The Property Tax is a Riot

After we'd looked at what the Market had to offer yesterday, some friends and I sat in its nicely old-fashioned cafe and had a cuppa, and the talk, as so often nowadays, turned to the situation in Ireland. Someone mentioned the new property tax.

The Market has lots of good things on offer. Like these...

Now I should explain that we have no council charges, domestic rates, property taxes or whatever they are called in other parts of the world. I have even heard it said that 'rates' is a swear word in Ireland, a hark-back to the bad old days of the British. Fair enough.

I have even heard it said that 'promises were made' that such an evil would never be re-introduced.

Hmm.

(Perhaps it was a Government that made that promise. Enough said.)

and these...

The new Property Tax is going to be a hundred euros per household.
Well - this year, anyway.
Once they have managed to make the country swallow the idea that rates (that old swear word) are indeed on the annual menu, then I suppose the sky's the limit. 

I guess you may all be gasping with amazement that we don't have a local taxes of some kind, but we're not getting away Scot free. Ireland is an expensive place to live, everything seems to be loaded, one way or another and we have a high rate of VAT, high road tax, income tax, some people pay water rates (soon everyone will pay water rates) and so it goes on... And if you want your rubbish collected (what else can you do with it in a country where bonfires are illegal?) you pay a private company...

Back at the table yesterday, someone voiced the opinion that the new tax was illegal. Someone else said you couldn't be forced to register for it. Only one person said they didn't mind paying, as the government needs the money - how else can it claw back the gazillions Ireland owes?
Another person said 'But it's not my debt!'

I'd have to agree with that one.

and these...

We then got on to discussing all the side issues - corruption, the lack of justice being meted out to the wankers, sorry - bankers who caused all the problems in the first place, the bonuses still being paid by the banking sector 'so that we can continue to attract the right kind of employees'.
Yeah. Right.
That really worked last time.



And the fact that the Irish secretly admire a chancer, someone who flouts the system and gets away with it. Lots of 'chancers' in positions of authority here.
It comes, one person said, from all the years of trying to get one over on the British.
Very true. But as she pointed out, now they are getting one over on themselves.
Not such a result perhaps.

and these soaps...

We discussed the current gloom and doom in the country and the sorry fact that the economy is flatter than last weeks pancakes.

It was what we didn't discuss that I found myself thinking about afterwards.
We didn't discuss standing up and shouting about it.
Or marching, or fighting back.
Or even having a jolly good riot. Riots seem popular in other places.
Riots, it seems to me, come about when people don't think they are being heard.
But you have to say something for there to be any chance of being heard.
Is anyone in Ireland shouting?

For shouting to be effective, it needs to start somewhere and grow.
Maybe the Property Tax would be a good starting point.
Why it needs to be levied in the first place.
We've all given up dreaming that with all the bank debt ladled onto Everyman's shoulders, there would be some kind of moratorium on mortgages, but at the very least everyone who pays the Property Tax ought to get the same amount knocked off their mortgage bill.
That's something else we could shout about.

We refilled our cups and the chat moved on to other things.

not to mention these samosas and goat's cheese tartlets...

And now I am wondering. Is it just my perception, or is that the problem?
In Ireland we love sitting around a table with a cuppa, chewing the fat.
We can do that for an Olympic Gold.
We're not given to shouting enough.
And I can't see a riot taking place.
Shame.

So I guess we're all just going to pay.
And pay.
And pay.

and locally made cards and crafts....  It's a very good Market!

Picture it in Your Own Words - Indulge

The Weekly Photo Challenge is Indulge.

I was so late getting round to last week's that this is coming hot on the heels of my recent submission.
Never mind.




Several things come to mind for this photo.


The inevitable

Two of the cupcakes I made for this morning's market

Then there's one I can't resist

Flowers

Poppies and lavender in my garden last summer

(Rosa Abraham Darby). My husband speeds up if we happen to drive past a garden centre, so that I can't GET IN THERE!. Flowers are an irresistible indulgence. And the scent of this one, in my garden, is heavenly

But I suppose these two are my real indulgence

Napoleon and his second wife, Marie Louise (very small, but every inch an Empress) I don't remember when she last laid an egg (and neither does she) and they take a bit of looking after, but I love them to bits. They are referred to as 'my babies'.

