Democracy, croissants, art and trains (Interlude)

Ahem. Yes, I know this post is supposed to be about Paris, but I have been sidetracked this week. Luckily for you there is still time a plenty for you to be similarly sidetracked.

This week I have mostly be attending The Convergence Festival, Dublin's annual conference on sustainability and resilience. Run by the good folks in Cultivate, based between the Greenhouse in the City Centre and Cloughjordan eco village in Tipperary, the conference started on Wednesday and stretches on into next week.

Of most interest to me were presentations and discussions in a World Cafe format on Wednesday on lessons to be learned from the global south, which started with talks on technology transfer but which left me with more insights into community building than I was expecting, and a panel discussion on Thursday night on the nature and function of Co-operatives, that produced two key insights; Gavin Harte, former head of An Taisce, called for a Brown Movement, a mix of Red and Green, arguing that it is impossible to talk about sustainability without addressing issues of social justice, and everybody's favourite broadcaster Duncan Stewart called for both the raising of the carbon tax from its current €15/ton to €200/ton, and the subsequent creation of a fund from the proceeds of which 25% would be redistributed across the board to the poorest 25% in society. Radical stuff indeed, and expect more about these thoughts in a future post.

I also made it along to a screening of "Home" in the Lighthouse, a film by Yann Arthus-Bertrand, photographer and producer of the "Earth from Above" books and exhibitions, pretty stunning even if it was produced for Gucci and their chums, as well as to the one-day workshop on creating Resilient Cities. The Conference continues today and on into next week both here and in Cloughjordan, with an opportunity tomorrow to visit the eco-village itself with an organised tour and buses from Dublin. Full information on all the events can be found here.

Of further interest to those of you living in Dublin is the annual Anarchist Book Fair happening today in Liberty Hall. A good range of book stalls albeit with a somewhat specialist selection on offer will be there all day, accompanied by a wide range of talks including one by Brian Hanley and Scott Millar, authors of last year's excellent history of the Official IRA/Worker's Party "The Lost Revolution", the progenitor of Democratic Left and the origin of most of the current Labour Party leadership. The BookFair runs all day, and is followed up tomorrow by a Radical Walking Tour of the city starting at 1pm outside the Ambassador Cinema on O'Connell Street, all of which is free.

Should none of these events pique your interest then may I recommend a lecture next Wednesday in The Science Gallery entitled 'From Mathematics to Art' by Daina Taimina, mathematician, academic, creator of Hyperbolic Crochet, and occasional commentator on this blog (well, once is technically an occasion). If you haven't seen the Hyperbolic Reef its well worth arriving a good bit early to wander around and take it all in.

While all of these events are annual or once-off, there are a remarkable amount of things to do in Dublin on any given day that don't have to cost the earth or your life-savings. Travel writer Anto Howard has just produced 'Slow Dublin', a guide to Dublin for Dubliners, encompassing the principles of the Slow Movement, with suggestions for walks, activities, slow food and the occasional bit of responsible shopping. Nicely produced with interviews, great pictures and a genuine sense of wonder in the city around us that we rarely look at in anything less than a negative light, it is a cornucopia of ideas for an ethical rainy, or not so rainy, day.

The amazing weather may be gone but there is still an awful lot of things to be doing out there in the next few days. Dublin can be great, but you have to open your eyes and let it in.

(This unusually perky and positive post has been brought to you by Unkie Dave's three weeks away from Dublin. If there is one thing we've learned from Joyce, Beckett, Behan, et al is that to truly appreciate Dublin you need to get far, far away from it on regular, if not permanent, occasions)

Democracy, croissants, art and trains (Part Deux)

And so on to Paris.

Why Paris? If the original purpose of our impromptu jaunt was to feed my seemingly unquenchable addiction for all things electoral, what reason could we have for extending our trip eastward into the heart of Old Europe?

We like travel, pure and simple. There is something about living in Dublin that necessitates the occasional experience of being elsewhere to remain sane, like a release valve on a nuclear power plant that stops the whole enterprise going Chernobyl. Other people smoke, or have cars, drink or spawn offspring, but our rainy day funds always seem to find themselves winding their way away into the pockets, purses and wallets of folks further afield than a Number 10 bus manages to take you, and herein lies the problem.

