Foreign Perspectives

Stenaline extended their £10 return day-trips to Glasgow throughout the summer and indeed the closing date quoted is now well into November so we were able to get the day-trip with the kids last week.

As with all day-trips involving any kind of boat or plane, there’s an early start. In this case, you’ve to be there no later than 7am and, of course, allowing for parking and whatnot that really means more like 6.45am. The ship doesn’t depart ’til 7.30 but the cheap trips over the holiday period are very popular so there was quite a line to checkin and it was quite a crowded trip. Arrival in Cairnryan is a little before 10am.

The ship is the quite nice Superfast, although with the trip taking almost 2.5 hours, it doesn’t seem that fast. Food in the restaurant isn’t cheap but the prices aren’t too over the top and the portions are ample (the childrens’ ones were fine for me). It’s best to grab a seat as soon as you get on as the available seats are taken up really quickly on the more crowded crossings. There’s the usual arcade games and small cinema (aimed mainly at the kids) with a spa along with assorted treatments for the adults. They’ve a small number of suites (for up to five people) which, at £25, are worth it after a tiring day though, of course, you only have use of it for a couple of hours.

The coaches set off not much after 10 with arrival in Glasgow scheduled for noon. However, in practice, we didn’t arrive at the Buchanan Street bus station until 12.30 which means that we only got four hours in Glasgow. The bus station is quite central though getting around Glasgow takes longer than you’d expect i.e. don’t try to be too ambitious if you’re intending to use public transport to get around.

What’s to see? It’s very much a Victorian era port city so there’s a focus on things along the docks although there are a number of things dotted around the city of course. All of these are covered in sufficient detail in the What to See and Do guide although the guide covers everything and for a day-trip is just too much.

Highlights suitable for a day-trip include:

• The Science Centre, accessible from the Cessnock stop on the underground (allow 40 minutes each way for travel as you’ve to walk to the Buchanan Street stop and have a 15 minute walk from Cessnock). Mainly aimed at 7-14 year olds; it seems to include almost all the science gimics that you’re ever heard of. Quite expensive and very overpriced for adults considering that they’re mainly just accompanying their children.
• Glasgow Police Museum is merely one of a range of museums covering different aspects of life in the city. Choose one that you’re interested as you won’t have time to do justice to more than that.
• And, of course, the shopping of which the Buchanan Street area is well served.

The fledgling underground covers the city but allow for long walks to and from the stations as they are none too plentiful at the moment. There’s the usual open-top bus which takes about two hours to get around the city so you can’t really use it to get from A to B on a day-trip.

Is it worth it? I have to say, “no”, basically because four hours in Glasgow just isn’t enough and especially so as you spend eight hours travelling there and back. If the time there were a couple of hours longer, it would make an enjoyable day but with only the four hours, it’s all to easy to feel that it’s a “blink and you’ll miss it” kind of trip. So, lots of stuff to see, but ruined by being there just too little time.

As from April 2015, those in the UK will have the option of taking full control of their own pension fund which is a fantastic freedom from the shackles of the insurance companies that up to now have controlled almost all pensions investments.

Although there are many people who invest their own private pensions just as they do with their ISAs, there is also the option of transferring one’s company scheme and investing that too. That’s a much bigger deal as one’s company pension is often much more substantial than one’s ISA although, up to now, that was not terribly relevant as you couldn’t take full control of it.

How much more substantial? Well, I recently calculated roughly how much it might be for a colleague and the numbers were quite staggering. Taking a simple example of someone who’d worked 40 years for this employer, earning £40,000 per year, the total value was aroud £450,000. More interesting, the pension that the employer was paying on that equated to around 4.75% (say £22,000).

So, in principle, if he were to take the £450,000 and could get 4.75% or more from the investments, he would do better than his company scheme. However, that’s not the full story. When he died the £22,000 would be reduced to £11,000 for his widow and when she died, the payments would stop. If he took the £450,000 and invested it himself, the pension income wouldn’t reduce when he died and in due course his kids would get to keep the £450,000 (or whatever it was then worth).

It looks like a better deal, and the only question is: would many people actually do that? Although it may seem crazy not to, the amounts of money involved are quite scary, after all you’re getting to manage an investment fund more than 10 times your salary and that’s probably a good deal more than most people are used to dealing with.

One way to get the confidence that you’d need to take the money is to run a dummy portfolio over the 5 or 10 years preceeding your retirement which should give you an idea of how well (or badly) you would be running the investments. That way, when the day comes, you’ll know whether or not you could do it. Whether you’d have the confidence to take the money and run it is, of course, quite another matter.

