Foreign Perspectives

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With the credit squeeze still upon us, it shouldn’t be a great surprise to learn that many parents are still tapping the Bank of Mum & Dad even as adults.

The research commissioned by Scottish Widows indicates that over a third of parents have had to tap into their retirement savings to fund these requests from their children. That’s a scary thought as it implies that those parents may well need to call in that loan at some point if/when they run out of money for their own retirement and I’m sure it’s not something that the “kids” have considered.

It’s not peanuts either as the research indicates that the amount involved is well over £60 BILLION.

Now, it’s probably fine for the 30% who were asking for money to fund the deposit on a house in that they’ve actually got something “in the bank” so to speak but over 40% were asking for the money to repay debt and that’s money that’s quite simply gone. Quite what those “children” are going to do when their parents come to them asking for the money back so that they can retire in the manner in which they’d planned to is a very good question. One suspects that they’ll end up needing to consider secured loans on the parental home at some point.

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Doing the English component of my modern languages degree as the very last course after years of learning both French and Spanish gives a slightly peculiar perspective.

For one thing, I know a lot of the linguistics words that they’re using but I only know the French and Spanish words for the relevant terms. It’s a little peculiar being able to speak about English using French or Spanish words!

It’s taught quite differently to the foreign language components too and seems, to me, much easier than they were even though, in principle, this course is at the same educational level as the foreign language ones. One very noticeable aspect of this is that I find that I can work on the English well into the evening whereas I couldn’t do that with either the French or the Spanish until towards the end of those segments.

The course starts off with something of a potted history of the English language itself and in particular it homes in one how very old English words and expressions live on in many of the dialects that are spoken around the UK today. Interestingly, some of these are now strongly associated with particular regions whereas they’d have been used throughout what is now the UK several centuries ago. For example, “wee” is very much seen as a Scottish term for “small” but it’s actually an Old English word dating back over 1000 years and one of many where the Scots even retain the phraseology of Old English in their use of it.

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One of the catchwords of modern times is ‘detox’ and no doubt everyone knows someone who has gone on a detox at some stage. It’s the new way of treating the body and health from the inside out and of course in many ways it makes perfect sense to do this. I guess it is because of our lifestyles that we feel the need to detox now and again to restore our body’s ‘balance’.

There are many ways of detoxing the body; fasting, just drinking fruit or vegetable juices for 48 hours and the increasingly popular method called the colon cleanse. I have heard it said, though I have not tried this myself, that this method is excellent for flushing toxins out of the system and assisting in restoring regularity - people say it also gives them energy and renewed vigour. I can see the point; having a sluggish digestive and elimination system certainly would leave one feeling sluggish and off-colour on the outside.

Of course, before doing such a thing at home I would consult a doctor or health practitioner - there are also clinics that specialise in this as well.

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