Originally, it started life way back in February 2004 as a means of keeping in touch with the folks back home when we were getting going on our life in France as from April that year all under the tagline of “Life in France without a TV crew”. That went great ’til we found ourselves in the position of being pretty much settled into life here, or at least settled in terms of not having anything much new to say about it. Net effect was that the writing fizzled out by late 2005.

Then I figured that what was needed to get me going again was a change of focus to an expat blog with a tagline of “Travel, expat life and foreign politics. As featured on TV and seen on Reuters.” as from the summer of 2006. Featured on TV? Well, funnily enough, the blog was the lead headline all day following the announcement of Chirac’s resignation. Articles from it are picked up fairly regularly by Reuters too although I’ve yet to work out exactly why!

However, now that we find ourselves in the midst of a partial relocation back to the UK (more on that anon), the focus is changing yet again. This time around I’ll be talking of our re-integration into the UK administration along with the continuing saga of my education and no doubt a whole bunch of other stuff along the way.

Separately from that we’ve made a start on the packing and trying to work out just how much will actually fit into the trailer. At the moment, it seems like quite a lot but, as always, no matter the amount of space that you have available, it’s never quite enough as there are always last minute things that you’d not thought of and then there are those things that fall into the “wouldn’t it be nice if we could take that?” category which expand to fill any space available, no matter how large it might have appeared initially.

What’s a really plus point this time around is that we’ve loads of rooms available and have the luxury of being able to accumulate all the stuff in one room in a rough trailer-shaped pile so, in theory, it should be fairly simple to relocate said pile into the trailer. Not only that, we can park the trailer in our courtyard so can pack it over a few days and just hook it up the night before we head off.

What happened last year? Well, the world economy took a definite turn for the worst as y’all know. We were expecting that to hit us bad but what it did in practice was to change the nationality mix which we normally get over the summer from Brits/French to German/Dutch/Danish/French and generally lengthened the average stay which in turn bumped up the profitability. Somehow I fancy that the economic downturn won’t be quite so benign on the travel industry over the coming year.

I did what was supposedly the hardest course in the university as the final one for my modern language degree and found it to be the easiest one that I’ve yet done. The net effect of that is that I had a considerably easier finish to the degree than expected and picked up my BA (Hons) Modern Languages in December. For next year, I’ve already signed up for a course on Child Development which is notionally the first one in my psychology degree although I’m really only doing it to help with looking after the little guys.

Although the last five years have been great here for the kids, now that their school life is getting underway we’re finding that the French education system locally just isn’t up to dealing adequately with non-French children. As we’d expected from comments last year James isn’t doing at all well in the local French primary school.

For a whole bunch of reasons we find ourselves in the process of moving to a France/UK split for our lives at the moment whereby we’ll be in the UK September to June and in France July and August. That will let us get James’ and John’s education back on track and should help neutralise any sustained downturn in the economy too.

If nothing else, the coming year will be an “interesting” period to come for us.

In most cases the comments are approved by the booking site before they’re published so you only get to see the relatively sensible ones as they weed out those that are from another planet. For example, the commentary that we received a year ago that criticised the “ancient boxy hairdryer” in the bathroom; in fact it was a reasonably modern room heater. Or the couple that wrote quite an extensive critique of their stay that rarely touched base with reality and for which it turned out that all their problems stemmed from them not having changing the time on their watch.

However, as well as the commentary there’s generally a scoring system in place which can sometimes have quite bizzare numerical effects. For example, on one site we’ve the vast majority of scores 7 and over yet because of two 2.5s from a single group we end up with an overall 5. It’s scoring bias like that which makes a nonsense of the scoring. In a large hotel with hundreds of comments one or two low scores disappear of course but when you’ve only a few dozen comments just one disgruntled customer can really throw the overall result.