We are an island nation. While technically it is possible to travel abroad without leaving our fair shores, aside from the funny coloured post-boxes and occasional acts of mindless barbarism and senseless sectarian violence, going to the North is a lot like staying at home, only more grim, like that point in the evening at a party where its actually morning and most people have sobered up but there are still enough folks around you in worse shape than you to remind you that it really is time you were heading off to bed, but for some reason you still haven't left the party and end up sitting on a couch in a room not talking to the other people around you, because they too are sitting in silence trying to work up the willpower to go home, and as you look from bleary set of eyes to bleary set of eyes it slowly dawns on you that not only do you look in all actuality just as haggard as everyone else in the room, they are having the same moment of anguish-laden self-revelation as you, and yet somehow they seem more horrified by the thought that they look as bad as you than you do of looking like them. That sort of grim.

Also, their Minister for Education doesn't believe in evolution.

So in order to experience a more engaging form of international travel it is necessary to leave our green and pleasant island altogether and this starts to place a toll on one's carbon footprint, or as The Very Understanding Girlfriend and I have come to call it, our Carbon Crater. This loomed uncomfortably large in our thoughts as we considered the options for our last-minute jaunt to London, and as a compromise we decided that we could go, but only if we could do so by train.

Again, it is important to remember that we are an island nation, and trains are notoriously un-buoyant.

Luckily as an island nation, we are remarkably well served by ferries, which (when all external doors remain firmly closed) are very buoyant indeed.

In order to compete with the illusion of cheap flights from budget airlines, the ferry companies on the Irish Sea operate a SailRail promotion, which lets you buy a combined ferry and rail ticket from Dublin to anywhere in the UK for a fraction of the price of individual tickets. Only its not available for purchase online. I phoned the number given on the website to book a ticket, and was told that unfortunately tickets can only be sold by phone eight or more days in advance of travel, and we were looking to leave in three day. Poo. Good news though, tickets could be bought in person at any major train station. Huzzah! I put down the phone and cycled to Heuston Station, one of our two largest train stations, only to be told that SailRail tickets were only available at Connolly, the other of our two largest train stations. Poo. To be fair though I had a 50/50 chance of picking the right one, better odds than the Lotto.

Giving up for the day I decided to drop in to Connolly the following morning, 48 hours before our travel, and upon doing so was somewhat relieved to find that yes, they did sell SailRail tickets, and then somewhat less relieved to be told that because of the volcano they had been told to stop all sales.

"Volcano?" I asked.

"Yes, the volcano. You may have noticed that for the last few weeks there has been an Icelandic volcano erupting, and the resulting clouds of volcanic ash have played a merry game of whack-a-mole with European flight patterns, resulting in the on-again off-again closure of Irish airspace at seemingly random moments?" came the helpful reply, though possibly not in those exact words.

"I am aware of such a phenomena", said I, "but I am confused, for is this ticket not for a ferry, a craft that travels at, and is technically somewhat limited to, sea level, and as such should not be disrupted by a cloud of volcanic ash hovering at somewhere above 30,000 feet?"

"Ah yes", they responded, "but you see many other travelers are just as cunning as you, and have noticed the ferry's innate invulnerability to clouds of volcanic ash, and thus demand for SailRail tickets has been quite high. Unfortunately our system is not computerised and so the last time the airports were closed, between the three ticketing agents we oversold by just a tad."

"a tad?" I asked.

"um, by about 2,000 places."

"and the ferry holds how many passengers?"

"about 800"

"aha", I nodded sagely, "a tad."

"yes, a tad. So now as long as the airports might close you can only buy your SailRail tickets directly at the ferryport on your day of travel"

"Yay!", said I, and returned home cursing both the Icelandic volcano elves and the end of the last ice age, when retreating glaciers and rising sea levels scythed our battered and windswept land clean away from the rest of Europe. "A pox on all geology", I cried.

So I broke down and bought the ferry and rail tickets separately online, and in the end only paid €30 more than the combined ticket would have been, but it was the principle of the thing that was galling. Thus given the many hours of pain and frustration that had gone in to the (albeit last-minute) planning of our trip, we thought that once in London we should see how much farther we could go while remaining true to our admittedly slightly flexible green travel ethos, and seized upon the idea of a Eurostar trip under the English Channel to Paris, and a TGV trip or two to the rest of France. Five minutes later we were in possession of deux allez-simple à Paris and our last-minute jaunt started to feel more real.

Train travel is great, when it works, and for the first leg of our European adventure it worked, and worked well. After a fast and pleasant ferry crossing we connected seamlessly with an awaiting train in Hollyhead, and by 'seamlessly' I mean 'after a panicked dash off the ferry and into the adjoining train station to join the queue to collect our train tickets, which could only be collected in person from a live human being at the single ticket window in the train station that mysteriously doesn't have a ticket collection machine unlike almost every other train station in the UK, while two hundred equally nervous people waited agitatedly in line behind me because a) they too had been unable to buy combined SailRail tickets and b) were equally fearful of missing the connecting train given the fact that it was due to leave in ten minutes'. Thanks to my willingness (some might say eagerness) to trample over old people and children in pursuit of my goals I secured a place near the top of the queue and thus we collected our tickets and made it on the train with a good five minutes to spare.

