Since New Year, I've been reading Caitlin Moran’s Moranifesto, her book mainly of columns from The Times [of London]. We’ve met Caitlin before and before. She grew up in a council house in Wolverhampton in the post-industrial West Midlands of England. Her father was a union shop steward on disablility, she was the eldest of eight children who were home educated. She taught herself to write, and because she didn’t go to school, didn’t have any voice to adopt but her own and that of the many many books that she read as a child and teenager. She had to integrate facts, attitudes, politics and sensibilities and invent herself. Comfortable people should read her because she can make you feel uncomfortable without ranting like a demagogue. A joke can make the pill more bitter.
Here she is on the time when 'house' changed from being synonymous with home to getting redefined as asset, investment, nest-egg . . .
In the 1980s, when the Conservative government put Britain’s council housing stock up for sale, my father received a letter – asking us if we wished to buy our home, for £12,000.
‘Even if I had the money, I wouldn’t do it,’ he said. ‘There’s no moral logic to it. A council house is for someone who would not have a house any other way. If you can afford to *buy* it, you shouldn’t be *in* it”.
Our old house – our home – is now worth £100,000. I looked it up on a property website this morning. Those council tenants that did buy, back in the eighties – half our street – got an astonishing bargain.
In Ireland, we slavishly followed the Thatcherite model of letting The Market sort out housing, including the selling of much of the corporate housing stock to the then present incumbent. Those families, particularly in Dublin, are now sitting on an asset: the mortgage will have been paid off and the house can now be used as collateral for further loans. Meanwhile, The Market generated thousands of domestic houses during the boom, often in famously unsuitable locations: on the flood-plains of rivers; with no transport infra-structure; on top of radon sumps; on foundations of pyrite. In 2009, the chattering classes looked around tsk tsk to count the ghost-estates of empty and half-finished houses which were never going to sell.
Now the chattering classes are talking about the housing crisis because hundreds of children spent Christmas in hotel rooms and hostels. Many of these talking-heads have an "obvious" solution to this glitch in supply and demand which turns out to be "impossible to implement". It's impossible to implement under an economic model that building houses has to involve profit as an incentive. But there's all sorts of things that happen for / in society which don't make a profit: public transport, the post office, the Abbey Theatre, national parks, schools, parliament itself. For reasons that go beyond logic, the first three items on that list, at least, are 'meant' to be profitable. But nobody seems to ask why?
So let's ask: why should public transport or public housing be profitable? And what parameters do you throw into the model to determine the profit and loss? Homeless people are more likely to get sick and occupy a hospital bed. What price do you put on a chap topping himself because his home has been repossessed? Will properly resourced = unprofitable transport infrastructure get cars off the roads, allow children to walk their obesity off on the way to school, reduce road-rage, decrease commute times, lower the carbon foot-print? Caitlin Moran asserts that 75% of the rentable domestic housing stock in London is owned by foreign investors. In Dublin this ratio is only 40% but we're catching up. Cui bono? Who benefits here? not the people on benefit.
Monday, 16 January 2017
Sunday, 15 January 2017
Not of this world
I was alone in the house the other day and a bright and chirpy chap on the other end of the line said “Why hello Bob, it’s Eric here from Whoosh telecoms”. The Conversation continued . . .
B. Err, hi?
E. Which provider are you with, let me guess . . . Vodafone? Whoosh can cut you a deal for €27.99 a month all in: landline, mobile, data.
B. Vodafone? I don’t know, I don’t think so.
E. Well, who do you pay the bills to?
B. I don’t know, I don’t pay the bills.
By now, Eric is convinced that he’s talking to someone who is a bit slow, rather than someone who makes 3 telephone calls a year, and is in a hurry to close the telecon down to get on to his next mark.
E. Thank you for your time, Bob, have a nice day
. . . brrrrrrrr.
