Dublin

I haven't used my blog in nearly a month now that term's finished, but I don't think this is due to lack of motivation since I went home for summer, it's due to lack of inspiration. For some reason I keep forgetting how dull and uninspiring Chichester can be as a home town, especially being here for a stretch as long as 3 months. I'm quite fortunate to have friends in Brighton I can escape to frequently and my dad's place in London that often stops me from going mad. But this week I grew increasingly frustrated at home and decided to escape for a bit. So, at around 3am after a (quite dull) night out, I booked a ticket to Dublin by myself to return in five days.

I've been here three days now it it's turned out to be the best decision I've made in a very long time. Being part Irish and never having been to Dublin I felt it was the obvious choice in destination - granted, I didn't quite realise just how expensive it can be, 5 euro for a pint being a cheap deal. It's a great city full of really interesting buildings and structures and I've managed to start reading and writing a lot again (of which I was doing nothing at home), meet lots of new people and just feel more relaxed in general. I'm staying in a hostel right in the centre of town and spent the last two nights on pub crawls with a group of 30-year old, ultra-conservative American frat-brothers from Ohio and New Mexico who are on a reunion.

I've been reading two books, one a background to British Politics and the other called 'the Black Swan: the impact of the highly improbable', a theory put forward by Nassim Nicholas Taleb about the logic behind randomness and uncertainty and how we deal with events. I really like his ideas about things becoming 'predictable' only after they occur, and his thoughts about man's great ability/determination to apply logic to rare, unpredictable events afterwards in order to make it seem as if they could have been easily foreseen. I will write more about this once I've finished the book.