Foreign Perspectives » Family

The library as child minder

Arnold — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 09:40:12 +0000

We go to our local library twice a week for the kids Kumon class and it’s quite noticeable how different the mix of people in it are.

On Tuesday afternoons, the place is packed with school children. So packed, that it’s difficult to find a seat and indeed today we couldn’t find a seat at all. On Saturdays it’s more of a quiet library atmosphere. Fairly full alright, but there are always seats to be had.

The difference is down to it being used basically as a child minder service during the week. School age children use it basically as an after-school club and in a number of cases parents simply drop the children in and go off on errands or whatever. We’re talking down to fairly young primary school kids too.

Still, at least it hasn’t reached the extremes that Wendy experienced in one Australian library where the library had to bring in a rule that kids required an adult to accompany them. Somehow I can’t see it being long before that happens.

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How long should you prolong a life?

Arnold — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 10:58:26 +0000

We’ve had a small run of deaths in the family lately which has set me thinking just how long you should consider prolonging a life.

In the past, prolonging a life generally meant a reasonably short lengthening so the issue of quality of life didn’t really enter into matters. Prolonging a life a few months or perhaps a few years seemed like a “good thing”. After all, there were painkillers to relieve any major pain so you weren’t torturing the person in any sense.

However, these days it’s quite a different matter. If you’ve a disease like malignant Mesothelioma you could potentially be living for years yet get to the point quite quickly where you were effectively a vegetable to those around you. That’s how my uncle spent his last decade of “life”. Was it worthwhile prolonging his “life” that extra decade? Well, consider the impact of having done just that….

For a start, he had a number of minor strokes over that decade so he was in to hospital just about every one of those years. Minor strokes don’t seem so bad but each one destroys part of your brain so as time went on there was less of him there. When we left for France some six years or so ago he could move his hand and in rare moments would stumble across the name of someone close to him that was visiting him in the nursing home. Last year, he could neither move nor speak.

Possibly more noticeable was that ten years back he was able to walk and see various friends and family now and again. Granted, his mind wasn’t all there at that time but aside from wandering out at all hours and thinking that every day was Sunday, he managed to get by quite well. In his final years he only saw his sisters briefly each week and never saw any other friends or family. In the eulogy at his funeral service the massive difference between his early life travelling the world and the final decade couldn’t have been more striking.

On the other hand, consider my cousin Harold. He’s been diabetic since he was 13 which sounds really awful and to some extent that’s certainly true. However, that didn’t stop him having quite a full life right up until a few weeks ago. Whilst he didn’t get to travel the world as Andy had, he certainly had a lot of good times with his family right throughout his life. Oh, sure, the diabetes was a major hassle causing him to lose his toe and his kidneys to close down but keeping him alive throughout that time did give him quite a good quality of life and indeed a good life (“quality of life” rarely means that, of course).

Prolonging a life that’s reasonably good does seem worthwhile. The snag is that there’s a tendency to prolong it way, way beyond that time these days, simply because we can.

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Isn’t it a hassle being a teenager?

Arnold — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 22:56:18 +0000

Sometimes (well, most of the time) we forget how hard it is being a teenager in any era.

These days in place of the end of course exams the assessment goes on throughout the course. So in place of the one-time exam stress they’ve continual stress coinciding with the continual assessment. That I can at least empathise with as I’ve just received the latest assignment results from the psychology degree that I’m doing.

Then there’s the things that we’ve long since forgotten about like looking for the best acne treatment. Oh, there are better treatments around these days but it’s just a hassle that I’m sure the little guys could do without.

And that’s just the hassles that we even think about.

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Just what criteria do you use when choosing women’s clothing?

Arnold — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 21:20:36 +0000

As well as the shape of the woman in question, the style and the event needs to be taken into account, doesn’t it?

If you’re buying women’s large clothing that tends to restrict the choice available quite substantially as I’ve found out in recent years. It’s not that Wendy’s big all over but that she’s big up top. Oddly, clothes for those that are big up top tend not to be in the more general women’s clothing shops which seems peculiar in many ways.

