Tag: featured

Soap, and other possible Christmas gifts

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Does a bar of soap make a good Christmas present? I’m not talking about handmade soap. (Though the header image for this post is from a crafting blog called Gluestick and a post about making your own soap if you’d like to give it a try. Everything I know about making soap I learnt from Fight Club which is not a good guide to follow.) I’m talking about soap that you buy. Would you be glad to get it or does it feel like an obligation gift from someone who doesn’t know you very well? I think soap is an acceptable present – like socks it’s a good backup because everybody needs it. Particularly this year.

The soaps below are maybe more everyday soaps than gift-soaps, but this is a good thing because it means they’ll get used instead of being “saved for best”. I’ve written before about trying to cut down on plastic, and using solid soap is a really easy way to do that. And according to the Irish Times, “The production of liquid soap requires five times more energy for raw material and almost 20 times more energy for packaging production than a bar of soap.” All the more reason to buy a bar for yourself or to give one to someone you love!

These are all soaps that I have bought and used this year.

  1. The Handmade Soap Company

I bought this soap from Designist back in April. It’s handmade in Slane in Co. Meath and comes in a cardboard box so there’s no plastic involved at all. They have a nice selection of scents and it’s available all over the country, and the around world. You can find a full list of stockists here or order online directly from the company here. They also sell that other 2020 essential – hand sanitiser.

I haven’t been to the physical shop in almost a year but I always love a wander around the Designist shop on George’s Street because you never know what weird and wonderful things you might find there. In April, I was on their website looking for a bedside clock to help me stop using my phone at night. I also bought some Irish-made cards to send to friends and family during lockdown.

Designist sell lots of soap but they also have an interesting collection of books and lots of great kid’s toys. It’s a great place to buy a few Christmas presents. If you don’t know anyone who’d appreciate a bar of soap for Christmas, maybe they’d like a vegan cheese making kit or some gold iron-on patches. It’s also a great place to get really creative Christmas cards.

2. Bí Urban

For anyone living in Dublin 7, this is an extremely local soap. It’s handmade in Stoneybatter using over 50% locally foraged ingredients including discarded carrier oils from Lilliput Trading Company. It’s a really solid soap and holds its shape down to the last sliver!

As far as I know, it’s only available in Bí Urban on Manor Street in Stoneybatter. You can order the soap online but have to visit the shop to collect it, though they do say you can email to arrange getting items posted out. There are lots of other interesting things for sale from the shop including bamboo toothbrushes, local honey and the Bí & Sea Exfoliating Face Mask Kit, which is one of a number of Bí Therapy products.

Bí Urban is more than just a shop. They describe themselves as “a nature based social enterprise promoting health and well-being” and are working on a number of interesting projects, which aim to increase biodiversity in Dublin city and protest pollinators. It’s worth a visit if you’re in the area.

3. L’Occitane

This is the only non-Irish soap on the list but I’m a long-time fan of L’Occitane so I had to include them. We’re in more traditional Christmas present territory here. They do lots of lovely Christmas gift including a selection of guest soaps. But they also have lots of regular soaps. The soaps are really moisturising so they’re great for people who tend to get dry skin in cold weather or from a lot of hand-washing. I also recommend the Shea Butter hand-cream if your hands need an extra bit of TLC this winter.


All their products are palm oil free and they have recycling programming where you bring in your empty beauty and skin care products from any brand and they will give you 10% off your next purchase. I haven’t done this myself yet, but I do have a bag of plastic pots that I am planning to bring in at some stage.

4. Mr. Bloom’s Lemon Soap

Last the summer, on a stunningly sunny Saturday morning I visited the Museum of Literature (MoLI) on Stephen’s Green for the first time. I was keen to see the building and was particularly interested in their Nuala O’Faolain exhibition. I’d just finished reading her biography Are You Somebody? The book is wonderful, full of the inner life of the author but also really interesting about art and culture in Ireland in the 1960s and 70s. I enjoyed the insights into her working life, particularly her career in television.

I really enjoyed my visit to MoLI. I loved the beautiful building and the garden at the back, as well as the exhibitions. I also visiting the gift shop where I bought a bar of Mr. Bloom’s Lemon Soap.

This soap already had a blog-post written about it by it’s creators. It might be a bit gimmicky but it has a lovely fresh scent and does the job.

Now that museums are open again, I would recommend a visit to MoLI. The Nuala O’Faolin exhibition is still running and I also really enjoyed the poetry room where the poem you hear depends on where you’re standing in the room. The poetry is also running across the walls.

