Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Family’ Category

The take from our recent break-in must have been quite a disappointment to the burglars and particularly those that bought from them.

Notionally the most valuable item on the list was a 28″ TV. A good result normally I suppose except that it was a British TV and won’t receive any French TV channels so it’s pretty useless to them.

Next up was a 1999 portable. British keyboard so not too useful but in 1999 it came with 4GB disk and there are a lot of web pages that it can’t open these days.

Then there was the British toolbox which is filled with imperial size spanners which aren’t too useful here in France.

Overall they seemed to have amassed a whole collection of stuff that’s little or no use to anyone in France. For instance, in addition to the above they managed to take a portable DVD player but without the charger that it needs.

So we’ve lost a bunch of things that were of some use to us and they’ve gained effectively a bunch of useless junk

By the time you read this, we should be well on the way to our place in France (scheduled posts are wonderful!) and pretty much totally exhausted.

The plan is that on Saturday morning we’ll have gone from Belfast to Rosslare to catch the LD Lines ferry to Le Havre around 5pm. That’s a relatively easy 4 hours drive though it seems to go on forever as we found out doing the route the other way in January.

It’s an overnight ferry trip which is quite relaxing in comparison to the drive from Stranraer to Dover. Cheaper too when you offset the cost of the cabin against the savings in petrol. Unfortunately, that 5pm-ish departure makes for an arrival around the same time the next day in Le Havre.

Our theory is that we’ll relax on the boat and start driving when we get off. Snag is that at this time of year most of the hotels along our route down France will be full so we probably won’t have any choice but to drive on through the night which isn’t altogether appealing to put it mildly.

Sadly, we’ve just heard the news that some ******** have broken into our house in France and trashed the place.

What seems pretty much a cert is that the things that they took (seemingly less than a dozen things in total although we need to do a full check) will be appearing in one of the vide greniers (car boot sales) over this weekend. Some of their customers will be less than pleased with their purchases as they include, among other things, a TV that can’t receive French TV programmes and a number of region 1 DVDs that won’t play on French DVD players.

It isn’t so much the things that they’ve taken which is annoying though: it’s that they simply trashed most rooms in the house looking for stuff that just wasn’t there. Thanks to the high prevalence of the black economy in France, most French households are likely to have quite a pile of cash stashed away but us foreigners just don’t work like that so their cash take amounted to a few euros at best.

In other countries there’d be an insurance claim, of course, but in France the insurance only pays out when you have the original receipts and, for the most part, people don’t have them so you end up paying a whole lot for insurance that realistically you will never be able to claim on.

Anyway, it looks like our notional holiday will be taken up with cleaning up the mess that they’ve left behind and wasting time with the insurance company.

Seemingly without fail, the social services people lurch from one extreme to another in how they treat cases.

Whilst they obviously failed Baby P very badly, they’re now in the process of going out of their way to fail the babies of Mr & Mrs N. Thanks to a joke remark from Mrs N it seems that the social services feel that the best thing to happen is that her children should be put up for adoption.

Oh, it’s not just the off-hand comment she made, of course. There’s the matter of her being angry that social services took her children from her so she clearly has anger issues. Why were they taken into care? That’s because the first time parents were having difficulty in looking after the premature twins. Well, if that’s the reason then I think that the social services people would be best to take ALL babies born to first-timers into care. What first-time parent could honestly say that they didn’t have trouble looking after their children in the early days?

Of course, as with Baby P, it’s the children that are getting the worst of this. In the critical early days after birth the twins only get to see their parents for ten hours a WEEK. That’s not nearly enough to establish a firm attachment and will almost certainly affect their later development.

Sure parents won’t be perfect carers at the off. How could they be? But they’re almost always the best possible carers that a newborn will ever have. It’s not right for social services to exercise this draconian power with such impunity. One hopes that disciplinary action will ensue WHEN they lose the case over this.

The problem with really high profile cases such as Vanessa George’s seems likely to be is that the very high level of publically expressed opinions can mean that the court case can be thrown out.

To avoid that what usually happens is that a reporting restriction is invoked whereby it’s deemed to be in contempt of court to publish specific information about the case in advance of a verdict being announced. That system worked really well in pre-internet days but is increasingly unworkable in the Internet age as I’ve said before. As it stands right now there don’t appear to be any reporting restrictions in place for this particular case which has had the effect that it’s been talked about on TV, radio, newspapers and, of course, blogs and 99% of what’s been said is very much along the lines of “let’s lynch her now” as you’d probably expect.

However, there’s also the not so small matter that she hasn’t been convicted yet so is rechnically innocent of the charges at the moment. That’s as it should be, of course, since the whole British legal system is built on the premise that people are considered until a case is proven against them. You might think that with all the public outrage that she couldn’t possibly be truly innocent of all those things that she’s been charged with but it does happen. After all, people have been arrested for taking photos of their own children before now and they’re generally laughed at when they reach the courtroom.

The vast majority of people have only heard, at best, second hand reports of the charges. They haven’t even heard second hand accounts of the evidence. Don’t forget that the grandmother I referred to above was charged with producing pornography yet it turned out she was doing nothing of the sort when the evidence was examined.

Are you still prepared to say that Vanessa George is guilty having merely heard an account of the charges against her?