It’s like I say, I don’t use the telephone much but I do own a mobile since the days when I was commuting home from Dublin at the end of a working week. Friday evening traffic out of Dublin was so unreliable that it was impossible to predict when I’d arrive at the bus stop “near” home to get picked up. A txt or a call from Castledermott, 25 minutes to destination, meant that herself and myself could coincide +/- 5 minutes. That was an efficient use of mobile teleccoms. I buy €20 worth of calls when Vodafone tells me they’ll give me extra €redit if I do this. That much tends to last me about six months. I’m not really helping to float the telecoms bubble, and it’s only partly because I’m 'near' with money.
Talking of my old bicycle and commuting to work in the days before we bought a car reminded me of using that old black war-horse to take the laundry to the laundrette in those days before we owned a clothes washing machine. I made a huge laundry-bag by folding a nice piece of chequered cloth in half and sewing up two of the three sides. When full this became a fat sausage which could be slung across the carrier of my push-bike and, barely, not scrape along the roadway on either side. One Saturday I had a particularly large consignment to process and dithered about whether I should do it in two machines or one. Being near, I went with the cheaper option – naturally. When the load was finished there were items of clothing in there that, far from being properly washed, were not even wet – the machine was that tightly packed. Really, I haven't a clue and it shows.
B. Err, hi?
E. Which provider are you with, let me guess . . . Vodafone? Whoosh can cut you a deal for €27.99 a month all in: landline, mobile, data.
B. Vodafone? I don’t know, I don’t think so.
E. Well, who do you pay the bills to?
B. I don’t know, I don’t pay the bills.
By now, Eric is convinced that he’s talking to someone who is a bit slow, rather than someone who makes 3 telephone calls a year, and is in a hurry to close the telecon down to get on to his next mark.
E. Thank you for your time, Bob, have a nice day
. . . brrrrrrrr.
It’s like I say, I don’t use the telephone much but I do own a mobile since the days when I was commuting home from Dublin at the end of a working week. Friday evening traffic out of Dublin was so unreliable that it was impossible to predict when I’d arrive at the bus stop “near” home to get picked up. A txt or a call from Castledermott, 25 minutes to destination, meant that herself and myself could coincide +/- 5 minutes. That was an efficient use of mobile teleccoms. I buy €20 worth of calls when Vodafone tells me they’ll give me extra €redit if I do this. That much tends to last me about six months. I’m not really helping to float the telecoms bubble, and it’s only partly because I’m 'near' with money.
Talking of my old bicycle and commuting to work in the days before we bought a car reminded me of using that old black war-horse to take the laundry to the laundrette in those days before we owned a clothes washing machine. I made a huge laundry-bag by folding a nice piece of chequered cloth in half and sewing up two of the three sides. When full this became a fat sausage which could be slung across the carrier of my push-bike and, barely, not scrape along the roadway on either side. One Saturday I had a particularly large consignment to process and dithered about whether I should do it in two machines or one. Being near, I went with the cheaper option – naturally. When the load was finished there were items of clothing in there that, far from being properly washed, were not even wet – the machine was that tightly packed. Really, I haven't a clue and it shows.
Bit 'n' Blobs 150116
I think I've given up on youtube, because it became so restlessly unfulfilling for me, but I need a place to pop 'interesting things' for my records and your edutainment.
- A coastal walk with a bit of edge. [tides, inrushing]
- A longer walk with some weaving. [pub-crawling]
- A shorter walk on your knees [Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages]
- The beginning of a journey for Sasha and Misha [comms with white house children]
- Cryptography for girls [Action Man can't compete]
Saturday, 14 January 2017
Dinner catcher
Failing sight is an almost inevitable consequence of aging. In the early days of WWII, roaring about in the dark in a gunned-up 20m powerboat, my father was known as Cat’s-eyes for the acuity of his night vision. My eyes were grand until I shuffled past my mid-40s and I’ve been using glasses since. Although they are functional, even essential, they are nevertheless Stuff which has to be accommodated somewhere when they aren’t on my nose for 'close-work'; which is whenever I’m not reading or sewing. In my last place of work I was mocked for planting the glasses on top of my head, as if they were sun-glasses and I was on the Côte d’Azur with my shirt open to the sternum. I am so alien in my current job that nobody dares say a word in case a racism accusation is made. I have many sets of reading-glasses and it has happened more than once to push them up only to have them clink against an already incumbent pair in my hair. Dau.I, being a generation more adrift from Cat’s-eyes, also has reading glasses although she is much younger than me; and she stores them on her head as well.
