Hard Times, Easy Living

Here we are now, Entertain Us!

2009-11-27T04:55:00.000-08:00

Entertainment used to be for the most part a pleasure most people enjoyed almost for free. People would tell tales around the fire, sing songs that had been passed through the generation, and drinking alcohol or other narcotics they produced themselves. This is how it was for most people until the beginning of the 20^th century. By then there was already a leisure class that had enough money to listen to symphonies, watch theatre and buy books. Somehow, though, these simple pleasures became too simple for us and we started demanding more complex ones. New inventions at the start of the last century like Cinema, radio and later TV suddenly made the old forms of entertainment seem fairly quaint. At the same time literacy became more widespread as a result of investments made in education in the Victorian era which meant there was a ready market for tabloid newspapers and cheap paperback books. Then there was the development of copyright which meant that songs, books and designs could suddenly be “owned” by the people that produced them and they could effectively charge other people to experience them.

Today, people in the music industry speak of copyright as if it was some sort of universal law that has existed through the ages but it really only came into being in the last number of centuries. The US complains that counterfeit CDs and DVDs can be bought on the streets of places like Mexico and Vietnam but the truth is that the US didn’t grant copyright protection to foreign artists until the 1890s. Before then, the idea that music could be “owned” was a novel one. The ancient Greeks believed that music was a gift from the gods that was channeled through certain individuals (and birds) and this persisted right up until the era of Bach and Mozart (who I’m listening to right now). It wasn’t until Beethoven came along and decided that his music was expressing his own personal tortured, conflicted feelings that the idea that music belonged to anyone came into being. His life coincided with the development of sheet music which made music accessible to people who didn’t live in the cities where professional musicians played but also had serious commercial possibilities that were easily exploited, especially as a few people controlled the printing presses and was allowed in many cases only by royal decree which was often granted with arbitrary, Simon Cowell-like capriciousness. The power of copyright increased further with the invention of the gramophone, which gave people the ability to hear high-quality recordings, though at a price. It also precipitated a shift from music being composer-orientated to being performer-orientated which happened fairly suddenly… Gerswhin and Irving Berlin were more famous than any of the people who performed their work, but who knows who wrote most of elvis’s songs? Then there were improvements in recording technology that meant that the version of a song that appeared on an album was pretty much the definitive one, as anyone who’s tried to play Stairway to Heaven themselves will know.

By the time that song was written, chinks in the armour of copyright were starting to appear. Magnetic tape, which was originally invented by the Nazis to broadcast fake speeches (I’m indebted to Mr. Stephen Fry for this historical nugget) suddenly became available to almost everyone and allowed them to copy records and later CDs and share them with their friends, much to the consternation of the music industry, which started printing little skull and crossbones on LPs emblazoned with the words “Home taping is killing music… and it’s illegal” The latter was certainly true, but it wasn’t as if the people losing out were all that law-abiding themselves, except for maybe Cliff Richard. As for killing music; well, just watch TV on any given Saturday and see how many people want to make it in the music industry. Go to any singer-songwriter night or any karaoke bar and you’ll realize that the desire to perform music hasn’t been killed by the existence of magnetic tape… or mp3s.

I have over 20,000 mp3s and WMAs on this computer I’m using right now, and at most 10% were purchased through legitimate channels. The rest were ripped from other people’s CDs or copied from their hard drives. I realize that this makes my a criminal, but the idea that I owe the music industry in the region of €19,000 isnt that acceptable to me. A lot of the music I have is stuff I’m happy to have, though would never have paid €20 for a CD of. Also, the idea that I’m somehow “stealing” music is a bit ludicrous, as it’s not something that can really be owned in the way that a car or a tube of toothpaste can. Who owns the music of birds, for example? Is it the birds themselves, or do we own it because we define it as being music? (Music industry lawyers would define birdsong as “public domain” music). I watched that youtube flick of that obnoxious prick Kid Rock attacking people who download music illegally saying in his arrogant, pompous way that downloading music was the same as stealing a computer. Well, it’s not, actually. If you go into a computer store and manage to steal a computer, the shop loses the money it invested buying the computer, whereas the musical artist, if you could really call Kid Rock that, only loses the money they would have got if the album had been downloaded legitimately or purchased as a CD. It’s not rocket science, Mr. Rock. If you hadn’t been drinking whiskey from the bottle when you were 17 you might realize how fuck-headed your argument was.

His passionate defence of copyright would be even less palatable if I thought he knew about copyright is abused in the natural world by companies like Monsanto, who are able to “patent” new forms of life and then charge anyone who’s crops cross-breed with new varieties. It is horribly ironic that rich kids who are able to afford fancy computers with fast internet connections get away with breaching copyright while poor farmers in India are held to the letter of laws that they had no part in making, but the plight of those farmers is the result of taking the principal of copyright to it’s ultimate conclusion.

Actually, CDs were one of the great rip-offs in history. The record companies had the technology to digitize music but needed to come up with a way of packaging it and selling it to consumers, who would be forced to buy a whole new machine to play them on, even though they already had perfectly good machines called “turntables”. Even though CDs didn’t cost any more than records, they charged more because they were using the extra money to promote CDs by saying they were unbreakable, would last forever, sounded even better than hearing music live and lots of other patently untrue stuff. They made an awful lot of money by getting people to buy their whole record collection again, though now it’s coming back to haunt them with the ease and speed of modern ripping technology.

To be fair, the cost of legitimate downloads has come way down in price, though this is mainly because the music industry realizes that they were fighting a losing battle against a new technology. I do buy some music legitimately. I have a subscription to eMusic, which supports up-and-coming bands on smaller labels, and charges way less than iTunes, though the price differential is narrowing. 7digital and Amazon have the same range of stuff at cheaper prices. A new album on 7digital costs only €7, which is little more than the cost of a daytime cinema ticket, which average at around €5.50. 20 years ago, a new LP cost 7 POUNDS, at a time when a daytime cinema ticket could be had for around £1.50. True, LPs used to come in big, shiny folders but they also used to get scratched and worn down through overplaying. You’re probably also aware that downloading music through peer-to-peer networks puts your computer at risk of being infected and unless you’re a techie this can be extremely expensive to get fixed and it can work out cheaper just to buy the mp3s legitimately. One p2p network that’s reportedly fairly safe to use is called Shareaza. Of course you can also stream videos for free on youtube, or music on spotify for a reasonable price, though you need to have a fast web connection all the time to do this. Copying other people’s CDs or music from their hard drives onto your computer is a far safer proposition. Your computer doesn’t really know who bought the original CD. Some new CDs are rip-proof, although only until someone comes along and develops a new technology to overcome this. Until recently iTunes used to cage their mp3s with Digital Rights Management software (DRM) so they couldn’t be copied, but they were forced by commercial pressure to change this. You still can’t use an iPod as a portable hard drive, so if you are in favour of sharing music a Zen, a Zune, or an Archos makes far more commercial sense, as buying a portable external hard drive will set you back at least another 50, as well as giving you something else to carry around; worry about losing, and increase your carbon footprint.

I can’t make the decision for you on what it’s defensible or not to download illegitimately. I do know that most established musicians don’t need the money all that desperately. I was pretty aghast to find out that Jimmy Page had someone who was trying to make a few bob selling knock-off Zep CDs arrested. This is a man who, in his musical prime, used to throw TVs out windows, fly around in his band’s private jet and have sex with more or less any young female that caught his eye, and now lives in a huge country estate. When his band were together, there was a progressive taxation system that forced the rich to pay at a far higher rate than the poor, but this system was smashed in the Reagan-Thatcher years and now they pay only slightly more, or less in the case of people with offshore accounts, like Bono. This soi-disant savoir of humanity actually moved his money away from Ireland, which is a bit of a tax haven itself, to the Netherlands, where taxes for artists are even lower. Then there’s Metallica, whose base player, instead of thinking how lucky he is to have made all that money playing bass in a heavy metal band, invests all his money in art to make even more money, and chastises those who download his music illigetimately.

Then there are those artists who aren’t alive anymore and whose estates receive the royalties. The “estates” in question often compromise people like Yoko Ono, Heather Mills, Courtney Love and other people who contributed nothing to lives of the artists in question. What’s worse, Ms Love fought for years to take money away from the other 2 guys in Nirvana who actually helped to produce the music and then gave all the money to some Bernie Madoff –like character who lost it all. Whether they still need our continued support is at least a matter for debate.

In the case of classical music, which makes up 11% of CD sales, the composers have generally been dead for hundreds of years. Most of the money from CD sales goes to either record company executives, conducters and soloists, while the rest of the people in the orchestra get paid fairly dismally.

It is worth supporting up-and-coming bands. Many people who make music aren’t entirely in it for the money, though they can make better music if they can focus on it entirely and don’t have some shitty day job to go to. I’m hoping that many bands will follow Radiohead and sell directly to the consumer, taking both record companies and the likes of iTunes out of the equation. While most of the really great music that’s been made has been made against the wishes of record companies who feared it wasn’t commercial enough, all of the really bad music that’s been made has been made in record company’s pursuit of the bottom line. The relationship between art and commerce has always been a messy one that may be heading for a painful separation. On the whole iTunes is probably fairly bad for music. On the positive side it does make music available to people who might not have had access to it otherwise. On the negative side, it prioritises tracks over albums and is turning music back from an album-orientated medium to a single-orientated medium, which is tragic as many of the great works of art of the last 40 years have been albums and it’s often the more obscure tracks on albums that are the most enduring.

It won’t have failed to come to your attention that seeing artists in concert has become way more expensive than buying on of their CDs. Twenty years ago it cost around the same as a CD, or twice as much as an LP, to see an established artists, now it can cost ten or more times the cost of downloading an album legitimately, and that’s before you buy the horribly overpriced soggy chips, warm beer, tacky souvenir t-shirts and washing powder to get all the puke stains out of your clothes. I think it’s good thing that people still want to see live music as it represents a desire for authenticity on some level and a desire to connect directly with an artist. On the other hand, I think some artists are compensating themselves a little too much for the loss of revenue from CD sales by charging over €100 for a concert ticket, especially when the bands in question are often 70’s and 80’s bands who bring out a best selling compilation box-set every year.

I’ve been to Electric Picnic a few times (not to put too fine a point on it, but , there are way too many skangers at Oxegen) but never felt tempted to try to sneak in for free, as it’s reportedly fairly easy to do. Even though I felt the tickets probably were slightly over-priced I still think it’s worth paying to see musicians whose music has genuinely enriched your life. On the other hand, I didn’t spend all that much on having my fortune told, getting a full-body massage or getting married in that plastic church. I did get henna’d …by myself, though I have to admit my work isn’t of a professional standard.

I have snuck into a few movies. I think it’s one of the few advantages of having soulless multiplexes instead of the charming fleapits that were still around when I was growing up. It was something I started doing in college and should have grown out of but never did. It involves spending a lot of time in the bathroom. Again I try to support films that were made by people who have a genuine love of the medium rather than just wanting to make more money. I don’t feel bad about about not supporting Hollywood studios who; in the case of the first 2 Star Wars sequels I’m actually proud I didn’t give George Lucas any of my money. Since the Reagan era, the Hollywood studios have been owned by conglomerations that are focused entirely on making money. For example, Universal Studios is owned by Vivendi, a French firm that started out in sewerage management. They invest so much money in marketing and promoting their films that they really can’t take any risks which is why so many movies are formulaic; even when an original idea manages to get made into a movie it ends up being sequelised and threequelised. Some good movies still get made, though when you pay to see them in the cinema not all that much money gets back into the hands of people who actually made the movies. Most of the money goes straight to the cinema, then a huge proportion goes to marketing movies. Another big chunk ends up as profit for the conglomeration that invested in the movie in the first place. Of then people who are involved in making movies, the actors get paid the most even though many of them are talentless idiots whose fame is a product of the same publicity departments that people fund by going into the cinema and paying to see actors with star power. The people who actually create movies, the writers and directors, actually see very little of the money that you slap down at the box office, though some of the more established directors and a very small number of writers can still “open” a movie.

People still pay quite a bit to watch movies at the cinema because of the whole experience of queuing outside, buying popcorn and fizzy drinks which can make the whole experience worthwhile even if the movie isn’t that good, which is why movie theatres can still charge such crazy prices; though relative to a concert or a fancy restaurant they still represent fairly good value for money. After all, it was during the original great depression that cinema first took off as a medium, swinging wildly between uplifting entertainments like Gold Diggers of 1933 to gritty dramas like The Public Enemy. Video stores, however, are seriously feeling the pinch, although it has to be said they were charging some insane prices when they were able to get away with it. Last year it cost as much as €5.75 to rent out a DVD for one night, though they cost only around double that to buy at retail prices. Right now they cost €2 which works out at 50c apiece if you bring 3 friends round, and a profit can still be made at that price. Trouble is, from the video stores point of view, that if you want to watch a movie in the comfort of your own home, you can pretty much do it for free on the internet. In the US they have something called Netflix which lets you stream loads of movies with near-perfect picture quality for a mere $5/month, though there’s no sign of that being introduced here. Instead, to watch movies online, you have to go onto shady websites like theonlydevice.com and watch-movies-links.net… because they have to keep changing their name to avoid being caught by the entertainment industries lawyers. They may have changed these names, but you’ll still be able to find them by doing a google search. Now that movies can be rented for a mere €2, it’s debatable whether it’s worth putting up with the crappy picture quality on most of these sites, though they do have the advantage of being online almost as soon as the films are released theatrically, or even before in the case of movies that are released here weeks after in the states, or leaked from the festival circuit. I’m hoping some movie makers will follow the Radiohead route and release their movies online, though it’s probably a more challenging proposition technically. I watched an excellent movie called Humpday online recently and enjoyed it so much that I wished I could have paid for it in some way, but right now the only channel through which I can do this is waiting for it to come out on DVD here, and then they’d only get a very small chunk of the €2 I paid there.

I don’t know why people buy DVD box sets of TV shows. Some bright spark wrote a big article in the Tribune saying they were the new books, citing as evidence that some people keep them on their bookshelves. There is the advantage that you can watch shows without any ads for stuff you don’t need, although apparently you can get fancy hard drive recorders that can tell when the ads are coming on and refuse to record them, or just let you flick through them even quicker than you could on VCRs. Or you could just stream them online, on sites like tvduck.com or tvlinksdb.com. I imagine that because over the last 10 years there’s been so much superior stuff on TV to the cinema that people want to pay for TV in some way other than buy patronizing advertisers which is indirect at best. Having said that, it’s hard to see how anyone can justify the cost of paying €500 for the complete Friends on DVD, which is what it cost when it first came out, though now it can be had for around a tenth of that price.

Some people still read books even since DVD box sets were invented. After all, you’re reading this one right now, although it’s available online as well. They’ve proved pretty enduring, as they offer something that TV and movies don’t. Jean-Paul Sartre called reading a novel a “free dream” though I actually think that’s a more apposite description of a movie, which is experienced fairly passively, unlike books, which really demand some active participation and allow you to exercise your imagination. I’m reading The Kite Runner like millions before me, but my experience will be different from everybody else’s as the way I visualize the novel will be different. If I wrote a random sentence like “my cousin visited a lawyer last Saturday ” it would conjour a different image in the mind of everyone who read it, depending on whether they have cousins and what they look like if they do, what they imagine my cousins look like of if I had any or just made that statement up, whether they have ever been to a lawyer themselves or just seen them on TV or movies, what they were up to last Saturday, where they live and what the weather was like where they were… the permutations are almost infinite.