(Don't forget, fellow challengers, to check you spam bins! Wordpress generally unceremoniously dumps Blogger comments. If you find a comment from me in the bin, and reinstate it, I will be recognised next time I visit you. Yipee!)

Picture it in Your Own Words - Down 2

In case you missed my recent post, joy of joys - my blog problems are resolved.

You can now Subscribe to this blog, should you so desire, and you WILL finally receive email notification of new content.

If you are one of my valued and loyal Followers, please note that you also need to Subscribe in order to receive notifications of new posts.

Just click on Subscribe at the top right hand side of the page and fill in your email details.


Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.

________________________________________________________


The prompt for The Weekly Photo Challenge is Down  

First, a DESPERATE note to fellow challengers! I have left - tried to leave - comments on many of your photos! Wordpress doesn't like Blogspot comments and - I think - spams them! PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE look in your spam bin and see if there is a comment from Writing from the Edge. If you 'reinstate' it in  your comments, generally that means I will be allowed to comment in future. Yipee! 

(You cannot believe how frustrating this is....)

Now - enough of blog problems. 

Here's what came to mind when I thought of Down

If you have ever held a new chick, you'll know it's just a ball of down on legs. These chicks' mother, Henrietta, has her own ball of down as a hat - we call it her pom-pom

The recent storm brought an old tree down in the woods. It lies like a toppled giant, motionless amidst its own broken ruins

The river flows down to the sea. I think of the river as a fixture, but in fact it is new every day. Yesterday's water is long gone. I'm sure there is something I could learn from that.

This is my second entry, as I posted my husband's photo on my first - see here.
(Probably against all the rules. Sorry)

Picture it in Your Own Words - Down

In case you missed my recent post, joy of joys, my blog problems are resolved.

You can now Subscribe to this blog, should you so desire, and you WILL finally receive email notification of new content.

If you are one of my valued and loyal Followers, please note that you also need to Subscribe in order to receive notifications of new posts.

Just click on Subscribe at the top right hand side of the page and fill in your details.


Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.

________________________________________________________


The prompt for The Weekly Photo Challenge is Down  

First, a DESPERATE note to fellow challengers! I have left - tried to leave - comments on many of your photos! Wordpress doesn't like Blogspot comments and - I think - spams them! PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE look in your spam bin and see if there is a comment from Writing from the Edge. If you 'reinstate' it in  your comments, generally that means I will be allowed to comment in future. Yipee! 

(You cannot believe how frustrating this is....)

At last - sorry for the delay! - here are the pictures:

White birds fly down onto the water

Held down at the railway station

I am entering both these pictures on my husband's behalf, as I think they are great interpretations of the theme. He took them in Antwerp a couple of days ago.

He took this one too, but not in Antwerp!

Sitting down for a rest and a picnic in the rain

In Memory of the Elm Tree

I sat down to write something about my beautiful elm tree (now deceased) the other day, but I got waylaid.

Someone had left a comment on my post Picture it in your own words - Regret, in which they said: 'I hope you have a picture of your beautiful tree', so I fished out my old shoeboxes of photos, but then - immersed in a zillion captured moments of my life, I ended up writing On Reflection... instead.

But I am shocked to discover that - so far - I have only unearthed one photograph of my elm tree. A winter picture.

My beautiful elm on the left of the gate, clothed all in white, it's younger sibling standing to attention alongside

The picture is appropriate to the time of year, and beautiful withal, but it doesn't speak eloquently of the elm's soft summer grace, its bountiful green shade, or the delicate elegance of its long, serrated leaves.

How can there be no pictures of my elm? It stands (its poor amputated limbs pleading with the sky) outside my bedroom window, and even more significantly, in full view of the place where I work. I gaze at it every day either consciously or unconsciously. The rooks squabble noisily in its branches every spring, vying for the prime real estate sites - south facing but with the full sea view. Many have had to settle for second best - a grand sea view, but north facing.

Pleading, but to no avail

And here I am, still thinking about it, and writing about it, in the present tense. Because the trunks of both trees still stand, savaged and mute. Any day now, they too will be felled and I shall have to get used to the past tense.