Vision problems among the young are not limited to myopia. When I was working in SVUH 15 years ago I heard a self-deprecating story from one of the lads. He’d been out on the Saturday night getting hammered with his mates when he realised that, if he legged it now, then he could catch the last #7 bus home to Dun Laoghaire. He made it, paid full fare to the end of the line, went upstairs and fell asleep. He woke 40 minutes later in Tallaght, a far less salubrious suburb in the Wild West of Dublin. He said, ruefully, that he’d seen then #77 on the front of the bus as he got on but assumed his vision was blurred from the drink. A fine example of Confirmation Bias.
The other day, beach-combing [multiprev], I popped the glasses into my shirt-pocket as I got out of the car and was 4km away on another beach before I noticed them missing. I went back to the first place and found them under a large tangle of rope and netting from which I’d been plucking buoys. Other pairs have just gone or been sat upon or driven over. So head-top is better than shirt-pocket. My mother has adopted another option: she wears them round her neck on a chain. Which is grand until she needs to use them right after lunch: then her view is likely to be occluded by a splot of soup that hasn’t reached either her mouth or her lap. Dau.I says that one of her arty pals is starting a business making ornamental glasses-chains. Maybe I should order one – a double helix? – then I’d be sure to have a mid-afternoon snack. A dinner-catcher is waaaay more useful than a dream-catcher.
Friday, 13 January 2017
2016 a bad year for death?
Oh ho, Friday the Thirteenth, let's not be in a rush to recognise [reports of] ill-things that happen on this day, because they are probably in the normal range. As our family gathered over the Christmas & New Year, it seemed like a lot of celebrities were going down. The girls were down, and both of them are 'on' Friendface, and their social network was restlessly pointing to yet another death. Carrie Fisher was one noted , her mother Debbie Reynolds the following day, John Berger on Christmas Eve. I was going to put together a tribute in the form of short clips respecting each well known person's death, but then we had our internet access issue and I didn't get round to it. That also made me reflect of the folly of watching youtube clips as a way of passing the hours compared to, say, reading . . . books. ANNyway, between us we quickly knocked off a list of a dozen famous folk would had died in 2016: Andrew Sachs, Loenard Cohen, his muse Marianne, David Bowie, Prince, George Michael, Vera Rubin, AA Gill, and Richard Adams. It seemed like a lot. Because of availability error, it was much easier to remember Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds than Muhammad Ali, or Eli Wiesel whose deaths in June 2016 are fading from my memory despite being blobbed up at the time.
Because of the immediacy /availability of the recent it can seem as if 2016 was a bad year for celeb-death and a few people have made that comment. Anyone with a crap-detector should be skeptical about whether such an observation was objectively true but it takes a special type of quant to start shovelling data into a hopper and doing a proper statistical analysis. Jason Crease is The Bloke for doing it. Picked up on Metafilter, where the comments are, as often, worth reading. One comment points out that, with Crease's sort of analysis we can measure whether John Lennon was 'bigger' than Jesus rather than just taking Lennon's assertion to be true [he isn't].
[aside: another comment draws attention the story of a Brazilian woman over many year praying to a statuette of Elrond believing it to be St Anthony. Dau.I also picked up that story a couple of days ago and told me, which allowed me to point out the parallel's with George Orwell being saved from the brink of starvation by praying to a picture of a courtesan].
This is Crease's bottom line for the date of death of mega-celebrties. I've added the arrow pointing out that 2016 is just above the 99% confidence interval. You expect that many deaths in a year about once in two centuries, so it's not a holocaust but it is indeed more than expected. You'll have to click on his article to get the list of 2016's crop of famous-folk. And while you're there, check out the comments at the end, which are instructive.
