Foreign Perspectives

Archive for February, 2008

We’re in the process of thinking about where we might move after we sell this place and one place that’s come into the frame is Scotland.

Now you might think that moving house in the UK is simple enough but in fact the house buying process in Scotland is so different from that in the rest of the UK, it’s better to think of it just as you would a move to a foreign country. That mindset means that you won’t be taken by surprise by developments in the buying process as you ordinarily would be. For instance, in Scotland there is no gazumping simply because the first contract is binding.

That single difference means that if you’re moving from another country to the UK then it’s considerably easier to time your move. At the most extreme case, in Northern Ireland there’s a considerable amount of bidding that goes on which makes it virtually impossible to time a house move there at the moment.

Of course there are other considerations than the simple legal system. For one thing, if you were thinking of moving to the Hebrides then you’d probably need to learn Gaelic and, of course, throughout much of Scotland it’s Scots that’s spoken which would be hard enough to pick up if you were used to “normal” English.

Wendy’s been busy whilst I was away and we now have a whole bunch of new cities represented on Whole Earth Guide.

There’s several in the UK and Ireland, a first in Hungary, the bigger cities in Italy and a few in Switzerland too now.

As usual, we’re aiming these guides as specifically tourist guides primarily for short break holidays and we’re aiming to cover the top tourist cities in Europe before the summer season if we can manage to keep at it.

Usually when I go off on a short break there are a few new entries on the B&B and self-catering listings sites but this time I returned to something of a bumper crop which took me most of the morning to catch up.

In theory, the process is quite automated but in reality there’s almost always a little work to be done to get the new entries online. Most of the time, it’s a matter of a few minutes but now and again you get someone that just puts “see website” and, of course, their website is rarely in a form that allows a straight copy and paste to get it online. In fact, this time it was worse as they’d their whole website typed in uppercase letters so I’d to retype it all and correct the grammar too for that matter.

That grammar problem is quite strange really. You’d think that people would put the effort into their site to get both the spelling and grammar reasonably correct but now and again you come across a site that you’d think had been written by a small child which surely can’t be an attractive proposition for a potential guest, can it?

Strangely, it’s usually the foreigners who are writing in their second or third language who get both the spelling and grammar correct and this morning was no different: the entry from Italy was perfect apart from one word which only needed to be changed to put a truly English-English spin on the phrase they’d used.