Foreign Perspectives

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.

We didn’t manage to get out to see the rally on Saturday so we’d quite a trek to get to Ansignan to see it on Sunday morning.

As usual in France, all the promotion of the event is in French so there are relatively few foreigners attending what is quite a good rally. The most complete information on the rally is on the French site here which will have the information on the winners etc. in the not too distant future. One interesting consequence of this limitation in the promotion is that Foreign Perspectives achieves top ranking for searches about the rally.

The area over which the rally takes place comprises quite an intricate set of roads so you need to know the area fairly well or have a very good map to work out how to get to the various vantage points. For example, a journey which normally takes about 30 minutes from here ended up taking nearly 90 minutes due to the various diversions for the rally.

Whilst it’s mainly French teams taking part there’s quite a sizeable representation from Spain too.

Quite an interesting event if you’ve over here at the appropriate time next year (probably November 23rd & 24th 2008). Although it’s usually pretty good weather here, the route goes through several rather windy mountain passes so it can be pretty cold if you’re out of the sun.

I read one time on a high profile blog that they recycle old posts if they can’t think of anything new to write on the basis that a) the content of the old post was still valid and b) nobody would notice because they had so many posts on the blog already.

Whilst I don’t do that myself, it isn’t such a copout as you might think on first reading that. Some of my older posts get quite significant amounts of traffic and bringing them to the attention of new subscribers might not be such a bad idea now and again. There’s also the reference nature of some of them and it would probably be useful to do a tidy-up now and again in some cases that takes account of the various comments made.

What do you think? Is it a valid way of moving the blog onwards or is it just a copout?