Thursday, 12 January 2017
Talking rabbits
Rabbits Orychtolagus cuniculus are members of the mammalian order Lagomorpha. They are not rodents, although in the grand scheme of mammalian taxonomy the two orders are close (as are We The Primates) within the Subclass/ super-order Euarchontoglires. One of the defining characteristics of the Lagomorphs is the presence of two diminutive 'useless' incisors tucked up behind the prominent "what's up doc?" first incisors. Rabbits are not kosher because, although they have split 'hooves' they do not chew the cud. Cud chewing is what cows, sheep and goats [Order Artiodactyla] do: having allowed a load of grass to ferment awhile in the rumen, these animals barf it up and give it another going over in the mouth to abstract maximal nutrition. Rabbits double down the digestion too by re-eating their own, first-pass, green, poos to give them another journey through the gut. Neat, eh? Efficient use of the microbial flora of the gut - we should all give it a whirl. As discussed before, whales and dolphins (and pigs!) are Artiodactyls but are not kosher either; because they live in the sea but do not have scales. The whole kosher thang is a series of rules-of-thumb to stop the chosen people eating the wrong food before the days of DNA testing to determine relationships and a proper understanding of food hygiene and the sources of nematode parasites. You can choose to emphasise the wisdom of the ancients in the matter of spoilage of pork products or put it all down to woowah mumbo jumbo. On dit que, the highest loads of intestinal worms are to be found among Lutheran pastors of the US Midwest, who are obliged to sample the, some doubtful, home-made sausage of all their parishioners.
As you know, for Christians and post-Christians, perhaps especially at Christmas, pig Sus scrofa pork, sausage, hammmmmm good and rashers are okay to eat - Chrosher, maybe? And so are rabbits. Rabbits have been in my mind a lot over Christmas, which we spent with Pat the Salt down in Tramore on the Waterford coast. On Christmas Eve evening, I escaped from the heat of the kitchen to take a long blustery walk along Tramore strand to the rabbit burrows [R R = RabBur] at the far end. It's a round trip of about 7km and I've never done it before. Tramore strand is a classic sand-dune system combed out from the rocky headland, on which the town is built, by the prevailing West-to-East current. The back-strand is an interesting domain of tidal slobs and wetlands which was used for several decades as the county dump! There is very little evidence of rabbits in their eponymous burrows nowadays but in the olde dayes, sandy islands in Ireland were often used as rabbit warrens; and this is captured in several place-names, like Coney Island, clapper = Fr clapier = ME clapere rabbit burrow or hutch; coneygarth = cunicularium; coniger etc. Information which I have gleaned from Paul Murphy Dept Arts, Heritage, Regional, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs
12 days later, I was on the beach again, this time on the South coast of Wexford taking a constitutional with friends at Bannow Island. The landscape is very similar to that at Tramore, some barrier dunes protecting an area of slobs and mudflats from the full ravages of Atlantic storms. Bannow Island is not at present an island because the sand has piled up on its Eastern flank to join it to the mainland. The tide rips twice a day through the narrow gap on the other side. The slobscape changes radically after each storm. One of the hummocks on the island is believed to be a man-made rabbit warren and has been the subject of an archaeological dig as described in a chapter by Paul Murphy, doctoral student NUIG, in a new book Medieval Wexford: essays in memory of Billy Colfer eds Ian Doyle and Bernard Browne a snip at €45! And hats off to Mr Murphy for getting such a prestigious publication before he gets his doctorate.
