Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘UK’ Category

When we had the first little guy I was the one working as Wendy was at home looking after him but by the time we had the second little guy we were both working from home.

Since Wendy’s from Sydney and I’m from Belfast, that has had an unexpected effect on the accents of the two. James, the oldest, speaks with a mainly Sydney accent but with a Belfast sprinkled in amongst it whilst John speaks largely with a Belfast accent but with Sydney words in it.

Of course, that’s why they refer to your first language as your mother tongue in that, in times gone by, it was always the mother that was around the children the most. That’s obviously still the situation for most people these days but there are a growing number of families where it’s the mother working and the father at home or even both at home.

Obviously it’s not as noticeable when both parents are from the same place but when they’re not it can produce an interesting mix of accents in the speech of the children.

As part of my “thinking about an English literature course” thinking, I’m currently plugging away with reading Father and Son which is an autobiography written around the early 1900s.

To be honest, I thought that I’d hate it from start to finish but I find that I’m getting on for 1/3rd of the way through it now and it’s easy going as far as reading it is concerned. I’ll grant you, that it wouldn’t have been a book that I’d have bought if it weren’t for the course but it isn’t the chore that some of the other books have been to read.  Actually, given the era in which it was written, it’s a surprisingly easy book to read on the whole.

If you’re wanting an easy way into late 19th century English literature, this wouldn’t be a bad place to start.

The prices of digital cameras have had a gentle drop over the last couple of years mainly because they have added features and resolution as otherwise the price drop would have been quite dramatic.

If you just want a general purpose camera then you can get excellent ones around £100 or so these days. Even £30 gets quite a reasonable camera if you choose carefully.

However, the problem that all of these cameras have is that they are relatively slow in taking a photo. At the £30 level you press the button and it can be half a second or more before the image is fully recorded so photos taken with these cameras will generally look a little wavy unless you hold them very still. You definitely can’t photograph moving objects with them.

Move up to £100 and that half second delay drops significantly. There is a delay whilst the camera stores the image but the image is completely captured in one go so you don’t get the wavy lines. No problem with moving objects anymore. Spending more generally gets more megapixels which will let you print larger images.

However, if you try taking a photo of something like a car race you still have problems because of the delay in the camera capturing the image. There won’t be any wavy lines but chances are the car won’t be in the frame completely. If this type of photography is what you like to do then you will probably need to move towards one of the SLR digital cameras which start around £300 or so. There’s quite an overlap in the price range of top end compact digital cameras and SLRs and the two have similar capabilities but the speed of image capture is considerably different and, of course, the SLR cameras let you change the lens.

Typically around the £100 to £200 mark spent on a compact digital camera will get one that will suit most people. If you’re into sports photography you’ll need to take that up to £300 for a digital SLR.

Perhaps one of the most interesting developments in the mortgage market in recent years is the arrival of chequebook mortgages. That’s interesting in the Chinese sense of the term in their curse “may you live in interesting times”.

A key aspect of a mortgage is that it’s a very, very long term committment. Typically the term is at least 25 years over which time untold numbers of changes to your life and lifestyle can take place. Children can arrive, grow up and leave home over that time, interest rates can go from 5% to 15% to 5% (and have done exactly that in the past), the area in which your house is in can even go from “up and coming” through “marked for demolition” and back to “attractive” (which has happened in areas of Belfast). That’s just the changes that can happen to anyone.

So, as I say, the arrival of chequebook mortgages is “interesting”.

For one thing, 25 years is so long that you just don’t think about arriving at the end of such a period and that, for a mortgage product, is a fatal error to make. Chequebook mortgages actively encourage that kind of thinking in that they effectively give you an overdraft of perhaps £100,000 or even more. It’s all too easy to spend that on the day to day things and find that you’ve absolutely no way to cover the final mortgage payment 25 years down the line.

Ah, but you’ll look at your statements all the time, won’t you? Many people don’t but even for those that do, that 25 year period is just too long to appreciate the problems that can befall you by spending just a little bit too much as you go along.

As regular readers will know, I’ve been getting going on my direct mail campaign aimed at increasing the number of entries on the B&B and self-catering listings sites.

The second use of the mailing list for Scotland pulled in quite a considerable number of properties over the last two weeks. So much so that I’m going to have to implement the planned restructuring of the site well ahead of schedule.

For reasons which escape me, the England mailing hasn’t pulled in anything like the number that Scotland did. Something to explore the reasons for before I do the next one in 2008.

However, for the first time, I’ve targetted Northern Ireland. Early days yet of course, but it looks like the takeup will be relatively low. The size of the mailing was pretty much similar to that for Scotland but, so far, I’ve only received about 1/4 of the response. Still, perhaps some more will come in over the course of the weekend.