Ireland day 0105. Tuesday 11 January 2022- Frustration

Today’s summary	Paperwork in morning and afternoon. Found out I couldn’t apply for a credit card. Dropped all the recycling bottles on the floor. Need additional paperwork. But a lovely walk round robertswall hill in the evening
Today’s weather	Sunny, dry and clear all day. Dead calm. About 7C

Today’s overview location (the red cross in a circle shows where Val and I are at the moment)		Close-up location (Click button below to download a GPX of today’s walk or see interactive map at bottom): Robswall sunset

Commentary

OK I’ll admit it. Certain aspects of today weren’t entirely perfect. Fortunately we have had very few such days since we arrived in Ireland, so this was a bit of a rarity.

I will be brief and spare you the worst of the details. Anyway, things didn’t start well when the bottom fell out of the glass recycling box as I was carrying it out for disposal. Needless to say, the box contained a significant number of bottles (but in my defence I haven’t emptied it since before Christmas – approximately) and so they all came crashing out quite spectacularly. The liberal scattering of broken shards of glass all over the hallway floor was indeed a sight to behold and of course took ages of meticulous sweeping and hoovering to remove.

Then I thought I would try and apply for an Irish credit card. You need to use one when you are hiring a car in Ireland and it’s generally a lot more convenient to have an Irish one than trying to use a UK one – for reasons I can’t really understand, mine always seems to fail when I try to use it. Anyway, after a lot of fiddling around, I discovered that I can’t apply for one anyway – most likely because the address registered to my PPS number isn’t the same as the address where we are living now (it’s still registered to our temporary accommodation in Ardcath).

No problem, I thought – I’ll just go online and change the address on my government account. At which point I found I needed to Validate my PPS number first. You can also do this online but for more reasons that I don’t understand, it turns out you can’t actually do this online but need to book an appointment in an office. No problem I thought – I’ll book an appointment. Then I found you can’t do this online but you have to ring someone up. I called the number – no reply – just an email address to write to. Anyway I wrote, and finally got a reply this evening letting me know that I “might” be able to get an appointment in 4 or 5 weeks time.

Anyway – there’s more but I think you can probably get the picture so I will stop at that point.

To cheer ourselves up (and I have to give credit at this point to Val for staying calm while I was working myself up into a red-headed fit of rage) – we decided to escape into the fresh air while there was still a bit of daylight left. We headed up over what has increasingly become our favourite walk – Robswall Hill – and were actually quite breath-taken by the beauty of the sunset and the stunning views in all directions. I went a bit mad with my phone and took lots of pictures up there, so you can see a few of them below.

Suitably cheered, we dropped down to the coast and returned in the gloaming to Malahide. There was just time for a bit of Spanish – lessons start in 10 days and I have some homework to do first – and then dinner. Now that this blog is polished off (the website seemed to work OK so I didn’t have a final exasperation to complete the day thank goodness), Val and I are going to take a quick walk down to the Broadmeadow lagoon to take advantage of a good aurora forecast, to see if we can spot the Northern Lights. It’s a long shot I know – but we might get lucky.

Today’s photos (click to enlarge)


Looking over Dublin Bay from the top of Robswall Hill	If you swivel a bit to the left from the last photo, you can clearly see the Great Sugarloaf silhouetted against the horizon

Staying on the silhouette theme, (and you can tell I didn’t take a huge number of photos today so I am just padding out those that I have got) – you can also see the Dublin Hills quite clearly to the right of this photo.	Once you get to the top of Robs Wall hill, looking south you can see the Dublin Mountains, and to the north there’s the Broadmeadow estuary and Portrane. There’s even Lambay Island lurking in the haze (to the right, out of shot). Not a bad spot to linger

Here we are. if you look closely you will be able to discern the harried look on my face, caused by a morning of paperwork. Oh, and the Moon	Val looking altogether more cheerful – thank goodness!

Down on Lithostrotion beach with Lambay island on the horizon. You can clearly see the fossilised bedding planes on the beach. They are actually limestone, but I can’t work out why they are such a dark colour