As it happens, even at the moment that I was trudging along Tramore Strand, Richard Adams was dying in England. He was 96 and crossed The Bar just a few miles from Watership Down, in Northern Hampshire, and the place he'd been born, Newbury, just across the county line in Berkshire. You may sing along: Bright Eyes. Watership Down grew from a story about talking rabbits which Adams started to tell his two daughters on a a car-trip in the 1960s. In many ways it is a most unsuitable story for children, especially girls, but it is almost more a story of our time, with 50 million displaced persons shuffling about the planet, than it was 50 years ago. The rabbits are seeking a better life for themselves because their home place has been destroyed by humans in the name of progress. Adams insisted that it was just a story but others have read it is a parable and one of the most inspirational journey stories [Aeneid; Odyssey; Wizard of Earthsea; Canticle of Leibowitz; Grapes of Wrath; Heart of Darkness] ever written. The Metafilter link has dozens of expressions of grief and tribute about how Watership Down changed their young lives. One of the critiques of the book is that the does [doe, a rabbit, a female rabbit] are mere ciphers in the story and that this is what you would expect from the patriarchy. But St Caitlin of Moran's take on such issues is more affirming; a step in the right direction shouldn't be knocked right over and kicked because it doesn't address all the evils of the world. Watership Down pointed out some of the key issues in setting boundaries to the civic state; taking a difficult ethical stance; trusting your pals; and the peculiar condition called leadership, for which responsibility some most unlikely candidates step up to the plate: ". . . the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill . . ." Ecclesiastes 9:11
12 days later, I was on the beach again, this time on the South coast of Wexford taking a constitutional with friends at Bannow Island. The landscape is very similar to that at Tramore, some barrier dunes protecting an area of slobs and mudflats from the full ravages of Atlantic storms. Bannow Island is not at present an island because the sand has piled up on its Eastern flank to join it to the mainland. The tide rips twice a day through the narrow gap on the other side. The slobscape changes radically after each storm. One of the hummocks on the island is believed to be a man-made rabbit warren and has been the subject of an archaeological dig as described in a chapter by Paul Murphy, doctoral student NUIG, in a new book Medieval Wexford: essays in memory of Billy Colfer eds Ian Doyle and Bernard Browne a snip at €45! And hats off to Mr Murphy for getting such a prestigious publication before he gets his doctorate.
As it happens, even at the moment that I was trudging along Tramore Strand, Richard Adams was dying in England. He was 96 and crossed The Bar just a few miles from Watership Down, in Northern Hampshire, and the place he'd been born, Newbury, just across the county line in Berkshire. You may sing along: Bright Eyes. Watership Down grew from a story about talking rabbits which Adams started to tell his two daughters on a a car-trip in the 1960s. In many ways it is a most unsuitable story for children, especially girls, but it is almost more a story of our time, with 50 million displaced persons shuffling about the planet, than it was 50 years ago. The rabbits are seeking a better life for themselves because their home place has been destroyed by humans in the name of progress. Adams insisted that it was just a story but others have read it is a parable and one of the most inspirational journey stories [Aeneid; Odyssey; Wizard of Earthsea; Canticle of Leibowitz; Grapes of Wrath; Heart of Darkness] ever written. The Metafilter link has dozens of expressions of grief and tribute about how Watership Down changed their young lives. One of the critiques of the book is that the does [doe, a rabbit, a female rabbit] are mere ciphers in the story and that this is what you would expect from the patriarchy. But St Caitlin of Moran's take on such issues is more affirming; a step in the right direction shouldn't be knocked right over and kicked because it doesn't address all the evils of the world. Watership Down pointed out some of the key issues in setting boundaries to the civic state; taking a difficult ethical stance; trusting your pals; and the peculiar condition called leadership, for which responsibility some most unlikely candidates step up to the plate: ". . . the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill . . ." Ecclesiastes 9:11
Wednesday, 11 January 2017
On being present
In November, Dau.I came back to Ireland after five years making her way in England. In contrast to her sister, she is determined to learn Irish and live in Baile Átha Cliath, as is the official Irish designation of the capital Dublin. It is a tourist-baffling mystery why An Fear didn’t call the city Dubh Linn, the black pool and provide some bilingual consistency with modern toponymy. Whatever, she’s landed a room in a house in the far Northside in Finglas = Fionnghlas, the clear stream. This is boomtown country which shows as white space on our year 2000 street atlas but is now a busy network of streets, avenues, gardens and closes. She was reflecting that she is returning “home” to Dublin almost exactly 20 years since we left the farmhouse in far outer distant Northside, where she was born, to come down the country and up the mountain where I am now writing.
