Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

We had a lovely day out at Tollymore forest park at the weekend (or “on the weekend” as Wendy says: is that an Australian thing?) and managed to get round almost all of one of the longer walks that they have marked out. Actually, as it turned out we could easily have it round the whole walk but we the legs of the little guys were wearing out and we didn’t know just how little farther we needed to go to reach the turn around point.

With turning round though we had the benefit of seeing one of the true posers of the hiking fraternity. This guy was jogging off with a backpack on his back and another on his front and looked suitably impressive as he set off. Our turn around made it obvious that he was just trying to impress as he was back in about 20 minutes!

So don’t let the fully equipped guys put you off getting some exercise over the Easter break: our four year old managed a lot more distance than he did before his legs started to run out.

South Africa has been out of the question as a vacation destination for a long time but has quietly been getting promoted as a destination for a while now so there’s quite a lot of moderately underused tourist infrastructure.

The country itself is vast and with an equally wide range of attractions so you’d need to be selective. Many of you will still be considering it as a safari type destination but there are major cities dotted around the country each with their own attractions and, of course, there are untold numbers of beaches around the coastline.

So great are the number of attractions that it’s one of those places that you should pencil in for repeat visits over the years. If nothing else, flights to South Africa will be sure to drop in price as the number of tourists grows.

Photo copyright South African Tourism

Since I’m “between jobs” in one sense albeit still employed in another (career breaks are confusing things) I’ve been signing on as unemployed for the last few weeks.

One of the key things that you need to do if you want to get what they now call “job seekers allowance” is to look for jobs. Fair enough and indeed that’s how it always should have been as the whole idea behind the organisation concerned was to provide some assistance to tide people over when they were between jobs.

Anyway,  in the absense of a job, so far, at the end of the career break I’ve been taking the opportunity to look around for one. Amazingly enough I found what seemed to be the perfect job last week although on first reading of the requirements it seemed to rule me out. Second read of the actual detail of the requirements though and it was a different matter so I thought I’d apply for it. Snag was that by the time I’d identified it as a serious possibility it was coming up to the time that I needed to “sign on” for the “job seekers” allowance

No problem, sure all I needed to do was to call them and let them know I was in the midst of applying for a job, eh? Well, no, because that was my signing on time they said I MUST come down and do just that. But, isn’t the whole objective of the place to get people into jobs? Yes, but you MUST come down now because we can’t change your signing time for anything was their reply.

As it turned out the application took a lot less time than I’d expected so I was able to do both albeit arriving quite late for the “signing on”.

Seems that the renaming of the place as “jobs & benefits” has left the emphasis on “benefits” rather than getting jobs after all.

Frankly I figured that the relabelling of “unemployment offices” in the UK some years ago as “job centres” as just a PR gimmic by the government but it would appear that there’s a little more behind it than I’d thought.

As y’all know I’m technically between jobs at the moment. However, I hadn’t really thought about myself as being unemployed until Wendy pointed out that I should probably be off claiming some sort of unemployment benefit. These days, of course, it’s called jobseekers allowance to distance it both from unemployment and benefits but ’tis still the old unemployment benefit office that you go to if you want to claim it, so off we went last week.

That relabelling brought with it a lot of other changes. For instance, in the “unemployment office” you now find two separate groups of people that deal with you. First, there’s the people who handle the benefit payments who are basically the same group as have always been there and who are interested in seeing that you’ve made the appropriate social security payments to entitle you to the benefit. Separately from them are the employment people who are there to do what they can to help you back into work and who will prod you into getting up and looking for work if needbe. Formerlly the two were quite separate and in buildings separated by several miles so there wasn’t the sense that there is now of the payment being there just to help you along whilst you’re off looking for work.

One side-effect for me is that there’s what’s almost a trick question on the form: are you currently studying? I am in that I’m doing a child development course but seeing as it’s not a full-time one that means that I’m actually available for work which is what the question is really asking.

Full marks though for that relabelling and the reorganisation that happened almost behind the scenes. Although, in theory, I have a job waiting (sort-of), it has prompted me to have a look around anyway.

Despite us having to go through all kinds of hoops to try and register Wendy with a doctor, it’s been surprisingly easy to get a European Health Card issued.

In fact, all we had to do was to quote a name and address for them to post it to. They took our National Insurance numbers because we had them to hand but didn’t need them.

That’s pretty odd when you think about it as it means we can bill expenses from abroad for Wendy to the very health system that won’t register her to be treated locally!