Others were not so lucky, but such is life.

Don't blame me, blame Darwin.

In contrast boarding Eurostar the following Monday morning couldn't have been easier, just very relaxed, comfortable and hassle free, clearing passport control at St. Pancras Station in London and stepping off onto the platform at Gare du Nord in Paris some two hours twenty-two minutes later. Its only as you step on a train in London and off again in Paris two hours later that you truly appreciate just how isolated we are in Ireland, but I may have mentioned that before.

(I appreciate that I have not actually managed to explain anything about our actual visit to Paris and beyond in this post, and that in fact much of the action and adventure detailed herein takes place either before or concurrent with events as outlined in my previous post. Rather than catgeorise this post as at best a minor digression or at worst a time-thieving deviation, I suggest that you view it more along the lines of a flash sideways, à la Season Six of 'Lost', though without the obvious implication that you and I, and the other assembled readers of this blog, have together created Booming Back as a communal holding place for our souls, a chance for the departed spirits of all those we hold most dear to join together until we are all united and ready to leave this place together and Move On. But without Mr Eko. Seriously, what's the deal with that? The whinging brother and sister from Season One get to come back, but not Mr Eko? Dude, that's weak, seriously weak. But I digress, we'll get to Paris in the next post, honestly.)

Democracy, croissants, art and trains (Part One)

Hello, my name is Unkie Dave, and I am a politics addict (Hello Unkie Dave!).

They say the first stage in overcoming a problem is admitting that you have a problem, a later stage is then apologising to your loved ones for all the hurt and trauma your addiction has caused them. That would place me somewhere between step one and step eight, as I freely admit I have a problem and love politics of almost any stripe, but not only have I failed to seek absolution and forgiveness from my loved ones, I continue to drag them headfirst into the mud and filth-laden mire that is my addiction.

Over the last eighteen months frequent readers may have noticed that I have been of the opinion that an election is quite badly needed here in Ireland. On more than one occasion, be it clerical abuse, the Criminal Justice Bill, NAMA, Anglo Irish Bank, AIB, the Civil Partnerships Bill, expenses scandals, ministerial interference in criminal cases, ministerial electioneering dirty tricks involving journalists, or just plain and simple appalling mismanagement of the economy, it has been suggested that the most appropriate thing for those in power to do would be to raise their collective hands, say "My bad", and let the other folks have a go, or at the very least let the good citizens of the nation have a chance to have their voices heard. Finally, after eighteen months of deep frustration and desperate cries out into the night, someone in power finally heard me and decided to do the right thing and go to the nation, cap in hand, and give power back to those with whom it rightfully rests, the good men and women that are a nation's citizenry.

Unfortunately it was in the wrong country.

No mater, an election is an election and not quite being able to justify a flight to Bangkok either financially or ecologically, I convinced The Very Understanding Girlfriend to join me on a mad dash by ferry and train to London on election day, where my Rather Tolerant Sister and her fiancee accepted my imposition upon them with grace and charm. When you are Underemployed you rather forget that not everyone a) can accommodate guests with less than twenty-four hours notice and b) has the luxury of staying up to 5am watching election results come in because of something called "work" in an "office" that starts at 8am.

A truly fantastic few hours then ensued, wherein we accompanied them to a polling station (apparently Irish folks are allowed vote in UK national elections, a courtesy reciprocated here for Dail, Local and EU elections, but not for Presidential elections or referenda. I suggested that my sister vote Irish Parliamentary Party, but strangely enough they didn't seem to be running a candidate in her borough), took a wander by Westminster to see the BBC projecting a tally of the results on the side of Big Ben, almost getting run over by John Snow on a bicycle in the process, then on to the Queen Elizabeth II Centre on the South Bank for an election party before finally calling it a night sometime around 5 when it became obvious that no clearer picture would emerge of the results until much, much later.

Saturday saw me joining a protest in Trafalgar Square (again, there's that addiction thing, I'm not really too bothered about what exactly a protest is about, as long as its something vaguely to do with overthrowing the established order you can pretty much count me in) calling for the introduction of proportional representation. The UK electoral system for national elections uses the rather antiquated First Past the Post system coupled with single seat constituencies. This means that a party can get an overall majority in Parliament with less than a third of the popular vote, or conversely get a third of the popular vote and somehow end up with ten percent of the total seats thanks to decades of gerrymandered constituency boundaries.

