Keeping us in Czech

Slow off the mark I know but various circumstances prevented me from posting on Ireland's exit from the Euro 2008 qualifiers until now (OK, they still have a mathematical chance of getting through, but I tend not to put my faith in maths at such moments). We lost 1-0 last night, a result that has provoked anew sideline judgements on the merits of Irish soccer (believe me, the shambles in the rugby - supposedly Ireland's 'new sport' - was far more significant). To be totally honest, the team played well. We gave away a bad goal in a poor opening twenty minutes and were thwarted on a number of occasions after as we tried valiantly to redress the balance. Kevin Doyle hit the post, and, at the risk of being mean, it was a poor finish - the ball was always going away from the goal and it was no surprise that it deflected the wrong side of Paul McShane. I still think that Doyle was surprised to be called onside (which he definitely was) and he instinctively fluffed his shot. His Reading teammate Steven Hunt was superb when he came on for John O'Shea in the first half and his jinking runs silenced the fairweather home support that had been booing him because of that collision with Peter Čech last year. When he got sent off, it was harsh (which both managers agreed on) and after last night's game I think it might comfortably be said that Greek official Kyros Vassaras is a fool whose future absence from international football would benefit everybody. His comic display in the Ireland v Israel game two years ago (in which he sent off Andy Reid in mysterious circumstances) was matched in Prague. And I'm not being a sore loser about that - there were many dodgy decisions that went against the Czechs too. Not to mention his Graham Poll-esque double-booking of Marek Janukoski, which UEFA have since whitewashed but which the rest of us remain sceptical about.

Ultimately a decent performance was not enough and the lost ground that the Irish had already conceded in Nicosia, at Lansdowne against the Czechs and in Bratislava the other night, will now determine out exit from the competition. I still think that Staunton is not a capable manager but I have to acknowledge that he has instilled a sense of self-belief in the team, which allowed them to attack in both games this week. The team is limited enough but they would surely grace a major tournament better than a mediocre Czech team that is a pallid shadow of the side that played the most exhilarating football at Euro 2004. But then again, we lost and they didn't. Once again for an Irish side, the loyal fan is looking two years forward, in the hope of a qualification for the South African World Cup. My own frustration at the failure cult that seems to prevail in Irish football and which has been endorsed by 'battlers' such as Niall Quinn, who has lectured fans from his Guardian column against expecting 'miracles' is sharpened because we get so close so often and fail miserably. There is no reason why we should not be competing every two years in a major tournament. Our squad might be limited but with good organisation that extends beyond the majesty of Richard Dunne's defending, a regular spot in major finals would be well within our reach. Keano was right: until the will exists in Irish football to punish failure, we're not going to do much.

I'd Be Late for my Own Funeral...

I have waited literally my entire life for Sligo to win a Connacht Championship; when I first saw the world in October 1975, Barnes Murphy's men were the reigning champions, only the second title in their history, though the lustre of their replay win in the provincial final had been lost by their hammering at the hands of the mighty Kerry team of Eoin Liston, Jack O'Shea, Mikey Sheehy et al in the All-Ireland semi-final in the eighth month of my gestation.

There have been three provincial final defeats since, in 1981 and 1997 against Mayo and five years ago against Galway, when Sligo later defeated Tyrone and ran eventual All-Ireland champions Armagh to three points in a replay. The latter two finals were contested by men that were very much my own generation and I'd played underage football football and soccer against many of them. I was at the final defeat by Mayo ten years ago and followed the campaigns of five and six years ago on TV. This makes my failure to remember yesterday's final, which resulted in a 1-10 to 0-12 win over Galway, all the more embarrassing and unforgivable. It was a text message from my mother, who was at the game, that told me the good news. I wait every minute of my existence for the unthinkable to happen (and this year the prospect of a provincial final win was particularly unthinkable) and when it does, I am, as it were, at the bar, or in queue for the jacks, if you will.

