Foreign Perspectives

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.

Once we get into August the number of guests starts to rise quite rapidly and with that rise comes an even larger rise in the work associated with it.

Surely the work rises in proportion to the number of guests? You’d think that it would but it rises much more than that thanks to a number of factors. First, the number of overnight stays increases quite dramatically so it’s commonplace to find that one is completely full on Friday, Saturday and Sunday night with a completely different set of people in place of the smaller number staying several days at a time earlier in the year.

Next there’s the rapid rise in problem guests. In August just about all the accommodation for miles around is full and in particular the beach accommodation is almost all full for the bulk of the month. Thus we get a lot of people who really wanted to stay at the beach but find that they can’t and are staying in a place in the country instead. Moreover, prices are higher in August generally and dramatically so in the case of beach resorts. Whilst most people accept this situation, a small minority don’t and frequently end up taking up a lot more of our time than is reasonable.

Finally, we find that pretty much all of our slack time of earlier in the year is taken up by the much larger number of guests and the work associated with them. Thus we end up spending the whole morning and right through lunch getting the place reset for the next guests, we’ve lots more restocking trips for supplies, and so on.

Overall this means that in many cases even much of the “essential” admin doesn’t get done… don’t expect us to reply to emails too quickly over this period!

After much debate I have finally gotten around to signing up for the Human Biology course and the related residential.

The Human Biology course is something of a tangent to everything that I’ve done before. That seems likely to make it fall into the category of “challenging” for me (that’s what everyone seems to call the courses with lots of work these days). To make it that little bit less “challenging” I’ve been reading through the first of the course books for it which seems to be around 25% really hard, 25% really easy and the rest fairly doable. That’s probably about typical for a course that’s aimed at a very wide range of people: everything from nurses through to social science people with everything in between.

For me the really hard parts are the medical bits, the doable are broadly organic chemistry and the really easy are the social science sections. Since it’s aimed at a wide spectrum of people there tends to be quite a lot of hand-holding throughout the book which, hopefully, will make it fall into the category of “doable” as assignments and the exam come up.

At the moment I’m not really sure what to make of the associated residential course. There’s a massive textbook that I’ve to buy for it which implies a lot of pre-course reading that I’ll need to get going on over the coming months.

It’s too early to register for the final couple of courses in the upcoming sequence which definitely includes Exploring Psychology and its residential. I’ll be waiting to see how the Human Biology course goes before signing up for Biological Psychology which would overlap it by about five months. Ordinarily, I’d not have worried about that particular overlap but both courses, although only 30 points each, have a reputation of being “challenging” so I’m putting off the signup up decision until the last moment (early December).

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.