My first look was at what was on offer from the Open University and it’s a pretty substantial list of courses under just about every possible faculty. The only notable thing missing is an all-out medical degree though they seem to be working up to that as they’ve a range of courses covering a lot of topics in that area.

However I thought that I’d have a look around online to see what was on offer around the world and it’s a very mixed bag. A growing number of universities put parts of their courses online as a taster and a number of others offer full-blown degrees taught largely or completely online. Fancy a degree from Harvard? Well, you can pick up a range of liberal arts degrees via their extension school. Sadly, Yales’s contribution doesn’t currently come with course credit but I suspect that they’re working up to that.

But it’s not just the big names that are in this market. If you’re looking for courses that’ll give you credit I found: Athabasca, Atlanta, Colorado, Ellis, Harvard, Illinois, London, New York, Notre Dame, Open University, Oxford, Queensland, Penn State, Walden after a good trawl through those offering courses online.

By and large the big names offer a fairly limited range of courses and qualifications; notable exceptions to this are Harvard, London and the Open University. However, the range of courses on offer and the number of universities offering such courses is increasing all the time: given a few more years it seems likely that it’ll be the norm for universities to offer at least some of their courses online.

One big plus point is that, by and large, most of these online offerings are open access which means that you don’t need qualifications to get admitted to the various courses. Having said that, some do demand SAT scores and the like.

Boxing Day brought us our first serious bought of snow for several years and for a while it was looking like we’d be snowed in for quite a while. As usual the French didn’t even bother to slow down on roads completely covered with ice and snow so I’m sure that the accident figures are well up.

France is a slightly peculiar place to be over Christmas in that they don’t formally “do” Christmas thus the shops were relatively empty on Christmas Eve and indeed the toy shops were eerily empty even the week before Christmas. Just as eerily empty as the toy shops in the UK were a few weeks earlier though that presumably was down to the current recession.

Although the shops do close several hours early (as does the post office) on Christmas Eve and everything is closed on Christmas Day, by Boxing Day it’s back to normal everywhere and you’d think that it was a normal shopping day. The law doesn’t allow them to have sales at the moment so you don’t get the usual post-Christmas sales that you do elsewhere and nowhere do you get the 70%+ reductions that are commonplace nowadays because the law won’t let shops sell stuff at a loss (which should create interesting closing down sales in due course).

On the sale front, we were comparing prices with the UK and found a surprising number of things sitting at around two to three times the UK prices at the current exchange rate. Obviously with all the shenanaghans recently with the interest rates  the exchange rates are not really at their “true” levels and if the price differentials are anything to go by it should be around EUR 2 to the pound rather than the current 1.10 or so which implies that there’s going to be either a major drop in the euro interest rate or massive increases in unemployment in the euro zone.

That’s a big change from a few years ago when typically you’d receive the course materials at best a week before the course started. Now, in theory you’re not really supposed to start the course until about a week after the stuff arrives if you go by their course calendars but in reality most people I know are keen to get at least flicking through the books and whatnot as soon as they can to at least get a feel for what’s in the box if not to actually start work on it as such.

So far my record was receiving a Spanish course a few years back several months in advance which was a teensy bit too early really as I’d just finished the previous course a matter of weeks and wasn’t really geared up to start looking at the next one. It’s a little over a month in advance this time around which seems just about right were it not for the little problem that I’ll not actually get my hands on the materials for another two or three weeks as we’re in our place in France at the moment and probably won’t see the parcel ’til we get back to Belfast.

That little bit of extra lead-time is really necessary these days as the range of material that turns up is enormous compared to what they used to turn up. In place of a relatively small package of a course book and a few supplementary bits & bobs such as course calendars and the list of materials itself these days you get the course guides, supplementary guides, DVDs, DVDROMS, CDs and a whole host of other stuff. Even finding the “read me first” note can take a while and I’ve had courses with such a range of different types of material that it’s been scary to do anything more than attempting to find the contents check-list on opening the box the first time!