The gift-shop is also worth a visit while you’re there. But if you can’t get there, you can still buy Mr. Bloom’s Lemon Soap on their website. There’s also a wide selection of Irish books, including Are You Somebody? And other gift type things like a Poolbeg Towers ornament or some fancy stationery.

Reading in 2020

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When I went to the library at the end of June, my first visit after lockdown, it was not my typical library experience. Instead of spending time browsing the shelves, I had to order my books online and then wait for the library to phone to set up an appointment to collect them. After weeks of being at home with no plans all day, it felt strange to have to be somewhere at a specific time. The library looked closed when I arrived and I had to wait outside. The librarian opened the door, took my name and then hurried back inside, found my book on a table just inside the door and passed it out to me. That was it. I went to the library and didn’t even get to go inside the library.

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Therapy – the benefits and barriers

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At the beginning of February, around the time of the General Election, BBC4 showed the first series of This Life, the 90s drama about co-habiting lawyers. February – a distant time when we regularly left the house to go to work, ate in restaurants and meet friends in the pub – now seems almost as long ago as 1995, when This Life first aired. It’s aged well. The clothes and hairstyles don’t seem particularly ridiculous because the 90s are fashionable again. And it’s still good. The characters and storylines still feel real and dramatic. The first time I watched this show I was about 10 years younger than the characters, I’m now more than 10 years older than them. That’s always the weird thing about fictional characters – how they stay frozen in time while you age beyond them, having experiences that inform how you interpret their actions and attitudes. Some of the attitudes in This Life do feel dated. Attitudes towards women and gay people, particularly. I suppose that’s to be expected; it was 25 years ago. The characters’ attitude towards therapy also really felt odd and old-fashioned to me.

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The last 28 days (ish)

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Feb 28
I have a job interview this morning. This means I have to leave the house. I haven’t been doing that much lately, due to unemployment and general anti-social tendencies. As soon as I get off the Luas, I scrub my hands with hand-sanitiser. When I shake hands with the people interviewing me, I reassure them that my hands are germ free.

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7 ways to start preparing for the next recession now

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Based on nothing more than a hunch, I think there’s another recession coming. A hunch, and the fact that stock markets are plummeting, the US is becoming increasingly unstable and if the UK succeed in crashing out of the EU, they are going to take us down with them. At home, the soaring rents and house prices aren’t sustainable – can’t be sustainable – and in the boom and bust cycle which we seem cursed to repeat, that means a recession is on it’s way.

Nearly €2.5bn wiped off Irish stocks amid global slump
From the Irish Times on Dec 6th 2018

After seeing this terrifying headline early this month, I started thinking about what I could do to prepare for this inevitable recession. I always feel better when I have a plan.

My plan does make some big assumptions. It buys into the narrative that there’s more money sloshing around right now than there was 5-10 years ago. I know this isn’t true for everyone. There are over 10,000 homeless people in Ireland. There are children growing up in hotel rooms. Over 15% of the population is living under the poverty line and the income gap is growing all the time. People are working good jobs and still broke because their salary is being eaten up by rent.

This silly listicle will not be relevant to a lot of people and I’m sorry about that. A better way to prepare for a recession would be for the government to take the Apple tax (and the Google tax, and the Facebook tax) and invest it in social housing and other public services. I can’t make that happen so here are some things to do instead.

1. Get out of debt.
Obvious one first. Pay off your loans, clear your credit card, get out of your overdraft. If you find yourself penniless and out of work, you don’t want to owe the bank anything. You’ll miss repayments and the interest will just keep clocking up. Clearing debt is a very boring use of money but if you are lucky enough to have a bit of extra cash now, invest it in becoming debt-free as soon as possible.

This also means that if you have a future financial emergency, those lines of credit will be available to you and might help you ride out the recession.

2. Save.
Another boring, practical piece of advice – start saving. Preferably with a credit union because it’s easier to borrow from them. Set up a savings account and a weekly (or monthly) direct debit into it. Even if it’s only for a small amount, some savings are better than none and being a regular saver looks good when you go looking for a loan. I also like the credit union because it’s hard to get at the money. There’s no cards or electronic transfers, you have to physically go into the building. That helps my savings grow!

3. Learn to cook
The cheapest way to eat well is to cook for yourself. It doesn’t have to be fancy just learn how to make the thing you like. The BBC Good Food website has lots of easy recipes with clear instructions. (Personally I really like this two-step recipe for chicken, sweet potato and coconut curry.) Cooking well isn’t hard but it takes a bit of practice. Better to make your mistakes when you can afford to, so if the meal is completely inedible there’s a pizza in the freezer you can have instead.

