Foreign Perspectives

Mum’s journey into a nursing home was largely unplanned for and constantly suffering from delays on the part of social services but she’s been there for several months now. That’s created a much greater involvement with social services and social security than we’ve had up to now and it’s something of a nightmare on the whole.

First off, the financial assessment people want a whole bunch of information about her finances. That sounded like it would be simple when they demanded it (“ask” isn’t in their vocabulary) but in fact it isn’t. Even getting information from their colleagues in social security proved extremely difficult. In fact, that difficulty should really be obvious: you’re phoning up to ask about someone else’s financial situation. Naturally, the answer is along the lines “we can’t provide that information to you”.

On the other side of the coin their colleagues in social services are concerned about protecting her finances. Well, protecting them for themselves really as their view is that all her assets were built up to pay for nursing home fees. However, there’s a conflict in their demands and those of the financial assessment people.

Then there’s the matter of transferring numerous direct debits built up over a period of time. Not quite so simple really although that at least appears to be doable for the most part with the exception, so far, of Sky who can’t get their head around needing to cancel Sky because the person using and paying for it has moved into a nursing home. I look forward to their demands for payment now that I’ve canceled the direct debit. Well, actually, I won’t get them as they insist on speaking to the bill payer, who ain’t here any more.

Anyway, I think I’m on the home run with moving the bills to appropriate places.

Nobody is openly calling it a depression but then it’s a difficult call to say whether you’re in a depression or not when you’re actually in the midst of one.

Aside from the obvious financial difficulties that a growing list of countries are finding themselves in, signs this time around are seemingly all around on the smaller scale too. The list of bankrupts seems to be growing although that’s not really a terribly reliable sign in these days of financial engineering.

What’s perhaps more obvious is the number of small shops gradually disappearing. The smaller shops are more dependent on the local economy than the large chain stores and they tend not to have a large financial cushion to help them ride through the bad times either. Indicative of this too is the rise in the number of charity shops which can operate through financial difficulties as they don’t pay their staff nor do they pay for their stock. Thus in difficult times, charity shops tend to replace small shops.

Slightly strangely in some ways is that the chip shops and home bakeries are closing up. Two different reasons are working here with the chip shops suffering as they’re popular as cheap food outlets and thus have a fall-off in trade when those at the bottom end of the income levels have to make cuts. To some extent that affects the home bakeries too but there’s also the element of their products being a bit of a treat and that “treat money” is in shorter supply these days.

Will we all look back on this period ten or fifteen years from now and call it a depression? Somehow I suspect that the answer to that will be yes and that there are even more difficult times lying ahead.

Whilst playing around with book borrowing on the Android, I came across a brilliant little book on sketching: You can draw in 30 days. I’ve always meant to learn how to draw properly and this book is just the ticket for that. Each lesson takes around 20 minutes or so to do though there are supplementary exercises that would double that time if you wanted a little more practice.

What’s really amazing though is that after only a couple of the lessons, the sketches begin to look like proper drawings. So far it’s only spheres and boxes mind you but just using those you’re drawing a little castle by the seventh lesson which is pretty good going I think.

This is the first course where I’ve had an iCMA to do. In principle they’re the same as CMAs but, if the first one is anything to go by, they’re much shorter (only four questions), you have to do them whilst you’re online and you can’t print them out to mull over.

Shorter is certainly good. There are five iCMAs and an EMA for this course which looked like quite a lot of work. In practice it took about 10 minutes to do this one so hopefully the remaining four will be of a similar length and be equally easy to fit in.

Doing them online is a bit of a pain as is the inability to print them off (or at least to do so easily). That ties you to the computer while you’re doing the questions although you don’t have to do them all at once. Not being able to print them off is probably the biggest nuisance though as you’ve no record of what you’ve put in unless you  type them all out separately (which I’ve done).

The format is not fantastic this time around as all four are multi-part questions of various types. For instance, this time around two were “select one or more of”, one was “complete the following sentences” and the final one was “select two options”. One answer seemed decidedly iffy (definitely wrong in fact) but there’s no “unsound question” option on the iCMA.

Anyway, that leaves the road clear for the chemistry TMA which I will be starting on during the week.

I’m doing this one basically to ease myself back into the psychology and a brief leaf through the DVD last week showed up a whole bunch of relatively familiar terminology.

This is one of the new-style online tutoring courses which in principle should be excellent but, so far, they don’t seem to have hit on a totally successful formula for them. The problem is basically that as the tutoring is done in a course-wide group, they need everyone to be moving along at roughly the same speed which for SK124 means that the various assignments are only released three weeks ahead of the due date. Unlike the TT courses, where the course materials were released three weeks in advance, you could actually finish working through all of the course material but that would mean that you’d be doing the assignments weeks or possibly months after you’d covered the relevant material which would make them a little harder.

As it’s a 15 pointer spread over 20 weeks it looks like the course will proceed at a relatively sedate pace. There’s quite a lot of DVD based material but as a rough guide it looks like a chapter a fortnight rather than the usual chapter a week rate for OU courses. The first chapter is largely introductory but as I completed it in a couple of hours it looks like the course won’t eat up a lot of time.

So what is autism anyway? Well, it’s a range of conditions that exhibit in the form of difficulties in communication, varying degrees of inflexibility eg needing things to remain the same and/or repetitive actions, and social isolation. Although there seems to be a big genetic component, there also seems to be an aspect of environmental factors which may trigger it (though nobody knows what they are yet).