For six years I’d been plugging away with language courses and this was the first proper one that I’d done with the OU outside that area. With those there’s not really a whole of pre-course information that you get other than simple things like the prospectus and whatever any recommended texts there might be (usually none).

However, the psychology people are a whole different bunch of people. On the OU course record page there isn’t really a whole lot on at the moment aside from the scary entry that the course material was mailed last Friday, just two days after I signed up. Outside the OU though there’s a whole mountain of material ranging from information about study guides and intensive revision sessions through to one brave person who’s put most of her assignments online. The scariest of all is definitely that first TMA though I find that most assignments look pretty scary before you start them.

What’s clear from all that’s around is that the psychology people treat the topic very seriously, or at least those that have anything to say certainly seem to.

Up to this point it’s been pretty easy to choose in that I was sailing along the path of the BA (Hons) Modern Language Studies since 2002 but that ship has finally docked so I’ve run off the end. Anyway, last November in a fit of optimism I figured that I should start looking around to see what I might be interested in doing after the degree was finished.

Along the way I looked at just about everything or so it seemed. To begin with I figured that I really should finish off the Diploma in English Language which consists of two courses of which my final course for the degree is one. However, as it turned up, excellent marks not withstanding, English just ain’t really my subject or at least the two potential courses I could do aren’t appealing at the moment.

Then I thought that it might be nice to consider either history or perhaps the history of art. Whilst the history book was definitely interesting it didn’t feel like a subject I’d fancy doing for a degree. One look at the art history book was enough to put me right off that one.

Which brings me to the two strands that I’ve been interested in for quite a while but haven’t gotten around to doing anything about until now. First there’s physics which is difficult at times but really interesting and then there’s psychology which can make for some really interesting anecdotes.

In the end I found myself down to a choice of two courses yesterday. Planetary science and the search for life  and child development. Both are interesting for different reasons. Planetary science appears to be one of the most interesting courses in the university if the comments are anything to go by and it also has the plus point that it’s a 30 point course which means around 4 to 7 hours a week vs about twice that for the child development one. What swung the argument for the child development is that the little guys are 4 and 6 and it seemed a better idea to go for that course now so that they’ll get more benefit from it than they would do if I did it in a couple of years time.

The problem now is that I’m notionally signed up a BSc (Hons) Psychology….

Holidays and vacations are discretionary expenses which means that they’re among the first to be cut back on when times get tough and this seems to be one of those particular times. However, many people don’t want to skip a vacation so what you could see in this area are people taking shorter vacations, downgrading the accommodation that they stay in, and probably using local or short-haul trips rather than heading for long haul destinations.  We’ve already noticed that this year with the poor exchange rate encouraging Americans to book via a hostel site rather than via a hotel booking site and that will likely become much more common in the coming year.

Added to the problem of getting the money saved or available on credit is the exchange rate problem for overseas holidays. We’ve seen the pound/euro rate moving from around 1.30 to more like 1.00 in a very short period of time ie a holiday from the UK to Europe has risen in price by around 30% even if the base price remained the same (which, of course, it rarely does). Throw in hikes in price from the airlines and that means a substantial rise in the cost of your holiday.

So what will the outcome be? Well, on our listing sites we’ve seen the traffic drop around 80% compared to the same period last year which implies a very substantial drop in bookings in 2009 for many people. Notable too is the increase in the number of adverts we’re taking onboard which implies that the owners are ramping up their advertising early presumably because they’ve had fewer than usual booking enquiries. However, even if both those indications are pointing towards much lower bookings in the year to come it could be that people are simply postponing their bookings until the economic picture clears up.

In reality I suspect that there will be a lot of last-minute bookings in 2009 but that overall there will be a lot fewer people going on holiday which could mean some great discounts on the more expensive holidays if you’re prepared to wait. Unfortunately, it’ll also mean that your choice will be much more limited in 2010 as many travel related businesses will be closing up in the coming year.