Even worse, I have been unable to see the edited highlights on RTÉ's news streaming because of foreign broadcast rights. No sign of it yet either on YouTube. Apart from one Sligo person I know over here, there is no-one to celebrate it with either. How can one savour a moment in isolation? I suppose people did it easily enough in the pre-Setanta era but that's no consolation. I won't be missing the quarter-final clash, whenever it is, and whoever it's against.

Apple Lossless

A couple of months back I listed a number of items I have lost over the years, many of them things I have since managed well enough without, the loss of which having occasioned only a temporary frustration. The weekend just passed almost added my iPod to the list, as at the double birthday party of two friends in a bar near Porte de la Villette on Friday night, I returned to pick it up from where a friend was mixing only to find that it had disappeared. Being among friends I didn't suspect it stolen and the presence of a similar apparatus, with a similar cover suggested that it might have been taken by accident. It had in fact been mistakenly given by my friend to a friend of the owner of the other iPod in question. After about twelve hours' worrying and resignation to its loss, its whereabouts were located and I collected it off a personable Mexican filmmaker called Juan on Sunday evening.

There are few things I carry about that I worry about losing - my laptop is obviously one, whenever I have it out and about, as is my wallet, for equally obvious reasons; another is my notebook (or notebooks) and I generally have good luck with them when I do lose them, my mobile phone is another, more to avoid the hassle and expense of replacing it, and since I bought it last November, my iPod is another. These are the only things that I keep on my person whenever I go out, entrusting them to nobody, and when people lose phones and mp3-players that they have left in jackets or bags lying in corners of bars I don't have a huge amount of sympathy. Nor did I have much sympathy for myself after my rare lapse of vigilance the other night. Which makes me feel guilty that I should attach such importance to such a clearly unimportant thing. It is truly dispiriting to evaluate loss in terms of consumer goods, and the fact that it has come back to a stupidly piggish consumer (as I am wont to see myself) induces a sort of consumer's remorse at this level of effeteness that I have allowed myself to attain. I soon got over my angst by putting Icky Thump on the retrieved toy, as well as Richard Hawley's 'Cole Corner', which I have dallied far too long over getting hold of. Thanks once again, Tim.

Wi-fi Wi-fi Everywhere and a Drop to Drink

Paris, from next month, will be the first 'digital city' in Europe with the establishment by the municipality of wi-fi access points at 262 locations across the city, divided evenly between municipal buildings such as public libraries and parks and gardens (with the exception of the Tuileries and the Luxembourg gardens, which do not come under the city's auspices). The points are accessible during opening hours, though Parvis de Hôtel de Ville (in front of the City Hall) and the Champs de Mars (in front of the Eiffel Tower) will have 24-hour access for those foolhardy enough to carry their laptops about in the early hours of the morning.

The initiative will cost €2.9 million to implement, with an annual running cost of €540,000, which media-savvy Mayor Bertrand Delanoë will no doubt fund quite easily from advertising. Paris is already endowed with a large number of bars and cafés offering excellent free wi-fi access for the price of a coffee. From now on it will be possible to be online almost ad infinitum. Which is a bit bothersome for me, considering how much time I tend to waste on the Internet; when I need to get some writing done I usually decamp to a public place where the temptation of clicking on my web browser is not a potential distraction. Now there may be few such places left. Still, wi-fi users in Dublin will be envious at this indulging of Parisian surfers, especially considering the extortionate rates charged almost everywhere for wi-fi there. If it's any consolation, the Dublinesque weather that Paris has been subjected to recently - with rain every day for the past three weeks - will ensure that I won't be sitting on a park bench blogging too soon.

Mauvaise Passe

Distressing news received this weekend, as I found out that MK2, that greatest of all cinema chains, has pulled out of its Carte Le Pass subscription, that it has offered for the past five years in conjunction with Gaumont and Pathé. The Carte Le Pass allows unlimited access to up to fifty cinemas in Paris for €19.99 per month, which is a damn good deal when you consider that ticket prices are usually €9 per screening. MK2 have fallen out with their partners due to their impending eviction from the Beaugrenelle shopping centre, to be replaced by a Pathé multiplex. The card is still valid at MK2 cinemas until November, at which point going to the cinema is going to become much more expensive for me, as Gaumount and Pathé have both a less interesting roster of films and are located the opposite side of the city. It will still be valid for two of my local cinemas in Bastille but if MK2 choose to launch an initiative of their own, I will be forced to choose between two.

