Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

It’s been over a year since our last enquiry re participating in a documentary so we were overdue for this one.

Thus far we’ve been getting enquiries from the various “moving to France” TV series producers but this time it’s in connection with the possibility of us setting up a B&B back in Northern Ireland.

As with the French series, there are surprisingly few people who meet the criteria for the series. For our first one for instance, we met all the criteria but weren’t able to move in January so missed the time slot for the filming.

My Dad died a year ago today so I thought it would be appropriate to write a little about him a year on from then.

People still ask me if I miss him. The funny thing is that I don’t. I’ve thought about why that is off and on over the last year and it’s down to a whole lot of reasons. I suppose that the most important is that we basically did everything together and thus hadn’t any un-ticked boxes remaining. We’d been on holiday many times and I’ve loads of videos as reminders of those times. We’d had the chance to have proper talks much more in the last few years which many people don’t get the chance to do. In what turned out to be his final year we managed to check off just about all of the little things that one could wish for: we’d the perfect final photo of him and my little guys, the three of us had a chance to say goodbye properly and James even got to thank him yet again for buying his bike.

However, I do miss him on behalf of the children. He had the chance to see James starting school but missed John’s first day by a year. He’ll miss hearing their tales from school over the years to come and he’ll not be there at their graduations. That last is probably his greatest loss because one of the highlights of his life was the days on which I graduated.

James misses him a LOT for sure and can’t understand why he’s not around to take him walks and do all the little things that seemed trivial at the time but which mattered so much to both of them. Of course, that’s the peculiar thing about the stuff which you remember: sometimes it’s the most trivial of things that turn out to be the most important when you look back on it.

John misses him too but didn’t get the chance to be with him so much so I guess that over time the memories of his granda will fade from his memory as the years pass by. My own grandfather died when I was about the same age as John was and I really only remember three incidents from my encounters with him so I guess that John’s memories will be pretty similar in detail.

As we all know one of the strange things about funerals is that you can find out a whole bunch of stuff about the person that you didn’t know beforehand or which trigger thoughts about them in you. For instance, I’d not thought about why my parents had bought the house that Dad finished his days in. It turns out that the reason was quite simple. Dad wanted a house with a garden for me to play in so they saved up and bought one. In fact an awful lot of things that they did subsequently date from the year that I was born. Wendy thinks that the silliest of those is the Christmas tree bought for my very first Christmas. Sure, the silver leaves and general appearance are very dated now but it’s been put up in the house every Christmas since then.

I think that one of the easiest ways of describing the birthday and Christmas presents that he bought over the years was “too dear” as my Aunt would call them. That’s not he’d have described them though as he didn’t seem to understand how anything could possibly be described as “too dear” if it was for me. Those are the kind of presents that he bought for James and John too, of course. Thus, they’ve each got an Aspire One when obviously they’re a) too young for them and b) they’re clearly “too dear”. And yet they both use their little computers just as much as the PSPs which he bought them the year before.

There was a simple reason why those things were never too expensive: he took on extra overtime and part-time jobs so that they never would be. Thus, whilst many people buy books for their university courses selectively and second-hand, Dad and me just went to the bookshop and bought everything on the list. As far as he was concerned he’d been working hard for 18 years just to make sure there was enough money to do exactly that.

As far as that education goes, to him doing my best wasn’t merely good enough for him but seemed to be much better in his eyes than that. Whilst the arrival of the letter saying that I’d been accepted into university was a relief to me, for him it was simply fantastic and over the years that followed he was always telling people that his son was going to university. Although James was merely starting on his education when Dad left us, he’d the chance to see the school videos from his first year and the award winning movie produced during his second year which, of course, he thought were just brilliant.

It turns out that he worked so much to ensure that nothing for me was ever “too dear” that there’s enough money left over to help James & John on their way too. At the moment, it’s looking like I’ll be able to continue to get those “too dear” birthday and Christmas presents for them on his behalf for quite some time to come. And, though he’ll not be there in person at their graduation days, there’s a good chance that they’ll have had a lot of help from him along the way to it.

Anyway, thanks Dad for all those memories and I hope that between the three of us we’ll create a whole bunch more times in the future that you’d have been just as proud of as that day when that letter arrived from Queens so many years ago.

Not so long ago, drive-by guests made up a substantial proportion of our bookings but with the combination of a rapid rise in the profile of online reservation systems and mobile internet the drive-by is very much a dying breed.

Over time this trend seems sure to have a substantial impact on the “ideal” locations for hotels. After all, when drive-by guests are less important there’s not so much need to build your hotel right on the highway as used to be the case. Nowadays, it’s much more important to be findable by a satnav system so we’re quite fortunate in being a place on most of the systems in current use.

The other notable effect is that, on the whole, you don’t need nearly so many signs to your place as you used to. Locally it’s quite noticeable that those hotels with the most signs tend to have the least number of guests. That’s down to their concentration on signage to the expense of an Internet presence.

In these days when virtually everyone books their accommodation online it’s particularly important to read the small-print regarding cancelling your trip or simply not turning up at all at your accommodation.

