Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

It’s been a very long time since we had the opportunity to view how the use of a wide range of products changes when the price of them goes down.

Sure, we’ve been used to that happening on all kinds of electrical and electronic items with computers almost dropping to the fashion item price range (hence the arrival of colour choice recently of course). However, who’d have thought of that very same thing happening to something like eyeglasses?

That’s a product that’s historically been seen as involving highly trained opticians, expensive offices and skilled technicians which overall seemed very much like a recipe for high prices as far as you could see. Except that online retailers like ZunniOptical are changing all that with prices at the bottom end of the range (which don’t look like el cheapo glasses by any means) coming in for pretty much loose change.

Clearly when a product drops into that “loose change” price range from previously having sat well in the “fairly serious money” price range then there’s going to be big changes in how it’s perceived and used. For one thing, the concept of having a single pair of glasses purely because it wouldn’t be worthwhile to have more than one pair doesn’t hold any more. Thus, even at the lowest price there is heaps of choice and the opportunity to match your glasses to your outfit in a way that wouldn’t have been viable before.

I wonder what’ll be the next product that this will happen to?

Over the last year that Mum’s spent with us we’ve really began to notice that she’s slipping into old age and sometimes it seems that she’s doing it at quite an alarming rate.

For instance, in 2008 we all went on holiday to Venice and she was able, with not too much difficulty, to follow us round. Granted, not at a fantastic speed, but she managed it. Just over a year later it’s obvious that she’d have no chance of being able to do that as her walking ability has dropped dramatically in the last year.

She’s also gotten into the habit of repeating things that can get seriously annoying at times. We don’t really need to know that it’s rainy/sunny/whatever every 10 minutes or so! Whether she’s been doing that for a while is difficult to say as she wasn’t with us constantly before 2008 and indeed with us being over in France for the previous five years we didn’t get the chance to notice that anyway.

Related to that is the forgetfulness or rather the losing of the sense of time. On Saturday she was all set to go to church for instance. That’s fairly new though but I guess it’s something else that we’ll notice more as time goes on.

She’s not “old” generally but seems to be heading that way going by some of the things that we’ve been seeing.

Physically disabled people obviously need a bit of a hand in the ever larger car parks outside major supermarkets these days but the problem is in identifying those people who actually need that bit of a hand.

At the moment, the identification is purely through possession of one of the “disabled parking” badges on a car. The problem is that these seem to be handed out like confetti with many people possessing them who clearly don’t need them but get them purely through reason of them being old. Yes, some old people need them but those are disabled old people, not those that are simply old and see it as their right to have one of those disabled badges. It’s as bad with the parent and child (formerly mother and child as it remains in some places). Yes, you need a wider bay to unload the kids into a pram, but you don’t need a wider bay for teenagers (unless they’re so stupid that they just swing the doors out).

What’s really needed are two stickers: a “parking close” one and a “wide bay” one.

At the moment, there seem to be very few people in our local supermarket who would need the “parking close” one which is as you would expect. After all, even if you parked in the closest disabled or child parking spot to the door, you’d still have to travel several hundred yards within the store to get to the back and would probably end up travelling something like a mile or more if you went round all the aisles. Thus “disabled” people who claim that they need to park close to the shop really only need to do so if they have a wheelchair in which case they actually need a “wide bay” sticker.

It’s obviously different in smaller shops but for supermarkets it appears that a massive reduction in the “disabled” slots (and probably in the parent & child ones too) would help those people who really need them.

By the time the shorter holidays swing round we seem to have built up a massive list of things that we should take the kids to. Summer isn’t so bad as there’s a couple of months to play with but it can get pretty bad during the shorter holidays like Easter.

In fact, Easter seems to be the worst of these. Not only do the kids and ourselves have a list of things that have accumulated since Christmas but there’s a whole host of activities going on aimed at kids all over the place. Almost all of these activities fall from the Saturday through to Easter Monday though so there’s not so many that you can actually get to and, on the whole, we always miss out on at least a couple that we’d have liked to have gotten to.

Over that Saturday to Monday period we always seem to end up with both of the little guys pretty much totally worn out and this year has been no different. Saturday ended up relatively quiet but we made up for that on Sunday and Monday with all day trips to Castleward and Portrush which left them both exhausted.

Still, at least we’d fairly grim weather on Tuesday which gave them (and us!) a bit of a chance to get some rest.

One of the most striking things about the Gordon Brown entourage this morning was just how staged it was.

Although he passed numerous people along the way, strangely his entourage of supposedly the normal public were about as diverse a mix of races as you could possibly manage to collect anywhere in the UK. Of course, they weren’t really the normal public at all: the majority of these were labour party supporters bused in especially to make sure that Gordon Brown came across as being attractive to all races represented in the UK today.

Incredibly cynical, wasn’t it?

Yes, the UK is now, as it has been for centuries, a multi-cultural country but do we really need artificially created entourages to try to show one party or another is the one to best represent the UK today? I think not.