They've Got My Number

The new phone book arrived on my doorstep today; perhaps because of falling home phone use, the Parisian White Pages is only offered on a by-arrondissement basis now, with only the Yellow Pages covering all of Paris. I don't use my landline too much, except for international phone calls, as they are free to other landlines in most other countries I would be calling, but I checked to see if I had been added as I wasn't sure if I requested to be ex-directory when I got my phone installed. I was there but it wasn't my home number but my mobile; how it ended up there I am not sure but I am worried that I might now be subject to spam cold-calling, especially as my number is not listed with a symbol that denotes telemarketers are unwelcome. I have a year of this to put up with now. Why was I not informed of this in advance?

That Was #500

The last post was the 500th I have made on this blog since I started last July. At just under eleven months that is not a bad average considering I only started the blog to regain a bit of momentum that had been lost in my writing elsewhere. The very first post, written two days after the World Cup Final, offered little in the way of direction and ambition, and though the blog has gained some speed in that time it is still very much a hotch-potch, an indulgent, ad hoc amalgam of things I would otherwise have been mumbling incomprehensively to anyone that might be forced to listen (those that know me will aver that my accent is rather strong, except maybe those from Sligo, who will argue the very opposite).

The blog, enjoyable as it is, has become an albatross of sorts around my neck however, a distraction from doing other activities, the same ones whose abeyence occasioned it to be started in the first place. For this reason the posts may well become less frequent over the next few months, which is something I regret as I enjoy writing it, and, to be totally honest, I could probably have posted 2,000 times had work commitments, the odd hangover and the more productivity-stifling reaches of Web 2.0 not stymied me. I have really had that many ideas, which is no bad thing. I have to admit, of course, that keeping them from the world was no bad thing either.

With regards to blogging and the Internet I remain a sceptical enthusiast. Much has been written in the past couple of days about Andrew Keen's attack on the extension of the publishing franchise afforded by the Net; while I feel that Keen's gripes - to judge at least from the quotes in the adjoined article - owe more to sour grapes over a loss of prestige of the official intelligensia, it's hard not to agree that much of the Internet is depressing to wade through. Don't get me wrong: I read about 100 blogs daily and I would probably search for many more I had more time to satisfy this bulimic habit. Those that I read are all excellent and the fact that their RSS feeds end up on my newsreader every day is the only worthwhile praise there is.

I have to say though that blogging, for all its liberatory qualities and enjoyability is still inferior to print. Perhaps not print newspapers, the vast majority of which, worldwide, are of dubious trustworthiness and wretched quality, but to books, yes, I'm afraid it is. Blogging has legions of fine qualities and there are great writers on the web that, thanks to the medium, get audiences that might otherwise be denied them. Some have progressed to writing a book, from Salam Pax to Twenty Major, but writing a book is a different kettle of fish altogether. It demands stamina, quality, balls, self-belief, discipline, a mastery of the most mundane technical matters and, after publication, a willingness to turn yourself into a consummate bore in order to get anyone to read it. That does not make it a greater art - it doesn't even make it an art in itself at all - but the challenge is a lot bigger. Blogging is great, and I would hope to continue this one for a couple of years to come but the challenge of writing something more substantial is much greater.

Lest I appear to be too serious here, I would like to thank all that read this blog (even those that expect to find pictures of Lawrie Sanchez or Artur Boruc in the nip or torrent files of glamour models peeing on one another) for doing so, and I have resolved to reply to all comments from now on (being from the west of Ireland, manners don't come naturally to me). Here's to another 500, as lazy hacks in the old media would say.