Though not everyone has the concentration to read books and some people basically just find them boring… one survey said that one in four people read no books at all, while 50% of people read less than five a year; if you do enjoy them you are fairly lucky as it’s a pleasure you can enjoy almost for free. It certainly costs a lot to buy new books in hardcover, though relative to a lot of other things the price has come way down. Paperbacks on the other hand have been getting cheaper all the time, costing around the same as they did 10 years ago while everything else has hyperinflated. It can work out cheaper to buy a paperback than to see a movie at night, and it generally takes several times longer to read a novel, though it does make more demands on you. And you can always go to the library and get them for free, though if you want to read the new Dan Brown novel, for example, you could be waiting a while for everyone else to finish with it. Libraries became a little bit unfashionable in the 90’s and early noughties as paperbacks became cheap and bookstores suddenly became sexy, offering coffee and comfy chairs to sit on, 2-for-1 deals, soft classical music, etc, though now times are tougher libraries are seeing a rise in membership. You can also find books cheaply in charity stores and second-hand bookstore though some of the latter are struggling to survive in the age of the world wide web. Classic books suddenly became extremely cheap overnight in the 90’s with the collapse of the net book agreement which was basically a cartel between bookstores and publishers.

While books are a lot cheaper than they used to be in bookstores, they are still cheaper online, although not so much if you live here in Ireland, where Amazon charge a ludicrous £4 per book to post to. There’s an American store called Better World Books which gives it’s profits to a third world literacy fund and only charges $4 to post to here, though they don’t have the same selection as Amazon. Even so, it often works out cheaper to buy on Amazon than buying books in bookstores here, even if as much as 99.75% of the cost is taken up by postage. Of course you can also do what previous generations did and share them with your friends, or, if that’s a bit 20^th Century, go onto bookcrossing.com and pass books onto others by leaving them in random places. Or donate them to charity shops and write your email address on a random page.

Setting up a reading group is a cheap way of socializing with people of common interest, though finding the people and agreeing on a book to read can be difficult.

I seriously don’t see the point of an ebook reader. I actually had a mp3 player which had a very basic ebook reader for over a year but I only managed to read 2 books on it ever, partly because it used to break up words at the end of sentences, mainly because it used to hurt my eyes more than reading a real book. The new generation of ebook readers from Amazon and Sony are reportedly easier on the eye but the prices are a long way from being competitive. Unless you read a book a day which only college professors allegedly do, it’ll take years to pay off the cost of buying one at current prices, unless you only read books that you download for free from the wonderful project Gutenberg. It’s possible to read them straight of a computer screen as well though that’s an even bigger strain on your eyes. None of the arguments in favour of buying one seem to stack up to me. If you are going travelling and don’t want to carry too many books around, the best solution is to only carry one at a time, rather than be worrying about having all your books on your ebook reader stolen. It’s one of the pleasures of travelling to find a book that you really like in some random place. In any case bookstores can be found almost everywhere there is electricity. Then you have some another really valuable possession to worry about as well as your camera and your mp3 player.

Before literacy became widespread and films and TV were with us, literature was mostly performed orally. We don’t have many of the old Spalpin Fanachs around though we do still have live literature in the form of theatre. To be honest, I don’t go there as much as I used to when I was in college when I used to get a student discount from a price that wasn’t that excessive in the first place. I remember the Everyman theatre in Cork used to have a pay-what-you-want night every week which seems impossible pre-Celtic Tiger now. It’s kind of understandable as prices have gone up everywhere else and being an actor is a notoriously fickle profession. There’s this other place in Cork called the Opera House which doesn’t really look like an Opera House from the outside and only has room for thirteen musicians in the orchestra pit. Recently they had a live webcast from the metropolitan opera in New York and charged more to see it than the cheapest seats cost in the real Met, though those cheap seats are effectively subsidized by the people paying $400 up in the front. Its cheaper to see Opera in a lot of European countries where the government subsidise it a lot and it’s not considered as hoity-toity as it is here.

I used to play a lot of video games when I was a kid but sort of lost interest in my early 20’s and now only play the ones on my phone and ones I can get for free on the internet. I have no idea how much wii, playstations and Xboxes cost or how much value for money they represent. From a parents point of view, they help keep your kids off the street though they can distract them from their studies as well… that certainly happened me. That was before the weird sub-world of online gaming that exists now, where people pay gamers in Eastern Europe to be their opponents and buy online identities… or The Sims or Second life where people spend real money on virtual stuff… it’s all very weird to me.

On the other hand, I’m totally into social networking. It’s a way you can have fun without spending any more money than the price of a computer and web connection. I have accounts with Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Fubar, HotorNot, Speedate and probably some more that are dormant though I really use just use facebook nearly all the time these days. I can see why some people don’t like it… they are afraid of getting addicted though it’s a bit too late for me to worry about that. There are issues relating to privacy as well, I’ve given access to all my personal details to anonymous people who’ve set up some application that’s given me 2 minutes of amusement, though I can’t really see what they can do with it. Giving people your credit card number to people is something you really do have to be careful about. Actually, having a credit card at all is something you have to be careful about. I’ve got into credit card debt only once but I’m someone who’s pretty careful with money as you can probably tell by now. They cost very little to have relative to the amount you can save online as you as you stay out of debt. I still have a €2000 limit that I’ve had since the Celtic Tiger years, I got it extended from €1000 simply by writing “inflation” where they asked me to cite a reason for this on the application form. When I originally applied for one, I was unemployed, but the bank just told me to leave the employment details blank on the application.

You can also save a lot of money on phone calls by using Skype or yahoo messenger and getting all your friends to do the same. I used to live with some Bulgarian guys who were contacting their relatives back home all the time that way which was great from their point of view. As it’s a relatively new technology there are still a few kinks to be ironed out and calls can break down all the time but it’s still amazing to be able to see and hear people who could be in a different continent for whatever you pay to go online. You can also send 300 free text messages from the web if you are on meteor, with no strings attached… other providers have similar offers.

Though I spend a lot of time fooling around on dating sites, I’ve never had that much luck when I’ve met up with people in real life. Oddly enough, I’ve had more luck just meeting people in bars and nightclubs. It still goes on, though apparently one bar is closing every day at the moment. It’s hard to feel sympathy for a lot of them who are basically drug dealers dealing in a legitimate drug that harms a lot of people. They were making a huge profit before the celtic tiger years started and an even bigger one afterwards… it seems we used to drink so much because we were so poor and had nothing better to do, then we drank so much because we had so much money to spend. One bar-owner in the village where I grew up was asked if she and her husband made a lot of money a night when people were spilling out onto the pavement as it was so busy. She said they didn’t make any more because they had to take on extra staff. Another local bar gave me a job the summer my father died as he was a popular local figure and it looked good for them. They paid me a fifth of what the minimum wage was when it was introduced eight years later. Prices did increase in those years, but not by 400%.

Though people are drinking less in bars, it doesn’t mean we’re drinking less overall. If anything, we’re probably drinking more as booze has got so cheap in supermarkets since the lovely Ms Harney abolished price controls. It really makes more economic sense for people to buy cheap supermarket booze, drink it at home where they don’t have to go outside every time they want a fag and then hit the clubs later. Its really hard to blame them as the mark-up on booze in bars is so outrageous. I think the country is going to become more like France where people have their friends over for wine rather than paying almost €5 for a beer in a dismal bar. Sadly, though, the reason many people drink booze is to get away from their families. There are other ways of altering your consciousness as Homer Simspon discovered that time Moe wouldn’t spot him a drink, though most of them are of questionable legal status. It’s pretty stunning that the government were planning to outlaw energy drinks like red bull when people need them to do all the work they need to do to pay off the mortgage… and a lot of them basically don’t work anyway. There are products that you can get in health food stores that really aren’t that good for your health except in the sense of raising your spirits for a short period of time. I take Guarana before going out, a natural herb that’s basically a purer form of caffeine that the Incas used when they were carrying all those rocks up the mountains to build Machu Picchu. Though it’s contained in a lot of expensive energy drinks you can get it way cheaper by buying it in tablet form. They actually sell it in Tesco’s as if to underline how unambiguous its legal status is, though the quality is poor and you’re better off getting it in Holland and Barrett. Funnily enough I found it hard to get in the US where I could only find it in some energy tablets that contained a whole load of other natural stimulants that I’d never heard of. Surprising, as people have a more fast-paced life there, for the most part. When I was travelling around there on the bus, they used to sell tiny bottles of energy drinks for $4 apiece, which I suspect was somewhat of a rip-off as the benefits of some of those herbs are unproven. Another really cheap way to get an energy boost is to eat raw root ginger. Not everyone can do this as it has such a strong, acerbic taste but if you can handle it it’s worth the brief stinging pain.

Red Bull doesn’t give me wings; it doesn’t work for everyone and just makes me feel a bit dizzy. As for non-legal stimulants, the fact that they’re not legal doesn’t stop people from taking them but it does make them way more expensive than they would be otherwise. Having said that, in spite of all the danger money that accrues from having to pass through so many middlemen, marijuana is still cheaper than beer as it takes so much less land and energy to grow, at least in places like Morocco where it grows naturally. Unfortunately it’s illegal to export it and the powers that be move heaven and earth to stop that happening and people use thousands of watts of power to grow hybridized varieties which are far more dangerous than the naturally grown form of the drug… and you never know how strong the drug actually is because nobody is obliged to tell you the THC content as they are with alcohol. It’s a mad situation that allows criminals to take money that would go into the taxation system if it was legal, it could also be labeled properly and people wouldn’t inhale toxic levels of THC anymore… but it would be tantamount to admitting that government policy has been misguided all this time, and the criminals would find some other area to ply their trade. Ironically Salvia is legal here and the government has no plans to outlaw it even though it’s just as likely to cause psychosis as marijuana and way more addictive. Asking whether it’s cheaper than alcohol is a bit of a non-sequitur as it offers a totally different sort of high. I bought some once paying €20 for what was supposed to give 2 hits but I only used a tenth, shared it between 4 people and 2 of them went completely off their faces. LSD and ecstacy have reportedly become really cheap though they are 2 drugs I’ve always been a little afraid of. LSD is a really hard drug to police as it can be made in home made laboratories and disguised with ease, though that doesn’t stop the government from trying. Ecstacy has also gotten cheap as it’s not nearly as popular as it used to be in the 90s and nowadays only skangers use it. It often gets cut with other substances and can lead to long-term depression as well. Cocaine is going to be horribly expensive as long as it remains illegal, though that’s not such a bad thing as it makes the rich idiots who take it even more obnoxiously self-absorbed than they normally are. Having said that, I’d rather people didn’t have to risk their lives carrying it inside their stomachs and that you could buy it in certain bars for a huge cost so that all the coke-heads would be confined in one space… I don’t see it happening in my lifetime though.

Although I can see the point of coke, which is that people tend to be impressed by confidence regardless of where it comes from, I can’t for the life of me see the point of tobacco. I’m given to understand that people generally start smoking in their teens because school is so boring that they need something to look forward to, even if it’s just a brief respite from the craving they have for nicotine. I was really bored at school as well, but my father had a really chronic smoking problem and he would always become frighteningly edgy when trying to give up tobacco. I realized the only way I could avoid ever being like that was never to get addicted to tobacco in the first place. Then there was the health warnings on boxes of tobacco, which have got way less subtle and more prominent since… the way it’s going in a few years there will be a box that says “Smoking Kills” with the brand name in the corner, though forbidding them does make them more appealing to some teenagers. Part of the reason that tobacco is such a drain on people’s income is that the government taxes it so much, although the taxes barely pay for the health care costs of the 50% of smokers who get lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema or any of the other manifold diseases that smoking causes. On the other hand, smoking probably saves people the cost of being in a nursing home later on in their lives. Smoking is one the worst things for the environment as tobacco sucks nitrogen out of the soil the same way watching Home and Away sucks brain cells from your head. As nitrogen is one of the 3 main elements of life, this isn’t a good thing. We don’t grow it here in Ireland as it’s not dry enough and our soil is too fertile to piss away on a poisonous drug like tobacco, so it has to be imported from places like Virginia and Tennessee where it used to be grown by African-American slaves and now gets grown by Mexican wage-slaves.

If you are unfortunate enough to be a smoker, huddling around outside in the rain under one of the outside heaters while everyone else enjoys the tobacco-free atmosphere inside the bar or workplace, all isn’t lost. You can buy nicotine patches, which can potentially save you a fortune in the long run, and there are all sorts of other treatments like hypnotherapy which can help many people. There are plenty of websites and helplines to help people with tobacco addiction. It’s often said that nicotine is more addictive and harder to get off than heroine, having been addicted to neither I really can’t say. I did read a survey in the Irish Times that said that 3% of Irish teenagers had tried heroine while “only” 0.5% got addicted; which implies that tobacco is more addictive, as more than 1 in 6 of us are hooked on it. So why aren’t we allowed buy Heroine when we’re 16? I suspect it’s because heroine causes people to become lazy, listless drop-outs whereas tobacco gives people who work in factories and other boring, dead-end jobs something to look forward to. If they die before retirement age, replacements can always be found.

It’s odd that such a great evil was tolerated in Ireland for so long when almost every other form of pleasure was frowned upon. It’s true that it doesn’t say anything about smoking in the Bible, which was written thousands of years before tobacco reached Eurasia, although you would think an omniscient deity would have known about it and warned people against it. The people who wrote the Bible clearly did have issues about sexuality which is why our extremely catholic nation used to throw women who got pregnant outside marriage into virtual prisons where they did other people’s laundry all day; why we didn’t legalise the pill till the 80s, and why so many of us still have so many hang-ups today. It wasn’t always like this; the ancient Celts were among the first to realize that women had a libido which they celebrated by creating Sheela-na-gigs. In fact, right up until the famine, we used to have a fairly easy-going attitude to sexuality which later got the blame as we were perceived to have been horribly over-populated. Logically this should have caused us to welcome contraception when it came around, but as late as the 90s one Irish supreme court judge referred to condoms as being “filthy”, though fortunately they were reasonably legal by then.

Contraception makes what used to be a potentially extremely expensive pleasure extremely cheap in monetary terms. The pill ensures that an expensive bill for the evening’s entertainment won’t arrive in nine months time, condoms can save us from a lot of the medical bills and funeral expenses that come with some of those many STDs out there. This is one of the few times in history that you can get sex for free…at least as long as you are an attractive young woman. For the rest of us it still involves a lot of drinks bought or money spent on make-up, not to mention all the psychological costs and the guilt issues that many of us have. It’s a shame that we do, as sex is probably the most natural pleasure in the world. It’s possible that we haven’t really adjusted to the reality that’s relatively new in evolutionary terms that it can be had without risk of pregnancy. After the events of 9/11 casual hook-ups increased dramatically as people thought they could die any second; in Africa where death is so prevalent that there’s no point in being scared of it, people fuck around like rabbits, though regrettably for them condoms cost a great deal more relative to income in spite of the fact that the world’s second biggest rubber forest is right in the centre of the continent. It’s interesting that we only legalized condoms here in the 80s when unemployment got up to 17% and the dole was pretty parsimonious compared to now. Did the government realize the insanity of preventing people from having the pleasure of having sex when almost every other pleasure was unaffordable? Only time will tell.

