Gavan Reilly

“If a single-percentage drop in retail sales is enough to wipe out so many high street retailers, the Government have no option but to cut VAT.”

Discuss.

You don’t have to be there for very long to realise that despite their incessant, crippling urge to bureaucratise things like breathing and eating, the Germans have a tradition of doing things in a very sensible way.

Nowhere is this more visible in their rail system. Today* we were standing on the platform at the Hauptbahnhof waiting for our S-Bahn back to the airport. On the screens at the platform, we were advised (bilingually) that the rear section of the train would be the one going to the airport, while the front half would be splitting and heading onward. Hence, passengers should board the train “in the A section”. How was the A section signified? There was a sign at that end of the platform.

“The train will arrive in three minutes.” And it did.

“The train will arrive at the airport in 51 minutes.” And it did. And the airport itself? Voted the best in Europe for the last four years: easily laid out, open, warm, airy, well spaced out, and never cramped. All this from a city with a population of about 1.3m, not a huge amount bigger than Dublin’s.

Compare this to Ireland where you’d be lucky to predict which platform any train might arrive or leave from on an hourly basis; where trains cost more than the minimum daily wage, and where combination tickets for more than one public transport service involve brittle, unreliable swipe tickets that don’t work on most buses. And don’t get me started on Dublin Airport – though, to its credit, Terminal 2 really ought to be referred to as Terminal 4, because piers A and D would be named as terminals anywhere else in the world, not least for the reason that you could fit small eastern European republics between the check-in desks and the departure gates.

And that’s not the only example. When the Germans built roads, they did it the right way – big, wide, open, and with no speed limit (I don’t advocate their complete abolition, but when was the last time you heard of a fatal collission on a motorway?). In Spring of 2007 when I lived there, VAT was raised across the board. Now, when the economy gets sluggish? They’re cutting it again. Put more money in peoples’ pockets, and they have more to spend.

Clever, clever people? Not really – just a country who understand that the earlier you spend money, the cheaper a project becomes, and with the profound sensibility to simply think things through.

* which is now yesterday, as I couldn’t get online to publish this post.

Sometimes one must wonder why they punish their bodies so badly, and make their bodies make them do such horrible things. My body’s taking revenge on me today for a few days of abuse, and it makes me wish I’d been a much better host to my body.

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Sorry for the light blogging these few days; getting the internet has been more difficult than I’d anticipated. Regular service should hopefully be resumed tomorrow, or definitely by Saturday and while I’d been knocking together posts and saving them for upload, I just haven’t been close to a connection to do so. Normal service resumes on Saturday.

It is extraordinary to think that humans have the ability to see things on the page in front of them, written in a language entirely seperate from their own, and be able to make sense of what they see.

It’s a trait I wish I was better at.

There’s something magical about the internet that sets it apart from other media – that no matter where one might be using it, or what the circumstances of the user, the internet always looks the same. Going to gavreilly.com in Ireland or California (hi Cat!) or Munich is no different*. The page, content, feel, navigability of a site is perfectly uniform for everyone, everywhere in the world – and to me, that’s a far more special attribute than the universality of TV or radio. In fact, I’d predict that once the world develops sufficiently to the point that everyone has access to a phone line, and once laptops become cheap enough for them to be bought on a wholescale international basis, we’ll see an enormous schism in media as we know it.

Just a brief thought to bear in mind. Next time you’re watching an international spoting event, or perhaps Obama’s Inauguration next Tuesday, have a think about the incredible ability of human kind to manufacture systems where a single microphone placed at a human mouth, and a single camera pointed at a human face, can be manipulated, formatted, resolved, condensed and transmitted, and broadcast to someone on the other side of the world with a portable television, with such speed as to make the whole process seem instantaneous. This is the miracle of human endeavour: the fact that Obama will speak into one microphone, or twenty-two footballers will take to a single patch of grass, and have that activity transmitted worldwide (I mean literally worldwide; I don’t mean this word lightly, or in a figurative sense) at the speed of light and at the blink of an eye, is a product of extraordinary human agility and magnificence – not to mention that we have the ability to send ourselves to the moon and back, and the fact that broadcasting as we know it existed long before the advent of broadband made global communication so much easier.

It is this, above all else, that sets human beings apart from their companions on planet earth. The desire of the human to innovate and create, for entertainment or therapy, for fun or medicine – now that‘s something worth celebrating. We may have made drastic changes to this world, or even wrecked it: but in doing so, we have done some marvellous, awesome things.

* Unless you’re using Internet Explorer, in which case the stylesheet doesn’t load as properly as it should. I’ll get to fixing that though, I promise.