That's Great Tax-Returning Weather, So It Is

The weather is miserable this week, cold and drizzly - more like Dublin in mid-February - and tax returns are due in tomorrow. For somebody with no dependents, no property and a narrow range of renumerative activities, filling in the form should be straightforward enough. But, of course, it's not. I think I've cracked it now, and with work in the morning - to be rapidly followed by dropping it in person into the tax office, just to be safe - I have no desire to pursue the issue any more. Let them come after me if they want to. I'm off to bed.

"Try the Carriage Office!"

Things I've lost over the years:

• One brown corduroy jacket, lost in the Castlemore 'Night Club', Ballaghaderreen, Co. Roscommon, early 90s.
• One Filofax, on the Dublin-Sligo train, c.2000
• Three mobile phones, the second of which was lost twice and returned to me twice, all in the back of taxis, various times.
• One wallet, replete with credit cards and various forms of ID. In the back of a Parisian cab after having shared a joint with a dodgy cab driver, April 2003.
• One copy of Broken April by Ismail Kadare, in a café in Bastille, September 2000 (since repurchased and read).
• One copy of All the Names by José Saramago, somewhere on Parliament Street, Dublin, March 2001. Promptly repurchased and read.
• One copy of The Book of Evidence by John Banville, in a phone box at St-Germain-des-Près, early 2003. Since borrowed and read.
• One record bag (recovered), containing the following
• One pocket Paris Pratique (street map) deluxe edition (unrecovered)
  
• One Moleskine notebook, the written pages of which were ripped out and posted to me, the rest of the notebook being unrecovered.
• One copy of In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin (unrecovered, still unfinished)
• One set of keys to my old place in Dublin (recovered)
• One brown zippy-up top (recovered). All the above lost on Metro line 1, September 2005
• Two more Moleskine notebooks, one on a Ryanair Dublin-Paris flight, January 2005, one lost three times, twice in cinemas, once in the Bernard Shaw pub, South Richmond Street, Dublin, recovered each time, December 2006-January 2007
• Two other notebooks, one lost in the back of a taxi, Dublin, July 2001, one lost in Bar du Marché, rue du Buci, Paris, January 2003
• One copy of Ways of Seeing by John Berger, in the back of a taxi, Dublin, July 2001 (see 'other notebook' above)
• One Irish passport, new biometric series, the Bernard Shaw pub, December 2006 (see 'Moleskine notebooks' above). Since recovered by helpful bar staff, too late alas.
• One black turtleneck with red Japanese-style motif on front, the Lizard Lounge, Paris, October 2004 (football weekend)
• One Colibri ball-point pen (value €50), probably stolen by bourgeois student brat, the Coolín, St-Germain-des-Près, early 2005
• One copy of Nip the Buds and Shoot the Kids by Kenzaburo Oë (since borrowed and read), somewhere in Dublin, early 2003
• One CD copy of 'American Recordings: Volume IV' by Johnny Cash, somewhere in Dublin, June 2003

Next week, all those CDs and books I've lent to people and not got back. Name and shame. Until then there'll be no more posting from me. Off to Seville for the brother's wedding so the iBook's staying at home. Have a good weekend all.

Inland Empire: Any Questions?

There are two things that I am not going to do regarding Inland Empire, the latest offering from David Lynch. One is refer to it in block capitals as Lynch prefers (the title - mentioned only once in the film, in Polish - refers to a residential area on the edge of the desert in L.A.) The other thing I am not going to do is review it, because I found it for the most part impenetrable, his most opaque work since Eraserhead and little I could say would illuminate the film anyway. Suffice to say that for a three-hour-long plotless art film with multiple confusing segments and a family of giant rabbits, Inland Empire is remarkably watchable.

