Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Family’ Category

We’ve not mentioned the Toyota in a long, long time basically because it’s been sitting in the car park for the last couple of years after one of the brake pads stopped working and we just didn’t get around to having it fixed.

It’s not that it’s got a whole lot wrong with it, just that we never got around to sorting it out.

Anyway, although we’ve not been looking for one we may have found a buyer in the form of one of the chimney sweeps.

Well, we have an offer of cash or a swap for his van. I think we’ll be going for the cash somehow.

It’s back to school today for James which means that we’ve to start getting up at a fixed time yet again.

One of the oddities about this business is that there are no regular hours at all. During the summer we generally need to be up no later than 7.30am each day and often need to stay around the office until after 11pm each night. Once we get outside the peak period though there starts to be periods of a day or two when we’ve nobody in and can lay in a while and over the winter you often get stretches of a week or more at a time when you can take it easy.

Well, perhaps “take it easy” isn’t the right description as we use those times sans guests to get various bits of maintenance done, to catch up with the administration and move more into our little empire of online activities. Still, ’tis nice not to have both the early start and late finish for a while even if it is a little muddied by school days.

We’d forgotten to hand out one of the presents for the last birthday (or was it Christmas?) of one of the little guys and came across it yesterday.

They’re just 3 and 5 so it’s only got 24 pieces. Well, had, now it has 22 and the 5 year old is almost ready to kill his brother who managed to lose those two pieces!

Do you ever wonder why you buy presents that need all the parts to work?

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.

The theory was that we would consider the Christmas break to Valencia as everyones’ present to everyone else.

However, we’re finding that this is one theory that doesn’t hold a whole lot of water. Already the demands for not one but two PSPs are getting incredibly loud and we’ve still a good three weeks to go before the present cut-off time arrives of course.

Buying in Valencia isn’t really an option. In principle, it would be a good idea but realistically we’re not going to be there until late on the Saturday and I don’t fancy our chances competing with Spaniards in the shops on Christmas Eve.

Or, to put it another way, we gotta get the PSP ordered pronto if it’s to be here before Christmas!