Foreign Perspectives

I was a bit taken aback by the very high takeup from our e-mail to Scottish B&Bs and self-catering places a couple of weeks ago. So many took it up in fact that I’m going to have to implement a redesign of the site for Scotland that I’d not planned on doing ’til next year at the earliest.

So, I figured that the takeup would be broadly similar in Northern Ireland. Yet, although I’ve mailed a similar number of places (allowing for NI being smaller), the takeup is only about 10% of that for Scotland. Less than that actually as I’m still getting new entries for Scotland from the e-mail of a few weeks ago.

The wording is identical too so I’ve no idea why the takeup should be so abysmally low: lower even than the notional 1% that I should have received.

When we had the first little guy I was the one working as Wendy was at home looking after him but by the time we had the second little guy we were both working from home.

Since Wendy’s from Sydney and I’m from Belfast, that has had an unexpected effect on the accents of the two. James, the oldest, speaks with a mainly Sydney accent but with a Belfast sprinkled in amongst it whilst John speaks largely with a Belfast accent but with Sydney words in it.

Of course, that’s why they refer to your first language as your mother tongue in that, in times gone by, it was always the mother that was around the children the most. That’s obviously still the situation for most people these days but there are a growing number of families where it’s the mother working and the father at home or even both at home.

Obviously it’s not as noticeable when both parents are from the same place but when they’re not it can produce an interesting mix of accents in the speech of the children.

If you’re considering relocating and you have a choice of time in which to do it then chances are that you’ll follow the crowds and do your searching between Spring and Fall.

Ironically, that’s probably the worst time of year to search for a new home. Aside from ending up following crowds of people around the homes for sale and thereby complicating the scheduling of your visits.

However, the worst aspect of timing your visits for the Spring to Summer is that the weather is totally different. That place that looked really cute at the bottom of the valley might have howling winds right through the Winter. The lovely way that the sun falls upon the garden of your ideal choice might not happen at all in the Winter: indeed, if you’re unlucky enough, you might find that the sun doesn’t reach the property at all during the Winter.

So, if you want to find the perfect property you need to either visit it in the Summer AND in the Winter or just in the Winter. If the house market is moving along it’s usually not possible to visit a particular property in both seasons of course so in reality, most of the time, you’re limited to seeing it in the Winter or at least late Autumn/early Spring if your chosen area has a Winter that is just a little too serious to face house hunting then.

I’ve been “hit” yet again by StumbleUpon for a post in the same subject area ie on The France Show.

As before, there are the usual hundreds of hits and diddly in terms of adsense income from them as, on the whole, StumbleUpon people tend to be looking for something fairly specific (which is pretty ironic given the nature of it, of course).

What I keep meaning to do is to use StumbleUpon in some way as I feel sure that there must be some way to keep the arrivals on the site in some way. So far though I’ve not sat down and done more than think a little about it.

Ideas welcome!

As part of my “thinking about an English literature course” thinking, I’m currently plugging away with reading Father and Son which is an autobiography written around the early 1900s.

To be honest, I thought that I’d hate it from start to finish but I find that I’m getting on for 1/3rd of the way through it now and it’s easy going as far as reading it is concerned. I’ll grant you, that it wouldn’t have been a book that I’d have bought if it weren’t for the course but it isn’t the chore that some of the other books have been to read.  Actually, given the era in which it was written, it’s a surprisingly easy book to read on the whole.

If you’re wanting an easy way into late 19th century English literature, this wouldn’t be a bad place to start.