Foreign Perspectives

When you’ve got a family it doesn’t take long for the price of couple-type holidays to get completely out of hand by the time you multiply the airfares by four or five, throw in the multiple rooms required and that’s before you even think about organising something that most of you will like most of the time. That’s where european holiday parks look very appealing.

The transport costs are considerably lower normally as you can just get in the car, over on the ferry and you’re there. In most cases you can do the door to door transport in much the same time as you’d be talking about with flights by the time you add in the couple of hours prior to the flight and all the messing about getting to and from the airport. Moreover you don’t have any of the hassles entailed in avoiding the excess baggage charges and, of course, you have your own car so you don’t need to budget for renting one.

The accommodation costs are massively less as you don’t have the multi-room problem (why can’t hotels allow for larger families?) and the food costs are a whole lot more controllable if you aren’t tied to hotel/restaurants all the time. In some cases you can get a weeks accommodation at one of the parks for less than you’d get a nights accommodation for a family in a hotel and that’s not requiring you to go downmarket to make savings like that either.

Once you’re there you’ll find activities laid on to suit just about everyone at every age and, of course, there’s the option to explore the local countryside too.

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It’s been a long time coming but we seem to be on the final stages of designing our new bathroom.

Funnily enough it’s the seemingly trivial items that are taking up most of the time at the moment. You wouldn’t think that porcelain sinks would take a whole lot of time to choose but the problem is that we want the whole ensemble to go together rather than look like we’ve chosen a porcelain sink at random as seems the case in some bathrooms.

The problem of course is that once you’ve settled on, say, the WC then you need the sink to go along with that, the bath and indeed the rest of the room. Our problem is that the people that design baths don’t seem to bother with the rest of the bathroom so you’re left to find matching items largely by yourself.

Oh well, at least it’ll be getting installed soon-ish!

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That’s one of the questions that you get asked in the abbreviated test for dementia that doctors sometimes use.

I’m sure that it sounded like a sensible question when the test was first devised but it was devised by people who work “normal” Monday to Friday jobs which, of course, is something entirely different to the kind of activity pattern experienced by the, usually, retired people it’s intended to assess. When you’re retired, by and large, every day is very much like Saturday is to the rest of us with the sole exception of Sunday for church goers.

Another is “who is the Prime Minister” which also isn’t quite such an obvious question in these days when there’s a whole plethora of prime ministers in the UK. And, of course, we’ve just got a new couple at the helm. Thus, not such a valid question after all.

What about asking what year it is? That makes a lot of sense when you’re working but realistically isn’t something that matters a whole lot when you’re retired and don’t work to a calendar.

Which just goes to show how difficult it can be to devise even an apparently simple test.

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