Booking a cheap short-break holiday sounds really simple,  doesn’t it? Just pick a cheap flight from your local airport and off you go.

There are two problems with that approach though. First, there’s the flight times in both directions. Whilst 10am sounds reasonable enough as a departure time for our next trip it means a 7am departure from home which is a little early and forget about that 8am departure! Likewise, on the way back you don’t want to be shooting for morning departures from an unfamiliar city; much better to aim for late afternoon or perhaps early evening which a) gets you more time in the resort and b) gives you lots of time to organise the trip and allow for any mistakes you may make in the journey to the airport (eg our next trip involves a walk, boat trip and coach trip to reach the airport).

The second problem is the accommodation. In the off-season you can find that there are more flights going to a resort than there are reasonable rooms available to cope with the people arriving or that the reasonable rooms are way too expensive for a short break.

However, it’s not all doom and gloom. For example, if you’re thinking of Madrid you could consider Madrid Norte rather than those right in the centre. Amersterdam is small enough that Amsterdam hotels generally don’t get split so much into regions and the small size of the place means that most are either in or close to excellent spots in the city and much the same applies for Lisbon hotels too. It’s even possible to shoot for romantic hotels in Florence (although do watch those tagged “boutique hotels” which can be considerably more expensive than normal hotels and may not offer much for that supposed exclusivity).

Prices in all the above aren’t too bad although do be wary of the “prices from X”. Sorting by price for a double room works well if you’re looking for a double room but if you’re bringing along the kids you can sometimes find that the hotel with the cheapest double room either doesn’t have family rooms or if it does they’re not the cheapest available in that destination so it pays to check out the prices of the first four or five hotels listed.

Way back in 2009, I finally got going on the first course for my psychology degree (ED209) and was intending to plug away with that over the following four or five years, working through DSE212, DD303 and DD307 along with a couple of other courses to make up the 360 point total. However, one of those “other courses” was SK277 (human biology) and that really got me fired up about biology so I ended up working through the rest of the biology degree which I’ve just about finished.

In the meantime, they totally reorganised the psychology programme and are mid-way through introducing a whole new range of courses that’ll ultimately mean that they’re offering three or four different psychology degrees in place of the one general one that existed when I started. Net effect of being mid-way through and me having done some of the old-style courses is that there’s a confusing choice of modules at the moment.

The new ones seem to have dropped the popular residentials but there’s one remaining on its final run this coming year. That therefore seems to me to be the best spot to start so I’ve signed up with DSE212 and the associated residential DXR222.

After that, it gets quite confusing and I’m not really sure what I need to do to complete the degree. In theory, I could do the old-style degree but that needs to be completed before the end of 2017 which in turn means that I would need to do up to four 60 point modules over two years which seems a bit much at the moment. If I don’t do that, I would need to complete under the new-style regulations which is the same number of modules but without the need to complete by 2017.

What modules though? On the new-style degree there’d be E102 and DE100 but that assumes that I can’t count any of my existing modules and some of those fall into the psychology camp. I don’t know what I need to do there at this point. At level 3 there’s the compulsory DE300 plus a choice of three or four others coming up depending on whether you want a general psychology degree, a forensic psychology degree or a counselling degree.

At the moment, the only thing I’m fairly sure about is that I’d need to do DE300, would probably need to do DE100 and would probably do EK313. So, another call to the SMT people is called for I think.

It seems like aeons ago when we were all routinely pampered with blankets, pillows, endless food & drink, socks, little “do not disturb” signs, toothbrushes, combs and even flight bags. Actually, you needed the flight bag to carry off all the goodies that you were given in those days. That was in economy too… in first class you’d have needed porters to take everything with you!

Everything is different now of course in the age of the discount airline. The food & drink only turns up if you pay for it, the flight bag has long since been consigned to history and they’ve even cut into the basics such as blankets and pillows which often aren’t even adequately stocked on planes never mind being at least the little bit overstocked as they were yesteryear.

Funnily enough it’s actually the summer season when travellers end up feeling cold or even freezing. That’s the season when everyone’s heading off to the beaches and leaving home when it’s fairly warm too so they’re travelling in their summer attire of t-shirts, shorts, skirts and light clothing generally.

What do you do about it though? Well, you could cart on a blanket and pillow but, frankly, you’d look like a complete plonker doing so and besides you’ve got to factor the weight into your greatly reduced luggage allowance. It’s also two carryon items which may not be allowed but anyway, do you really want to juggle two more things on your vacation?