Foreign Perspectives

Archive for April, 2010

The cancellation of pretty much all air travel throughout Europe this week has shown up just how radically different people are when they need to take responsibility for themselves.

This was a pretty much unprecedented event. With 9/11 the flight cancellations were short and for a known period. This time around, they’re for a completely unknown period and the way that this period has been extended seems to almost have been designed to create the maximum amount of stress for all concerned. If it had been announced at the outset that flights were off for the next week then those affected could have reacted better. Being stuck in a foreign airport for a day isn’t an unknown experience but a week is a whole different ball game.

Thus, people have had to reach the point all by themselves where they needed to say that enough was enough and it was time for them to work out an alternative means of getting to where-ever they needed to be. That’s hard to do. Few people decided to search for that alternative right away and those that did seemed to end up doing crazy things like spending a thousand pounds or more on a taxi when clearly a train would have been cheaper and more practical. We’re seeing the effects on the ferries now for the second wave who have now decided that they really need to get home: early on the ferries could easily cope, now that’s not so much the case obviously.

However, I suspect that there are still considerable numbers of people waiting for “someone” to do “something” for them and get them home. That’s unlikely to happen. The majority of those stranded will have gotten to their destinations by way of a discount airline and one of the features of such airlines is that there is little or no slack in terms of staff. Even with the best will in the world, it seems unlikely that they could get everyone from what’s usually an isolated airport to another isolated airport: as we all know, the transport infrastructure around the airports that they use is almost non-existant.

So, how long will these people wait around? Will they still be there this time next week if the planes still aren’t flying? I suspect that quite a number will be if some of those on the phone-in programmes is anything to go by. For instance, during the week one distraught lady phoned in to complain that the airline wouldn’t fly her with her severely disabled daughter. She wanted the plane to take her regardless of any grounding: her reasoning seemed to be that since her daughter was severely disabled then she had the absolute right to get on the plane regardless of anything else. This was someone who was in Paris and who would have had no problem going by train if she’d just paused to think about it.

How many other people are thinking that this will go away in a week or two and are already booking their flights for the bank holidays in May? Quite a lot if the pricing on some routes is anything to go by: they’ve gone up almost ten fold in the last two weeks.

We’ve our two little guys enrolled in the Kumon programmes but for different reasons.

Thanks to the disaster that’s French education for the non-French, James kicked off in school here well behind where he should have been. Therefore we enrolled him with a view to catching up with where he should have been at this point just under a year ago. John started school here last September and quickly found it boring so his enrolment in the maths programme was to keep him interested in learning.

After just under a year James has moved through four levels and should be around where he should be in school early next year and seems to be gradually picking up the pace with the Kumon. John starting from the proper level raced through four levels in under four months and shows no sign of slowing that pace so may manage six or seven levels over the 12 months. In fact, both are doing so well that they’re both getting awards for their progress next month.

Ordinarily, the rate of progress is supposed to be around 4 levels in the first year and a couple per year after that which would get you from scratch to calculus in about 10 years and the equivalent in the English programme. However, I suspect that’s a very biased statistic if our Kumon centre is anything to go by basically because a significant number of students have non-native English speaking parents thus it’s being used by them to aid school work (as we’re doing with James) rather than to get the kids ahead. Thus, I’m expecting that the J&J progress rate will be more like 6 or 7 levels in year one and 3 or 4 after that (it obviously gets more difficult when your kids are well ahead of their school work, hence the slowing down) which, in principle, would take John from scratch to calculus over about five or six years.

If they achieve anything like that I guess there’ll be issues by the time they leave primary school but I’m sure it’s better to err on the side of them being too far ahead of their school work than take a chance on them falling behind.

Incidently, for those considering the Kumon programmes or just wanting a preview of what’s coming up, the Loggers Run Kumon centre have a great little website with examples of the sheets and loads more.

Going by the debate last night, immigration would be a very easy thing to control (so, why hasn’t Labour done so already?).