If you simply don’t turn up almost all hotels will charge you for the first night of your stay but some resort style hotels will charge you for the entire stay. In both cases this is a non-refundable charge.

However, you don’t necessarily need to pay it. In most cases, if you call the hotel a day in advance of your stay you’ll generally not have to pay anything further. Even cancelling the same day can sometimes save you money. For example, although we can charge for a noshow unless the reservation is cancelled a day in advance, in reality we waive this if we can get someone else for the room following the cancellation. Incidentally, it’s really not necessary for you to make up some excuse to explain your cancellation: hotels have heard them all before and it’ll make no difference as to whether or not they charge you.

Do watch any deposit payments that you’ve made though as in many instances these are kept by the reservation system that you used and are usually not refundable. If you find a hotel listed on a reservation system it’s usually worthwhile to contact them directly as this will save you the booking fee and you may get a discount too.

You might think that these “noshow” charges are just profiteering on the part of the hotel. They aren’t. Whenever you make a guaranteed reservation online the hotel is obliged to keep the room for you even if other people turn up asking for a room. In some cases we have turned away as many as a dozen couples looking for a room because our last room was subject to a guaranteed reservation only to find out that the people who’d booked it never turned up.

And a final plea… read the description of the hotel and particularly its location. Hotels are usually listed by “resort” which means that all hotels within about 25 miles of a city will come up as being attached to that city. This means that hotels well into the country are listed as associated with cities. Cancelling because you discover that a hotel you expected to be in the city centre is actually in the country doesn’t save a “noshow” charge if you only discover that when you arrive in the city.

The first time I came across ELQ (Equivalent and Lower Qualifications) was a year or two back when it was mentioned in one of the rare rallying cry type emails that come out from the Open University. What’s it all about? Well, basically the government are intending to drastically reduce funding to universities for those students who are studying for a qualification that is equal to or lower than one that they’ve already got. For example, if you already have a BA or BSc degree then if you sign up for another BA or BSc degree, even if it’s in a totally different subject, then you come under the ELQ rule.

In practical terms, the number of ELQ students is fairly low in most mainstream universities but it’s quite a different matter for the OU where many people start on a different degree for leisure purposes (the proportion of retired students is pretty high on some courses), to change career or to acquire a degree in a more relevant subject to their existing job. Thus, something that would largely have affected the night classes run by mainstream universities is going to affect the main business of the OU. Ironically it would appear that an excellent institution created by the Labour party way back in 1969 may well be killed off by the Labour party of 2009.

So how significant is this reduction in funding? Well, that’s the problem: nobody really knows for sure. Yes, there’s a figure for the reduction but the snag is that the reduction in funding is being met by an increase in course fees and nobody knows what impact that will have on the uptake of courses by students.

Plucking some figures out of the air might give some idea of the impact though. At the moment the OU charges around £10 per point degree courses thus overall a 360 point honours degree costs about £3,600 or around £600 a year on average spread over the typical six years of their courses. Depending on the subject that you do residential schools may increase that to more like £4,600 so say £800/year on average.

However, were the university to double those fees which some would say seems likely, what would happen? Would people find it so easy to justify £1,600 a year over six years? The snag is that it’s not quite so simple as that because there are a lot of quite major universities around the world offering distance learning in similar ranges of courses. Whilst an overall cost for a degree of under £5,000 is quite a bargain generally, that’s not the case were the overall cost to be twice that.

Already discussions are ongoing in the university as to what to do. For example, the science faculty seems likely to drop all but one of its named degrees and is looking for ways to drastically cut the cost of running the residential schools. Whereas right now you can do degrees in physics, chemistry, biology, geology, life sciences and natural sciences in the future there might only be the option to do just “science” albeit with at least some of the currently existing degree programmes continuing to exist as strands within that. Although as they say most of those named degrees were only introduced in 2003 taking them out just six years later seems rather a rapid move on the part of the OU. I’m quite sure that I’m not the only one of their students who ruminated over doing a degree with them for a number of years before actually getting around to it.

Now whilst they argue that they need to drop the residential courses because they don’t make any money on them, they’re in this situation largely because they separated out the residential courses from the courses to which they were originally linked. For example, S103 included a residential whereas S104, its replacement, has SXR103 as a separate residential course. Thanks to the way that most companies sponsoring students on courses work the non-compulsory nature of SXR103 means that fewer people will get funding to go on it.

That’s just the science faculty too. Other faculties attract more hobby students and could see substantial number of courses needing to be dropped if the prices go up too much. For example, how would the various history courses fare at double their current cost? Yes, many of them sound fascinating (and are on my own short list) but realistically I’d have thought that they’re more likely to be done by the retired hobby student population (who tend to get much better marks than the rest of us) and so could be more price sensitive than other more employment oriented courses.

Supposedly none of this affects us students registered for the courses with addresses in Northern Ireland. Not yet, anyway. I imagine that it’s none too ethical but presumably the OU could just supply all students with an NI forwarding address and thus continue to claim the full funding. I wonder if anyone’s floated that suggestion yet?