Stray mailout - 29.11.02. Daniel Español

On Faithless's latest album, when the vocalist
says: 'If you place something at the center of your
life that lacks the power to nourish, it will
eventually poison everything that you are', I'm
pretty sure he was talking about Nutella.
To the uninitiated it's a spread made from
hazelnuts that looks and tastes like chocolate. At
one third fat and two-thirds sugar it's the lowest
common denominator of food. I had resisted getting
into it, staying a staunch peanut butter consumer,
figuring a massive chocolate hit first thing in the
morning would be more than my non coffee-brutalized
metabolism could handle. But it's one hundred
percent of the two things taste buds are
evolutionarily preprogrammed to go berserk over so
I've been hitting it pretty hard. I was so intent
on avoiding smack, crack and dak I got blindsided
by, um. snack.
It's the inspiration for me calling my eventual
movie production company 'Sugar and Fat', being all
you need to give people to make them happy and love
you.

Sorry about the lack of mail outs over the last few
months, for some reason being in Ireland hasn't put
me in the frame of mind to rant. I think it's
probably because I've met some of the best people I
ever have. I write because I miss talking to you
all, but I've had by no means a shortage of good
company over the last four months.
So lack of solitary thought has left me now with
not a lot to say. I'll try to sum Ireland up now
and get it out of the way.

One third of the ads on Irish television are for
lending organizations offering easy loans, and one
third are for services to manage excessive debt.
Why is no one else making the connection? The other
third are for charity.
The bulk of these ads are on MTV, aimed at people
my age. I can't call it the Irish dream since
everyone seems to hate it, but it's seems that no
one here over the age of twenty five is houseless
or childless. The birth rate must be freaking huge,
especially in the poorer areas, because if you ad
up the amounts of toddlers, prams and heavily
pregnant women it seems to form the majority of the
population. Everywhere I see people not much
younger than me leading round half a dozen kids not
much younger than me.
And Dublin has the worst children on earth.
My apartment looked out over an intersection and
every night (and most days) I got to look down on
the packs of drunken children throwing bottles,
rocks, fireworks, fists at anyone they feel like.
In all the time I was there I seriously didn't see
a single kid not doing something deeply sociopathic.
Watch 'The Butcher Boy'. The kid on that is pretty
accurate.

For a month I looked out over droves of Spanish and
Italians fleeing the apartment building like they
knew something I didn't. Irish immigration is
tidal. People come to learn English, work like mad
for very bad pay, spend it on very expensive beer,
discover how much they dislike Dublin, and get the
hell out.
At the end of August I was nicely settled into my
flat and on the verge of looking for work when on a
sudden impulse of procrastination I left for a
hitchhiking mission around Ireland. And found
Galway. I moved there intending to get a flat and a
job, and ended up with neither.
I was slightly stressed and resentful at the whole
fire toy thing, feeling that all I was getting out
of it was hassle, until I realized that all the
running around kept me in Galway, stopped me from
coming and going and let me spend more time with
the people there than I otherwise would have.
If something pisses you off, wait. It'll make sense.

The jokes told about the Irish are true. Not the
people themselves, apart from a near universal
alcoholism they're just like everyone else, even
the Gypsies (yeah you heard me, Gypsies are all
nice and romantic when they're played by Jonny
Depp, but when it's a car full of mullets trying to
run you off the road north of Prague, you get a
different impression. But as I say, they're just
like everyone else; you just don't meet the 99% who
aren't trying to hurt you.)
The Republic of Ireland is completely out of
control. It needs to be burnt down, metaphorically
speaking, and rebuilt from scratch. To get a job
you need a bank account and a tax number, to get a
flat you need a job, to get a tax number you need a
bank account and a flat and to get a bank account
you need a flat, a job and a tax number. It's
enough to make you want to work illegally. But once
people there start realizing that the economic boom
of the last ten years has reversed the first to
bear the blame will be the immigrants who just want
a chance to clean the toilets any Irishman would
rather die than touch.
They only started recycling two years ago, the EU
forced them, but although, to their credit, about
half of all households have started sorting and
binning their rubbish, it's all just shipped to
Germany and incinerated. *


* Possibly not true.

About a month ago Dublin was blanketed with posters
saying

NO
2
NICE

about a referendum on the Nice (nees) treaty, but I
didn't know anything about it and kept wondering
why they were advertising how nice nitrous oxide is
when it's illegal in this country.

Most Irish are very friendly when they're drunk,
the country is beautiful around the coast, and I
definitely plan to go back.

These last two weeks before I return to Australia
for Christmas I'll spend in Spain. Unfortunately I
had to come here via England, in order to replace
my passport, which was stolen pretty much as soon
as I arrived in Galway. I thought I was going to
have to kill ten days in the UK waiting for it to
clear (not to mention pay quite a bit), but when I
arrived at the embassy in London they said, oh
yeah, we don't cancel passports fully until you
come in here personally. And since I got my
passport back after I thought I had canceled it
(the thief dropped it in the shower) they just
cancelled the cancellation. Yay.
I've been staying with my beautiful friend Mayte
Gonzalez for the last week at her apartment in
Madrid, with her brother and mother. Who don't
speak a word of English, but don't seem to mind my
constant glassy eyed stare at anything they try to
tell me. I can't learn Spanish because it'll
smother my Italian.
Tomorrow Mayte and I are driving to San Sebastian
on the north coast, near the oil slick. Then it's
somehow to Barcelona for a wee while, then
Amsterdam to fly to W.A. to stay for three weeks
plus minus, then back here to find a ski field
that'll take staff on short notice. If I don't head
back to Galway first to catch up with the crew
there.

Natalia - sorry, after all the talk I won't be
coming to Valencia before heading back. I had
planned to, but time and transportation are saying
no.
Shae - still trying to get hold of you, are you
still in Barcelona? (By the way, I'm your cousin; I
don't think we've met.)
Dean and Karen - thanks for the place to stay in
London.
Miriam, Naomi, Lu, Duchon, John, Brigitte, Grainne,
Cormac, Xantal, Anton, and the whole Irish crew -
so damn good to meet you that I just can't quite
believe it. See you soon.
Mum and Grandma - see you sooner.
Sammy - can you please resend that compilation of
mailouts, I had to delete the last one because it
was taking up too much space in my inbox.

Which should tell me something about how happy
y'all'll be when you get it again in a few days,
but there's a lot of new people on the list and I
want to bring everyone up to date on the travels so
far.

So, umm, yeah.

Much love

Daniel.