Foreign Perspectives

In times gone by, getting inflation down was always considered to be a “good thing” and it still is but the problem is that the underlying reasons for inflation these days are quite different from those a few years ago.

Nowadays, inflation is largely driven by the oil price either directly through increasing the cost of your own petrol or indirectly through increasing transport costs generally. More to the point though is that it isn’t driven by the banks handing out money as they used to as anyone who has tried to get credit lately will tell you.

Yet, the Bank of England persist in using interest rates as their seemingly only means of driving down inflation. It isn’t working and it won’t work because it’s not bank lending that’s keeping inflation up (as is clear by the “credit crunch” that we’re all experiencing): it’s the oil price. Even if they took interest rates to 50%, inflation would still remain high.

What those high rates are doing though is killing the economy; they’re certainly not killing the inflation.

After much tinkering around with other peoples’ WordPress templates, I figured that it was time that I wrote my own one.

That sounds like it would be a major undertaking but in reality it’s not nearly as difficult nor timeconsuming as you’d think basically because a lot of the groundwork has already been done so it’s effectively tinkering around but on a slightly larger scale.

Anyway, I’ve been plugging away with that off and on for the last month or two over at SevaTeem and it looks like it’s getting close to the time when I’ll be able to release it on an unsuspecting public. As a bit of preparation for that day, I’ve started to roll it out on some of my little family of blogs with the one over at Our Inns probably being the closest representation to the final product although as it’s going to offer loads of options it could well look quite different and Personally Chosen is also using it.

What’s needed next is the addition of some options to avoid people needing to dive in and edit the code itself.

The staffing levels of post offices often seems to be very much politically led and rather than being subject to whatever local demands would dictate seems merely to reflect that it’s considered as effectively a job creation scheme.

Thus, although the nearest post office to us is on a main road and in quite a large village, it has the same number of staff as the post office in the small very quiet village where our son goes to school. The net effect of us is that what should be a fairly well staffed post office is almost always virtually unuseable. Not only are the queues frequently out the door but they close quite often to catch up with the backlog of work that this generates.

By contrast, the post office in the little village rarely has queues and always leaves us with a good impression. However, a large part of that good impression is no doubt due to that office being effectively well overstaffed for the level of business which it receives.

Whilst I wouldn’t want to deny the small quiet village its own post office, that service should really be part-time with the staff working the rest of the time in the larger one thus improving the service standards considerably for a large number of people.

Funnily enough, just as I figured that it was probably all downhill from here on the English course, I’ve hit a bit of a pothole in the form of a chapter on literature.

Well, not so much literature, but rather the language that Literature (with a capital “L”) uses including various types of poetry and the classics. The amount of stuff that I don’t know about literary techniques could fill a library so this particular chapter is proving to be pretty heavy going for me at the moment.

Fortunately there’s a choice of questions on the exam so I should be able to get by without really knowing a whole lot about the content of this chapter which is just as well.

Although the English course that I’m doing at the moment has the reputation of being the hardest course in the university, I’m finding that as I go through it I’m picking up speed and seem likely to get to the end of the course something like three months ahead of schedule (which is some going on a nine month course!).

Yet, whilst I’m moving along at a seemingly hectic pace (and, no, I’m not skipping sections to do that), others are saying that they’re falling further and further behind. Why? Funnily enough, it seems to be a result of my history of doing language courses which appear to have covered a good deal of the material before, albeit either in French or Spanish. Most of the others are approaching this English language course with a history of English literature courses behind them which, of course, wouldn’t have covered that type of material.

Whatever it is, I’m now around 75% of the way through the course and planning on taking a week out to do some revision and to complete the next assignment.

What this experience has shown me is that there’s little point in reading about the experiences of others of particular courses in isolation from their prior experience. For example, when I look at the forum for the phychology course that I might be doing next, I see that many people on that are saying that they’re getting behind too. Aside from not knowing what prior experience in the field that they’ve brought to the course, there’s also the bias towards forums being places to air problems as opposed to saying “I’m doing great”.