Foreign Perspectives

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Worryingly, the answer is probably “yes”.

In the last year the UK has had a series of high profile banks going bust (although they never used that phraseology). Just over a year ago the Northern Rock was taking around 20% of the entire UK mortgage market which is some doing for what was a fairly small building society not so long ago; not too many months later it was taken over by the government. Since then we’ve had Alliance & Leicester being bought by Santander, Halifax/Bank of Scotland being rescued by LloydsTSB (ironically one of the more logical takeovers given the history of both banks) and just this weekend Bradford & Bingley joins the Northern Rock in public ownership. That’s just the big players too as numerous smaller outfits have disappeared in the past year with the Nationwide alone sweeping up the Portman, Cheshire and Derbyshire and no doubt others have gone by the wayside with a less public profile.

Thus the business of obtaining mortgage quotes is becoming both simpler and more complex. Simpler in the sense that there are fewer outlets around these days but more complex in that the criteria for granting a mortgage have become somewhat stricter: after all, when the banks themselves are going broke and tightening their belts they need to do the same to potential customers.

How could it possibly get worse though? Well, to date we’ve “only” had banks in the lower end of the top 5 or 10 going bankrupt thus it’s possible for LloydsTSB to sweep up the Halifax and JP Morgan to absorb a string of smaller banks in the past year. What would happen if some of those at the top end of the range went to the wall though? Who could take over the likes of Citibank or HSBC?

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If you’re thinking of moving one of the first things that you need to source is moving boxes. These are one thing that you just never seem to be able to have enough of. We found ourselves going back to the box company three times during our last move as we just couldn’t get the number or size right.

It’s best to get these fairly early on as it takes ages to get things packed for most of us and, of course, you’ve to fit all that in around your normal day to day activities too.

Big or little? We found that it was a lot simpler to use lots and lots of little boxes. Yet, it took longer to get them all put together and labelled but they didn’t fall apart and we could lift them easily enough. Few of the bigger boxes survived the trip in our case and we couldn’t fill them still be able to lift them so almost all were at best half full.

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In the days of Franco, the various local languages in Spain were, by and large, suppressed. The overall effect of that was that they were on the way to dying out.

However, since the early 1980s single language schools in the local language have sprung up in all areas of Spain where there is a local language. That’s particularly important in the Basque region as their language is so different from all others that it’s said to be virtually impossible to learn unless you learn it as a child.

But there’s a downside to all this promotion of local languages and that’s that it’s beginning to cut those taught in them from the rest of the world. This morning we had one of an increasing number of Spanish guests who couldn’t really speak any language other than Catalan. We could barely communicate with them at all because they couldn’t speak more than a few words of English, French or Spanish.

Now, I can understand that in some areas they would prefer not to be taught in Spanish but they really need to learn one world language or many people will find themselves virtually cut off from the world. Remember that these are local languages: if you only speak a local language you’re going to have trouble outside that region.

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