Charity

We have funny ideas about charity.

I was on the train home this evening, eating crisps and listening to my ipod. A little girl, about three, wandered over to where I was sitting and stared at me intently. I waved, sweetly, disinterestedly. I was hoping she would go away. She was cute and all, but I could see she had designs on my crisps, and I was pretty hungry. She didn't go away. She had very clear designs on my crisps.
Eventually I paused my ipod and asked her name. No answer. No interest. Sigh. I offered her a crisp (salt and vinegar hunky dorys). She grabbed, and left.

Two minutes later, she returned with her big sister - about six, I reckon. Adorable kids, with bright red hair and sweet faces... I handed over the rest of the bag. Shortly after this, at the back of the carriage, I could hear them being chastised by their dad for being cheeky.

Across the aisle from me sat an African lady with a small boy, who must have been seven or eight, munching contentedly on sweets and slurping on a can of coke. The lady had observed the exchange without comment. Now that I was relieved of food, the two girls returned, and focussed their attention on the little boy, until he too voluntarily handed over some of his sweets (I was pretty impressed - either at his capacity for guilt, or theirs for silently influencing). The girls retreat, and there's more chastising from papa at the back of the carriage.
When they returned to our section, the lady reached into her voluptuous bag, and pulled out a packet of bread rolls. Opening it, she handed one each to the two little girls. She looked really concerned. As they trailed away, she mouthed elaborately to me: "I think they're HUNGRY".

This was the second act of charity I saw this week from an African to an Irish person. The girls disappeared, either satisfied or banned from further forays, and we all lapsed back into our respective worlds. I felt warmed by the decency; I'm still not sure whether the kids were hungry or just very persuasive chancers.

Mourning facebook

I'm thinking about decommissioning this blog. I don't use it often enough and don't really have anything interesting to say. And, perhaps more pertinently, I have a feeling that web 2.0 is over.

My own relationship with the www has always been closely related to my residence, and works roughly like this: live in Dublin, don't use the web that much; live outside of Dublin, become one of those net cafe rats, scribbling away on strange keyboards at unsociable hours, upside down exclamation marks and circumflexes all over the place. I haven't developed any lifetime habits: when I was in Central America and experiencing new things every day - and furthermore when I had hundreds of people to stay in touch with and a limited amount of time to write - all of this turned me into a committed blogger. But once I zipped back into the same timezone as my friends, well, what was the point? I've blogged I think 5 times since coming home.

I think that's how blogging works, a bit. Some people get it, and keep it (big shout out to Shazzle); the rest of us peter out once we realise that we have not a lot to say.

But there did seem to be a frenzy of interactivity last summer - if you'll forgive me for coming over all nostalgic about what was in effect the day before yesterday -and it pivoted around Facebook. Facebook is over now, and without it, I seem to have lost all the other elements of web 2.0 that interested me.

Round about last Christmas, we all got very exercised about the things we lefties get exercised about. That Guardian article about the evil owners of Facebook got posted on every blog and homepage around. The cynics looked smug, and said they'd never trusted it anyway, were glad they'd never signed up. And people sloped off, a little embarrassed, leaving their undeletable profiles in the ether, never to be updated, never to be erased. Facebook was bad because it was invasive, another consumer machine, eating up your personal details and procesing them to sell you Givenchy fragrance. It was bad because shadowy corporate types were making money out of what was supposed to be a pure virtual space. Slowly, we also twigged that it was bad because there was no place to hide from friends we didn't want and reunions we hadn't invited.

Now Facebook is just a shell. The only people who go there are Americans and the friends I accepted most grudgingly, or in greatest confusion. Nobody sends me messages any more. My notifications are almost exclusively of the "Sarty Jenna-Bowman is friends with Josie Dinger-Chuncha" variety. The others are those darn applications where you spend 3 minutes doing a brain dead quiz only to discover that you have to invite 20 other people to do it to get the results. So you invite the people you see least on your friends list, or the ones whose judgement would least upset you. I get about 4 of those a week still.