The event aspect isn’t always quite so important though, at least if the parade that has passed by over the months when I’ve been collecting the little guys from school. It seems relatively sensible to be collecting the little people in normal day clothes and, to be fair, the majority of mothers do just that. But, in between the tracksuits, jumpers and assorted normal clothing that you’d expect, there’s a regular crop of crop tops, hot pants, (in the dead of winter too) and even just last week a sparkly top combined with rubber leggings (boy did that attract attention from the dads!). That’s not even counting the frankly weird combos that occasionally turn up.

So these days you can pretty much dump any preconceptions about style, event or, sometimes, the woman in choosing clothing!

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Isn’t eczema a pain?

Arnold — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 18:30:24 +0000

Our little guy is plagued with eczema.Well, perhaps plagued isn’t quite the right word because at times he’s completely free of it whilst at other times it seems it’s taking over his entire body.

As many parents will know, it isn’t always simple to work out the underlying cause of it and the trial and error phase can take a year or more. Over that time the other “minor” complication is that the little guy is growing up and possibly growing out of it (or into something else!).

Thus, originally we had worked out that the eczema was down to a lack of sunlight as it went away when we were over in France.

Now that we’re back in the UK, it seemed obvious that it would come back and indeed it has. But it’s now down to a lack of sunlight now, it’s down to the level of his chocolate intake. And, no, we didn’t bar him from chocolate in France. It appears that whilst he was there he grew out of the original sunlight related cause and into a chocolate related one.

Weird, eh?

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Growing old gracefully

Arnold — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 11:04:00 +0000

We’re all getting older and, thanks to the baby boom generation, there are more and more products to deal with that on the shelves these days and increasing number of medical treatments too.

But do you really want to stay young looking forever? I imagine that most peoples’ first reaction is a very definite “YES” and that would certainly be the answer were staying young an easy thing to do. The problem is that it isn’t easy and takes up increasing amounts of time as the years add up.

Those age spots that may be starting to appear will increase in number as your years add up thus it’s gonna take more time to cover them up as the years mount. Likewise for other treatments to cover up the cracks and wrinkles not to mention the hair to be dyed.

The alternative is to aim to gain a distinguished appearance gradually which is going to be much less time consuming I suspect.

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Living with cancer

Arnold — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 10:44:55 +0000

Throughout the human biology course that I’m doing at the moment they’ve interspersed lots of little case studies that talk more about the implications for the patient and their family of having a particular disease than about the disease itself.

Thus, there’s been little sections on heart disease which throw up an enormous range of what probably seem trivial things from the outside yet which make for a very difficult life for the people affected. One of those described a man (and it’s nearly always men for a variety of reasons) who’d had a major heart attack. Although he’d recovered he still felt that he couldn’t travel terribly far and indeed was largely confined to the house because of that, not because he actually needed to be but because he felt that he could go too far in case he had another heart attack.

Then there’s the list of cancers that one can get ranging from the likes of Mesothelioma cancer which has the plus point that at least people are prepared to talk about it through to various “mens’” and “womens’” cancers that people generally don’t feel too free to talk about. The mens’ ones are particularly bad in that respect and it’s often the case that the men leave it rather too late to go to the doctor: I’d a cousin who managed to leave it so late that by the time he went to the doctor he’d only two months left to live. That probably sounds a little daft but it’s all too common with the male cancers.

The problem with these type of diseases is that it’s not just the patient who is affected as the whole family can end up drawn into it. Even at the trivial level of fitting in hospital visits it can cause major upheaval for families. And, in many cases, those hospital visits and visits from various health workers continue for years after the initial detection of the condition. In the case of cancers there can be extended hospital stays for years on end and in terminal cases the “final stages” can mean confinement to hospital for quite a number of years (eg my uncle has been in for getting on for ten years now). That’s a very long haul for anyone and, despite considerable support, it’s difficult to keep going for such a long period without descending into depression.

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Sort-of winter is a hassle, isn’t it?

Arnold — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 08:52:01 +0000

Over the last week or so we’ve woken to a white landscape but, so far, the white is only frost with perhaps a very light dusting of snow.

That frosty covering makes for rather slippy pavements of course yet you don’t seem to really get the pleasure that proper snowfall can bring. No snowmen to built, no snowball fights. Just slipping and scraping the windows on the car.