Right now, it’s easier to meet people than it ever has been. You can barely turn on your computer without being invited to join some dating site, although they don’t always turn out to be free. I didn’t really think we had a culture of swing parties here like they do in places like California… until I googled. There’s one called swing4ireland.com which lists “dogging” locations of which there are 15 listed in Cork alone. I don’t think Eamon de Valera would have approved… but he was a twisted, swivel-eyed psychopath who wasn’t even really Irish. On one level dogging sounds a bit primordial but it couldn’t really exist without the existence of modern inventions like the pill and condoms, and computers and mobile phones. It also shows how cheap sex has become in monetary terms, as up till very recently men would have had to pay a prostitute to engage in this sort of thing.

If you still can find no-one else to have sex with, it’s cheaper to have it with yourself now the internet exists. When I was growing up the only way you could view pornography was if there was a sleaze section in your local video library and the owner didn’t mind renting out porn to teenagers. Otherwise you had to go on a boat to Britain and buy some porn mags there. Staggeringly, the only porn mag which is fully legal in Ireland is Playboy, which is a bit absurd as any amount of pornography can be viewed online for free. Jack Nicholson said he had to get disconnected from the internet as there was so much porn out there, and the amount is almost infinite to all intents and purposes, as there’s more coming online faster than there is time to view it; any attempt to view it all would be heroic in it’s way. Almost all women find porn objectionable although when you ask them why you can never get a really clear answer. Many say that watching porn leads men to become sex criminals but there’s simply no evidence for this. Rates of rape are way lower in countries where porn is legal, and highest in countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh where you can’t even photograph a grown woman’s face. Many women complain, with some justification that men get paid more in almost every job, but porn is the one industry where women get paid more, and where men often end up committing suicide. I think women’s real objection to porn is that it gives men freedom over their sexuality which is something they’ve had all to themselves for most of history. Some studies actually show that men who masturbate frequently as adolescents are actually better when they finally get on the main stage (as it were). Masturbating also helps prevent prostate cancer. There is a certain degree of shame attached to it, though this probably dates from biblical times when people got married when they were thirteen or fourteen and there were barely enough people to keep the tribe who wrote the Bible alive. Today there are so many of us in the world that our seed is probably better of spilt.

With so many things becoming cheaper, you have to wonder where the all the extra money in our economy has gone. Actually, I’m pretty sure most of it has gone into the pockets of property “developers”. Some of it has gone into the bank accounts of fancy restaurant owners though. I very rarely eat in restaurants when I’m in Ireland as the prices are generally way beyond a joke. There’s one in Cork called Café Paradiso which is reputed to be the best in the British Isles and is defiantly the best I’ve been to, though I’ve only been to three or four others. Although the food is excellent, paying the E25 they ask for a main course just seems excessive. I read one piece on this restaurant in the Irish Times which contained the line “even though you won’t find any meat or fish served here, it’s not really a vegetarian restaurant” which, being meant as a compliment seemed to epitomize the attitude of the catering industry to vegetarians. But then restaurant critics always seem like they’re on a different planet to me. I remember reading one review when I was really bored that described a meal for E90 for one including wine as being ‘budget”. To put that in some sort of proportion, that’s what a third of the world’s population have to live on for 4 months of every year. That people can afford to spend that sort of money paying someone else to cook their dinner while some people are dying of malnutrition is a sad indictment on our society. But then, I really don’t like going into McDonalds either. Going into most restaurants for me is like going into a brothel and finding that all the women are less than 15 and then being made to feel like you’re putting them out when you say you’d prefer to be with an adult. Most of them hold vegetarians in complete contempt and regard us as a nuisance. Gordon Ramsey once tricked a vegetarian into eating a pizza with meat on it thinking that was funny, yet this is a man who Britain’s richest people queue up to patronize. Fortunately, we have our own places in most towns these days, you can find them on happycow.org. Vegetarian restaurants are cheaper for all the same reasons that it’s cheaper to cook food at home; the raw materials are cheaper, don’t take as long to cook and there isn’t the same culture of celebrity chefs there. The whole idea of celebrity chefs is a bit troubling to me as the Roman Republic collapsed shortly after it’s richest citizens started employing people to cook them sumptuous 7-course meals, which they would have employed slaves to cook. The parellels with today are worrying, as there is a new super-rich class which can afford to patronize the Ramseys of the world who, even if though don’t employ slaves, still treat their employees as if they were. Fancy restaurants are like a microcosm of our divided society. On the top, there are the fancy property developers and their trophy wives or girlfriends, listening to soft classical music, being waited on hand and foot. Underneath, in the kitchen, people are running around in a stygian morass of hot ovens and stoves, being yelled at by the head chef… it’s almost too good a symbol, actually.

Regrettably many people are virtually forced to eat out because they work such long hours, which is why there are so many fast food places these days. That economic bright spark whose name I can’t even bring myself to mention coined the term “Breakfast Roll man” to describe people who had to have ready made meals. A lot of the so-called economic “growth” of the last 30 years is really people paying for what they used to get for free, like having their food cooked at home, doing their own laundry rather than going to a launderette, etc.

When we used to hear the older generation saying they made their own fun we used to laugh but they may have been onto something. We’re never going to have as much money to waste as we did over the last 15 years. We need to simplify. Instead of going to fancy restaurants we should have pot-lucks. Instead of going to expensive bars we should have house parties… after all, we paid enough for the houses and even if we rent them they are still a bit overpriced. Instead of buying a big DVD collection we should rent them and then have our friends over to watch them.

It’s ironic that Bertie Ahern is an acolyte of Robert Putnam who wrote Bowling Alone, a study of modern alienation which shows how community values have been eroded. No-one in Ireland did more to atomise the population by forcing us to work longer hours, have longer commutes, and spend less time with our friends and family. Now the bubble has burst, hopefully things will get back to the sense of community we once had.

Stuff Sucks

2009-11-27T04:53:00.000-08:00

As a budget shopper, I go to a lot of charity shops. I love their crazy randomness and I love how hygienic they are compared to rummaging round in garbage piles like they do in Africa. I love that you get really cheap things for yourself and somehow help someone else in the process.I love that they call them Charity Shops here, in the US they call them thrift stores which emphasizes the cheapness over the magnanimity. Most of all I love that stuff that would otherwise get thrown away gets used again. I’ve noticed a few things changing there over the years. For one thing, there are definitely more of them. 15 years ago there was only one in Cork, now there are over a dozen. The quality of stuff there has improved remarkably as well, and they’ve got way pickier about what they’ll accept. I noticed one had a sign up that said “no toys” because they were getting more toys than they could sell already. I once offered one woman help donating stuff but I realized she had about half a dozen bags in the back of her SUV and was basically “donating” to get out of paying bin charges. I heard that in London people anonymously “donate” stuff in the middle of the night and other people come along and scavenge it from outside the shop doors.

The horrible thing is that only about 20% of the stuff we buy ends up getting recycled in this way, most of it ends up getting buried under the ground or else incinerated. There’s a floating island in the Pacific that’s the size of Texas made entirely of trash.

Clearly, we are drowning in stuff. My nieces have 10 times as many toys as I did when I was a child, and I probably had 2 or 3 times as many as my parents did. Adults have more toys as well, and bigger toys, bigger cars, bigger TVs, more powerful computers and phones and cameras, many of which have planned obsolescence built in so people will have to buy the new model next year. When I was a kid there was just soap, shampoo and toothpaste in the bathroom but now in the same bathroom you can find moisturizer, mouth wash,conditioner, facial cream, hand toner, and exfoliating body wash. We’re not making any of this stuff ourselves like we used to in the old days. Since China joined the WTO in the early 90’s, consumer goods have constantly got cheaper making it seem like we are far richer than we are.

I’m immune to none of this consumerism myself. I’m writing this on a netbook I got a few months ago after my old one broke from constant overuse. I don’t suspect this one will last that much more than a year. I have an mp3 player and a camera that will probably break as well, and its usually cheaper to replace stuff than get it repaired as people get paid less for making stuff in China than they do for fixing it here. In the current economic system, it makes more sense that stuff doesn’t last as more money is added to GNP when stuff is bought; apparenty, almost 70% of the US economy is based on consumer spending and it’s probably not much lower here.

This can’t go on forever, which is probably a good thing, as most consumer goods are produced in factories in China that employ virtual slave labour and run on horribly polluting and inefficient coal power. While I’m not seeing any signs that consumer products are becoming more durable, at least we are starting to make an effort to re-use and recycle more things.

everything I’m wearing right now is recycled in some way, except for my underwear and socks, which cost me e1.50. I got the pants for e2 and the sweater for $1.50 when I was in the US. The t-shirt was gift from someone who didn’t want it anymore. I’m not wearing any shoes, I did kind of splash out e18 on the pair I have though they are a fancy brand that would have cost more than e100 new. I have to confess that I end up buying a lot of women’s clothes as I have a fairly svelte figure from eating a vegetarian diet though nobody ever notices this until I point it out to them. everyone I knew was complimenting me on a new “shirt” that I was wearing but they all got a big aghast when I told them it was really a blouse. I estimate that about 80% of the stuff you find in charity shops was originally worn by women, as they get some sort of endorphin rush from shopping that men will be doomed never to understand no matter how many books on evolutionary psychology we read. I saw one ad for Oxfam which encouraged women to donate their clothes to Oxfam as it made more space for new ones, which is the sort of conspicuous consumption on the part of westerners that they should be discouraging. Most of the clothes we buy are made in either Asia or Latin America by people who get paid less that we could possibly live on here. Clothes are made a number of ways. If made from animal skins, they are responsible for a great deal of land use and a varying amount of cruelty, plus no end of methane emissions. If made from crops like cotton, they are still responsible for a lot of land use, a huge amount of petrochemicals and something close to slave labour at the harvesting stage. If made from synthetic fibres, then they are basically made from oil which is finite resource that is going to run out pretty soon. Ironically, the type of fibre that has the least impact is hemp, though because of it’s associations with a certain drug isn’t subsidised so ends up costing more than anything else so only pretentious bobos wear it.

I read to my astonishment a while ago (I normally don’t get astonished that easily) that the average Irish student spends on average e20 a week on clothes. I barely spent e20 a year on clothes when I was in college and somehow managed never to freeze to death or get arrested for indecent exposure. I think it’s fair to say that not everyone spends that amount so some must be spending more than e1500 a year. Imagine how much they must be spending when a regular income comes in. I read that 10% of British women have more than 30 pairs of shoes and that the average American woman has the same amount. I understand (sort of) why women like buying shoes so much though I really can’t remember any of the shoes that any of my ex-girlfriends wore except for one garish pair of floral wellies that were purchased for electric picnic in 2005. It may be true that shoes are a factor in considering a mate for some males, though for most of us, natural good looks, breast size, personality, sense of humour, intelligence and the ability to pretend to be interested in football are more important.

I remember reading this one article in the Tribune about women’s love affair with shoes that included the line “While most men can get by with one black pair and one brown pair…” and asking myself what sort of fancy men that journalist was hanging out with that owned TWO pairs of shoes. (Full disclosure: I have a pair of hiking boots in addition to my shoes. They cost e20). The funny thing is that after almost 40 years of female liberation, men still do most of the outdoor work in western countries, most of the jobs that involve standing on your feet or walking around like police work, security, construction, agriculture, etc, yet we spend a fraction as much on shoes as women.

We spend an even smaller fraction on handbags (I’m guessing close to 0%, even though you see some metro-men with man-bags these days). I partly understand the need for handbags, as our female ancestors were primarily gatherers and they must have needed some sort of receptacle to keep the berries in. However, in those days they probably used the same receptacle till it wore out, whereas today some women say they “need” different handbags for each occasion. I really don’t know what happens to women who wear say, a shoe-shopping handbag to a parent-teacher meeting, but I know that getting kicked in the testicles is definitely worse. It may seem to a woman that having a fancy handbag is a way of conveying to the world that they are successful career women, but to a man it just makes them look like people of expensive taste and that’s not always a good thing.

We don’t really need any of these new clothes. If all the clothing factories in the world shut down right now, we would have enough clothes to keep us going for many years in spite of the fact that most of the clothes we buy are made from fragile, transient materials. Travelling around Africa, Asia and Latin America in noticed that almost everyone was wearing second-hand western clothes emblazoned with logos like “Tennessee State Spring Break 2003” and the like. (I also saw some Cork GAA shirts) There’s probably a more environmentally friendly way of distributing clothes than making them in Asia then shipping them to the US or europe where they get worn once or twice then shipping them back to Asia, but none that works within the current economic system, as the people who make clothes can’t afford to buy them and have to wait for the people who buy them to throw them out.

The bizarre thing is that even though 80% of our clothes go to landfill, we still generate enough used clothing to clothe everyone in the third world, or so it can seem when you travel around there. I think we are starting to wake up to the fact that we have so much more than we need and are starting to share things among each other. There’s a place in Dublin called Swop Shop (www.swopshop.ie) where people exchange clothing. Browsing through their website, it seems that it’s mostly orientated towards women though I’m sure there’s some men’s stuff there too. But it’s okay if there isn’t… we still have charity stores. There’s another site called gumtree on which you can find all sorts of stuff, often for free. While most of the free stuff seems to be unplanned progeny of pets, there’s some useful like bikes, chairs (good for sitting), coal, barbecues and the like. Some chancer from Cork also has an ad asking for a “free motorbike, mini moto, petrol go cart or quad” I wish him well in his quest. I don’t see anyone offering their golf chalets or the use of their racehorses, not that that surprises me that much. When I used to work as a fundraiser it was always lower-middle-income people who would donate while people in fancy suits would walk around me like I was a piece of canine excrement. People don’t get rich by being generous, except for Angelina Jolie.

Also some bartering on the site which is another way to save money although often someone will come out a deal better than their barteree . browsing through the site, I see someone offering 9 acres of land for a flat in Limerick, a rowing machine for a mobile, 2 BMWs for one car (sic) and someone wanting to swap “electrical work for drums”. Some conventional economists would regard this as being part of the black economy, but they were probably the same economists who thought it would be a good idea to build a load of houses that nobody was going to buy.

Still, no end of stuff ends up in landfill, which isn’t a surprise as we buy so much crap that either seems like a wise investment or an emotional pick-me-up at the time. Flicking through the argos catalogue, I see 57 types of hair straightener, 40 curlers, 9 camcorder bags, 28 exercise bikes,22 treadmills, 14 rowing machines, 23 car seat covers, 6 “leaf blowers”, 6 “power kites”, a “garden vacuum” a flying alarm clock, a silver digital photo keyring, and pretty scary-looking “spy pen” .

