Foreign Perspectives

With only two days of heritage days and a massive booklet listing what must be hundreds of places, you really need to take some time to identify what will be the best places to see (assuming that there’s decent weather, of course).

Be careful of the small print as some places are only free on one of the days or have, say, the gardens open both days but tours only free on one of those days. Slightly misleading is that many of the places listed as free (getting on for 90%) are always free although you can find a tour or something similar added in specially for the heritage days.

Always at the top of the list are the National Trust places with all of them open although do read the small print as not all of them are free on both days. However, don’t neglect the equally magnificent privately owned mansions that are only opened on the heritage days eg Killymoon Castle in Cookstown. Although going to the National Trust places will save you a few quid, going to the private houses is something that you can’t normally do and of those I’ve seen the value is at least equal to the National Trust places.

Top amongst my picks has to be the Titanic Boat Tour. Normally at a tenner a go (£30 for a family ticket) this is a little expensive but you can get the same tour free on the 2pm and 3.30pm sailings on both days. It’s fully booked but I’m reliably informed that many people didn’t turn up last year so you’ve a good chance of getting on if you go on the day. If you’re into boat trips there’s one to one of the islands on Lough Neagh leaving at noon which sounds like a great picnic spot.

A little different is the architectural bus tour on the Friday afternoon which looks like it’ll go round some places that you ordinarily wouldn’t see. In a similar vein there are walking tours in a number of towns around the province which, for the most part, are only run for the heritage days.

Reopening just for the heritage days is the Ulster History Park at Gortin. This was an excellent protrayal of pre-historic Ireland but a combination of being a little off the beaten path and not being well sign-posted lead to its closure a few years ago. Hopefully this is a sign that it’ll be reopening properly next year but in the meantime, don’t miss it as in addition to its usual attractions, it’s one of the History Alive events.

Their server isn’t quite up to the job of handling all the requests at the moment so best to pick up the paper form of WonderfulNI instead. Obviously since it’s a European event, Ireland also do an equivalent event although, somewhat more sensibly, it’s at the end of August during the school holidays.

Both the little guys are very happy that they’ve not received any homework from their new school but I think that they’re about to be disappointed on that score.

Aside from that, John still isn’t too happy with the school. It’s probably the biggest change for him as the previous school was run very much as a creche for older children rather than a school as such. The new one is very much a school rather than a creche which will likely mean more of a feeling of school work for him rather than of play.

James isn’t so bad at the moment as at the last school he ended up quite overloaded with teachers and he hasn’t gotten into that treadmill aspect in this school yet.

We’ll see more of how they’re doing in a week or so when we’ve the first official meeting with the teachers.

Up to now I’ve been using the Open University to study things not so much for pleasure but which would enable me to do other things for me or the family. Hence the Modern Languages degree grew out of a desire to move to France and the Child Psychology and Human Biology out of a desire to know some stuff that was useful for the family.

However, after considerable internal debate I’ve decided to go for TT280 which is the first of a set of six short courses spread over about two years that basically amount to a web design training course. Along the way it should update my computing knowledge in a whole host of areas from HTML through to Java and server performance. It’s probably one of the most general computing courses that they offer and seems like one of the best re-entry points into computing. In practical terms, if all goes according to plan, I may pick up some of the topics in more detail through other courses eg I don’t think it covers Java in much detail as there are three 30 point courses on Java and there are much larger courses on server technologies and whatnot.

Although it’s a university course, it seems to be run much more on the lines of a training course with quite a tight timetable in place of the normally more laid back OU timetables from other courses. I’ll be doing the first course (TT280) on its own for much of the 12 weeks but after that, if I do them, the other five courses will be running alongside courses already in my plan.

Usually university open days are held on the campus and you get to ask questions of some of the lecturers who you’ll meet should you take up the offer from the university.

However, the Open University doesn’t work like that as the lecturers are all based in Milton Keynes and outside of summer schools you won’t meet the people who actually produce the courses. What happens on an OU open day is that you get to see a whole bunch of specialist study advisers. Essentially there’s one person for each prospectus thus there’ll be someone for maths/computing, technology, art, science, etc. along with some more people able to deal with more general questions.

Thus it’s not necessarily as useful as it might be. Certainly it’s handy for fairly specific questions about the faculties but if you have a very specific question about a specific course you’ll get an answer if it’s a popular course but not necessarily if it’s one of the oddball ones. Having said that, the people there can put you in touch with someone who can answer questions about those oddball courses too so it’s handy in that respect.

The other problem is that the advisers tend not to know about what’s happening to specific courses outside what’s said on the website about those courses. So, for example, in the science field they’ll know that S204 (the main biology course) is being replaced by two 30 point courses and that one of these is starting in February 2012. What they won’t know is that it’s now looking possible that the second course will never appear (if the forum information is anything to go by).

This recession is turning into a much longer and deeper one than anyone expected which is becoming more visible to a wider range of people as time goes on.

Individual house sales are a fairly rare event for most people so we’re still seeing people putting houses on the market at prices based on a purchase price from a few years ago which, in many cases, was a higher price than the current market will support. That houses won’t sell at these prices is obvious but in many cases the owners simply can’t afford to sell them at the current prices so they add to the collection of “for sale” signs which in turn make things seem a little bit worse as their numbers build. As an example of how far away from the current prices these can be take the example of a house a few hundred yards from me which was bought at the peak of the market at around £300,000 whereas identical houses are now selling (slowly) for around £170,000. Had those people bought on an 80% mortgage they’d need house prices to rise another 40% from their current level just to cover the mortgage.

However, even when houses are priced at an appropriate level that still doesn’t mean that they’ll sell quickly as once a buyer is found and the house is taken off the market it’s quite likely to get the “for sale” sign back as buyers frequently can’t get mortgages: in one local case it took three buyers before reaching one who could get a mortgage.

Sadly all this means that people will be stuck in their houses potentially for decades if they can’t simply write off what could be a substantial loss.