Winds and Breezes

It’s been a while since new pictures here.

Right now I am listening to a chillout list on my iPod. It includes obscure chillout stuff from European discos, the soundtrack to Chocolat, Astor Piazolla, and obscure French rock, plus some Breton stuff. I have an eclectic taste in music.

That’s good sometimes, particularly for bargain box purposes.

A cursory glance at the news sites I usually look at tells me that the world hasn’t improved any economically over yesterday; so I’m not going to comment on them. There’s no point. And I lack the motivation to get worked up over anything much.

I was shopping today and I didn’t want anything. I don’t want any more Photoshop books (I have half a dozen), CDs (because iTunes gets all my money and anyway I don’t listen to the radio to “discover” new stuff, thus saving myself money). There was nothing in TK Maxx, not even yet another pair of flipflops. I’m trying to work out if this is because I am essentially very happy (good) or essentially very lethargic (not so good). I later got accused of being unusually negative about something whcih suggests lethargy rather than happy. But that was in a debate about supporting Enda Kenny, so possibly disillusionment with how politics work in this country.

About 7 years ago, when I had absolutely no money, there was an ad for a house somewhere in Brittany. In Finistere, I think; I can’t remember for sure. I was still on dial up at the time.  It cost 29000E. A bargain you’ll agree. It was tiny, but I must say I liked the look of it. Today, I remembered that there was a lot of dereliction around the high mountain parts of Provence, where I went on holiday about 3 years ago (not for me the beaches though; I went to the Gorge du Verdon and over exposed four rolls of film because my then camera did not have the capability to shoot faster than 1/1000) and Avignon and other nice places like that. What I remember was the number of houses just standing in the middle of nowhere around parts of the route I drove. I was told, at the time, that there was no employment for the young people there; they all left. The country had the look of it it, to be honest. Nothing to be doing other than hitting the bright lights of Nice.

I had a look to see how much a derelict site would cost you in Provence, for the purposes of restoring and behaving like one of the Germans who moved to Ireland in the 1970s, you know? I had a vision of doing something similar, going to Provence, to the high mountain areas, where no young person could find a job and finding some way of making it financially viable, but not by farming lavender because that looks like backbreaking work and my back, courtesy of a nasty recurring sports injury already has its own problems. Lavender farming OUT, but anything else considered, including working in McDonalds to pay for renovations. But not eating in McDonalds.

They’re too expensive. No, seriously. Already, dereliction in Ireland is over priced, but frankly, Provence is not far behind. I’ve scrapped the idea of Provence, the high mountain comparatively poor parts, as it’s just too expensive. In Brittany, I will find a wreck for 30K. In Provence I can pay four to five times that. Also, I suspect that the making of some sort of a living might be more likely in Brittany than in Provence, if only because far fewer of the young people have left, there are two universities and the roads aren’t regularly closed by falling bits of mountain. Please understand, I didn’t want to do a Peter Mayle trick - seriously - I just wanted to live somewhere marginally less rat-racish than Dublin.

I’m damn sorry I didn’t buy that fisherman’s cottage thing in Brittany at 29K seven years ago. It didn’t need to be renovated.

Oh well, this is life.