Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

You might think that medical treatment in France would be pretty much the same as it is elsewhere in the world once you get to the point of visiting the doctor, but it isn’t.

Assorted link trains seem to be the flavour of the season from the original Technorati Favourites Exchange (still plugging a way a month down the line), to the MyBlogLog train  (on a slower line) and now we have the BlogCatalog My Neighbourhood train which I came across at SYAF the Geek just yesterday. 

***Start Copying Here:***

Here are the rules:

1) Write a short introduction about how you found this list and include a link back to that blog.

2) COPY the rules and ENTIRE list below and post it on your blog.

3) Take My New Neighborhoods Members’ and move them into the The Original Neighborhoods Members’ list.

4) Find 3 new blogs, join their Blogcatalog Neighborhoods and add them to the My New Neighborhoods Members’ section. Remember to also add the Join this Neighborhood’ link next to your new blogs. ( Example: http://www.blogcatalog.com/blogs/syaf-the-geek.html )

5) Join as a member to each Neighborhoods listed here by clicking on Join this Neighborhood’. The goal is that all of the new Members listed will join your neighborhood, and you should do the same!

My New Neighborhoods Members

The originals

1. Foreign Perspectives Join This Neighborhood
2. MdRafi2k Join This Neighborhood
3. ByDesign Join This Neighborhood
4. Blog To Profit Join This Neighborhood
5. Another Maria Join This Neighborhood
6. Webee Join This Neighborhood
7. Zakman Join This Neighborhood
8. One Eyed View Join This Neighborhood
9. Syaf The Geek Join this Neighborhood
10. Esplanade Join This Neighborhood
11. Wampago Join This Neighborhood
12. WonderWoman Join This Neighborhood
13. Kucau Join This Neighborhood
14. Cymru66 Join This Neighborhood

***End Copying Here***

The margin was relatively slim (53/47) but France has, much to my surprise, chosen the president that it needs at this time.

His first hundred days are likely to be turbulent ones and I suspect that last nights riots across France are merely a taster of things to come. Many of his policies seem to run against the deep socialist grain of French thought and practices.

The 35 hour week is to be reviewed. That was one of the planks of job creation from the socialist era. Reduce the time that anyone is allowed to work and everyone will have more work, won’t they? Well, perhaps in theory if you drop the permitted working hours by 10% you might think that employers will need 10% more people to get through the work but that’s only going to work with cuts much larger than 10%. As is clear everywhere else in the world, semi-parttime workers get through just as much work as full-time workers do.

Immigration rules are to be tightened up. This one seems pretty strange coming from the son of immigrants. The counterpart to this is that he seems likely to work with the countries in northern Africa to form a kind of African Union to help improve the economies of those countries.

France is to become a little bit more capitalist too as he plans to reduce the regulations on businesses to make the job creation process much easier. Taxes too are to be reduced to improve the incentive to work.

Will he have the strength of character to follow through on these reforms is the biggest question though. I think he will: he seems to have that inner strength that is so necessary to do it.

Family history is something of a now and again activity for me.

When I found the big family bible some years ago, I had a major flurry of activity going through it and integrating all the information into what I already had and then it was a few years before anything else happened.

Then there was the arrival of the Mormon family history site which seemingly filled in numerous details that were missing from the family bible. Mainly places of birth and death but also a number of relatives who weren’t mentioned in the family bible. I also ventured into the various family history forums on the Internet but with a name like Stewart they’re not nearly so useful as you might expect as there are just too many Stewarts around in the world these days.

It’s worth looking at that site now and again and indeed the forums as people add information to the various sites over time. By doing that, I picked up a whole branch of the family that we were sure had died out in the 1930s although I’ve not, yet, firmed up contact with them as yet.

Anyway, that’s all to introduce our new blog at Stewart Family History. As with my other activities in the family history arena, the entries on that’ll likely be now and again affairs but we’ll see. It’s separate from Foreign Perspectives as it doesn’t really fit here and should, in due course, interest a whole different bunch of people.

Initially, it’ll be principally the Stewart line as you’ll gather from the domain name but I’ll be starting into the Douglas history too fairly shortly and will no doubt add other names as I go along.

I find the cemeteries in France really fascinating.

Naturally there are loads of military ones around the sites of past battles in the two world wars. The second world war ones up around the Normandy beaches are perhaps the most impressive in terms of the sheer scale of carnage that they represent. However, in addition to those there are many much smaller WW1 cemetries dotted around the landscape. The area of the Somme has untold numbers of these from the large Thiepval and numerous smaller versions in that area from the Ulster Tower to relatively small Australian ones.

One thing that they all have in common is that every single grave in them is still well tended for, no matter how long ago the death occured. As we were going through the Somme cemeteries last year, every one looked as though it was only filled a few weeks ago. Don’t forget that these graves are getting on for 100 years old by now too. The reason for this is simple of course: the Commonwealth War Graves Commission  really live up to the phrase “they shall not be forgotten” and are constantly caring for the graveyards and refurbishing the headstones.

Of course, they don’t just look after the major graveyards and the photo here is that of the brother of my grandfather sitting in a cemetery in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, one of a couple of dozen or so scattered around that particular graveyard.