Does any of this stuff make us happy? The short answer is “No”. psychologists agree with each other on few things, but one of those is that people stop being more contented when they reach a certain level of income, and that level is well below the amount you need before you can splash out on things like leaf blowers. But just as people who are obese often have a gene that impels them to eat food that would have been beneficial at an earlier stage of evolution, we are stuck with a desire to accumulate things in times of plenty, even though most of the things we buy now aren’t built to last.

I’m probably not the first to point out that a treadmill is the perfect metaphor for modern life. Many of us choose a life where we have to keep walking faster just to remain in the same place. Buying an actual treadmill may be a sign that you are on a bigger, metaphysical treadmill, feeling pressure to look good but also to eat the many products that are advertised on TV and shouting at us from supermarket shelves. I remember working as a gardener for one guy who had a treadmill in his basement. even though I wasn’t planning this book on thrift at the time, it still occurred to me that instead of paying us 300 quid and paying roughly the same again for the treadmill, he could have got some exercise and some fresh air into the bargain by doing his own friggin’ garden and saved himself 600 quid, but I wasn’t in a position to say that at the time. Here’s a funny thing; and by “funny” I mean bitterly, painfully ironic: when I was looking up the cost of a treadmill on the argos website, I found it under “Sport and Leisure.” What sort of twisted, warped society have we created where sweatily struggling to keep up with the pace of a machine built in a coal-fired plant in China somehow constitutes leisure? When Thorsten Veblen wrote Theory of the Leisure Class he was talking about people who sat around living on the toil of others, not toiling on treadmills themselves.

Here’s a definition of Leisure from the good people at dictionary.com

–noun

1. freedom from the demands of work or duty: She looked forward to retirement and a life of leisure.

2. time free from the demands of work or duty, when one can rest, enjoy hobbies or sports, etc.: Most evenings he had the leisure in which to follow his interests.

3. unhurried ease: a work written with leisure and grace

enjoying a leisurely stroll along the beach, or a leisurely few hours playing with your kids, or some leisure time listening to music… sure. But sweating on a treadmill… please!

That guy who owned the treadmill had an SUV as well (Quelle surprise, as they say in Kinshasa). SUVs have a really useful function in society. In Gunter Grass’s excellent novel The Tin Drum a young boy in late 20’s/early 30’s Germany develops the ability to drill holes in windows with his shrill, piercing voice. He stands behind lampposts and drills holes in Jewelry shop windows and waits to see who steals stuff from them. As literary metaphors go, it ain’t that subtle.

Today we can all tell who the greediest, most selfish people are in our society, and we don’t need any special powers conferred on us by a magic realist novelist. They’re the ones behind the wheel of an SUV. It’s true that some people need SUVs, like Park Rangers and people who live on really rough land in places like Donegal. The people who actually own most SUVs are people like drug dealers and property speculators. Many bought them in the early 2000’s when oil was really cheap and the expectation that it would remain cheap as the Middle east became a US colony. Now they can’t afford to run them in many cases and can hardly give them away. My heart bleeds for these people, it really does. It bleeds so much that if you drained the blood you could save the life of someone that’s been in a crash with an SUV, of whom there are quite a few. There they were, buying gas guzzling behemoths, pumping tons of greenhouse gases into the athmosphere, using up rapidly diminishing resources, all so everyone could see how rich they were, and to be fair, keeping their kids safe while endangering everyone else’s. now they’re stuck with them, waiting for oil to get cheap again. Ain’t gonna happen, folks.

Unfortunately, it’s not just a matter of leaving SUV drivers stew in the own juice. By driving such big cars they push up the price of fuel for everyone. They push up the price of food as well, as they drive demand for biofuel, which has caused riots in Mexico and startled looks here. In some countries people have taken direct action against SUV drivers like slashing their tyres and spray painting offensive graffiti. I don’t believe in doing stuff like this, partly because it’s illegal and largely because it often strengthens people’s resolve to keep doing what they are doing. More subtle things like cycling slowly in front of them and not letting them in at intersections, might, if performed on a mass scale, be more effective.

I don’t even know how to drive. When the cost of depreciation, insurance, petrol and maintainence is taken into account it’s estimated that it costs €10,000 a year to keep an average family car, and that’s more than I’ve ever earned in a year. Some people are surprised when I tell them this, particularly in the US, where I usually have to explain 2 or 3 times, though the class my brother teaches were surprised to learn that my sister, my other brother and I don’t drive as well.

Except when I’ve been travelling and been really near some fascinating places that can only be reached by car, I’ve never really regretted not being able to drive. The advantages of using a bicycle are enormous. Obviously, it’s way cheaper: I estimate the cost of maintaining a bicycle at around e300-500 a year, less than a twentieth of what it costs to maintain a car. If u pick up a bike second hand then it works out even cheaper. I used to pick up cheap bikes that the gardai had recovered though these days they just have one annual auction. They can still be found in second hand stores, in the classified ads section of newspapers, on gumtree and on craigslist. It’s getting harder to find cheap bikes as demand is increasing so much but you can get lucky some times.

It’s not even that much slower to get around a city by bike, in fact one British study concluded that it took 4 minutes less to complete a certain journey by bike, and that was a controlled study where cyclists kept off the pavement and stopped at red lights, which not all cyclists do. Motorists, particularly SUV drivers hate it when we cycle “guerrilla” style as it gives us a competitive advantage over them in the race to get wherever we’re going. But then, we don’t have to worry about getting penalty points or losing our no-claims bonus.

It’s a bit paradoxical that motorists are forced to get insurance to drive while cyclists aren’t as cycling is obviously more dangerous: around 4% of road deaths are cyclists though they only make up around 1% of total traffic on the road. There are other downsides to cycling; videlicet, getting wet, getting sweaty and the fact that you need to eat more, though this won’t be a problem for everyone. In my chapter on travel, I estimate the relative cost of “fuel” for biking and driving long journeys, and even though there are some variables and intangibles it invariably works out cheaper to cycle. In urban areas, the differential is more marked as cars use up a lot of energy when stopped at lights while bicycles use none ( sometimes you really have to stop at lights.)

As for using public transport… well, it’s cheap, I guess. The buses in Cork boast that you can buy a monthly bus pass for the cost of a tank of petrol, and they’re probably right. You are left at the mercy of arbitrary timetables, surly bus drivers who lately are often close to being monoglot Polish speakers, shaky, smelly buses, and bus stops which often aren’t covered. It’s not that surprising that so many people who commute to school by bus are pressurizing their parents to let them learn to drive. I was the exact opposite. My dad couldn’t wait for me to learn to drive as this would have reinforced the middle-class status which he worked so hard to achieve, but even as a teenager I considered cars to be smelly, polluting beasts. I never had to get a bus to school though.

I don’t understand why the government makes public transport such an unappealing choice and forces so many of us to buy cars. This is the way it is in the US, though there they used to make most of their own cars and drill most of their oil until the 70’s, and still have some oil left.

I heard when Ireland joined the eurozone the economy got a big boost as people spent the money under their blankets on new cars, as we had two years previously when people rushed to buy “00” registered cars. I fail to see the economic logic of this, as we don’t produce cars here, we don’t produce any of the components of cars here, and we don’t produce any of the fuel for cars here (we are starting to grow rape for biofuel, which I disapprove of enormously. In the future we may be able to generate fuel for hydrogen cells from either wind or wave power, but no cars bought today will be able to run on that.) So it seems to me that those petrolheads could have given as big a boost to the economy by giving the dusty old pounds to random people on the street.

If you really have to drive, and I accept that if you live in a rural area and/or have a small family you might not have a choice, the only advice I can really give is to have a small, fuel-efficient car, to go online and compare the cost of different insurers (see, for example. www.compare.ie or www.compareireland.ie), to buy a used car from a trusted dealer, to check out a petrol-price comparison website. Most of the latter are fairly localized, if there isn’t one in your own area you should hook up with someone who knows HTML and set up your own one. Also, have your tyre pressure checked regularly as a lot of fuel is wasted as a result of tyres not being pumped up enough. Or just get a bicycle instead.

Oddly enough, fancy stereos seem to be going the way of the dinosaur, by which I don’t mean that I expect anyone to be reassembling them in 65 million years time and speculating about what their output in watts was. I remember my dad spending £1000 on one in the early eighties which on the cinema-ticket index would be about €4500 today, while the most expensive one in the argos catalogue today is a mere €999.99. It had all sorts of buttons on the front, most of which did absolutely nothing. It had massive speakers which were almost 3 feet long and you could feel vibrate like those deaf kids in Children of a Lesser God. As well as a woofer and a tweeter it had a so-called mid-range speaker which just seemed to amplify the scratchiness on LPs even more. The one after that had a graphic equalizer which I used to fiddle with all the time until I realized that the way to achieve optimum sound quality was to leave it alone. That didn’t stop me from arguing with my friends in the middle-class enclave in which I grew up about whose dad had the coolest stereo. I don’t even have a hi-fi at the moment. I had one that I bought for €70 second hand that I used to plug my ipod or laptop into but it mysteriously disappeared after I went on my last road trip. Surprisingly enough, the sound quality on the laptop I’m using now is quite good.

As I alluded to above, we use a lot more things to wash ourselves with than before; though just as we buy more shoes even though we’re on our feet less than ever, we do less work which involves getting dirty than ever before yet buy a plethora of cleaning and “personal care” products which I enumerated early on in the chapter… and that wasn’t all the stuff you can get in supermarkets. Some people would argue that it’s no harm to have all these products as you can’t be too clean. Well… you can be too clean, actually. If you aren’t exposed to any harmful germs you become more and more sensitive to disease especially to new strains like the bird flu and swine flu. Some of them may be more harm than good in themselves, containing more chemicals than you can shake a stick at, many of which may be carcinogenic. Many contain aluminum which is implicated in all sorts of diseases, particularly alzheimers.

Richard Power’s novel Gain uses the personal care industry in the US as a metaphor for the whole country to pretty good effect. It starts off in the early 19^th century where a family of German immigrants start making soap from animal fat and gradually make a business for themselves. By the start of 21^st, the descendents have become lazy and spoiled as the company has to keep generating new needs for health and beauty products to keep going in the modern corporate world, most of them now made abroad and most made from petrochemicals instead of natural materials. Though much of capitalism is based on creating false needs, cleaning products are so apposite because we probably need them less than we did 200 years ago when most of us lived on the land and got genuinely dirty every day, and probably could have used deodorant more if it had existed at the time.

I used to wear anti-perspirant in school, partly because we used to wear almost transparent light blue shirts which would turn navy in any area where we sweated. This was pretty embarrassing, though the upside was that the girls wore the same shirts and we could see the outlines of their bras, and as you may know teenage boys live for moments like this. When I found out that sweat was your body’s way of regulating your temperature and secreting some chemicals like urea, I thought it was better to let it flow, and started using deodorant instead. I kept wearing this until I travelled to South east Asia where the mosquitos who carry malaria are attracted to sharp odours. After that, I never got back into the habit and have never really regretted it. If anything, I’ve actually had more luck with women since then. Some scientists suggest that men give off natural pheromones that women subconsciously detect and wearing a spray made from artificial chemicals can only confuse that process. And they are all artificial, no matter how natural and earthy they sound. Most of them will cease to exist when the oil runs out and that may be in your lifetime so you may as well stop now.

I still use shampoo, though some hardcore environmentalists insist it’s not necessary. Apparently our hair secretes it’s own fluids naturally which adding hot water and chemicals destroy. The catch is that, if you’ve been brought up using shampoo as I have, it takes around 6 weeks for your hair to start naturally cleaning itself, and this is a long time to go without washing your hair at all. Some brave souls do manage it though, like Leo Hickman, author of the excellent A life Stripped Bare, though, it should be pointed out that he is almost completely bald. I still have soap as well. Generally, I use soap that doesn’t use animal fats, though this can be hard to find. I also still use toothpaste and don’t intend to ever stop as keeping your teeth clean is way cheaper than going to the dentist and paying for whatever cheers you up after having been to the dentist. It’s one thing you shouldn’t scrimp on, the cheap toothpaste in Tesco’s being particularly useless. I also use floss, though not as much as my dentist would like. I really don’t recommend the “value” floss in Tesco’s… take it from someone who’s learned the hard way.

Moisturizers and skin creams aren’t really that necessary. The best way to have smooth skin is to have a diet that’s low in saturated and trans-fats and high in fruit and vegetables and omega oils. As for conditioner, I just want to wash my hair and go, I don’t want to put freakin’ conditioner on it. I have curly hair, so using it just makes me look like Shirley Bassey.

There are a few things you can spend money on that will actually save you money in the long run and also help the environment. energy-efficient light-bulbs are an obvious example, as they use only a fifth as much power as the older ones, which account for about 20% of our electricity bills. If you live in your own house, it can be worth investing in insulation to keep heating bills down. The last time I was living in an apartment where I paid all the bills, I never paid more than e7/week on electric bills even though the heating was electric. It was basically a matter of moving my whole life into the bedroom and having the heating on there for around 2 hours every day. If you live in your own place it’s worth looking into a cost/benefit analysis of getting either a wind or solar generator. These are getting increasingly more affordable and the time is going to come when you can’t afford not to have them. even in our mild, overcast, soft-day-thank-god country it’s possible to live off-grid if you use energy sparingly.

Other domestic appliances are complex in terms of cost-effectiveness. Microwaves can save you a lot of money as they use far less energy than ovens though if you buy a cheap one it can break down and you are saddled with the cost of replacing it. Bread-makers can save you a little on the cost of buying fresh artisan bread from a baker but not on the cost of buying mass-produced bread from the supermarket. They also make a god-awful amount of noise which the smell of fresh bread in the morning doesn’t always compensate for. Plasma TVs might seem like a one-off investment until you get the next electricity bill… they use around 5 times as much power as a regular TV.

Having become an uncle in the last few years I’ve seen how children get drawn into the consumerist lifestyle. I don’t know how much things have changed since I was a child myself, I remember when I was a kid looking at all the ads on TV for toys and wanting all of them. I remember looking through the Mothercare catalogue when I was about 5 and asking my mum for almost every toy there. It’s possible that some mothers would actually accede to that demand these days. My mother used to work full time though was somewhat of a pioneer in that respect, though that was in the austere, pre-Celtic days when almost every kid had no more than a mere handful of toys to play with. When my nieces were born it was a little depressing to see their parents’ families falling over each other trying to buy more presents for them, particularly as most of them are made in China and this doesn’t augur well for their long-term future.

Parents are able to afford all these toys partly because so many more women are working these days though much of the money gets sucked up by mortgage payments. It’s unfortunate that people can’t spend more time with their children instead of paying someone else’s children in Asia to make some toys for them, but that’s how it is for many people these days. It might not be that way if people didn’t feel a “need” to “own” their house, but that’s the choice many make. Ideally we could all work 20-25 hours and live within our means; ideally a lot of fake jobs could be abolished and all the unused houses turned into low rent accommodation for working families… the imagination isn’t there to make that work though.

