modern complications

What is it with our modern, urban, monetary world and the seemingly unavoidable generation of red tape?

I’m trying to organise going travelling in the EU. I have an EU passport, so this shouldn’t be complicated. After all, I have no visa applications to contend with.

But as I’m planning to take a road trip, the red tape has not only mutliplied, it’s formed itself into myriad hoops. The vehicle must be documented, serviced, taxed, insured for every country I may pass through, and I need vignettes for about half the countries on the trip as well. The vehicle just about needs its own passport, given the documentation I have to take – originals and copies.

And it needs its own little kit of spares and tools and items “just in case.”

You’d think it would be simple. It sounds simple – ride from here to there and back again. No hire companies or third parties involved, so how complicated can it be?

There’s the logistics, of course. It would be so easy just to let the road take me where it will, and just ad lib the food and shelter. No go. At various points, accommodation must be pre-booked, pre-authorised, pre-paid and re-confirmed with a mile-long email chain I must (naturally) print and take with me.

The more we correspond instantly, globally and effectively, it seems, the more of a papertrail we generate. The forests must be petrified, watching our merry paper-fuelled antics.

I’ll be surprised if I have any space for clothes once I’ve packed all the documentation and legally required information and extras. I bought pocket-sized phrase books to help me out (and prevent the kind of unwitting offence I’m otherwise likely to cause), but at this rate they’ll stay home because it’ll be them or underwear.

zen and the art of motorcycle loading

I’m going on a road trip, or at least I’m trying to. Packing for it is proving entertaining. On a motorbike, there is limited packing room, and the EU insists everyone carries a long (and quite bulky) list of equipment, mostly just in case something goes wrong. I mentioned all this last week.

So I’ve made the list of what I need to take, and tried to pack it into my luggage. It doesn’t fit. That is, it fits, but then the zips don’t close. The trouble with biking is that you can’t simply just change bags.

So I’ve unpacked it all and tried to decide what isn’t so essential. The art of Zen and minimalism are seriously coming into their own here. If only I were any good at them.

Of course, I need to think about how likely I am to need stuff urgently (like my waterproofs in a downpour on an autobahn at 100mph) and how delicate it is (like my camera in a downpour on an autobahn – you get the gist) and also how much everything weighs because weight distribution is a far bigger factor on two wheels than on four.

I’m not that precious – I don’t need a hairdryer, an iron or other such luxuries. Okay, I’m not mad about wearing the same shirt for days on end, but I think of that as socially acceptable, not precious.

The trouble is that biking comes with a massive pile of gear at the best of times, and holidays do as well. Combining the two into one relatively cabin-sized bag isn’t nearly as easy as I’d hoped.

So I’m trying the much vaunted tip of living with piles of stuff for a day and then cutting it down to half, rinse and repeat. Eventually, the essentials will be left, apparently.

I’m trying all the methods of packing and all the cool online packing-list tools (http://www.independenttraveler.com/packing). In the end, as long as it all fits in the bag, that’s all I need.

Objects in the rosy rear-view may appear other than they were

We tend to look back to the past as being somehow simple and golden. Or at least rose-tinted. The facts are far more pragmatic. When we look back to a simple golden bygone age of peace and harmony, we’re looking at a myth. Harmony is what you get when you run out of other options.

People lived simply because they didn’t have much – they couldn’t afford it. They had one set of clothes because clothes were expensive, making them time-consuming. They made do and mended everything because it was cheaper than replacement. They looked after their few possessions because the cost of replacement was prohibitvely high. Sunday best wasn’t just an expression, it was the one set of clothes you kept for holy days – for the day of rest, and the rest of the time, you wore the same working clothes day in and day out. In medieval times, Europe would have stunk. Not purely because of a lack of sanitation but also because if you’re wearing your clothes all the time, you have no time to clean them.

We look to them as an inspiration for a simpler way of living, and forget they had no choice. They aspired to a more complicated way of life, with more possessions and more requisite skills and manners. It’s only human to aspire to the life of those in power, because they are the ones who are more likely to survive – they have the pick of the resources, after all.

