Foreign Perspectives

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The take from our recent break-in must have been quite a disappointment to the burglars and particularly those that bought from them.

Notionally the most valuable item on the list was a 28″ TV. A good result normally I suppose except that it was a British TV and won’t receive any French TV channels so it’s pretty useless to them.

Next up was a 1999 portable. British keyboard so not too useful but in 1999 it came with 4GB disk and there are a lot of web pages that it can’t open these days.

Then there was the British toolbox which is filled with imperial size spanners which aren’t too useful here in France.

Overall they seemed to have amassed a whole collection of stuff that’s little or no use to anyone in France. For instance, in addition to the above they managed to take a portable DVD player but without the charger that it needs.

So we’ve lost a bunch of things that were of some use to us and they’ve gained effectively a bunch of useless junk

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A long time ago buying a new TV was a very simple affair. You just picked the screen size and off you went.

It’s changed a lot since those blissful days though. Nowadays when you look at televisions there’s still the size to consider but now you’ve added the choice between flat screen and CRT style (not to mention the different flat screen technologies), then there’s normal vs high definition (and HD vs HD ready) not to mention the possibilities of home cinema and potential computer connections.

Even the “simple” choice of screen size isn’t so simple anymore. It used to be that 14″ was bedroom size but now that the prices have dropped so much you can easily be thinking in terms of 32″ instead and living room screen sizes run to feet rather than inches these days.

However, with all that complication has come a massive drop in price. The 42″ flat screen that replaced our 7 year old 28″ TV was only 2/3rds of the price and those prices are still dropping.

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By the time you read this, we should be well on the way to our place in France (scheduled posts are wonderful!) and pretty much totally exhausted.

The plan is that on Saturday morning we’ll have gone from Belfast to Rosslare to catch the LD Lines ferry to Le Havre around 5pm. That’s a relatively easy 4 hours drive though it seems to go on forever as we found out doing the route the other way in January.

It’s an overnight ferry trip which is quite relaxing in comparison to the drive from Stranraer to Dover. Cheaper too when you offset the cost of the cabin against the savings in petrol. Unfortunately, that 5pm-ish departure makes for an arrival around the same time the next day in Le Havre.

Our theory is that we’ll relax on the boat and start driving when we get off. Snag is that at this time of year most of the hotels along our route down France will be full so we probably won’t have any choice but to drive on through the night which isn’t altogether appealing to put it mildly.

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