Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Family’ Category

When we got back from France it wasn’t long before James was set to go on a school outing and the school were asking for parents to volunteer to come along to help with looking after the children. So, we volunteered or rather we tried to because we were told that we’d first need to get a CRB check done and found that we couldn’t get one as we didn’t have the necessary documents at the time which seemed a little silly at the time but the school had a policy of requiring a CRB check for parents helping out with school trips.

However, documentation aside, the real problem with the CRB check is that it only looks at previous convictions and, of course, Vanessa George didn’t have any. In fact, she still doesn’t so would pass a CRB check right now which is obviously somewhat ridiculous given what she’s been getting up to.

In some ways the CRB check has made it a lot easier for undesireable people of one sort or another to get into positions that they shouldn’t be in. That’s because in place of what would previously have been effectively an assessment by the principal of whether or not someone was a suitable person to be working with young children, now the school child protection policy says that she must instead rely on a CRB check as indeed do a great many schools and nurseries around the country.

However, clearly there still needs to be an assessment of the type of person that gets each job. Whilst Vanessa presumably won’t be getting any more jobs dealing with children she’s managed to harm quite a lot of children before she was caught and that doesn’t seem right. The other thing that this case highlights is that women are just as likely to interfere with children as men.

Hopefully this case will highlight the need to reduce the complete dependence on the CRB check that has built up since it was introduced.

We’d a special interest in reading to our kids when we were in France and we wanted them to grow up knowing English as native speakers and readers.

Of course, it’s not just the business of reading that matters in our case, it was the topics of the books too. In their nursery school it was the French nursery rhymes and fables that they were coming across so at home we made a point of working our way through the various stories that we came across in our own childhood.

To begin with, we concentrated on the Ladybird range which is for babies up to around five or thereabouts although that’ll depend on your childrens’ interests and notionally their range runs up to around seven. However, just by chance we came across the Usborne range of books which seems to pretty much take over where Ladybird finish although with quite a bit of overlap.

As with all these publishers aiming at the child market, they’ve loads of different ranges of books but the one we chanced on was their Young Readers Series 3. It’s actually aimed at older children than our nearly 4 and nearly 6 year olds but they just love the books so we’re planning on plugging away with those over the next six months or so although with the remainder of the Ladybird ones and some from the Usborne Series 2 mixed in amongst them.

When we were in France, we got a library book from the school each week and read that to the boys in English which is much harder to do than you’d think. After all, if you’ve learned French as a teenager or adult you’ll have missed out on all the words for things like witches and goblins which make up a surprising amount of the reading material that ends up getting brought home. In the end though we were only defeated entirely by one book.

Over the years I’ve been making efforts now and again to track down various friends from places I’ve been ranging from primary school through to university.

Thanks to the likes of FriendsReunited, FaceBook and LinkedIn it’s gradually become an easier task as the years went by. However, there’s a surprisingly high percentage of people who don’t use any of those services and particularly surprising in my case as I did computer science at university so I’d have expected the percentage of those from the course using these services to be higher than average. I even had the idea some years back that presumably there’d be quite a high percentage of the computer science people who would have their own domain name by now but, so far, I’ve only tracked down one person that way. Still, now and again there’s little flurry of activity on one or other of those sites and suddenly you find people you’d been looking for over a number of years.

One of those little flurries happened over the past couple of months and I’ve added more contacts from the past than I’d done in the previous several decade from primary school right through to university.

Obviously the people I’ve not seen from primary school have put on “a few years” with their appearance. However, what’s really striking is how differently people have aged from university. Probably a silly assumption to make but I figured that we’d all look like we were 22+X years but in fact the range of appearances is something like 22+X-10 through to 22+X+10 ie some look around 20 years older than others even though we’re all just about the same age.

Now, I can understand the shows like 10 years younger have 40 year olds who look like they’re 50 to begin with and who look 35 after their transformation because they’re picking people from a whole host of different backgrounds and lifestyles. It seems strange that you can get a similar range from people with quite similar backgrounds and, by and large, fairly similar life histories since the last time I saw them at university too.

What I must do next is to compare what people said they were going to do with what they actually did… I’m sure between this post and that one I’ll end up having nobody speaking to me 🙂

Now that we’ve really started to ramp up the exercise aspect of our weight-loss programme we’re at the point where we’re hitting the buffers on the actual weight loss since the muscle that we’re building is heavier than the fat that we’re losing.

Now you might think that there can’t be a whole lot of difference in the density of muscle and the density of fat but in fact the difference is around 18% which is pretty substantial obviously. In reality though it’s probably going to hit us most in the early stages of our more intensive exercise programme, the thinking being that presumably there’ll be a much higher percentage gain in muscle in those early stages than later on. Thus whilst my weight seems to have stopped dropping over the last week or so, there is definitely less of me hanging out than there was a week earlier.

Later on it should be different in that maintaining the diet plan whilst simultaneously upping the ante with the exercise programme should eventually (within a week or two given the programme we’re following) reach the point where the gain in muscle levels off whilst the fat continues to disappear. I suspect that the weight would go down relatively quickly at that point but we’ll see in a few weeks time.

One wonders how many people who’d like to “lose weight” pack in their exercise programmes in the early stages due to their gaining weight from all that extra muscle that they’re building?

Incidently, one other trend that we’ve noticed in the gym this time around compared to our experience five years back is that there seems to be a massive growth in the use of personal trainers. Previously you’d have seen one every couple of days but now there are three or four going round with people every day. We’re starting to feel left out as we don’t have one but Wendy says I can’t have the blonde one that promises “great one on one fun” 🙂

It wasn’t that we’ve been putting off joining a gym for the last couple of months but rather that we’ve been both working up our exercise programme and checking out the prices/facilities on offer locally.

Our first thought was to head for Esporta which we’d been going to before. It’s an excellent choice for the long term committed gym goer in that it’s quite a large place with lots of free space around the equipment and it provides a very complete health club setting with everything including a pool, a wide range of exercise classes and quite a nice little restaurant. However, it’s 12 month contract at around £50/month (they have various offers so the price on offer varies) and we knew for sure that we’d be taking a two month break this summer.Besides, the £50/month is really only worth paying if you’re making full use of the facilities and we won’t be for a while. In a similar vein is David Lloyd although they currently offer a three month trial membership which we might take up in September.

At the other extreme are the small gyms run by private organisations and the local councils. These are generally run on a pay per visit basis which is a great way to start out an exercise programme as you can begin with a once a week visit and work up from there. The larger council places usually run classes too. However, the pay per visit approach can get very expensive. For example, a typical £3/visit with three visits a week amounts to around £40/month. Add on classes and you can easily be talking over £60/month at which point clearly somewhere like Esporta is a more sensible option.

Finally, there’s Fitness First which falls in the middle ground between the two extremes. Pricing for a membership cancellable at one months notice runs to around £30/month which includes gym access and classes ie it’s all-in; for a 12 month membership it’s around £20/month. This is essentially an Esporta cum David Lloyd place minus the pool, tennis court and restaurant and with the exercise machines packed quite close together. We’ve signed up for the one month notice version and will be cancelling next month seeing as we’re off in July.

And we’ve even started going, unlike the surprisingly large number of people who sign up for the gym but never actually go. Even more surprising is how well we’re doing already after just a few days. We reckon that we’re not quite fit enough for the classes but should be in a couple of weeks or so.