some reason, I read a lot of pieces in the Irish Times that suggested emigration was really hard, and coming back was a lot easier. For me, it really was the inverse. Leaving wasn’t so hard. IN a way, it was an adventure. Coming back left little pieces of me in Finland, France, Germany and Belgium. Maybe not so much in London. And yet, I knew this would be the way it was. I sometimes wonder if the current returning ex generation emigration are set up to face this.

Cities for living

tl;dr: read this Intelligent urban transport systems

When I left Brussels for Dublin in 1999, I was operating under the assumption that Dublin was becoming a better place to live. The bus system was still catastrophic, but the Luas was under construction, and there was a buzz around the place which suggested there was a focus on how people could live more easily in a city which to be honest, had been a bit of a disaster when I was in college there in the early 1990s. People from Dublin do not tend to like hearing this but fine.

However, against that any time you as a returning emigrant highlighted things that could be done better (and were elsewhere), there was still a prevailing attitude of “Well here’s the Ryanair website, off you go if it is so much better in France”. Most people would take the view that health care in fact was better in France. In general.

I spent 17 or 18 years in Dublin before eventually escaping again. It took about 5 years of planning, battling, thinking about stuff and trying to catch opportunities before it all came together and I got out. The thought of growing old in Dublin depressed me and when I look at debates around certain aspects of living in Dublin still going on I reckon I would be old before Dublin reached a stage where in fact it was an attractive city to live in. Essentially, it can be very difficult to create a healthy life style in Dublin – I managed it for around 12 of the years I lived there and when it went bad, it went quite badly. In the end, I was losing 2-3 hours a day in commuting over a commuting distance of 7 km. It’s one thing to lose that sort of time if you’re travelling 60 km each way. It is ludicrous if the distance is 7km. I walked it one day. It was deeply unpleasant as well.

I’ve long been of the opinion that people in Dublin would be a lot healthier if the place had a coherent, dependable, integrated public transport system. It doesn’t. Not only that, it isn’t getting one any time soon. There is a current project in place which will displace 13 million bus journeys to facilitate something like 1 million bike journeys. There just isn’t an integrated consideration of the question “How do we make this place a good place to live”. Symptoms are attacked piecemeal, other problems are not addressed at all. All in all, if I had to pick one word to describe trying to navigate Dublin, the word Stress would line up.

I whinge at length about public transport in Dublin, but in particular I want to highlight a key problem in that particular city – I am not sure that it is unique to Dublin but my experience is that it is particularly bad in Dublin. It is a city and society in which the default is an unhealthy lifestyle rather than a healthy life style.

For more than 10 years, I worked somewhere that was a guaranteed 20 minutes from where I lived. Every single morning, that’s how long it took me to get there and that’s how long it took me to get home. This meant I had more time to do things like go swimming three times a week, cook in the evenings when I got home without being utterly exhausted, go climbing, do more needlework, go to more concerts. The logistic reality of my life was not all that stressful in the grand scheme of things. When I started working in the city centre I attempted to make public transport work for me because really, it’s more environmentally sound, and in theory it should be a bit cheaper. In reality, the transport times across two jobs in two different city centre locations were either completely unreliable, or consisted of a mode of which one was completely unreliable. I eventually went back driving because the journey times were generally more reliable, and came in at shorter than the public transport options. Again, that was for 7km, and one of them was sa point to point bus service.

People cannot live healthily like this. And yet in Dublin we just took it for granted? Appointment at 7pm? Travel wildly early because travelling on time didn’t guarantee you’d be on time. The amount of time wasted in inefficient travel in Dublin for me was just beyond calculable and it was utterly depressing.

Time wasted like this has all sorts of knock on effects. It puts stress on parents trying to collect kids from childcare, arriving home later from work cuts into time for doing stuff like oh preparing and cleaning up food, doing any sort of a hobby, getting exercise. I can clearly flash back to having spent a crazy amount of time figuring out how best to fit swimming into my schedule and still failing because an 8km journey could take up to 2 hours. Arriving home at 8pm with a need to be up at 6am has a fairly desperate impact on your ability to manage things like a regular healthy eating habit, a reliable sleeping patter and any sort of relaxation. We have increasing rates of burn out and our health indicators are pointing towards obesity and diabetes and other environmental issues in the area of air quality.

As a society we create an environment where the default option is to be unhealthy and to be in an unhealthy environment. It’s a macro level problem. And we expect people to fix it on a micro level. Individuals need to fight hard to sort out diets and eating habits, and getting enough exercise even as they still don’t have time for either and are trying to operate in a lifestyle which is designed to counteract every effort they make. It doesn’t have to be that way.

When you move outside the public transport side of things, there is also the general social issue of presenteeism. Where people work crazy hours and make a virtue of it. Despite the fact that it adds to their stress, adds to the amount of time they don’t spend recovering, doesn’t necessarily add value to their working day. And then they complain about people who they perceive to have easier lives and instead of working on the premise of improving life for all, they look to disimprove life for all

It’s corrosive and it is something we will have to address urgently particularly in the wider context of things like minimum basic income and especially automation of jobs and moves to replace workers with intelligent systems (for a given value of intelligent anyway).

It is clear that we need things to be sustainably financially for things to operate without causing war or catastrophe. But against that, we need to ensure that the benefit of things are shared relatively fairly. We don’t tend to have this debate either and ultimately, it is not going to be healthy to have an increasing number of people unable to find work while another sector overworks itself to an early grave.

I suppose, the point I’m making is we don’t ask whether the way our society operates is healthy and whether our objectives are sane and sensible in terms of enabling people to live healthy lives. I’m not sure how we start that conversation. But I do know that reliable transport would make people’s lives a lot better.