Full disclosure: I buy almost as many toys for my nieces as anyone. I buy almost all of them in Charity shops, where the alternative is going to landfill. The great thing about kids is that they can’t tell if stuff is new or not until they are about 5. Generally charity shops wash everything, though it doesn’t hurt to wash them again, unless they are non-machine washable in which case either the toy or your elbows get hurt. When I have bought new toys, I’ve tried to avoid buying toys from China though this is easier said than done as 90% of toys are now made there. There’s one specialist toy store in Cork and I’m sure there are some in other big towns where you can buy quality, european-made toys though Irish-mde products are thin on the ground. If you are skilled in crafts it can be really satisfying to make your own toys, though some kids can be sniffy when they receive non-branded products.

The process of indoctrination into consumer society continues into our teenage years. To be fair, it’s not quite as bad as in the US where some schools have “Coke Days” and “McDonalds Days” though you can see it heading that way. Studies have shown that many children are more likely to recognize brand labels than types of flower that grow in their area.We are already fairly brand-conscious as kids, but the process goes into overdrive when we hit puberty, when we suddenly start “needing” to wear the most fashionable clothes and having the most up-to-date mobile phones. I’ve never been that interested in fashion partly because I’m a male and partly because I grew up in a rural backwater, although having said that my sister grew up in the same place and she’s a regular fashionista. To be fair, a lot of males get suckered into buying clothes they don’t need, football shirts being a particularly egregious example. I like watching soccer on TV as much as the next man, and do have a favourite team, though I’m not saying which one. The idea that you “need” to have a new kit every year, and an away kit into the bargain strikes me as a bit ludicrous, particularly when they are made for a song in Asia and the club keeps around 2/3 of the cost which ends up in the wage packets of the spoiled monkeys who play for premiership teams.

As those Yorkshiremen in that Monty Phython sketch might say, there weren’t no mobile phones when I was at’ teenager. Well, there were, but they were the size of a brick and couldn’t send text messages or take pictures or play mp3s and only stock brokers carried them around. I avoided having them until 2004 by which time it was virtually impossible to get by without one in a western country. Actually, it’s hard to get by without them even in the developing world. When I went to Kenya I was surprised to see so many of the local slum-dwellers having fancier mobile phones than me. They are an excellent example of how everything has been commodified. In the old days people didn’t need phones because we lived in small towns or urban communities where people knew each other and there were fairly limited social options. People used to leave their doors open so friends could visit, whereas now we call each other up at great expense. People weren’t as scared to leave their kids play unattended as there weren’t so many media scare stories about paedophiles although if anything there are probably less of them around now than ever before. Nowadays, parents are afraid to leave their kids go anywhere without a mobile.

If you are fairly careful with mobiles, they shouldn’t cost that much. If you choose pay-as-you-go and use the web to send free texts, and only call when it’s really necessary, then they shouldn’t burn that big a hole in your budget. Then again, if you have access to the web, there are all sorts of ways you can communicate for free, like skype, yahoo messenger and msn messenger. It seems to me that Meteor is the cheapest provider and that Nokia are the most reliable, longest-lasting phones, though opinion is divided on this. I had a Sony-Eriksson which had all sorts of fancy applications but started to break after 6 months. Iphones and blackberries are really not worth considering if you want to save money. Funnily enough there’s a money-saving app for the iPhone which can be had for a very reasonable 79c though when you have to pay €45/month minimum subscription the irony won’t be lost on some people.

Oddly enough phones seem to have got more expensive in the last few years when everything else has got cheaper. When I got one in 2004 I paid €100, got €80 free credit and got a free DVD as well, and that was before you could stream any movie you wanted online. When I got one a few months ago from the same provider (Meteor) it cost only €50 but came with only €20 of free credit which I still haven’t got and no sign of a free DVD.

It’s possible to do so much for free online these days, as I show in the next chapter, that it can work out cheaper to have a computer than not to have one. It makes more sense to have a laptop as they use so much less energy and higher portability. There are great bargains to be had at the moment on eBay although if you buy a computer second hand it may not last all that long. While Acer and Fugitsu-Seimens are the cheapest, it may be worth splashing out on a slightly more expensive one as they can last years if you are careful about which illegal files you download. Again, I wouldn’t dream of buying an Apple as they aren’t worth the extra money. The new generation of netbooks are really cheap though they can crash if you try using more than 2 applications at once though I’m using one right now and listening to music while writing this. It cost me €260 though it doesn’t come with a CD drive so it’s going to end up being more like €300 after I pay for an external disk drive. Some are given away for free if you agree to a certain broadband providers plan which ends up being way more expensive.

Sadly, computers still aren’t being built to last. The technology is moving so fast that the one I have now would have cost twice as much and taken up 3 times the size 4 years ago. It won’t be able to handle the latest operating system which means it won’t be able to run some of the software that comes out in the next few years. While some obsolete computers end up in developing countries and others are stripped down and recycled many are just thrown away. Many of the raw materials like Coltan, a rare alloy which makes all the minaturisation possible; come from conflict zones like DRC where there is a huge blood price to be paid. It’s estimated that for every gram this computer and every other weigh around 70g of minerals had to be mined.

I read a typically doom-mongering, hysterical, Chicken-Licken report in a newspaper that tried to alarm us all by letting us know that consumer spending was down by a massive 13%. If this were concentrated at the top of the social spectrum then it would definitely be a good thing, though sadly the opposite is probably the case. It’s presented as bad news because a mystical, ineffable beast called “the economy” needs us to spend more money for it to stay alive, while on the other hand a very real entity called Planet earth needs us to consume less stuff to stay alive. Sadly, our politicians have taken the side of the economy and want us to get back to our old, high-spending ways as quickly as possible. It’s probably better that we use what we already have as best we can. We’ll have to downsize eventually, as the coal and oil will definitely run out eventually. What better time than now?

Trailers for Sale or Rent: Getting around on the cheap

2009-10-01T12:11:00.000-07:00

Travel isn’t a new phenomenon. Humans have been travelling since our ancestors, perhaps as few as 100, first left the African Savannah , made their way up to the Caucuses, then spread out all around the world, traversing almost every possible landscape. Many of those who ended up in our part of the world weren’t finished yet even though it may have looked like we’d reached the end of the world at the time. A sixth century Irish monk was probably the first European to get to the Americas, but certainly not the last. There were the wild geese, spreading irish names all of Europe and latin America, the post-famine diaspora…the list goes on. So travel is ingrained somewhere deep in our psyches… I’m actually writing this on a greyhound bus in Quesnel, BC (I hadn’t heard of it before either)

Yet recreational travel was the preserve of the very rich until a relatively short while ago. Before the 18^th century tourism didn’t really exist at all, then the so-called Grand Tour which took English grandees to places like Venice and Paris, so much so that when Goethe’s Faust was written in the early 19^th century, the main character wonders why there aren’t any Britons visiting hell.

Another Englishman, Thomas Cook had the unbelievably bad idea of trying to stop drunkenness by organizing cheap package tours so that Working class people would have their horizons broadened. Thus, fairly inauspiciously began modern tourism, and it’s stayed the same in many ways.

While in the past we travelled to find food, fight wars or look for work, now we started to work in one place and save the money to have a short holiday every year. And there’s the rub. Travel costs money. There’s flights, insurance, hotels, car rental, bus tickets, plus whatever people deem is a reasonable price for visiting whatever the local tourist attractions are.

Or does it? In New Orleans, I met a guy who was travelling to every state in the US spending money only on beer. He’d been teaching English in Japan and was sick of people there imagining that the US was a paranoid society where everyone carried hand-guns around with them, and decided, like another famous NOLA resident, to rely on the comfort of strangers. He decided to make a movie on the theme of trust in America. He found out about a website called couchsurfing, where thousands of people around the world o(including me)offer living space to travelers and then (hopefully) find places when they go on the road themselves. Then he oiled up his hitching finger, packed his bags and got on the interstate. He carried a video camera around with him and documented the whole experience.

I’d hosted a guy from Toulouse who was doing pretty much the same thing, except he was trying to promote world peace by walking round the world (no, I couldn’t see it either) after that I stayed with a guy in Montreal who cycled the 5000km to Vancouver…sure beats sitting on the sun in Benidorm getting drunk and having your swimming pool place stolen by Germans. All in all, I’ve hosted people from 15 different countries and stayed in 7 different countries with other hosts.

So finding out about couchsurfing, which I did entirely by chance, sitting down reading the Guardian one day, altered my life pretty substantially. I wouldn’t be in Canada right now if it wasn’t for chancing upon it. I love that something like this can exist in a world where there’so much greed and paranoia. There are those who would say that it doesn’t benefit the economy, but that seems to be looking at it the wrong way…believeing that GDP per capita is the ultimate measure of happiness hasn’t exactly worked out that well for us, has it? In any case, many of the people who I hosted would probably never have come to Ireland if it wasn’t for this project.

Since then its become way bigger, when I started there were only about 100 people in the whole country, now there’s more than that in cork alone. There are a couple of similar sites called hospitality club and global freeloaders but neither of their websites leapt out at me the way couchsurfing did. I like the way you can create a facebook-style profile so people have an idea who you are. There are also some craigslist style forums (for a?) discussion groups on subjects like finding cheap flights and getting rides… basically you can spend your whole life there and some do.e

It always takes me a while to explain to people that people let you stay in their houses for free, when I explain the exchange element they always assume that the same people stay with you but the chances that there’s someone in Regina, SK who wants to stay in Cork are rather slim…it’s really a global, sharing, pay-it-forward thing… and it works.

In case you are wondering, those signing up (you haven’t yet? What are you waiting for?) have to sign a couple of icons ( I say “sign” though I know there’s probably some fancy computer term) saying that you recognize that it’s not a dating site. However…people are people… we all have the same basic needs…the first coupple I stayed with actually met on the site and ended up marrying each other…whether I ever became more than just good friends with anyone I met on the site is obviously something I’m not at liberty to say.

I have had a few experiences which I wouldn’t have had staying in a hostel or a hotel. In Philadelphia I got taken to a place where I got a vegan Philly Cheesesteak (seit an and soy cheese, since you ask) In New Orleans I somehow managed to get into a frat party where Girls Gone Wild had been th year before. In Cleveland, I got into the Rock’n’Roll hall of fame for free. In Washington DC I stayed with four gay drag queens who brought me to a Mexican Day of the Dead party. In Regina I was at a party for cross-dressers where every drag queen in Central Canada was in attendance. In Lisbon I got to stay in a restored 18^th century mansion which just survived the tsunami of 1756. In Santa Fe I stayed in a house made from soil though that’s not a big deal there.

Like everything else in life, it hasn’t been all plain sailing. One of the hairiest things to happen me was in Berlin earlier this year (09) when I went out to a nightclub in Berlin but wasn’t trusted with the keys by my hostess. She told me to ring the bell but I got no reply; this was in January and it was -5 Celsius outside. I threw some pebbles at what I thought was her window but the response I got was from some other, angrier German woman… I don’t speak the lingo but I did catch the word polizien… but such is life. This was in Prenzlaur Berg which I would have had to cross a mine-ridden, barbed wire covered wall to get into 20 years before…

I also had major complications in 2005 as a host. I shared one place with a guy who was, and there’s really no nice way to say this, a psychopath who would have gone and snitched me to the landlady if he knew I had anyone over. I used to have to wait till he went to bed which he did at 10.30 every night and then smuggle people in climbing up the stairs in tandem with them…part of me got some sort of surreptitious thrill from it, though.

I’d also like better if it was truly global, but sadly not that many people outside Europe, North America and Australasia get to visit Ireland. One guy from Bombay was going to crash with me but he found somewhere else.

The next cheapest way to find a roof over your head is to stay in a hostel. Hostels have a bad reputation in some quarters mainly thanks to that Eli Roth movie which I haven’t seen, and have no plans to see, thank you very much. There’s also a quote from a Douglas Coupland Novel called The Gum Thief that I was actually reading while working in a hostel where a typically alienated Coupland protagonist writes that hostels are like crack houses without the crack. Never having lived in a crack-house ( I used to live in the same block as one, but that’s another story) I cant comment but if crack houses are as bright and friendly and helpful as some of the hostles I’ve stayed in then crack has been given a really unfair portrayal by the media. The one I worked in was actually pretty institutional as many are, though some people prefer quiet places where they can get a good nights sleep. Bizarrely, they hosted a wedding party one night but that does show how hostels have come up in the world in some respect.There are a number of websites like hostelbookers, hostelworld and hostels.com which help to sort out some of the wheat from the chaff. I use hostelbookers a lot as they give $5 worth of phone calls every time you book with them. Just in case you are wondering, I actually was hosting couchsurfers while I was working in that hostel. I used to live just across the road and used it to give directions.

Before there was couchsurfing, there was backpacking. Actually, backpacking is still there. I don’t know if a definitive history of backpacking has been written, but as far as I know it started out in the late 60’s and early 70s when Australians in their late teens and early 20s realized how much cheaper places like Bali were than their own country and Americans and Europeans started going to india for much the same reason (oh, and to find enlightenment) It was the start of a beautiful friendship that lasts into this era of cheap flights, web access and satellite TV. The publication of the first lonely planet guide to South East Asia turned the trickle into a current and I don’t see that stopping for a while.

My first experience with backpacking was in India in the crazy, rollercoaster year of 2001. I’d managed to save up enough money while writing a screenplay that never got made into a movie and living on unemployment benefit. When I think back on it now, I wonder how I actually did it… remember, that was back in the early years of the Celtic Tiger and there’d only been 3 massive, inflation-busting rises in the dole since the soldiers of destiny got back into power. On the other hand, India, being a poor but relatively stable country, is really cheap, or at least is was before all our call-centre jobs migrated there.

One thing I didn’t like about India was that many travelers (don’t even mention the word “tourist”) see cheap travel as an end rather a means. Once in fort Kochin in Kerala, there were 2 Germans and myself trying to get a cycle rickshaw ride, (thankfully, they don’t have any of the foot-pulled rickshaws there any more) He wanted 15 rupees for the 3 of us, but they insisted on paying 10. When you consider that a rupee is worth 2 cents, it really doesn’t seem worth arguing over.

I only once paid more than 2 old Irish pounds for a place to stay. That was in Khajarau near the so-called Kama Sutra in stone, on the way to where I’d met 2 swedish girls who I wanted to try out some positions with myself. Never happened, but that place I paid a princely 3 quid for was so nice that I kind of wished I splashed out a bit more. En suite bathroom, fan, perfectly ironed mattresses…

India is probably the only place in the world where you can sit on the beach all day, be served fresh fruit by locals and spend less than E10 a day. At the time, in Kovalam beach in Kerala, I only spent around 5 pounds in old money doing that. I remember paying around 8 pounds for a 1000-mile railway journey from Mumbai to Allehabad and wondering how much that would have cost at home, a pretty redundant exercise as we don’t have that much rail stock in the whole country. Rumours were abound at the time that the Indian government were planning to introduce separate prices for foreigners as the Vietnamese government very unwisely did, but as far as I know it still hasn’t happened. The response in Vietnam was for tourist agencies to set up their own private buses, allowing people to travel the whole length of the country and stop off at all the interesting places along the way for as iittle as $21. That had come down from $32 a few years earlier, as there was so much competition in that so-called communist country for tourist dollars.