I had put off going to see it for six weeks, not out of fear of its inaccessibility but of its length; when I told this to a Lithuanian acquaintance, he laughed and said 'it's only three hours, it's not as if it's a 20-hour film by Jonas Mekas'. That put me in my place. I went to see it with my friend Tim and we both arrived at different times - I missed the first five minutes and he about twice that - so that we both probably missed some vital clues as to the film's overall meaning, if such a thing exists. I had just had a falafel and the temperature in the cinema was conducive to drowsiness, so within twenty minutes I was nodding off (not an unusual occurrence chez moi). I asked Tim later if I had started snoring (the worst thing about falling asleep in public) and he said 'No, you just started breathing heavier', a piece of Lynchian dialogue if there ever was one. There was a touch of Matthew Barney's Cremaster cycle about the film but Lynch is not near the chancer Barney is and his production values - digital video with wilfully amateur camerawork - are a good deal lower on this one. It reminded me of what the man who introduced me to Lynch at the age of 16 said about Eraserhead: 'it's not bad, but there's no way in the world you can say you love it'. Or maybe the inverse is true: Inland Empire may not be good but there's no way in the world you can't say you love it. We stumbled out of the cinema after a bizarre title sequence that made the rest of the film seem like a Julia Roberts film. We went across the street for a drink and chatted about Middle Eastern politics with the Lebanese barman. Now, that's easy.

Good Money after Bad

The episode I recounted last week of a visit from a rival Internet Service Provider has become even more alarming since as Noos, the ISP in question, has been given six weeks by the government regulatory body to deal with a backlog of about sixty thousand customer complaints. I think I'll be staying put for the time being.

As if that weren't enough French institutional hell for one week, I then discover that my bank, for some reason did not clear my direct debit rent last month, despite there being ample funds therein for it to do so. Which resulted in me spending a lot of money that was not mine to spend. And now I'm overdrawn. Admittedly I should have checked my balance a bit more attentively along the way, a mistake I will not be making in future.

Whatshisname...

How offensive is it not having your name remembered? It happened to me a couple of months ago when a casual acquaintance shouted 'Dave' across an empty room at me and got disgruntled when I didn't answer her. I wasn't terribly offended - in fact I was a bit relieved as the lady in question is a bit of hard work at the best of times - but I am often sensitive enough about getting other people's names wrong. Having worked as a teacher for the last few months, thus necessitating recalling the names of about seventy different people every week, I have made a few mistakes along the way, occasionally because of genuine absent-mindedness, occasionally because of a bizarre mental block regarding certain individuals. And then there are certain people whose appearances morph into those of their classmates, at least from their teacher's point of view. Of course it is ridiculous, especially considering that these very people barely know one another and they probably have little in common so to hear their teacher confounding them is as perplexing as it might be hurtful.

One class I had before Christmas included three French guys, all in their late twenties or early thirties, named Francois, Fabrice and Patrick, whose names, despite teaching them for six weeks, I could never place without recourse to a careful study of the attendance sheet and the respective types of pen and ink that they had used to sign it. In another class I more than once mixed up two middle-aged women, which caused them annoyance, and no end of embarrassment to myself. The other day I had my worst experience yet, worst because I had not forgotten the names of the students but I had nonetheless momentarily mistaken one for the other. And it looked worse still (or at least to my over-sensitive mind) because the two girls happened to be both black (and both sitting opposite each other in front of me); one was from Haiti and the other from the Central African Republic and both are, not surprisingly, noticeably different in both personality and appearance, but I still called the wrong name. True it is the only time I have mixed the two ladies up but I felt rather small at the time. Being stripped of your individuality is no doubt a difficult thing to take, and though the mistake seemed to be taken in good spirit by both - and by everyone else in the class - it still made me feel stupid. And there is the guilty idea that forgetting somebody's name reveals a blind spot that one would rather not have.

Pseudo Cream

I have a couple of annoying pimples on the forehead and I am despairing as, for some reason, I am convinced that only Sudocrem can do the job of ridding them by morning. It must have something to do with an over-application of the stuff to treat nappy rash when I was a wee nipper. You can't get the stuff in France though. Always read the label.