The day he came to remove its crown

I fell in love with the elm tree as instantly and as completely as I fell in love with the house. Except the tree came first, by a whisker. The ash, on the other side of the gate, is also magnificent, and its status has now been bumped up considerably, in the face of my loss. But the elm was always the one.

The butchery begins

In my mind, the tree is soft and green and overshadowing. The sentinel at the gate, the bower of rippling shade that marked our comings and goings, that fretted the early morning sky with filigree lace, that held the evening sun like a great, glowing bowl of light. And in winter, night and morning, the rooks would blow in on the wind like wisps of torn paper, and perform their ritual dance up and down the four corners of heaven before settling on every branch, filling the tree like an outrageously vast crop of fat, black pears.
And its singing has become the music of my life. Flailed by the winter storms, its song was loud and plaintive and robbed my sleep of comfort, but in summer rain, or a summer breeze, there is no better sound than the whispering of a tree - with or without the birdsong.

It is all in my head, but no photographs. Just an abiding familiarity, like an old friend, or the bed you creep into every night. As I said in On Reflection, the best memories, and the stalwarts of our lives aren't necessarily the things we snap. I have spent the last 18 years loving the elm tree, seeing it sometimes more often than members of my own family. It is part of who I am, but there's no photographic record.

I suppose I never needed one. I just had to look out of the window.
But no more.

I am very sad.
Kahil Gibran wrote: 'Trees are poems that earth writes upon the sky. We fell them down and turn them into paper that we may record our emptiness.'
How true, how true.

A lovely friend sent me this poem. She said it had consoled her when she also lost a tree she loved.
I think it is beautiful. Thank you, my friend.

 
The Tree Speaks   by Cathal O Searcaigh

I am the tree that will be destroyed,

tomorrow I will be cut and laid low.

My dignity will be hacked at;

my limbs will be strewn

in the dirt of the street –

my strong limbs.

The white blossom of my laugh will be stolen.

Everything I have stored

in the marrow of memories will be destroyed;

my first tears of joy; my first leaves of hope;

the first syllable of music pulsing through my branches;

the first Spring which clothed me in a green dress.

The tales of adventure related to me

by the birds; the nests that flourished

in the leafy shelter of my eye,

the storms I calmed

in the softness of my embrace.

The children who swung between life and eternity

in my branches; the whispered secrets

breathed to me in the night shadows;

the moon who dressed me in the golden lace of autumn;

the angels who alighted on me with the snow.

With the fluent tongue of my leaves

I defended, passionately,

this space in which I thrive;

in which I spread with wonder

the green thoughts  that come to me in Spring.

With bounteous seeds I covered

this earthly space around me with certainty,

in celebration of the Tree Spirit

that quickened firmly in me

as I came of age.

And tomorrow when they burn me,

when my bones will smoke,

I will become one with the Sky, the Fiery Sky!

that has fuelled my imagination from dawn to dusk

With brightness, with Light

How beautiful the colours and textures of these elm logs are

 Another kind comment I received expressed the sanguine hope that Spring would put new branches and leaves on the elm's severed limbs. Sadly, even if they did, they would die. Dutch Elm disease is carried by a beetle that gets under the bark. Apparently it flies at a certain height, and once the tree is infected, that's it. Curtains - eventually, although it takes a few years. This poor tree has been green and dying for some time. But there is hope that some young, smaller trees, if kept coppiced, might become immune, if they don't grow up to 'beetle flying height'.

The trunks of my trees are going to a friend who will wait patiently for them to season and then use them to make something beautiful - floors or furniture. And I have already kept several pieces that another friend is going to make into something for me to keep as a memento. I will treasure whatever he reveals from the wood.

But, sad as I am now, the future beckons. I am planning to plant two blossom trees where the elms stood. It will take them a few years to grow, but they will have their own identity and be beautiful in their own right. And as I plant them, I shall think of Henry van Dyke's words: 'He that planteth a tree is a servant of God, he provideth a kindness for many generations, and faces that he hath not seen shall bless him.'

As I have done, all these years past, as I have done.

I will also remember the Chinese proverb.
'Keep a green tree in your heart and perhaps a singing bird will come.'

There will be singing again, one of these days.

Perhaps I'll plant something like this - not an elm, but beautiful in its own right