The irony for me as I marched on Westminster with Billy Bragg to the chants of "Fair Votes Now" was that just as the Green Party here is seeking to do away with Proportional Representation in favour of a German list system in the vain hope that such a change will stop them from being eradicated at the polls next time out, there is a strong movement in the UK clamoring to adopt PR as the fairest and most just electoral system available.

Another thought that stood to the forefront of my mind was that you can now add Parliamentary Democracy to the list of things like football, rugby, cricket etc that the British Empire gave to the world and now sucks rather badly at, for we former colonials are clearly way ahead of the game with our historic and somewhat magical ability to represent broad swathes of the electorate through coalition governments, a situation that seemed unfathomable to both the UK press and general public as negotiations took place between the parties. It seems the English press, like their US counterparts, are very uncomfortable when issues are not black and white, or there is no clear winner. And of course everything must have a winner, for how else can you tell who the losers are?

When the final result was reached once The Very Understanding Girlfriend and I had reached Paris the following week, I was surprised. The Liberal Democrats are a progressive party, and were the beneficiary of votes from many disaffected Labour supporters. The Conservatives are certainly not their natural bed-fellows. But again I was reminded of the Green Party, and words from the Green Parliamentary Party during the special conference on the renewed program for government to the effect that if you are not in politics to be in power you have no business being in politics.

No doubt the LibDems believe, like the Greens did here, that it is better to be in Government with a chance to enact some of their policies than to be outside with nothing at all. The danger for them will be that as the much smaller partner they will find it difficult to exert real influence, and yet will paradoxically come to be blamed for failing to prevent the more draconian measures being passed, being viewed, as they will be, as the conscience of the Government. Just as Eamon Ryan or John Gormley seem to be wheeled out to the media to answer for the Government's failings at every junction, so too can we expect to see a succession of LibDem whipping boys taking the brunt of the public and media wrath for the inevitable public cuts and tax hikes that will be introduced in short order. The question is will any successes that can be clearly attributed to the LibDems be enough to protect them from the inevitable backlash at the polls come next election? Again they would do well to look closely at the Greens here, more as an abject lesson of what not to do.

Saturday rolled on into Sunday, and between election updates The Very Understanding Girlfriend and I managed to slip in an extended visit to the Tate Modern (very big), some experimental Japanese trash-rock in Hoxton (very loud), and some amazing Indian food in Brick Lane (very tasty, and very cheap), along with a veritable cavalcade of friends and family, including my six year old cousin who somewhat endearingly insists on calling me Unkie Dave. I am tempted to draw her a diagram/genealogy chart explaining the erroneous nature of her chosen nomenclature, but where's the fun in that?

On Monday morning we packed up our purple pro-democracy banners and accidentally-curry-infused jumpers, restored our I-can't-believe-its-still-hard-currency Euros to pride of place in our wallets and boarded an early morning train to Paris, the wonder of which still brings a smile to my face. Its only as you step on a train in London and off again in Paris two hours later that you truly appreciate just how isolated we are in Ireland.

A rugged windswept and insular rock in the North Atlantic, but at least we know how to do elections.

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More photos

So here we are now.

Wow, you turn your back for a few minutes and folks try and storm the Dail, create synthetic life, and create some form of bizarre political smorgasbord in the UK called a "Coalition Government", not necessarily all at the same time mind you, or the same folks, but an interesting few days. And I'm happy to say I witnessed one of them, and not the one you may think.

Yup, this fortnight I have mostly been in, um, elsewhere. London, to be exact. And Paris. And Giverny. And Bordeaux, um, and Lascaux. And, um, Carcassonne. And under the sea, and over the sea, and on an awful lot of trains.

You see at the very, very last minute The Very Understanding Girlfriend and I (proving just exactly how understanding she really is) dropped everything and headed off to the UK on election day to watch it all in person, by ferry and train, because we wanted to do it all ecologically. But we didn't stop there, for we took the Eurostar to Paris and then slowly worked our way down over the course of a few days to Carcassonne where we were finally forced to abandon our ecological credentials and fly back to Dublin this afternoon.

Along the way we joined pro-democracy rallies in Trafalgar square, visited Monet's garden, toured the Centre du George Pompidou at midnight, saw possibly the best reproduction of prehistoric cave art in the world, and walked the walls of a Cathar stronghold at sunset. And avoided an awful lot of duck liver, which was surprisingly difficult.

Updates will follow over the next few days, and no doubt a few pictures will as well. Thanks for your patience, and its good to be back.

Expect delays

Expect fewer than normal posts in the next few days, if that is even possible given my recent paltry output. There's things n'stuff a happenin', and I just don't seem to have a moment to write.

Feel free to talk amongst yourselves though.