Inviting friends over for dinner is also a good way to enhance your social life during a recession when nobody can afford to go out. Finally, as well as being able to feed yourself and others, being able to spend time preparing good grub is a great when you have too much time on your hands, because of unemployment or under-employment.

4. Invest in clothes that last, especially shoes/boots/coats.
If you can afford it, spend money on good quality shoes and coats that will see you through a few winters. This is good advice from a budgetary and environmental point of view but also because you find yourself walking more in a recession and it’s good to have things that keep you warm and dry.

5. Join the library! All those books!
Libraries are great. Not only are they full of books that you can take away for free, they are also warm places you can go and use the internet without spending any money. You’ll also be grateful for their weird collection of DVDs when you have to cancel your Netflix subscription and can’t afford to go to the cinema. You could argue that you don’t need to join a library now, but having lots of members help libraries stay open and (I imagine) help them argue for budget increases, so by joining today you can help make sure they’re still there when you need them. Also did I mention the free books?

Photograph: Tom Honan/The Irish Times, part of Patrick Freyne's article on the Dublin Central Library in the Ilac Centre.
Photograph: Tom Honan/The Irish Times, part of Patrick Freyne’s article on the Dublin Central Library in the Ilac Centre.

6. Vote for anti-capitalists.
I don’t know if the general election is going to happen before or after the recession hits but when it does, you should vote with the recession in mind. We need a government who doesn’t always take the side of the property developers or the landlords or the banks. We need more tenants and less landlords in the Dáil. We need more socialists who will increase investment in public services. We need people who will put an end to the boom and bust cycles.

Leo Varankar described himself as “the CEO of the organisation” on the Late Late Show recently. CEOs tend to be selfish, power-mad psychopaths and we shouldn’t let them be in charge anymore. We need a leader who is less like a CEO and more like a caretaker. Someone who looks after the country and has it’s best interests at heart, someone who identifies where cuts can be made and also where we need to invest. Someone who understands that they don’t own the country, they’re just looking after the place for bit. Please vote for someone like that, when the time comes!

7. Look on the bright side…
…a recession might be the only thing that will bring down our carbon emissions. The last recession really helped with that but they started climbing again as soon as the economy started to recover. Yes, this is clutching at straws and it is a fairly bleak bright side but we were identified as the worst offender in the EU for carbon emission last week, which is another super bleak and depressing headline, so I’ll take any bright side I can find. We need a few more politicians who give a shit about global warming in the next Dáil as well.

Avocado on toast flat lay

I am not a Blogger

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I started reading blogs almost 20 years ago, back when they were still called online journals or online diaries. The ones I read were mostly written by girls in high-school or college in the US. They were young women who had taught themselves html coding so they could create webpages and graphic design so they could create banners and logos. But really it was all about the words. In the 90s, the internet was generally more about words; connection speeds were slow and images meant more bandwidth, which was more expensive. Those early blogs were about about real people spilling their guts online, usually anonymously. The writers felt they could be their real selves online. They were kids who had the time and inclination to play around with computers (back when there were one per household) and learn about coding. This is what the internet was to me – online journals, webzines, mailing lists. I studied computers in college because I loved the internet, but I think what I really loved was words. I spent a lot of time online reading those websites. I had a long list of URLs that I would visit daily. I loved finding new blogs and having loads of back issues to read. I discovered the world that way.

html-for-beginner-2

Blogs and bloggers in 2016 are very different to the ones I used to read. It’s no longer all about the words, and you don’t need to know about html anymore. Now bloggers are more likely to know about algorithms and hashtags. There’s a blogger lifestyle, posts tend to be more aspirational than confessional and everyone wants to find a way to earns a living from their blog. Actually, I think writers always dreamt finding a way to make money from their blogs. And writers did get hired or published because of their blog, but the blog wasn’t usually the thing that made money. It’s interesting to see how it’s changed, and also how it’s stayed the same. The most successful blogs still have an honesty to them, and they are the ones where the writers engage with their readers.

However, I am still an old-fashioned, turn-of-the-century blogger. I don’t want my blog to be my job. I just want to write stuff and put it on the internet where people can read it and hopefully find it useful or interesting or entertaining. I have been writing on the internet for almost as long as I’ve been reading the internet. At this stage I can be fairly sure that I will always struggle to update regularly and I will always feel a bit weird when people ask me about my online writing in real life but I still like having a corner of the internet that’s mine. I can’t blog the same way as the hip, young Millennials and that’s ok. They’ll do their thing and I’ll do mine.

This is a long, convoluted way of saying that I’m going to try and write more regularly, but this will not make me a blogger. I’m just a person with a website.