Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘UK’ Category

If you value your “spare time” then you should be very careful never to pick up a prospectus from the Open University.

Nobody warned me about it and I started reading one in 2001 and it’s been eating up all my spare time ever since!

The booklet looks innocent enough, but then you start leafing through it and find that it’s just filled with all kinds of courses that sound really interesting. The short courses only take a few months and even a half-credit course only takes a few hours per week. Before you know it, you’ll be filling in the application form for one of them. Just to see what they send, you understand, after all you can pull out of it, can’t you?

You’re only planning on doing the one course, but then about half-way through that one they send you a letter about those that logically follow on from that one along with a little sampler of what the next course is like. All you have to do is to sign at the bottom and return the letter and before you know it, you’re walking along to the Post Office.

It’s the same next year, but by then you’re hooked and looking beyond the current strand of courses. You’re thinking “sure, if I do a couple of courses more I’ll get a degree”. That kind of thinking is fatal: you get another prospectus. Just to have a leaf through it, of course, but it never works out like that.

You think that it’s all over when you’re about to start the final course for your degree, but you’re totally addicted at that point and it’s time to get another fix. What about that other course that you were thinking of originally? Wow, they’ve updated it and it sounds even more interesting now, doesn’t it?

That’s what happened to me. I picked up the Diploma in French three years ago and have just completed the final exam for the Diploma in Spanish. That just leaves one English course and I get a degree in Modern Languages. But I always quite fancied their science courses and will be signing up for the first of those a little after Easter next year.

I think we need to start Open University Annonymous: it’s worse than drinking!

Thanks to dreadful flight times, I decided to stay a day in Manchester on the way back here.

Manchester aiport is a brilliant place for flight connections as all three terminals are within the one complex which includes access to the city via bus and train services too. The airport is so close to the city that you’ll often find it takes you longer to walk to the bus/train station than it does to get into the city itself. That closeness makes the price quite low too so it’s under a fiver for the return trip.

We were lucky enough to have timed our trip to coincide with the Manchester Pride events which, as you can see, include a very colourful parade through the streets. As usual with parades, the traffic before and afterwards is something of a nightmare but the small size of the city meant that we could easily walk back to the train station.

Also very pleasant is the free bus services which cover the Manchester city centre area.

We’ve just added Manchester to our Whole Earth Guide where you’ll find more information on the attractions of the city.

Carrickfergus is on the coast just 20 minutes or so north of Belfast so it’s easy to get to.

The castle is, of course, the main attraction of the town. Whilst it’s open all year with exhibitions depicting the history from the 1100s, it’s best to catch it during one of the Summer celebrations that are held. Allow about an hour to fully cover all the permanent exhibitions.

Strangely enough for such a major construction, much of its history isn’t known to great precision so you’ll find that the outer ward was probably added between 1228 and 1242 rather than having an exact date. In fact the only exact date quoted is that of the landing of King William the third on June 14th 1690 which is commemorated by a small plaque at the end of the pier which you can see in this photograph and also by his statue outside the castle.

Sadly the castle fell into disrepair after this time though it was still being used as a fortress when it was captured for the last time in 1760 by the French. After that it was used as a prison and then an armoury up until 1928 and later as an air-raid shelter in the second world war. As a consequence of this long period of non-castle use, numerous repairs were made after it was handed over as a musuem, some of which were a little overdone giving it an overall artificial feel.

This is part of our series of articles for Northern Ireland Themes.

Planning for Belfast’s City Hall began, naturally enough, in 1888 when it was awarded the status of city by Queen Victoria (hence the relatively large number of things in the city named after her, of course) with building competed in 1906.

The city centre location makes the grounds a very popular area for lunch in the Summer months and they’re used as the venue for the Christmas markets and various concerts.

Although there are regular free tours of the building during the week, these aren’t terribly well promoted at the moment so many people miss the impressive Victorian architecture, stained glass windows and paintings which are certainly worth the 40 minutes or so that they take.

 The Albert Clock is one of many Belfast monuments that were named after aspects of Queen Victoria’s reign, in this case after her late consort, Prince Albert. As you can see there’s a life-size statue of him right there on the west face of the monument which was completed in 1853.

Whilst many would blame the lean of the tower (which is quite noticeable) on too many bomb explosions around it, in fact it’s actually due to it being built on soft marshy land and the passing traffic over the years.

Although presently a little away from the centre of the city, the enormous number of developments currently taking place nearby seem likely to make this a much more central monument in a few years by which time the current regeneration of the centre and the docks area will have been largely completed.