Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

Whilst it’s peculiar to think of the difficulties faced when immigrating to the UK, that’s a situation that we will be finding ourselves in within the not too distant future so we’re considering some of the logistics.

Even for “native” English speaking children it’s not as easy to do as you might expect.

Why? Well, in our experience most people returning to the UK are doing so after they’ve been abroad at least two years and normally it’s more than five years. For simplicity, let’s take the case of a five year stay abroad of a British child who then returns to the UK schooling system.

If they were just born when the family emmigrated, then the child would be about five and therefore be starting primary school. You might think that would be fine but if they’ve been playing with non-English speaking children for those five years it’s not quite so simple. For one thing they won’t know the english words for all the toys nor the name of the TV shows. That’s even if they speak english at all of course because some emmigrants try to immerse their family in the local culture and language. However, this is by far the simplest point.

What about, say a six year old, moving back at age 11. They will find it fairly difficult as they’ll have picked up a lot of the foreign language in school and will need to learn the english words for all those terms. In fact, it’s generally the case that kids of that background can only speak english to their parents and other english speakers find them virtually impossible to communicate with in english so you can imagine the problems they’ll have in their initial period in an english speaking school.

The worst ages come later though. Someone trying to start A-levels who’d been abroad since they were 11 would have severe problems. They’d not know any of the specialised vocabulary in english for the various subjects that they’d studied. In fact, they’d almost certainly have to go to english classes before trying to get into a school. These problems are magnified a little more if they’re trying to get into a British university but haven’t gone through British A-levels.

So if you are planning on returning to the UK after a stay abroad of more than a few years, don’t just assume that your kids are english speaking because, in most cases, they are far from fluent in english and certainly very far from fluent in academic english.

I’ve been plugging away at a modern languages degree part-time for what seems like a lifetime sometimes but now that I’m getting to the end of it, I’m looking beyond it to what I might do next.

Since the final course of the degree is an English language one, I’ll be left with effectively half of a Diploma in English so I’ve been toying with the idea of doing the other half to tidy up that loose end but I’m going to wait ’til I see what next years course is like before I commit myself to that.

I’d also quite like to do a creative writing course at some point. However, to do that there’s a sort-of prerequisite consisting of a humanities course therefore I’ve bought the recommended texts for that one and have been working through them over the last few weeks. English literature isn’t really my thing if those particular books are anything to go by! That of itself has put me off considering seriously the full blown degree in English that I’d be almost half-way to achieving if I do the creative writing course.

On a separate tack I quite fancy doing the chemistry degree that I was toying with many years ago and bought one of the recommended books for that. Although it’s been getting on for 30 years since I did that subject, I’m finding the book a relatively easy read, especially considering that it’s a second year university text.

Anyway, if you’re thinking of doing a particular course, why not buy one or two of the recommended texts before you get to the point of commiting yourself to the course. You might find, as I did, that the “harder” course is more appealing and that of itself will almost certainly make it feel easier to you.

One thing that really amazes me is how few people even think about what using their credit card abroad is costing them. For that matter, there is still quite a significant number of people who buy all their foreign currency in the Post Office assuming that “commission free” is exactly the same as “free” when, of course, it isn’t.

Taking a nice round amount of £100 for simplicity, that “commission free” purchase actually costs around £6.50. In fact, in some cases it can be cheaper to get the money from a place that charges commission as the exchange rate they use may be better. The cost to spend that amount abroad on most cards? Well, that’s just £2.75 (£7 if you lift cash out of an ATM with a credit card).

What about that nice prepaid card that the travel agent sold you? The £100 will cost around £30!!

But surely you have to pay no matter what you do? Well, no, you don’t. Get a Nationwide Building Society flexaccount and both cash withdrawals and purchases don’t have any foreign exchange charge.

More on this at our article on getting money abroad.

We are just rubbish at choosing accountants. It’s not that we don’t ask for recommendations because we do.

It’s that the first accountant recommended as “brilliant” to us turned out to be fine when they did the work but they just never got around to it with us.

The second came with an even more glowing recommendation and indeed she was that good. What she didn’t tell us was that she was going to be leaving the firm just a matter of months later and that the firm (apart from her) left quite a bit to be desired.

In fact they were so bad that when she left they never even bothered to open the files on her clients that she, of course, left behind. Net effect of that was that we (ie all such clients I imagine) only found out about her departure when we started getting threatening letters from the tax people saying that they were going to apply all kinds of penalties.

That was in September of last year. They finally completed the 2005 accounts just a few weeks ago (ie two years late) and still haven’t completed the 2006 accounts which is, of course, bringing in more penalty notices and quite laughable demands for money.

By and large, only the American produced series that have been running for more than a single series are picked up by the UK TV companies so we only see a fraction of the shows that are cancelled on this side of the water.

However, now and again shows are picked up before they’ve gotten the approval for a second series and, if that sample is anything to go by, some of the series that end up on the scrap heap are there for no particular reason or at least none that relates to the quality of the show itself. Generally speaking shows in the UK are allowed to run for a series or two to gather up an audience as it’s accepted that not every series will pull in the big numbers at the outset. OK, some dreary shows get through that process but then you don’t get silly things like Star Trek being cancelled long ago and only on the second run did that whole franchise really take off.

Odyssey 5 was one that bit the dust towards the end of its first season. It’s one of a group that were ongoing at that time centered around the idea of some kind of conspiracy and/or it being the end of civilisation as we know it (very common in the run up to 2000). Was it any good? It certainly wasn’t at the top end of that genre but it was well off the bottom end of it. As with many such series it seemed to be written with a 5 year cycle in mind (much more explicitly used on this particular series of course) so there were multiple subthemes running through the various episodes.

Many such shows at the time built elaborate subplots spanning series and with some major league plotting (Babylon 5 springs to mind as perhaps the ultimate such show) and perhaps there were just too many of them fighting for position in audience share at the time. Certainly there was a bumper crop of conspiracy shows from around the mid 1990s through to the early years of this century. As I say many of those pre-2000 ran with “end of the world” themes although with us being past 2000 now that kind of show isn’t nearly so common these days.