South East Asia isn’t that more expensive and the hassle factor is exponentially smaller. Thailand has a reputation as the land of smiles and it’s hard to argue…it seems that they collectively know that tourism benefits them all, at least in the short run, whereas in India a lot more people are fighting over a much smaller piece of pie. Places like Vietnam that haven’t been that tourist orientated in the past have learned from every other countries experience and provide backpackers with everything they could possibly want. I stayed in one place in Hanoi that was a hostel, a restaurant, a cybercafé and a tourist booking office. If I’d asked really nicely, they would have probably cut my nails for me as well. I went on a tour of Halong Bay, possibly the most beautiful place on Earth, for 3 nights and 2 days, including all food and lodging, for $21, the cost of 3 beers in an Irish pub. It’s so cheap that even a dedicated cheapskate like me used to tip the people working as guides or drivers fairly generously. I was aware that most of the money goes to agents.

South East Asia is one place where you can get involved in extreme sports relatively easily. Thailand is one of the cheapest places to learn scuba-diving and rock-climbing. The cheapest place to learn to surf is on the pacific coast of Central America.

I’ve never been to South America which is pretty well established on the backpacker trail though I’m aware that it’s in the same price bracket as South East Asia. Argentina was one of the richest countries in the world but it’s economy has collapsed leaving it’s currency undervalued. Countries in the Northern part of the continent like Bolivia are particularly cheap. On the other hand, getting to Machu Picchu and getting deep into the jungle in Brazil can be costly.

The only really cheap place you can get to without getting on a long haul flight is Morocco which you can get to from Spain and there’s a few direct flights to Agadir now as well. You can get relatively cheap flights down to Mexico and make your way to Guatemala, Nicaragua and elsewhere from there. In many tropical countries its advisable to take anti-malarial medication which doesn’t come cheap, unless you have a medical card, in which case you can get doxycycline, which is also used to treat gonnoreah, for free.

The downside to suddenly being a rich person is that every poor person in the country wants you to share their wealth with them, and it just isn’t possible to help them all. You can help some, but you have to be really careful. Once, carrying a huge bunch of those small, locally grown bananas, I was unwise enough to give one to a little kid, prompting a swarm of little kids to surround me….i was taking nutritional supplements which contain potassium which they probably weren’t so I guess it all works out…I was a bit unfortunate that the prices of the Taj Mahal and a lot of other monuments went up exponentially for non-locals just before I arrived… the Taj went up from around $1.50 to $20 though that’s still only the cost of a nighttime cab ride in Dublin.

Many people only visit Western countries because of the perceived element of danger in the developing world, and it’s certainly true that, statistically you are more likely to mugged there. I had a walkman robbed in India, a camera nicked in Kenya, and made a non-consensual donation of E40 to a Morrocan beggar. All the really serious accidents I’ve had have happened in Ireland though. It’s best not to be too concerned about danger anyway. When I was in Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, TX, I was wondering why I was the only gringo flicking through the counterfeit DVDs that lay in stalls in front of cheap chemists and tequila bars. I found out when I got back to the US that thirteen people were gunned down on the street in broad daylight a few weeks before. But I’m still here to tell the tale, not surprisingly : as there are 1.7 million people in Juarez my odds or survival were pretty good. Likewise, in Laos, fourteen people got killed on the main road from Vientiane to Luang Prabang, the two most popular Lao towns for tourists, the day after I arrived in Luang Prabang. People were queuing up outside cybercafés to tell their moms they were alright which would have freaked them out as it wasn’t reported back home. Because bad news sells, you only hear about it when something bad happens a traveler to a third world country, but the fact is that more than 99% of us make it home without incident, whereas almost all of us are hospitalized at some stage back home as a result of workplace or traffic accidents or domestic abuse. To me, smoking tobacco is a far more serious gamble with your health, as around 50% of you smokers will die of either heart disease or Cancer, condemning yourselves to a slow and painful death.

Full Disclosure: I did panic a bit when I was in South East Asia and SARS broke out. That was because I was reading the papers, which made it seem like a serious disease.

Before I went backpacking around Africa and central America I had to actually earn the money to go to Africa as it’s a lot more expensive than India for a number of reasons. The paradox is that some really poor, screwed-up countries don’t really get that many tourists and the only people who stay are UN staff who are on expense accounts…in Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi (you knew that, right?) the cheapest hotel is $30, more than I paid for a dorm bed in Manhattan… apparently Bujumbura’s not that great anyway. I remember working in the shitty, repetitive, low-paid job I was doing in the long, hot summer of 06 when someone asked me if I was paying for the trip to Africa with money I’d earned from one of the novels I’d written. If I’de been a published novelist I wouldn’t have been working in that craphole. The truth is we just don’t know how rich we are and the only way we can find out is by going to poorer countries and watch how far our money goes. If it seems absurd that I travelled to Indian with money I saved from unemployment benefit I guess that’s because it is…but I cant change how things are…and neither can you.

I’ve read that some employers are giving employees 1 or 2 year breaks to travel around the world in the hope that the recession will have subsided when they come back, which makes perfect sense on some levels. No-one knows what the future will bring, but it’s my sense that the current arrangement where westerners with seemingly bottomless pockets descend on every poor-but-stable country in the world every winter can’t last forever, particularly as so much fossil fuel is involved.

It’s hard to know what’s going to happen to Flight prices in the next few years. Some were predicting that air travel would become a thing of the past when oil hit $100/barrel but it hit $135 last year and survived. It isn’t going to hit that level again until this recession is over and that won’t be for a while.

Also, we’re being told that we need to stay at home and keep money circulating in the country. I have some sympathy for this view even though most of us did nothing to cause the recession. It’s obvious that less people are going to visit Ireland in the next couple of years, the prices for hotels and B&Bs may be coming down somewhat, but from a really high, post-celtic tiger base so still cripplingly expensive for many people. I came across a piece in The Irish Times where they gave 3 hacks the supposedly small sum of E300 to spend a 3-day holiday. ONE HUNDRED EURO A DAY! In very few countries would this be considered budget travel. I only spent around E40 a day in Manhattan, and that was staying in a hostel rather than couchsurfing.

The good news is that our Island is really small and has a moderate climate so it’s possible to camp most of the year. I went camping last November on the Beara Peninsula way, one of the many excellent, reasonably well-marked trails that criss-cross our little island. Mind you, the island doesn’t seem quite as little when you are walking across it as when in a car or in a bus. I didn’t have the fancy equipment that you see many hikers using, just a cheap tent that I got in Dunnes for E30, which came with 2 bags and 2 mats; a backpack I got for e28 back in 05 and still have, a couple of makeshift repair jobs later. As for food, well, Tesco do some noodles that retail for 13c for they aren’t vegan so I went to Dunnes and splashed out on some fancy noodles for 25c, then winged it over to Tesco to get their half kilo bags of oats for 41c and some of their so-called organic fair-trade chocolate bars for 99c apiece. Fuel to heat this cheap nosh with another matter… I don’t recommend lighting fires because of the danger and because they draw so much attention and are pretty unreliable in our climate. Primuses (Primi?) and gas canisters don’t come cheap and the gas always seems to run out slightly too soon. I had a really cheap propane-based stove that I got in Africa which you couldn’t possibly buy here because it was so messy but when the wicks ran out I couldn’t replace them so I had to bid it adieu.

Camping is something that often happens in a legal grey area, though one time last year in Colorado I stepped over into the black side by pitching my tent in an unused fairground only to find myself woken up by a friendly officer of the law the next morning. It was my birthday so he let me off with a warning. Generally you can get away with camping rough in Ireland though a lot of farmers will get really angry if you stay on their land without asking and it can be harder to track them down as some of them own really big areas of land. I fell foul of one in the Kenmare area who was concerned with the possibility of being sued if I broke my leg on his property. I tried to tell him I had a new-fangled modern tent that was optimized to avoid those many leg-breaking accidents that used to occur but that was pissing into the wind which I’ve done in a literal sense on a few camping trips before and since. It actually worked out Okay as I got a free meal in the campsite 5 miles down the road.

As you probably know, the insurance industry has been making a concerted effort aided by some nanny-statist politicians to rob life of any aspect of pleasure from life and camping is no exception. There’s a place you may have heard off called the Old Head of Kinsale which was the best place in Europe to learn rock-climbing as well as being an area of outstanding natural beauty which you can only visit now by paying E200 for a round of golf. At first the golfers and hikers were able to co-exist peacefully like those humans and aliens in the bar in the first Star Wars movie but then one of the hikers got hit by a golf ball and sued...many people are scared to open a bar or a club because of the crippling costs of insurance as well. From a camper’s point of view it’s a bit paradoxical as many farmers wont let you camp without asking them, but their consent implies legal responsibility…it’s the sort of thing that even Franz Kafka wouldn’t dream up. Some farmers get around this by putting up liability waver signs, others adopt a don’t ask, don’t tell approach, and some, like that Kerryman go round looking for campers to evict as his ancestors would have got rid of peasant farmers after the famine.

It really shouldn’t be this way as farmers were compensated heavily for allowing hikers to walk along their land along with the massive subsidies they get for producing food that as often as not isn’t even eaten. Fortunately it’s generally possible to camp rough, especially if you arrive late in the evening and get up early in the morning.

Cycling is another way you can get around cheaply unless you’re one of those ponces who likes to wear lycra, goggles, tour-de-france style tops and drink energy drinks to optimize your performance. Me, I just wear charity-shop cut offs and shades I get from Penney’s. It’s said that it’s possible to cycle all around Ireland in a month though that itinerary leaves out some of the most impressive peninsulae. Personally, I can only cycle around 45 miles a day and for about a week at a time though that’s more than a lot of people. It’s a little sad that teenagers stop cycling as soon as they are old enough to drive assuming their parents can afford it but this trend seems to be reversing.

It’s actually gotten a little more expensive to cycle in recent years as second-hand bikes are getting snapped up way faster as people seek ways to beat to recession, though bargains can still be found, particularly at police auctions. Bear in mind, too, that Vittoria de Sica’s 1948 neo-realist film The Bicycle Thieves remains an inspiration for many people today. I’ve had 3 bikes stolen and have responded by buying thicker locks, though the thieves seem to keep buying stronger llock-breakers as well. It’s a kind of evolutionary arms race akin to the one that non-organic farmers are waging with super-bugs. I bought the last one on ebay at a cost of E18 saving me nearly a tenner but while I was waiting for it to arrive I had to walk everywhere like someone in one of those countries where they don’t have bikes.

In Toronto the police had the ingenious idea of buying some second-hand bikes and leaving them at a cctv-monitored spot… so brilliant in it’s simplicity that one wonders why no-one tried it before or why our own boys in blue haven’t replicated the idea.

Cycling is also a good way to keep fit as you probably know already. The guy who used to be my doctor until my medical card ran out cycles everywhere though he can probably afford a car. Apparently some bright spark had the idea of a machine called an “exercise bike” which was like a bicycle except it remained static and was only to be used in indoor areas called “gymnasia” or “gyms”. I don’t know if that ever caught on.

Many cyclists get around the way they do because it’s so much better for the environment which is why some of us feel we aren’t bound by the rules of the road the way motorists are. I actually worked out that the fuel I use for long-distance road trips (orange juice) isn’t actually that much cheaper that petrol as I can only get around 15 miles to a litre of OJ which isn’t that much more than some of the more fuel-efficient cars get from petrol, which costs around the same. However, when you consider the cost of insurance and the rate at which cars depreciate it works out way cheaper. And OJ tastes way better than petrol, as well as giving you vital vitamin C. Lets not forget that Minister for Energy at the time of writing (September 09) was once a guide to cycle tours around the Ring of Kerry. Before them, Samuel Beckett’s Molloy anf Flann O Brien’s Third Policeman rode the highways and byways of Ireland on two pedal-powered wheels, and older readers may remember that we had some of the best cyclists in the world in the eighties, so cycling is ingrained deeply in our collective psyche.

I’ve noticed that hitchhiking may be having somewhat of a renaissance as well. I used to hitch a lot up till the mid-nineties but then I stopped getting rides. I assumed it was because I was getting older but then earlier this year I managed to bum a ride from Glebeigh in County Kerry to Mallow, in 3 different legs. Last year I had a crazy experience in Colorado getting a ride from a guy whose house was shot during a siege on a neighbouring crack-house and who was able to get away with drinking beer and whiskey while driving since. He still drove more safely than my grandmother used to.

These experiences led me to suspect that the reason I wasn’t getting lifts all those years wasn’t my age but people’s increasing greed. I’m hoping that people realize more that they are lucky to have cars and that it doesn’t cost them anything extra to pick people up. In Washington DC, they effectively get paid to pick people up as there’s a discount for people in the car pool lane. I expect that our own government will follow suit around, oh, never; which is a terrible pity because car-pooling saves almost everyone including the government themselves who have to spend less money reinforcing and widening roads.

In French-speaking countries they have ride-share websites and there’s something similar on craigslist though that’s just a Dub thing here. I’ve met people who’ve had a lot of success arranging lifts on craiglist but I’m not one of them.

Getting around Ireland by bus has gotten a little bit cheaper since completion was introduced though only on the major routes where private companies like AIrcoach and Citylink can turn a profit. Elsewhere, Bus Eireann can basically charge what they want, which is generally quite a lot. They do have some offers for travelling long term but nobody’s jaw is going to drop when they see how cheap they are. This actually did happen me when I got a bus ticket from Liverpool to London for a pound… not a pound plus taxes and charges, but A POUND. I confidently predict that I will never get a ticket from Dublin to Cork for that price, no matter how long in advance I book.

There’s a company called paddywagon which does fairly good value tours aimed at backpacker. I did a Giant’s Causeway and Derry City tour with them earlier this year for a very reasonable 18 pounds and they get my seal of approval.

I don’t recommend getting the train, as it’s ridiculously expensive. Only in Germany does it cost more to travel by train and even there you can save money by booking way in advance to travel on their faster, more comfortable trains. I hate to say this because trains are the most eco-friendly way to travel, but the government seems to have no interest in promoting them. We actually had a more extensive rail network a hundred years ago, and they probably didn’t go that much slower.

Another way to travel cheaply is to work on organic farms through the World Wide Oppurtunities on Organic farms. (WWOOF) Like couchsurfing and a lot of other stuff I discuss it exists in the margins of the conventional economy though in this case you don’t have to worry about being on the side of the angels. Organic farmers are people who try to live in a sustainable way growing most of their own food which is what we may all have to do when the oil runs out. Like most governments, ours doesn’t support small scale subsistence agriculture very well preferring to give massive grants to industrial scale farms, though this policy is ultimately doomed. In return for helping out at whatever farm you rock up on, you get a place to stay and home-cooked meals every day. From relatively humble beginnings it’s become a global phenomenon helping to regenerate the economies of countries like Sierre Leone. You don’t have to go all the way there though, as there are plenty of places in West Cork, Clare, Galway and elsewhere that always need people. I’ve WWOOFed in quite a few places around the world and nearly all my experiences have been positive. I’ve stayed in the jungle in Belize and by the rocky shores of Skibereen, lived in gites and yurts and seen all sorts of eco-homes being built, always living on whatever bounty the land gives. It’s a way you can experience a whole different way of life without ever leaving your own country.