Those That Can't, Teach

I had been warned by a number of people that have worked as English teachers in the past that my level of English will be affected by daily exposure to people that mangle it despite their best efforts and intentions. I cannot say that that has happened just yet but neither can I say that I find the process too rewarding. Rather I find it painful listening to some of the awful constructions put on the language by some of my poor students. I have empathy with them but it is undeniable that I do ultimately resent having to listen to some of the excruciatingly bad English. Most of the worst is spoken by some of the brighter, more confident students, who both over-estimate their own ability at speaking the language and under-estimate the difficulty, the Protean nature, of the meanings and figurativeness of English.

This sounds churlish, I suppose; you might point out that my efforts in another language might provokes similar pain in another. That is true but my French is better than the English of probably 90% of my students (which is no surprise as I have far greater opportunity of speaking a second language than they have), and neither have I ever taken a French class, other than at school. I learned it on my own and my mangling of the language took place in a free-range environment, in shops, in bars, on the street, on public transport, in bed even. No poor teacher ever had to suffer on my account.

My first couple of months of teaching has taught me one thing, that most education and training is irredeemably compromised and necessarily shoddy. And doomed to failure. We do what we can but as Bernard Shaw infamously said of teachers, 'those that can't, teach'. There is a greater justice in that slur than is widely imagined. Most teachers, even with the greatest will and talent in the world are incapable of teaching most people. Only little slivers of knowledge will permeate the average student's conscience. We mustn't grumble all the same.

Nothing To Write About

It's my customary Tuesday-Wednesday blimp; two horribly long days where I am incapable of honouring any social commitments and which cause me to make painfully long Metro journeys to businesses west of Paris. And I have absolutely nothing to write about. The football tonight was largely inconsequential and dull. I wanted to do something about www.mydeathspace.com, the website devoted to deceased MySpace members, but, for some reason the site is down at the moment. There is also the story about thirty-odd death-row inmates from Texas having MySpace pages, which are maintained by their relatives (the inmates have no right to Internet access), one of whom is convicted copkiller Randy Halprin, but his page, though it can be viewed here, has apparently been deleted. Conflicting reports claim that MySpace has done the bidding of the State of Texas, though MySpace denies this. In the absence of anything to write about, I will do the dishes and put the rubbish out.

Goodbye Mr Chips

There have been grumbles from some over my absence from this blog over the last week; the truth is I have rarely had the time to sit down and do anything, and when the time was there the motivation had escaped me completely. My disillusion with my new job has arrived, not unsurprisingly, a couple of months after I have begun. I am overworked and because of this the quality of the classes I give has diminished. It does not help either that too many of the students I have this week are much too weak for comfort. And some of them are not that smart either, in the sense that they are making mistakes that should be easily diagnosable to them given that the mistakes hold for French too. It sounds crass and mean-spirited of me to talk about my students in this way though I have been exemplary thus far in holding my cool. I can understand how daunting it can be for mild-mannered middle-aged professionals to take a week off work to take twenty hours of one-on-one classes, only to make piddling progress in those five days. But even when the will is there it is difficult to move anyone beyond faux-elementary level when their understanding of the Present Continuous is so ropey and their inability to use their commonsense to decipher the simplest of crossword puzzles is so stark.

That many of my students have few English speakers they come into contact with regularly other than me compounds things further. A friend of mine suggested that bringing them out for a drink might help; an insane suggestion - why should I suffer further pain in my spare time when it is impossible enough when I am on the payroll and nominally motivated? One class whose invitations I have accepted on one or two occasions has now produced individual invitations to events I have not the slightest interest in honouring and which I even feel resentful at being forced to make a decision on. That is surely my problem: I am far too selfish to be a teacher, I really care only for myself and the only students of mine that really benefit from my teaching are the stronger ones. If classes drag and my resolution wavers then the poor weaker students are damned, inadvertently.

I spend far too much of my midweek either on the Metro or preparing to travel somewhere. I have even lost interest in playing my Saturday morning football, being far more attracted by a second morning lie-in. And nothing gets done, the laundry basket remains full, the flat is not hoovered, bank appointments are let slip, I continue wearing the same industrially-worn loafers to work because I have no time to waste trying on newer models. It's not all doom and gloom though, I can assure you.

