Foreign Perspectives

We were on the go from our afternoon departure from our place in France right through to 4am on Sunday morning which was as tiring as it sounds. Worse actually as thanks to the pretty stormy weather during the crossing I was the only one that wasn’t feeling a bit off.

That wouldn’t have been sooo bad but then James caught his usual Belfast asthma as midnight on Sunday approached so it was off to the hospital with him for another 3am bedtime on Monday morning. As if that wasn’t enough school was starting on Tuesday so we’d heaps to do on Monday.

It was John’s first day in school today which went really well. We’d been expecting awful things from him as he’s been with us every day his entire life up to today. The really big problem was getting him out of bed as school started at 9.30 and he usually doesn’t wake up ’til well after 10. That did show though: he conked out in the car on the way home and had a couple of hours of sleep when we got home.

Surprisingly we managed to get James to his Kumon class. Two months of that over the summer has really brought on his reading and it looks like he’ll be where he should have been by Christmas or so.

Tomorrow should be a relatively normal day though we’ve a heap of things to catch up with and it looks like it’ll be a week or more before we’re back to normal.

When we moved here it took us four years before all the various authorities recognised that we were actually living in France. That started quite a flurry of back-administration obviously and it still isn’t entirely cleared up (eg we still get three separate bills for the TV license).

However, it would appear that it’s going to take quite a substantial amount of time for the authorities to recognise that we have now left France and are no longer French residents. Although we ceased to be French resident in January we are still receiving reminders that we’ve not paid various social security and health charges some eight months on.

It’s not that we have ignored their demands for money though. In fact, we informed them in January that we had left, then again almost every month since using their Internet service, email, fax, letter and even recorded delivery letter. In fact, it would appear that all missives from us are completely ignored. Last week we even resorted to writing to them in English as it would appear that they don’t understand French!

Actually, that last letter from us was in a response to a demand from them that it would actually be illegal for us to pay!

Perhaps another couple of years will see it sorted out…

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).