On a related note, a volunteer project worth getting involved in for a small fee is groundwork, which helps to regenerate Irish Oak forests. As you probably know, the whole country was covered in Oak forests until about 500 years ago, which has since been reduced by a combination of imperialism and greed to two small areas which are fighting for their existences against an invasive foreign species… the rhododendron. I know… they look nice when they bloom in spring but they thrive so much on the acidic soil and their saplings block out the Oak saplings. Groundwork use only hand tools to cut back the Rhodos which is why they need so many volunteers. Even though there’s a small fee it works out way cheaper than visiting the national parks as a mere tourist as there’s nature walks every evening after the days work is done. I’ve done it four times in the past and I may do it again…who knows what the future will bring?

There are those of you who might say that travelling round trying to help the environment is a bit self-defeating, and have a hell of a point if you do. I’m loathe to admit that I’ve been on quite a few flights and I’ll probably be on a few more. I find it bizarre that it’s actually cheaper to fly than ge the bus or train, as through a series of complex agreements governments actually subsidize air travel. Worse still, by travelling on low-budget flights, I’ve lined the pockets of Michael O’ Leary, a man who’s actually glad the recession is happening. That’s correct, he actually wants you and your friends and your loved ones to lose their jobs so other airlines will go bust and then their employees will go bust and he can buy their fleets. Funnily enough, when I’m on a long bus trip it helps less to think of how I’m benefitting the environment and more to think I’m depriving scum like him of money that he very much doesn’t need. I’m hopeful the government will increase air surcharges or else subsidise buses so much that it becomes cheaper again to go by the ferry, so I can relive those school tours I went on.

I’ve never taken an internal flight in The Americas or India or Africa. I took one from Vientiane in Laos to Hanoi as I heard the bus journey was particularly tortuous. I spoke to one guy who did it, he said it was okay except the bus driver ran into someone and killed him which delayed them by an hour. I’ve got around North America by bus, which is the cheapest reliable way to get around. At the moment I have a pass which lets me travel everywhere in the US and almost everywhere in Canada that has a bus station, and it only cost $500 for 2 months. The downside is that travelling by greyhound can be really sketchy, as in the US generally only the poorest people use the bus, which is why the tickets come wrapped in recruitment ads for the army. As often as not you find yourself sharing the bus with criminals and crackheads. When I was boarding buses in both San Francisco and New Orleans I either heard a gunshot or saw someone being carried away in a police body bag. In Sacremento some junky spat at a woman working in the restaurant and had to be carried away by security… and this was just a few blocks away from the terminators office…Where is he when you need him?

One cheap alternative way to get around the US is with a private firm I recently found out about called green tortoise. They organize cross-country tours of the continent which can work out as little as $50 a night including all food which is all vegetarian. I really wish I found about it years ago but I’m happy to let you know about it right now.

I do buy carbon credits when going on flights. I’m not convinced 100% of the science behind them: it seems a bit too good to be true that you can neutralize your carbon emissions by paying the cost of a litre of 7up on a ryanair flight. Still, it seems better than doing nothing. I’ve been known to use price-comparison sites like expedia and cheapflights.com though they aren’t always that reliable. As I’ve hinted being computer literate helps you save money no end. Google maps is the best thing to happen travelers since the wheel was invented. I know many people have big privacy issues with them, but as long as they give me the directions to every thrift store in every town I rock up in,they csn film me in the bath as much as they like.

That’s how I’ve got around on a low budget. I never had to go to the extremes that Homer Simpson did to save up for that trip to Japan, which is just as well as I’ve never been a fan of plankton. We’re fortunate to live in an era when travel is cheap, it’s not quite over yet though it definitely isn’t going to last forever. Part of me would rather be a millionaire jet-setter as there’s places that are clearly off limits to people like us. At the same time most people in the world never stray that far from their home village so it’s easy to see why we appear so super-rich to those less fortunate than ourselves. And maybe that, after all the souveniers have been taken down from the attic and dropped off at a charity store, is the most enduring legacy of my travels.

Food for Thought? Nope.

2009-10-01T12:10:00.001-07:00

Saul Bellow’s 1953 novel The Adventures of Augie March one of the protagonists pondered what the consequences of bread becoming free would be, almost 60 years later the billion people starving in the world might consider it to be an improvement whenever it finally does happen. I guess he lived in a more optimistic time when people thought be now we’d having flying cars, robot servants and tv phones (Oh wait, we do have that last one. They’re called skype phones. Not cheap though.)

At the same time for people living in the west food has become incredibly cheap. The French revolution happened not because people were angry towards aristocratic dandies but because a couple of bad harvests forced the price of bread higher than what the average French family could afford and the price of cake higher still. Even in years of good harvests in that era a family would have to spend around 75% of their income just to get adequate calories from bread. Since then there have been massive improvements in technology, grain harvesting techniques and the massive boon of petrochemical fertilizers to the extent that an Irish family of four whose primary providers was earning the average industrial wage, buying the cheapest bread in Dunnes, would only have to spend 2.1% of their income.

I wouldn’t recommend that, though. For one thing bread is hard to digest on it’s own, which is why we smear butter, margarine, honey, jam, peanut butter, apple puree and the like upon it. For another, Jesus had a bit of a point when he said man does not live on bread alone. He wasn’t talking about having a balanced diet but it is really important to have one. He also used to eat fish , figs, drank wine which he made himself out of water… all in all the sort of healthy Meditterean diet that should have kept him going way beyond the tender age of 33. Besides, the really cheap bread is always white bread, which has all the bran and germ which contain most of the micronutrients scraped off it and made into vitamin pills

And monoculture isn’t a good idea. Living entirely on potatoes in the 19^th century got us into all sorts of trouble as dependence on bread did for our French friends a century before. Today most of the people who have life expenctency of 50 or less are inordinately dependent on one crop like rice or cassava. Our bodies are designed to digest small amounts of varied foods as our ancestors did, and some dieticians recommend something called the caveman diet which I don’t think is that realistic. For one thing it seems to assume that people ate meat every day which the vast majority of people didn’t until after the second world war. because of various developments since then, it’s become the norm for most people in the west to eat meat every day, so people assume that you must need to eat meat every day, which you certainly don’t. Only about a quarter of us do, and if the other four billion of us did we could kiss the rainforests goodbye and wait for global warming to wreak havoc on our planet and for life to basically end.

When I tell people that I’m a vegetarian I’m often asked one of two questions. One is “What do you eat?” I can see where they are coming from to an extent as I’ve often been to restaurants where I can eat nothing on the menu, but the ironic thing is that most of the people who ask me this are people who eat a piece of steak with some mushy carrots and potatoes, or else some pizza, for dinner every day. I remember making some falafel as a student and having ask me what sort of meat was in it. I told him it was made from chick peas and he just looked at me kind of blankly. He was doing a PhD, though not in food science. So that’s what I eat….stuff PhD students have never heard of like falafel, hummus, mung beans, chick peas, tofu, quinoa, alfalfa sprouts…

Another, more rational, question I get asked is, “Where do you get your protein from?” people are under a misconception about how much protein they need, largely thanks to lobbying from the meat industry as detailed in Marion Nestle’s excellent book Food Politics. While scientists broadly agree on how much carbohydrates and fat we need, they can’t seem to make up their minds about protein, though most people seem happy to err on the high side. The truth is that you can get all the protein, vitamins and amino acids you need from vegetable sources, though it’s difficult to get enough calcium and B12 without eating eggs or drinking milk, or taking some sort of supplement. In fact, it’s way more important to get at least 5 servings of fruit and vegetables a day than to eat anything like as much protein as the majority of westerners consume.

Once you realize this, you can save a great deal of money, as meat costs a great deal more that any other protein source. This doesn’t come as much of a surprise to me, as it takes 5 times as much land to grow meat as it does to grow beans, and a huge amount of energy and labour to slaughter, process and refrigerate all the dead animals involved, the only meat that’s available that’s in anyway comparable to vegetable protein in price is the so-called “value” meat that tesco’s sell. It’s made from what’s called Mechanically recovered meat (MRM) which is made from what’s recovered from slaughterhouse floors with a sort of giant hoover… it’s quite probable that other materials get in there as well.

Bear in mind that meat is only going to get more expensive as we only pay a fraction of the cost when we buy in in supermarket or butcher’s shop and the majority of the cost is paid for by EU subsidies which ultimately come out of people’s taxes. This is all going to end in a few years and coupled with the increasing demand for biofuels is going to push the price of meat even higher. It’s possible that within a few decades meat could return to being an occasional treat.

If you’ve never cooked vegetarian before and you suddenly decide to start living that way I guess you’ll know how my parents felt 20 years ago when I first became a vegetarian. Most days we used to have meat and two veg for dinner, so when they very reluctantly accepted that I was becoming a veggie they started serving me raw soya beans with 2 veg. I remember my brother noticing that soya beans came from Asia and had to be soaked overnight then cooked for an hour. He thought people in Asia were too poor and ignorant to do all that themselves. Twenty years later, he’s a teacher but still thinks much the same thing. When I pointed out to my other brother that lentils were way cheaper than any sort of meat, he started pretending to push away flies as he imagined they did in Africa where he imagined lentils were a big part of the diet. (he’s a teacher too).

Since then I’ve learned some recipes that are more sophisticated without being that much more expensive.

I can’t emphasise enough the value of cooking for yourself over eating prepared meals from supermarkets. In the food industry as it’s somewhat shamefully called, they refer to prepared meals as “added value” products though for the most part they are only adding cost. I used to live next to a guy who once showed me some prepared meals he bought in Dunnes, telling me that he’d got dinner a desert for “only” E5, which was almost my whole daily budget for food. It was mostly empty calories in the form of hydrogenated fat with a lot of chemicals and even in terms of raw calories it was pretty unsubstantial. There may be a place for cusine like that for people who are poor in both money and time, but in our country at the moment the only really poor people are unemployed and they all have the time to cook from scratch.

Having said that, I do have a weakness for fruit smoothies, which always leave me feeling good for several hours afterwards; but which could be classified as a “value-added food”. I’ve never actually done the maths and found out if it was cheaper to buy the fruit, I suspect not as much of the cost of fruit is taken up by transportation. In general, I cook meals from scratch, and I’m only too eager to share some with you. The up-side of being unemployed is that you have more time to cook complicated dishes like these.

This one is called Chana Masala, it’s my version of a dish with the same name in India which is much mushier and spicier. Once you hunt down the spices each subsequent dish doesn’t cost much more than a euro to make. Some specialist spice shops have the masala already made up, though I prefer my own version. I learned to make it Northern India, though only by reading the instructions on the back of packet of chana masala mix. I serve it to a lot of couchsurfers (see travel Chapter) as it’s an exoctic dish that you can make largely with local ingredienmts. To make it really cheaply, leave out the cardamoms, although you can get them fairly cheaply in some specialist stores and not that expensively in Tescos. All the recipes I list are for 1 person, the person in question being myself. I’m told I have a fairly ferocious appetite, I have a fast metabolism and walk and cycle a lot.

Chana Masala

Chana Masala mix (About a teaspoon each of, In descending order: Coriander Powder, Cumin powder, Turmeric Powder, Chilli Powder, Nutmeg Powder, Cinnamon Powder, Raw Black Cardomoms)

1lb potatoes

I tin chickpeas (It works out way cheaper to soak raw chickpeas overnight)

2 tomatoes

1 onion

A pinch of salt and sugar.

Chop the potatoes into small pieces, unless they are baby potatoes. Add to cold water and bring to boil.

Chop the onion and fry until tender.

Add the spices, fry gently then add a small amount of water, stir gently. Add the chopped tomatoes stir until they are tenderized then add the chick peas. Add the salt and sugar (you’re really meant to use something called jiggery goor, but this is hard to come by)

Bring down to a low temperature until the potatoes have boiled, then add them to the mix. Stir in fairly thoroughly and serve, adding salt and pepper to taste.

Not that complicated, huh? Gordon Ramsey would never serve this in his restaurants as no-one would ever screw it up enough to deserve a bollocking.

Another of my favourite potato-based dishes is one which I originally came across in a book called Vegan Feasts. It involves carmelising onions, which as I understand it involves frying the crap out of them they are really crispy.

Potatoes and Lentils in Creamed Coconut with Carmelised Onions

4 medium-sized onions

1lb potatoes

150g split red lentils

1 tablespoon creamed coconut powder

Splash of lemon juice

Raw Ginger

Turmeric, Mustard Seeds

Chop the potatoes into fairly small pieces, drain the lentils. Put both into a saucepan with enough water to soak both.

Chop all the onions and fry gently. When tender, remove about a quarter and place in a smaller frying pan or saucepan, while turning up the heat on the rest.

Add the turmeric, chopped ginger and mustard seeds to the smaller pan, stir gently. When the potatoes and lentils are almost cooked, add this mix along with the coconut powder.

Keep frying the original onions until crispy. Server over the potatoes and lentils.

It’s a little more complicated than the last dish, I grant you, though does have the advantage of being really cheap and filling; perfect for cold winter nights.

One more recipe I’d like to share with the world in the form of anyone reading this is for Kichdi, which I found in a book called Linda McCartney around the World. I’m still waiting for Heather Mills around the World . As far as I know, India was the part of the world she was around at that time as they have a similar dish called Pilau there. I’ve been making some version of this dish several times a week ever since I came across the recipe. It can be the most beautiful dish in the world if you can get it exactly right, even if you don’t, it still keeps the wolf from the door. Ideally you would use saffron instead of turmeric but saffron used to cost more than gold and it still costs way more than turmeric. If you can’t find any cheap basmati rice, try some of the easi-cook stuff.

Kichdi

150g Basmati Rice

150g split red lentils

1 cup broccoli florets

1 cup frozen peas

1 onion

1 tomato

Raw Ginger

Spices: 1 teaspoon each of Turmeric, Cloves, and Cinnamon

½ teaspoon each of pepper and chilli pepper

Add the spices to some hot oil in a large saucepan. When they start to sizzle, add the chopped onion and ginger. When the onion is tender throw in the broccoli and peas, followed by the chopped tomato. Finally add the drained rice and lentils, and half as much water again. Boil at a medium temperature for around 20 minutes, whenever all the water has been soaked up. Serve with salt to taste.

It’s a deceptively easy dish to cook, as getting exactly the right amount of spices takes some trial and error, but if you get it exactly right you’ll be cooking it every week for the rest of your life as well.

In general I recommend stir-frying or eating veggies raw rather than boiling them. My grandmother, like many people of her generation, didn’t think anything was cooked properly until it was soft and mushy. But really the more you boil things, the less nutritious they become, so when you boil a lot of vegetables you are spending money on energy to diminish the value of the food you eat. When I was working extremely long hours last summer I used to eat hummus with raw veg for dinner every night… as well as being cheap and nutritious it was really easy to prepare. I have to confess I bought the hummus ready-made, though if you invest in a blender and the requisite spices it costs way less to make it yourself from raw chick peas. I don’t know how people made it in the middle east before blenders were invented.

