Foreign Perspectives

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.

As we move through August the number of people in the place has been steadily increasing and, of course, we’ve had the usual spikes in occupancy at the weekends.

Unfortunately those weekend spikes have become even more pronounced this year. That causes us severe complications in terms of the logistics of getting the rooms sorted out as we end up using nearly all of the bedlinen over two or three days worth of over-night stays.

The reason behind those spikes is quite simply the Saturday change-over day for the self-catering accommodation in Spain where many of those people are heading to or coming back from (hence the three day spike). Packing all that change-over work must be even more of a nightmare for the villas further south than it is for us and it seems crazy that almost everyone sticks to the same change-over day which causes everyone upstream of them problems too and bumps up the flight and ferry costs on those days too not to mention causing a major backlog of traffic at the border.

Surely it would make more sense for everyone to stagger the change-over days?

Last year managing the reservations coming in became an almost full-time job at times as we ran right through the summer with the rooms over-listed and bookings were coming in at a fair pace over most of that time.

With the economic mess around the world it’s quite a different picture this year. Bookings everywhere locally are well down and so it’s even more important to over-list the rooms but in addition there’s much more work to be done in adjusting the prices in an attempt to fill the rooms.

Unfortunately, there are practical limits to the amount of over-listing that can be done. Typically we list about twice the number of rooms that we actually have but going much beyond that drastically increases the chances of double bookings at the peak of the peak times which would create much more work in proportion to the income that they might bring in.

You might think that when I say “adjusting the prices” that I mean lowering them. However, we’ve found that raising the prices can bring in more bookings than lowering them does and, of course, it brings in a lot more money too. In fact, it’s really only worthwhile to lower the prices of the cheapest rooms as that means that you come up on top of some searches. What raising the price does is to improve the image of the place in the minds of potential guests. After all, arguably the only “real” way they have of judging the quality of a hotel is by the prices of the rooms; some hotels rely on that false perception quite a lot as I’m sure some of you will have already discovered.

So, in practice, what we’ve been doing this year is lowering the prices of the cheapest rooms and raising those of the more expensive ones. It’s not bringing in quite so much business as last year (there just aren’t as many people around) but it does seem to be improving the occupancy numbers.

In my short term plans for OU courses the next one up is Human Biology which starts at the start of October and which overlaps my Child Development course by about three weeks. To reduce the work overlap what I’ve done is to buy the first book of the biology course and I’ve been working through that over the last month or two.

However, a bunch of the people doing the Child Development course are going straight on to Biological Psychology which starts in February. As it happens my aim in doing the Human Biology course was to simplify the Biological Psychology and they complement each other quite well. Thus, I’m in the process of getting talked into yet another overlap (February to June in this case).

Interestingly, since the bio psych course doesn’t have an exam it means that it may well not overlap with the next psychology course that starts in October as, usually, I end up running quite a bit ahead of the official course timetable so in principle I might be able to complete it some time in September if not before. That in turn should let me slip in the graduation ceremony for my modern languages degree which would have been this September but I couldn’t manage to fit it in.

What’s even more interesting is that doing the bio psych overlap would knock another year off my psych graduation and still be sticking to my 60 points a year maximum for the degree.