However, it’s not nearly so simple as it appeared in the debate. The problem specifically is in the measurement of immigration and the definition of an immigrant. As far as the immigration goes, counting is a very dodgy affair as it relies on people falling into normal categories so that they can actually be counted. The snag is that significant numbers of people don’t fall into neat little boxes like that. Take the travelling communities that seem to be forming an increasingly sizeable chunk of immigrants (or at least the more noticeable ones): in some cases a number of these people will escape the statistical net. Wendy, for example, lived in France for over five years yet never received any official letters and therefore was never recorded as officially having been there (which, I’m sure, will cause us problems at some point).

The definition of what a migrant is is quite difficult too. In most peoples’ eyes, it’s anyone not British (though the Irish would take issue with that!) yet on official stats, it’s only those who are not European. Therein lies the problem as significant numbers of “problem” communities have arisen in some areas of the UK consisting entirely of European migrants from economically poorer regions of Europe. In fact, they’re the kind of people who wouldn’t get in with a normal visa if they needed one. Some councils have so many of these non-migrants that the quality of local services is dropping dramatically as they simply don’t have the resources to deal with such an influx of people in such a short time.

The snag is that the number of these non-migrants aren’t something that can be controlled by the UK government. All the talk of schemes in Australia and Canada where immigrants are allocated to regions within the country is irrelevant in these cases. Just as the Australian government can’t tell a Sydney born person that they have to live in Western Australia so the UK government can’t tell a Bulgarian that they have to live in Yorkshire.

In reality the problem is one of Europe’s making. The countries most recently added in to Europe had economies that were just too far out of whack with the countries that were already in Europe. The net effect of that is that clearly it was to the advantage of citizens of those countries to move (not migrate) to richer European countries and naturally many did exactly that. European problems need European solutions but the snag in this case that the only short term solution would be to set migration quotas which would be contrary to the free movement ethos and difficult to implement, alongside a long term move to elevate the poorer economies to the level of the richer ones or, rather, to speed that up as it will happen in due course.

Isn’t it amazing at what a relatively small amount of natural pollution can do?

Whilst we all knew that Iceland was covered in ice, volcanoes and lava, very few people gave it much thought aside from when their banks all went bust. Why should they? After all, it’s a tiny place quite a long way from anywhere. However, now that just one of their volcanoes has erupted we find that northern Europe is basically set back 50 years in terms of travel and with no end in sight. Despite all the advances in modern technology (or rather because of them) there doesn’t seem to be any easy short term solution.

Will this make any difference to global warming? Yes, but probably not a whole lot but then this is just one volcano.

Listening to some people talk about how it’s affected them, it’s quite laughable how far they expect the airlines go in helping them. One lady on this morning was wailing about her severely disabled being stranded in Paris after a Eurodisney trip. The airline had provided accommodation for one night but said that was all they’d do. Presumably that one night was more than enough to sort out alternative travel arrangements: after all, Paris is pretty much the hub of the French travel system so there’s no shortage of means to get to and from it. The disability thing was stressed as medication was needed yet there’s no shortage of medicine, doctors or medical facilities in Paris. Granted, it’s a nuisance and a major one to be stranded like this but planes aren’t the only means of getting about and getting “stranded” in a major European city is hardly the disaster that some people make out.

It’s been a very long time since we had the opportunity to view how the use of a wide range of products changes when the price of them goes down.

Sure, we’ve been used to that happening on all kinds of electrical and electronic items with computers almost dropping to the fashion item price range (hence the arrival of colour choice recently of course). However, who’d have thought of that very same thing happening to something like eyeglasses?

That’s a product that’s historically been seen as involving highly trained opticians, expensive offices and skilled technicians which overall seemed very much like a recipe for high prices as far as you could see. Except that online retailers like ZunniOptical are changing all that with prices at the bottom end of the range (which don’t look like el cheapo glasses by any means) coming in for pretty much loose change.

Clearly when a product drops into that “loose change” price range from previously having sat well in the “fairly serious money” price range then there’s going to be big changes in how it’s perceived and used. For one thing, the concept of having a single pair of glasses purely because it wouldn’t be worthwhile to have more than one pair doesn’t hold any more. Thus, even at the lowest price there is heaps of choice and the opportunity to match your glasses to your outfit in a way that wouldn’t have been viable before.

I wonder what’ll be the next product that this will happen to?