As I alluded to, it can be hard to find some of the ingredients you need to cook vegetarian (or non-vegetarian as they say in India) food cheaply. It depends a good deal on where you live. Living as I do in Cork where we have one of the 10 best food markets in Europe (says The Observer, de oldest Sunday newspaper in de World, ya Langer) it’s rarely a problem finding cheap spices or vegetables. I’ve noticed that a lot of smaller towns now have some sort of health food store, though many of us still remain dependent on supermarkets. You can buy spices on ebay though they originate mostly from the UK which means international charges. Suprisingly, like the cowboy in movies who’s sitting down seemingly drunken and passed out like Dean Martin in Rio Bravo, Dunnes has sprung into life and become the best place to buy vegetarian fare like tofu and beans. You can get a pound of tofu there for E2.50 though this is still twice what it costs in the US where soya is subsidized heavily.

Supermarkets are a mixed blessing to put it mildly. On one hand they bully suppliers no end, take jobs out of every local economy where they are allowed set up shop, clock up endless food miles and turn many old towns into hollow shells. On the other hand they do sell some stuff cheaper than anywhere else, though if you look around carefully, you notice that not everything is cheaper there. They are mostly of benefit to people who have big houses in which to store bulk products and cars to transport then in, part of the paradox of the High Cost of Poverty. It is possible to beat the system that requires you to have a car to get the cheapest food, at least if you are a single person, with a family it becomes much harder. In general, the less money you spend, the less impact you have on the environment, but supermarket food only appears to be cheap as it’s long term impact on the suppliers, the massive distribution network and the huge waste involved isn’t always apparent. It may be true that we are spending less on food than ever before, but we are spending more on cars, petrol, insurance and everything else that goes with the cost of automation.

It’s a horrible paradox too that many of us are now going abroad to do our shopping every month, although some would take offence at that designation of the six counties. Its bizarre that by crossing an imaginary line that people drew eighty years ago to palliate half the people who live on one side of that line you can make the money that you earn go so much further… but that’s the strange world we created for ourselves. Bizarre, too, that our own government seem so impotent to stop it. I don’t actually blame people who are struggling to pay the mortgage for going cross-border shopping. I do blame the government for bringing us into the euro-zone without a proper debate; it’s been at the very best a mixed blessing.

I really have very little time for Lidl or Aldi. I managed to avoid Tesco’s for several years but when I went into one and saw how cheap everything was I got hooked. I was afraid the same thing would happen to me in Lidl but it never did… stuff cost around the same as Tesco’s but the athmosphere was wrist-slashingly Orwellian in there, or more accurately, like the dystopian world of Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. Horribly flawed as Dunne’s and Tesco’s are, at least some of the stuff there is produced locally whereas everything you get in Lidl and Aldi has come through a distribution centre in Germany. Some people say they like the crazy randomness of being able to go into a store looking for one thing and ending up buying another but frankly impulse buying isn’t what we need to do to get our economy back on track.

Until recently I was able to get vegetables cheaper in the old English Market, but this seems to have changed in the last few years. It could be because the supermarkets are using their dominant market position in a time of recession to drive all the opposition into the ground, or it could be that they are abusing their dominant market position to bully their suppliers even more. Either way you can get a bag of half a dozen peppers in tescos for E1.59 which is cheaper than anywhere else. On the other hand, if I wasn’t such a pepper-holic who would easily get through 6 peppers in a week it would still be cheaper to go the market.The ironic thing is that the mangy-looking peppers you get in a cheap-looking bag that marks you out to the other people in the queue as a prole are probably better for you than the shiny ones that you pay a euro each for, as they spray endless chemicals on them to make them look that shiny. Many of the chemicals are carcinogenic, which kind of defeats the purpose of eating fresh veggies in the first place, which is to remain healthy.

As I’ve said before, nutritionists recommend that people eat at least five portions of fruit and veg a day to remain healthy. But here’s the thing…they really think you should eat 8 or 9 portions but they think that isn’t very realistic for most people. To be honest, even though I’m pretty health conscious I don’t always hit the 5-mark. The scientists are also at pains to point out that it has to be 5 different fruits and vegetables, so you can’t just drink 5 200ml portions of OJ, appealing as that sounds and all. Its certainly possible to get enough fruit and vegetables on a low budget. If you have enough time, it’s worth buying fresh vegetables a few times a week, as some veggies lose their nutritional value fairly quickly. On the other hand it can be cheaper to buy in bulk though unless you are cooking for a family a lot of the bulk can end up being seagull food. In our country both tescos and dunes sell fruit and veg that are reaching their sell-by date cheaply. I once got what appeared to be 4 heads of broccoli for a euro, though when I opened the wrapper back home it turned out to be 6. I ate them all within a week, and didn’t turn green… that’s an urban myth.

A lot of stuff that reaches it’s sell-by date ends up getting thrown into dumpsters, which is disgraceful for many reasons. Firstly, there are people starving in the world who wouldn’t think twice about eating something that’s passed it’s sell-by date. Secondly, there are those who think, and I feel they have a point, that sell-by dates are a conspiracy by food companies to get us to buy more stuff. Like everyone else in the capitalist economy, they need to keep selling more stuff just to keep going, in spite of the fact that people in west already eat way more than need to already. Once the supermarkets have taken the food off their hands they don’t care what happens it…they aren’t charities. As supermarkets can’t legally sell anything that’s past it sell-by date it all ends up in dumpsters.

Thankfully enough people have become aware of this shocking development to do something about it in a way that benefits themselves. Dumpster-divers, or freegans organize trips to supermarket lots at night and scavenge what they can from the dumpsters, which sometimes can be really worthwhile stuff. The people I stayed with in New Orleans used to bring home fairly fresh-looking vegetables, as well as spices, juices, beans…basically enough to make a proper meal every night. If you go onto freeganworld.org you can read about people who get even luckier, one guy finding a fully functional computer outside an electronics shop.

On the other hand, it’s fraught with risk, as it’s unlawful and the resident Paul Blart won’t think twice about shopping you to the cops, although it’s said that Marks & Spencers turn a blind eye. As well as that you basically have no idea what’s in dumpsters and it could be toxic or sharp materials. There is some good advice on the freeganworld website, basically you need 3 people (one to dive, one to drive, one on look-out) and a car, a long stick for poking round and a hell of a lot of moxie. It doesn’t seem to have caught on in Ireland yet which is a bit of a shame.

Food companies have come up with other ways of getting people to spend more than they need. It’s a paradox of living in the west in the last 60 years that the poorest people are now the fattest. In India being considered fat is a sign of wealth, though this is changing fast as they are starting to have the same obesity problems that we have here. The same food companies that are making us fat are cashing in on our bulging waistlines by selling us “low calorie” food which is a complete paradox as calories are one of the essential elements of food. So the food companies, and 90% of the food available in supermarkets is produced by 5 vertically integrated companies; sell you something with half the food value for the same price and make it look like they’re helping you to lose weight. Here’s what to do if you want to save money on low-calorie fruit juice:

a) Buy some regular fruit juice

b) Mix it with water.

Seriously. Unless you buy the really expensive stuff, it’s basically concentrate shipped from Iberia and mixed with water anyway.

Then there’s low-fat food. Some food products are being marketed as 80% fat free which means they have 20% fat which is quite a lot. In any case your body needs a certain amount of fat, and a lot of the obesity problem is caused not by fat but by refined carbohydrates and sugars. There was an ad by greencore or whatever they’re called these days which boasted that sugar was a fat free food. No Shit! The people who make lard clearly missed a trick by not marketing it as a sugar-free dentally friendly product.

And don’t get me started on bottled water. Not only is tap water just as good for you, it’s actually better for you, as standards are higher for tap water than for bottled water. But somehow some fancy packaging and advertising has convinced us to spend money on what we could otherwise get for free. I saw a Michael Moore sketch that showed Mexican women who thought they could become tall and blonde if they used Avon products, and felt a bit sorry for them. Maybe it’s ourselves we should be feeling sorry for, thinking on some level that we’ll get laid as much as Madonna or Paris Hilton if we drink the same bottled water as them.

Packaging can make stuff look more appealing than it actually is. I’m pretty convinced that some of the “finest” and “value” products they have in Dunnes are the same product in fancier packaging, particularly pasta… seriously, what difference can there be? I noticed in Centra that the really cheap cranberry juice drink actually had more cranberry juice and therefore less added sugar than the one that cost twice as much and came in a nicer-looking box. Likewise for the sweetcorn and kidney beans they sell in Tescos. As far as I’m aware, some of the “budget” stuff you get in Tesco’s are “seconds” from the factory floor which means they aren’t on sale at full price because they don’t look nice enough, which seems like a moot point in regard to stuff like weetabix which doesn’t look that nice anyway. Then they have oats for 41c/500g which are actually made in Ireland and sell for half the cost of the oats in fancier packages… you wonder do you really have to pay so much for nice packaging? I guess it’s pretty natural to be attracted to things that are nice on the surface, otherwise no-one would have heard of Julia Roberts. When those of you who eat meat go into a supermarket you really only see the surface sheen and don’t see any of the suffering that goes into eating meat. And we put lots of stuff on ourselves to make us look nicer… but that’s another chapter.

Of course it could be the other way around as well, that the low price products are actually being sold below cost, which Mary Harney allowed by abolishing a ban on below-cost selling. Many people cling to the notion that if they are spending more they must be getting a better product but in many cases they are just charging you to advertise their products on TV. Supermarkets also charge producers to have their products at eye-level so you actually notice them so its worth either crawling round on the ground or else walking on tippy-toes to find cheaper stuff.

Or you could go out of the supermarket altogether as some stuff is cheaper in specialist stores. There’s an Indian store near where I used to live in Cork where almost every sort of bean and spice can found cheaper than in Tescos, as well as popcorn, pitta bread and other things I didn’t previously associate with South Asia. A lot of fruit and vegetables can still be found more cheaply in the market. There are also a lot of farmers markets springing up. Logically, locally produced produce should be cheaper because of decreased transport costs but modern capitalism doesn’t submit to logic any more than it does to regulation or morality. Until the price of oil gets really high it’s probably still going to be cheaper to buy mass-produced vegetables.

Organic is a bit more complicated. There’s a debate about whether organic food is actually better for you, but it’s clear that modern production methods are decreasing the nutrient levels in vegetables. In theory, organic food shouldn’t cost more as the decreased yields should be offset by the decreased spending on fertilizer and insecticide. However, instead of subsidizing organic farming, the government actually charge people to be certified as organic, and they have no choice but to pass the cost onto the customer. I saw some brazil nuts, which can only grow organically, next to some “organic” brazil nuts which were a very round 50c more expensive…you’re really just paying for the word organic on the cover. I also notice tesco’s have some so-called organic fair trade chocolate for a mere E1/100g. when you look closely at the label you see it’s made in Italy, where the standards are obviously much lower. (it is good chocolate, though). Apparently the two things you should eat organically if on a low budget are carrots and lettuce, which both suck up chemicals in different ways.

Likewise, fair trade products should be cheaper because of all the middlemen taken out of the equation but again it costs so much to certify and the cost is again passed onto the consumer. Its really disappointing to me that instead of subsidizing organic and fair trade products the government seeks to make money by charging people for certification.

One way to cut the money earned by middlemen like supermarkets, futures traders and the like is to grow your own food which is becoming really popular as people realize how nutritionally diminished supermarket veg is but baulk at the cost of buying organic veg. if you live in a flat you are probably limited to growing bean sprouts and having a window box, unless you have a flat roof in which case your options multiply. In any case bean sprouts aren’t to be knocked as they are one of the best sources of a lot of nutrients… they are basically the eggs of the plant world, generating all the nutrients they need to grow in the early stages of their development. And they are so easy to grow. You can splash out on a fancy device for growing them, but all you really need is a jam jar and some gauze and an elastic band. If u soak the beans in warm water for a few hours then drain them twice a day you should have some fresh, chemical-free bean sprouts to eat within around a week.

If you have a window box in a place with good light, you can probably grow lettuce, onions and other vegetables. The easiest way to get material to grow them in is to buy peat moss, but it can work out cheaper in the long run to buy a wormery (if you have room) and then compost all your kitchen waste and use that to grow things in.

If you have a flat roof or a garden, the possibilities are enormous. It’s said that if you grow biodynamically you can grow enough food to feed a family on quarter of an acre which many people have access to, although not the sort of people who would be reading this book. On the other hand, people have been “guerilla gardening”; taking over unused urban spaces and converting them into gardens for a while in the US, this trend is catching on in Ireland where we have no lack of disused urban spaces either.

Its notable that Havana, a densely populated city of 2 million people grows all it’s own food at the moment. It’s a strategy that’s been forced upon them by the US blockade on Cuba but it could be a pointer to a post-fossil future for many of us. Lets not forget that 160 years ago there were another 2 million of us on this island and the vast majority of us were growing our own food. We may need to do this again in the future, hopefully not becoming too reliant on one variety of one crop.

Until recently growing your own food, having chickens in the back yard, etc, was considered pretty retro and outré, satirized by shows like The Good Life. In recent years concerns about food safety, food security and food miles have put it back in the spotlight. Books like How to Grow more Vegetables by John Jeavons can help enormously for people with any level of experience in growing their own food.

Some food on the other hand, grows by itself, wild by the side of the road and doesn’t get eaten. I have a friend who used to live next to a place where there was an apple tree where the apples just fell to the ground and rotted. It wasn’t more than a couple of hundred yards from a supermarket where they sold apples that had been impoterd from either Chile or South Africa. They aren’t the only thing growing wild in Ireland. I grew up near a forest where wild onions grow, never knowing that they could be eaten. Turns out that not only are they edible, they’re actually somewhat of delicacy and sell for premium prices in restaurants. Mushrooms grow wild in the forest too, though you really should have some sort of guide to know which ones are safe to eat. In places like france and Italy people have folk knowledge of which ones are edible but we seem to have lost that here. I’ve got to confess I don’t really like the taste of mushrooms much as I love the idea of foraging in the woods for wild protein. Then there are blackberries which grow on what is for about 10 months of the year a fairly pernicious weed. Also elderberries, which are really just good for making booze with. For a more comprehensive list, take a look at Food for Free by Richard Mabey.

Erasmus said that when he had money he spent it on books and if he had any left over he spent it on food and clothes. He was probably exaggerating a bit as reading takes a lot of mental energy and that can only be obtained by having a varied diet, although there weren’t quite as many books around then.

It’s important not to scrimp on food but food companies do sucker us into spending more than we need and the results are too obvious in our expanding waistlines, the amount we throw out and the huge volume of meat we consume. Right now, it is possible to get a varied, healthy diet really cheaply, though to do that without patronizing supermarkets is easier said that done. Having a balanced diet is one of the cheapest ways to feel good as a lot of illnesses are caused by poor diet and not eating well can leave you feeling lethargic and listless. The good news is that you can get all the protein, fats and micronutrients you need without spending that much money. In an average week, I spend about E40 on food. It’s certainly possible to get by on less, though the price to be paid in the form of lack of energy really isn’t worth it. Food is at the top of the hierarchy of needs for a reason… we really can’t get by without it.