That's Me!!!!

My friend Eric, in town from Chicago on his twice-yearly visit recently, knowing of our shared regard for Geoff Dyer, gave me a copy of Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage, his unorthodox 'study' of D.H. Lawrence. It is one of the few works by Dyer that I had not read and I breezed through it, being entertained and enthralled, as ever, by the account of Dyer's inability to accomplish his planned 'sober academic study' of the filthy modernist and his subsequent penning of a book far better than the one originally intended probably would have been.

What struck me yet again however is Dyer's similarity to myself. There is nothing particularly hubristic nor fanciful about this; there are probably tens of thousands of dormant writers the world over that have noticed the same thing. I have remarked to myself before of my shared (with Dyer) disdain for academia and my distaste at the concept of a professional writer turning out industrial amounts of prose from their monastic cells in the blissful peace of dull suburbia, which Dyer also holds with. I also have an interest in photography (though piddling in comparison with Dyer, who is one of the world's finest writers on the subject) yet, like Dyer, I do not own a camera nor do I really know how to take photographs. Dyer has on the other hand has no interest in theatre and takes solace from such a lacuna in his cultural life. So do I: the last play I saw was in the Dublin Theatre Festival in 1997 and I can't say I've missed the experience too much. And we share many favourite writers: Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Roland Barthes, John Berger, Fernando Pessoa, Borges, Proust...

In Out of Sheer Rage however it was even smaller details that shook me. In the mid-nineties Dyer lived just down the street from where I now live, on the corner of rue Popincourt and rue de la Roquette (his description of it in the book is so exact that I was able to locate it instantly while cycling by the other night) and, like I have in the past, he felt the urge to put down some roots to put an end to the international listlessness that had been dogging him for almost a decade. His way of doing this was to subscribe to Canal Plus, as a way of committing himself to staying a bit longer. I too have had the same thought, a foolish one because of the outrageously expensive €30 per month charge which even being the best that French TV has to offer does not justify. When Dyer finally moves to Oxford - or Dullford, as he calls it - and buys a house, the first thing he does is buy a cork notice board to pin bills, postcards and other paper ephemera to. It was his particular conception of accepting domestication. Well, not that particular, as it was the very thing that I did when I moved into my current flat seven months ago.

To top it all off, Dyer admits to uttering profanities under his breath to innocent bystanders who happen to slow down his daily progress in supermarket queues, on crowded streets and on the Metro. Guess who does the same thing... Like the narrator of Poe's short story 'William Wilson' I feel I have found my double, one who might be even more me than I am. It might be said that I should not compare myself too conceitedly with Dyer as he has about ten books published in his favour against my none. But it did take the Loafer's Laureate as long to get started.

Peace in a Pod

Yesterday I bought an iPod, after a three-day ordeal that will be more familiar to buyers of a first home. My mistake was to buy it on what Brits and Paddies would call 'the HP' from Fnac, which entailed running off home jointly and severally for a piece of official ID and bank details and then submitting to an in-depth evisceration of my personal and financial life. Fair enough, but I was even willing to pay off the first €200 in cash, but, no, they would not let me. But still, paying the whole thing over five months is not the worst thing in the world, even at 3% interest (the funny thing about France is that the concept of interest only really exists when you are repaying a loan; you'll be waiting a long time if you expect your bank to pay you interest on your savings account).

After finally getting the turbulent piece of hardware in my hands, I admitted to myself that, like all the millions of other iPod owners worldwide, I really do not need one. I could plead unusually long Metro journeys across Paris for work but I have managed well enough till now without one and these journeys still constitute a minority of travelling time for me in a week. But in the modern consumer world, desire is much stronger than need, and though I managed for so long without really wanting an iPod in the past two months I have felt an insatiable desire for one. Completely irrational, of course. To the extent that when I showed some friends of mine my new machine, they replied with 'another one?' or 'I thought you had one'. Probably because I look like the sort of guy that just has an iPod, almost like I should have been born with a wee Nano tucked under my infant oxter, or safely concealed in the swaddling clothes. By the same token, people always assume that I am a smoker, because I look like one. Casual acquaintances are forever congratulating me on giving up, which is the most gratifying piece of flattery I have yet to receive, but which is also cruelly deprived of the tens of Euros per month savings I might have made had I a habit to kick in the first place.

