Foreign Perspectives

When Wendy and me started experimenting with the possibilities of running paid posts in our blogs it was just coming into the Summer and all the time it seemed to be a fight to get even a $5 post on some sites.

However, as we edge out of the Summer, we’re now in the situation where there are getting on for a hundred opportunities that are open to us each time we log in. OK, granted maybe half of those are only $5 but just a few months ago we were looking at something like a dozen available at any one time and most were $5. Tonight the first 30 are over $7.

That extra choice also brings the advantages that many more of the opportunities fall into the category of “interesting” and that the wordcount asked for can be as little as 50 words for payouts of $15.

What we’re also learning to do better is to check the opportunities available at an appropriate time. All of the main sites offering these paid post schemes are currently based in America so our original approach of writing the paid posts in the morning isn’t a good move as all we got was the leftovers from the night before. Simply checking in the evening instead pretty much doubled our takings overnight and combine that with the additional opportunities available over the Winter mean that we’re doing even better than that as we get more on top of the best strategies to use with these schemes.

Also starting to become noticeable is that the increased number of postings on the blogs is starting to attract other interest in the blogs. Nothing major from that as yet but ’tis early days.

I’m sure that many of you have photos just like this one. It was taken in 1909 and shows my great grandparents and their whole family at that time.

You won’t have terribly many photos like that because at that time having your photograph taken was a grand event and, as you can see, everyone dressed up for the occasion. In fact, that remained the case for quite some time afterwards and it was really only as we edged into the 1950s that the number of photographs taken went up with cameras getting into the hands of amateurs in large numbers.

So, chances are, that you have quite a lot of photos from the 1950s and in increasing numbers through to the 1990s.

And then we all began to go digital and took even more photos than we ever did before.

Yet, how many of those digital photos will be printed? Don’t forget that it’s almost certainly only going to be those that are printed that will be available to future generations. Your grandchildren certainly won’t have anything capable of reading that SD card with your wedding photos on it for sure. Ah, but you wiped it when you copied the photos onto the computer, didn’t you?

But what about those photos on the computer? Have you taken a backup copy of them? You certainly can’t depend on the hard disc lasting forever so if you haven’t a second copy of them, chances are that you’ll lose them sooner or later. Even if you do make backup copies, how good are you at maintaining them? After all, backup discs wear out too. And, of course, there’s the issue that your grandchildren probably won’t be able to read that backup disc anyway, unless you’ve made a point of copying it onto the latest type every 3 to 5 years (don’t forget that USB drives have only been available for around 5 years and probably won’t be around for another 5).

So, despite us taking lots more photos, I suspect that our grandchildren will only have a very small selection of them to look at ie those that we’re printed out over the years.

As for video? No chance. Right through the 1980s you probably recorded your video on VHS but now that those players are starting to be phased out, have you bothered to copy those tapes onto your computer or onto DVDs? If you don’t do it within the next five years or so, you could find that you no longer have something capable of playing the tapes.

The profile of guests that we receive changes quite dramatically throughout the year but it’s September that tends to provide the most enjoyable mix for us.

July and August always seems filled with people racing from A to B and, on the whole, just using us as a waypoint in their travels. In the very peak periods we get a lot of the overflow from the beach resorts which means that there are a fair number of people staying with us who really wanted to be at the beach and this therefore represents the peak of our problem guests too.

Early September sees a dramatic change in the profile. For a start, that coincides with the Visa pour l’Image photojournalism festival and we generally get some journalists staying with us then which always makes for a more interesting time. By mid-September we usually get some people staying for quite a long time using us as a base to explore the region. As we’ve fewer people staying at this time, we get to interact much more with those that are with us which makes for a more enjoyable time: we’ve already had the traditional storyteller from last week and this week it’s a historian who’s been filling in loads of gaps in our knowledge of the history of this area.

As we edge into the Autumn, it’s the season for receiving reservations made for the sole aim of getting a Schengen visa.

They’re easy to spot. They’re made by South Africans and Chinese, are for 10 to 20 days at a time and don’t reply to our confirmation e-mail that gives information about the region.

A lot of people think that this doesn’t cost us any money. Not so. We had a 20 day booking in July which resulted in us rejecting a number of other bookings yet it was cancelled just a couple of days before they were due to arrive. Net effect was that we lost several hundred euros of bookings.

Since we’re quite small, it doesn’t take a whole lot of such bookings to “fill” us up. In fact, we’d have been virtually full this coming weekend courtesy of three such bookings yet two have already cancelled and we’re not too confident about the third.

So, what we started doing a few weeks back was to offer these people two options: 1) we charge them the full balance immediately and it’s not refundable and 2) we cancel the booking and inform the authorities. The first cancellation has just arrived. She was none too pleased that we’d billed her several hundred euros yet we gave her the option of paying or cancelling nearly three weeks ago and, as expected, received no response. After all, if she let us cancel her booking and inform the authorities she’d not have gotten her visa, would have been tagged as someone who makes fraudulent visa applications and may it may have affected her right of residence in the UK.

The liquidity ratio of a bank is something that doesn’t matter to most people but it’s something that has become rather important following the collapse of the Northern Rock this week.

Oh, sorry, it hasn’t collapsed. It just doesn’t have any money of its own to give out to its customers.

What the liquidity ratio is is the percentage of the assets of the bank that are held in cash ie the amount that they can actually pay out. For the UK, the average liquidity ratio is just 3%. That might seem pretty low but in reality it’s more than enough as there’s obviously a constant flow of deposits and withdrawals.

However, when the flow is all outwards as in the case of the Northern Rock, that 3% isn’t really enough and that’s when they need to pay a visit to the Bank of England to ask for a few quid to keep them afloat.

As we said last week, the Northern Rock is finished. In reality that probably doesn’t matter as it’ll be taken over by one of the banks that were very keen to buy it just a year or two back. Let’s not forget that that they were very highly thought of not so long ago as an excellently run mortgage bank which just goes to show that having an excellent reputation doesn’t mean that a bank is “safe” (the Equitable Life was also very well run, of course).

This all begs the question as to whether the Bank of England should support the Northern Rock. After all, it didn’t support BCCI in 1991. What’s different is that the Northern Rock is a UK owned institution and the BoE want to maintain the image of the UK banking system being a safe place to bank. Something to bear in mind when looking for somewhere to deposit your money as several of the banks paying the top savings rates aren’t UK owned.