And, yesterday, an unannounced closure of the school for the day. Instead of a final lie-in before school started we’d everyone up early to make sure we weren’t late with the slippery roads and found ourselves in front of a closed school. Oh, sure, if it had been way out in the country we’d have expected that but there wasn’t any big problem in getting to it so it was just closed for no apparent reason.

Still, with the weather forecasts continuing in winter mode for the remainder of the week perhaps we’ll get a proper snowfall one of these days.

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What were your best Christmas presents?

Arnold — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 09:09:27 +0000

It’s almost always the case that the best Christmas presents are things that you’d never have bought for yourself but which seem perfect when you get them.

This year my best one is very definitely the Sony Reader which Wendy bought me. It’s the one that’s with me almost constantly and in use throughout the day. Why? Well, I’m doing a couple of Open University courses at the moment and that means up to four books totally around four inches in thickness to carry around. Instead of that pile I’ve a pocket sized electronic book which means that I can carry all those books around with me and read them when I get the chance rather than having to plan in advance to take them with me.

In fact I can carry around all the course books for all the courses which would have been pretty much impossible without the Reader.

The ebook technology is one that’s quietly zoomed ahead in recent years with the arrival of e-paper. The screens in these readers aren’t the same as those that you see in laptops. They’re not backlit, they’re quite slow to refresh (fine for reading, useless as a computer screen) but most importantly use virtually no power which means that the batteries last for weeks for even the most voracious reader and probably months for most people. Even my initial flicking around all the options and from book to book barely made an impression on the battery after a week. One thing to note is that the battery is only required when you turn the page and it makes virtually no difference to battery life if you take a second or a minute to read a page.

Thanks to Google Books there are millions of free books available for download. Beyond the free ones you can buy a great many books in ebook format these days though for reasons which escape me they are currently at pretty much the same price as the paper versions.

Downsides of it all? I miss the colour and the PDF scaling feature needs work. The metal casing makes for a cold read compared to actual paper though there are fancy covers that would fix that. The Pocket Reader doesn’t have an SD card slot so you’re limited to the 1/2GB internal memory. It’s not permanently online like the Kindle so no buying books on the fly although I usually mull over book purchases anyway.

Upsides are that the 1/2GB “limit” to internal memory means that it’ll hold over three hundred books which doesn’t seem like much of a limit to me. Copying books to the Reader is a whole lot faster than I’d expected: even copying a couple of hundred books was a matter of a few minutes. For normal books the 5″ screen is more than enough to display text at the normal size and in sensible chunks. That it’s not permanently online like the Kindle is a plus to me: Sony can’t see what’s on my Reader and neither can they delete things from it as Amazon have done.

In a word, this is brilliant.

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A busy day catching up on things

Arnold — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 12:52:42 +0000

When you’re trying to run a life in two different countries like we are at the moment there’s something of a nightmare in terms of administration load that can backup really fast.

This morning has been one of the days when I’ve tried to make major inroads with it all. Sadly the piles are still there but at least a number of important things have been sorted out this morning.

For a start there’s a heap of communication that needed done re selling our place in France. The combination of French administration plus time delays courtesy of the post mean that it’s sailing along at a snail’s pace and a month can easily go by with no visible signs of progress. Actually, a whole month did go by whilst we were waiting on a letter (nope, won’t fax, won’t email) from one place which I think was down to it being caught in the strikes in London.

Next up was sorting out some stuff re my OU courses. I’ve the flights booked for the residential now which leaves nothing more needing done with that until after the human biology exam in June. Also done was signing up for the Astronomy (S282) course which starts in February. That’s one that I’ve wanted to do for a very long time now but between one thing and another (well, mainly the modern languages degree), far too many years have gone by. That in turn should ease the path towards the astronomy residential in 2011 and indeed get my physics thinking back up to speed again in preparation for S207 in October.

Finally, there’s our Christmas letter which needed tidying up before we get all the cards away. As usual, the prompt for doing that has been the arrival of the Christmas card from Faye in Canada which has consistently been the first one that we’ve received ever since she started sending them.

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