I went for the biggest possible iPod, real estate in effect, because I figured that you are as well to go the whole hog if you are going to spend money on a toy of dubious function. The 4Gb Nano trades at €200, the 30Gb model at €300 and the whopping, hitherto-unknown 80Gb at €400. It's clearer and brighter at the top so of course I go for the 80. I have since been struggling with a pair of dodgy headphones from my last, sadly-underused Discman, which, however poor they are, are still a better choice than the official Apple earpieces, which, as a New York Times review once remarked, come in 'only one colour: "mug me-white"'.

My biggest anxiety following my purchase was not the usual buyer's remorse, which I suffer from as much as the next man (considering I don't start paying for it until the 5th of December and that I have a little money to spare from working two jobs in the past month, money is not, for the time being, an object), but guilt at having finally capitulated to consumer desire. I am not an early adopter by any means; in fact so late an adopter am I that I have yet to get myself a driver's licence, but, all of a sudden I felt like purchasing something completely unnecessary and which will, most likely, bring me minimal pleasure. But I am still proud of, and happy with my shiny new black iPod that plays me an enormously wide array of music that I would normally not give the time of day to if I encountered it all in the form of space-consuming CDs or vinyl. It feels like the decay of growing up has begun to set in; that I have given up the ghost and finally admitted that I am becoming one of Nietzsche's Hollow Men. When effete Western civilisation is eventually overrun by whatever vital and barbarous horde that will elect to do so, I will be caught square in the onslaught, but at least I'll have twenty Bob Dylan albums at my fingertips (or thumbtips) as I expire.

Nothing About Nothing

In the search for extra modes of income, I came across ads on writing websites looking for people to write copy for commercial websites. The pay is pretty awful ($7 per 400-word article, and some others pay as little as $2 for the same) but there is a large workload per week so I decided if I could master the format I could start knocking them out in less than half an hour, and make decent supplementary cash. Perhaps it would be good writing practice, writing huge amount of copy to set criteria; I even had some conception of myself becoming a macho Stakhanovite hack, unflappable in the face of fearsome labour, like Gary Cooper's architect working in a quarry in the film version of The Fountainhead.

When I attempted the first of the trial assignments that were sent me though, I soon wilted. I was asked to write 400 words on www.elitebodykits.com, mentioning key words five times throughout the passage. There were various other strictures, all of which are designed to provide a final text that is bland and barely informative in a sale-pitch way. A big disadvantage for me was the fact that I know nothing about 'body kits' and even if I decided to ad-lib the copy would be shot down for inaccuracy. After brooding over 80 words, completely lost, for over an hour, I gave up. Writing something about nothing has never held any fear for me; in fact, it's probably what I'm best at, that old school-detention assignment,"write ten pages on the inside of a golf ball" is grist to my mill. Writing nothing about nothing however is beyond me. I imagine there are people that do hundreds of these sorts of things, at an equally incredible rate, every week and earn a decent living off them. I dop my hat to them, in some way they are better men (and women) than me. I started the week envying (and admiring) the great Grigory Perelman, for his genius and his nonchalance in declining the Field's Medal (as featured in the film Good Will Hunting). I am now in awe of people much more ordinary than him.

The Pain of Checking One's Bank Balance

Many people have a grave fear of checking their bank balance, and I am no different. And so, for the past four days since I have returned from my trip I have put it off. Although to be honest it was a sensible thing to do as all the transactions have thus been accounted for. It turned out to be even worse than I suspected but at the same time I feel relief, because the abstract fear was greater than the material reality of being overdrawn. Belt-tightening is on the agenda for the next six weeks and also a serious effort to find a new job. We have nothing to fear but fear itself.