It’s all very well to look back and sigh nostalgically, but we’re actually nostalgic for an illusion. The idea of deliberately simplifying and minimising is a relatively recent one – and its early proponents came from those who had, because it’s only when you have that you can speculate as to the benefits of not-having. The have-nots are just trying to make ends meet and don’t have time for such patently stupid questions.

I’m all for living lightly and simply, but I don’t want to kid myself that it’s really a time-hallowed life philosophy. Which means it’s all still pretty experimental and there are no glib answers.

INSTANT TIDYING

So my parents came to stay the other weekend. I live in a shoebox. This was always going to be fun, so in a special effort to make it less fraught, I had a whirlwind declutter before they arrived (yes, in some cases just moving things to where they’d be unlikely to upset/ be discovered by my mother). This clear-out wasn’t about throwing stuff away, but about temporarily making more space. I needed to clear the surfaces, a dawer or two, and make space for their suitcases and the camp bed.

As a rule of thumb, the more visible clutter is, the more frustrating it is. So it pays to clear off the most visible spots first: the kitchen counter, the table, the desk. My lovely wide windowsills that serve as shelving. Thank fully, I have amassed (unintentionally) something of a collection of bags-for-life into which everything got shoved and moved to the store-cupboard. In my shoebox of a flat, I also use the area under chairs as storage, and that needed to be cleared as well, because it looks so untidy

In the kitchen, I am halfway toward my ideal recipe collection in that I keep everything in a plastic wallet . Ultimately, I want everything on catalogue cards and laminated (look, I’m not the tidiest cook, OK?)

All books, magazines, DVDs etc got put in pretty-looking cheap woven boxes and hidden on top of the wardrobe – I can still get at them but they’re unobtrusive. And frankly, not much else is going to fit up there – it’s a tall wardrobe.

The net result was just enough space for 3 people plus luggage without having to hold our breaths, and it took me less than 20 minutes after they left to get everything back to usual – including all the bags from the store-cupboard. Okay – not back to usual. Back to a very neat and tidy usual.

IDIOTS GUIDE TO ONLINE TRADING

I need to sell a motorcycle, and I want to use the web. So far, so good. But online selling, especially auction selling, is a minefield of compliex computer-ese and jargon and every time I venture into the quagmire, I’m to my eyebrows in acronyms in 5 seconds flat. So, in the interests of keeping things simple, I have compiled the following translation of the instructions:

Weird terms:
FVF - Final Value Fee
TOS - Terms of Service
Then there are the obvious generics for selling items online:

 - Contact details!! I know it’s obvious, but you need to be careful. I’ve submitted an ad and forgotten to put my details in the body text, with the result that on that website, they weren’t included in the ad. Somewhat pointless.

 - Photos (copy and paste free thumbnails via an online album service if you can find a free one. This gets around any picture fees)

 - Specific and detailed and honest description (especially for vehicles),

 - There are tricks for cutting down the fees, too. Every site you can list on has a way of charging you for the privilege – even the free ones. Usually, the charge is for a priority – top of screen – listing. They’re often not worth it. For instance – CAPS are free where bold is chargeable. On eBay, picking the right starting price instead of a reserve can help as they charge an extra fee for a reserve price, so it can often be cheaper to use a starting price instead. And gallery listing is recommended as a cheap “priority” option.

 - Timing is everything, as always – you need to think about when your likely buyers are likely to be browsing the web, and (for big ticket items like my bike) when they’ll next get paid. And you also need to think about when the forum you’re selling on is likley to have gremlins, high traffic or maintenance – because that’s the most likely time for your ad to get lost in some virtual black hole (but your fee will still be processed).

 - And talking of fees – it’s worth reading all the T&C small print for any site or method of payment you use, because they will hit you for yet more fees (caveat emptor has become caveat auctor, to a large extent).

 - Delivery methods are another potentially horrible cost, so use sites like www.parcel2go.com, but for my purposes, it’s irrelevant, because it will be collection only – and you pay me before you get the keys. After all, if you don’t I will simply report the bike stolen…