Who’d chide her for being enthusiastic about her next set of adventures? She’s really looking forward to meeting Finglas library which, it transpires, is about 2km from her new gaff. I was wondering how long it might take to walk, but she said “Duh, I’ve got my bike, I can get there in no seconds flat.”
When I landed my first job after my PhD, our home was about 2km from my office in the University. I had my old black no-gears bike from Dublin college days and used to whizz across the intervening distance twice a day. Occasionally, in the Summer, even coming home for lunch. After a year and more of this, I decided that this whizz time was dead time and it wasn’t good for my sanity or equanimity; so I gave up the bike. I set off a little earlier and paid attention to the Edwardian and Victorian streetscape that I passed through. It’s what trendies of the present day would flag as being mindful. It’s a long way from Mindful I was reared! After a few weeks of this new, more relaxed regime, I realised that I kept checking my watch at the key intersections to see if my progress was on schedule. This will never do, I said, and gave up wearing the watch. That’s about 30 years ago, and I’ve never missed the wrist-watch.
I told this tale as a bit of paternal parable and Dau.I’s response was “Yes, that might work, if I walk to the library, I can start reading the books on the way back. Heck and jiminy, who’d be in the present moment, when you can be on a flying horse slaying goblins? The wonderful Caitlin Moran was in a similar case with libraries. "I’ve written about that library before. About how this place was the delight of my life – a thing I would have married in my pre-pubertal anthropomorphic phase. I would have been happy as a clam – and, if the gods had so blessed us, in later year, I would have got pregnant by that library, and would have raised a couple of little mobile libraries together".
Dau.I was a little intrigued that I had been obsessively checking my watch back in the day when we had one-function devices. She suggested that I/we should have stuck with watch-glancing because once done it's over . . . until the next OCD tic kicks in. People of her generation don't have watches either, they have smartphones - checking the time on one of them might well involved a jump down a rabbit-hole of social media which will spit you out in anther frame of mind an hour after you last checked the time. Go on, give up the old instachatter, it's just a tic and you'll never miss it.
Who’d chide her for being enthusiastic about her next set of adventures? She’s really looking forward to meeting Finglas library which, it transpires, is about 2km from her new gaff. I was wondering how long it might take to walk, but she said “Duh, I’ve got my bike, I can get there in no seconds flat.”
When I landed my first job after my PhD, our home was about 2km from my office in the University. I had my old black no-gears bike from Dublin college days and used to whizz across the intervening distance twice a day. Occasionally, in the Summer, even coming home for lunch. After a year and more of this, I decided that this whizz time was dead time and it wasn’t good for my sanity or equanimity; so I gave up the bike. I set off a little earlier and paid attention to the Edwardian and Victorian streetscape that I passed through. It’s what trendies of the present day would flag as being mindful. It’s a long way from Mindful I was reared! After a few weeks of this new, more relaxed regime, I realised that I kept checking my watch at the key intersections to see if my progress was on schedule. This will never do, I said, and gave up wearing the watch. That’s about 30 years ago, and I’ve never missed the wrist-watch.
I told this tale as a bit of paternal parable and Dau.I’s response was “Yes, that might work, if I walk to the library, I can start reading the books on the way back. Heck and jiminy, who’d be in the present moment, when you can be on a flying horse slaying goblins? The wonderful Caitlin Moran was in a similar case with libraries. "I’ve written about that library before. About how this place was the delight of my life – a thing I would have married in my pre-pubertal anthropomorphic phase. I would have been happy as a clam – and, if the gods had so blessed us, in later year, I would have got pregnant by that library, and would have raised a couple of little mobile libraries together".
Dau.I was a little intrigued that I had been obsessively checking my watch back in the day when we had one-function devices. She suggested that I/we should have stuck with watch-glancing because once done it's over . . . until the next OCD tic kicks in. People of her generation don't have watches either, they have smartphones - checking the time on one of them might well involved a jump down a rabbit-hole of social media which will spit you out in anther frame of mind an hour after you last checked the time. Go on, give up the old instachatter, it's just a tic and you'll never miss it.
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