Foreign Perspectives

My Dad would have been 84 today had he lived but, sadly, he didn’t quite make it to even 82.

The photo here was taken on whilst he was over in France with us for John’s first birthday.

That’s the pity really… John was only 3 when he died so for him his Granda left him half a lifetime ago. We were over in France for most of John’s life up to that point whilst James grew up knowing him most of his first couple of years of life.

Interestingly though, both of them continue to mention him every couple of months or so and they haven’t forgotten him as much as I’d thought they would have by now. Sadly, they both have fewer memories of him than I’d hoped they would have had over the years but sometimes they create memories of him in situations where they would have expected him to be. Thus, James mentioned that Granda would have been there on his first day at he new school and that he’d have still been looking after them in what’s still their favourite park.

Of course, in many ways most of their “memories” of him will be of things that they would have expected him to have done over the years but which he didn’t live long enough to do. So he didn’t see them start in their new school, didn’t get to see James in the end of year event nor either of them in the Christmas carol singing. But they carry the memory of what he would have done through their experience of the things that he did do for them.

I think it’s fantastic that they can keep the memory of their Granda alive in that way.

Not so long ago there were all kinds of restrictions on transferring money abroad due to currency controls that lots of countries had in place. They’re almost all gone now and it has become more of a natural thing for “ordinary people” to need to transfer money abroad.

Most of the time it’s due to holidays, of course, but an increasing number of us are becoming small scale international jet setters with homes in more than one country and with both of those come a need to transfer money abroad.

Holidays usually involve a different category of currency conversion in that you are on the spot when you need the money, the amounts involved are smaller and you probably don’t have a local bank account. However, whilst the amounts may be smaller individually, added up over the years they will come to quite a hefty sum. Also, many of those who holiday in the same country each year may be considering the purchase of a property there and so have that local account too.

Most people ignore the costs of all those international transactions to their detriment. One friend of mine found that almost 10% of his entire salary was going in such bank charges simply because he was living abroad and using his “home” account in exactly the same way that he always had ie lifting small amounts frequently.

Saving money on those transactions is usually fairly easy. If you don’t want to change your bank, check out exactly how they charge for use of credit, debit and cash cards abroad. You will usually find that debit and cash cards are more economic ways of getting cash than credit cards are in that you won’t be paying interest on the money. However, that’s not to say that they are cheap. Typically a withdrawal of £100 in the local currency will cost you £4 to £5 but note that this includes a fixed transaction charge so withdrawing £20 will cost you around £2 ie 10% whereas £200 would be about £7 ie 3.5%. You can eliminate these charges altogether with some travel money cards.

It’s slightly better if you buy things, usually. Using a typical Mastercard or Visa card will only incur the foreign exchange charge ie buying £100 of goods will cost you £2.75 and that £20 item would be 70p. Therefore you should buy things with the card directly rather than lifting the cash to pay for them.

What about larger amounts ie if you’re living abroad or have a holiday home abroad? Well, if you follow our advice and get one of the better travel money cards you can lift £500 per day which means that it’s quite viable to use that card in conjunction with a local bank account to transfer amounts equivalent to several thousand pounds. You certainly couldn’t buy a house in that way but it’s enough to fund the payments for electicity bills and the like.

If you are talking thousands, then the usual way is to ask your bank to do a SWIFT transfer. This will cost around £25 plus there’s a currency exchange charge (which isn’t widely known). However, that too can be eliminated in some circumstances. For example, if you bank with HSBC then you can do free transfers to an HSBC account elsewhere in the world but the HSBC Premier account that you need to avail of this costs £20/month (unless you have £50,000 or more on deposit with them) so it’s not as useful as it first appears. However, if you are buying in Spain, the Halifax run to a free account which offers free transfers from Halifax UK accounts to Halifax Spain ones. What’s less obvious is that this route gives you a pretty much free way from pounds sterling to euros anywhere in Europe as banks are required to transfer euros at the same level of charges in other European countries as they do domestically ie to get euros in an account in France, you could transfer from the Halifax UK to Halifax Spain and from there to a French bank.

Other options include the use of the specialised money transfer services such as HiFX (there are lots of similar services around).

We could do with an extra couple of days added on to the week at the moment.

The kids are busy with their Christmas extravaganza at the moment. I think the school were rather optimistic about the staying power of 4 to 8 year old children as they’re running four performances of it over the course of this week and after just one day our little guys were pretty worn out. It also throws up extra stuff for us to do with a performance to go to later today and needing to pick them up before lunch on Thursday.

Friday will be even busier with Mum to be taken to the performance for the elderly in the morning, the Kip McGrath class just after school, immediately after that John has a party to go to and then just after that we’re off to a BBQ thing at the church. Yeah, I know, it’s not BBQ weather at the moment so we’re not 100% sure about going to that.

Next week is looking quite busy too with our first free slot not coming up until Thursday!

This is a course that certainly doesn’t hang around to let you admire the view. With a cut-off date of December 3rd, it was marked on the 6th.

Considering that it was my first history course since way before the A-levels I’m quite pleased with the mark. Actually, I’d have been moderately pleased with it even if I’d been doing history classes all along so definitely a decent start to the course.

At the moment, I’m in the midst of doing the TT280 ECA which requires a major change in style from the archaeology. There’s a major difference in the time I’ve been taking to do it too. So far, in the second day of working on it I’ve almost half of it complete vs somewhat longer to so the archaeology TMA.

The plan is that I complete TT280 over the next week or so, closely followed by the final question for SK185 and then it’s on to the second A251 TMA which is on the factors affecting the emergence of cities. It’s more explicit on this one that Internet references are required (which probably lost me getting on for 10% on the first one as I only added one at the last minute). The 1500 words isn’t split into two parts this time though you still need to consider old and new world sites which makes it quite a tight word limit.

Although I’m over half way through the reading for the course I’m still not sure whether I like it or not. The massive amount of reading makes for a feeling of not seeing the wood for the trees a lot of the time and in some sections it felt very much like sites were being listed just for the sake of listing them rather than furthering the argument. That reading volume also means that it’s very hard to keep a handle on the big picture and to keep in mind the sequence of events happening over the course of thousands of years and in any one of a half dozen or so separate regions. On the other hand, it’s been a fascinating journey ranging from the earliest farming in Mesopotamia around 12,000 BC through to, so far, Chinese empires in the first millennium AD.

I suspect that in practice this really needs to be a full credit course as it often feels like you’re just skating over the surface. That seems particularly to be the case with the Chinese empires which are into the historical period and for which there is oodles of documented history. For example, Confucius was only given a page when there have been entire books written on his works.

What is with this country? The second busiest airport in the country is closed, trains are stranded and thousands of people can’t get out of their houses. All because of a relatively small amount of snow.

What on earth would it be like if there was another mini iceage like they had in the 1800s when the Thames was regularly frozen?

Ironically, it would probably be a whole lot easier going. The reason for many of the problems this year is simply that the UK as a whole simply isn’t prepared for really cold weather. Were it to be a regular feature of our climate then more money would be thrown at the problem and many of the difficulties that we’re currently experiencing would go away. After all, colder countries don’t have all these issues.