So Facebook is shit. Fine. But I want to mourn it just a little. I loved catching up with all those old people, and welcoming them back into my universe (Nicole Nascenzi! Hugh Delany! Eoin Ward!). On dull nights in Tegus, on my own in a huge house, I loved hanging out in this laid back place, reading snippets of articles from my friends, looking at people's photos. Once we had established our profiles and put up our photos, far away people were near enough to chat - and never before or since I was a regular Facebook user did I use my gmail chat so much.

The only reason that Facebook is shit is because nobody goes there anymore. And everybody left for very good, pure, moral reasons. But in the frenzy of Facebook-condemnation, I think we've thrown the baby out with the bathwater. I liked social networking. I liked status updates, photo albums, notes and events. I organised my coming home party through Facebook, and it was a riot.

Now nobody emails me any more, I don't blog, and I haven't posted photos anywhere in months. My last status update was "Carol storms out of Facebook in a huff". Trouble is, now I don't know where to go.

Civic spirit

Leaving the house to go for a walk, we noticed the North African man from the house opposite dropping his rubbish on the derelict corner. This is the accepted place to dump waste if you're too stingy (or principled) to pay the bin charges. 

Tut tut, I thought. Somebody should do something about that. 

As he strolled past us, slowly, casually, I smiled and said Good evening. "Good to show him we're friends first", I rationalised to Simp. "Next time, we'll be able to tell him what he should do with his bins". 

We walked on. Within seconds, a neighbour was out giving the man hell, yelling at him: "Pick that up! Get rid of it! GET rid of it!". The self-righteous neighbour was being a bully and an oaf, but he did have a point. The North African man slinked away towards his house. 

We should drop a note into his house, rationalised Simp. Let him know the procedures. He probably doesn't know. 

Two minutes later, we glanced behind us to see the man at the exit to our road, carrying his black sack with him. So we introduced ourselves. 

"You need to get tags for those you see," we told him. "They won't pick them up until Thursday." 

"I know, I'm going to buy tags now." He pointed at the Centra. 

"No, but you can't leave it out tonight. They won't collect it till Thursday." 

"Oh. Oh I see." 

"Yes - and you can use green bags for recycling - for paper, and cans." 

"And they pick the recycling up every second Friday". 

We were on a roll. Falling over ourselves with civic responsibility and helpfulness and neighbourliness. 

"But you shouldn't leave that out now or that man will shout at you again."

"Ok. I'll bring it back to my house now. Thank you." 

We walked off grinning at how much better it is when you communicate with the neighbours. The man heaved the black sack over a fence and hurled it into the derelict yard at the end of the road.  

Experimenting with Pyjamas

I know, I know, but let's just not mention it, ok? Thanks.

Yesterday morning, hungover and broken, I was appointed to buy butter for the household - consisting of myself, Simp, and our Corkonian friend Lucy. Lucy and I decided this was our moment to try a local practise, and went to the shops in our pyjamas. In general when wandering the neighbourhood in the daytime, it's usual to meet small knots of women, sometimes (though by no means always) with prams in tow, at least one of whom is kitted out in pyjamas, slippers and puffa jacket. Lucy wasn't familiar with the trend, but was very definitely intrigued.

I'm sorry I don't have a photo, because we looked quite splendind in our winter coats and snuggly hoodies, with flimsy Betty Boop pyjama bottoms on. Lucy even had slippers to complete the look. There were a couple of giveaways though, most significantly my Converse and Lucy's heavy plastic designer glasses. And that was it. We knew we were frauds, and everyone else knew it too.

It was all a bit hair raising in the end. Emerging blinking from the alleyway onto Cork St at midday on a Saturday afternoon, I realised for the first time the extent to which this really is the city centre, and struggled with the near-certainty that I was about to run into my Leaving Cert geography teacher, or my boss (I wasn't, and didn't). But much more worrying was the knowledge that I was not a native pyjama-wearer, that everyone could see that I had never worn my pyjamas to the shops before, and god help us all, any genuine pyjama-wearers were likely to think we were taking the piss. Which we most definitely weren't. We just felt it was time to experiment with the nightwear-as-outdoor-wear trend.

I won't be doing it again. My legs were cold. I had no glasses on, so I squinted (threateningly?) at everyone I passed. And Lucy got no reassurance that she was part of a community: that morning, we were the only people we saw out and about in their pyjamas.