Foreign Perspectives

After a bit of an early start for the plane, I got to the Nottingham campus just after 11.30am to find a queue of people already there registering for the summer school.

As I’m here so early there’s nothing much to do for a while. Registration continues on to 3.30pm but towards the end it must be mainly for stragglers as the introductory lecture starts then and it’s about half an hour walk from the halls to the medical centre where the lecture is being held.

Useful to know is that Lenton Cabs (0115 9 781 781) only charge students £19 for the airport run vs the £35 of the airport taxis (and, yes, they can pick up from the airport for the same charge).

They’ve divided us up into three groups for the three themes of the summer school. I’ll be starting with the regulation and control theme tomorrow so will be attending the briefing on that at 4.20pm this afternoon. There’s a break after that before dinner at 6pm but then it’s back for a couple of lectures running form 7.15pm through to 8.45pm.

The shops on campus are closed over the weekend so for stocking up on nibbles I’ll have to take a walk into town (about 30 mins each way).

In the room is a phone (free internal calls), wired internet connection (you need a cable for this which you can get (free) in the Cripps security office; the wifi is quite poor in the room), desk, tea/coffee tray with kettle, sink, wardrobe, towels (with soap & shampoos) and a single bed. The shower-room and toilet is shared  by about half a dozen rooms.

Not so long ago you were encouraged to put as much as you could into checked luggage so that the passenger area of the plane wasn’t cluttered with a whole heap of a little (often a lot) too large carry-on luggage.

Of course, it’s completely different now and they want you to do without checked luggage altogether if you can. Despite their normally over the top approach to charging even Ryanair has raised the carry-on allowances to a notional 10kg  (Ryanair say “It should weigh no more than 10kg”). In practical terms, so long as you go for online check-in, there really isn’t a limit so long as you can actually carry it onto the plane and so long as it’s not too far off the 55x40x20 size.

Even the liquid limits don’t seem overly severe so long as you don’t try to bring drinks. Normal sized tubes of toothpaste might look big but they’re no more than the 100ml limit. You can even bring on drinks so long as you buy them after you’ve passed through security thus avoiding the ridiculous prices on the plane (though don’t be drinking too much on Ryanair as it’s £1 for the toilet).

Laughably these days you’re still not allowed to take “magnetised materials” on-board although that’s a rule that has been totally impractical to enforce since credit cards came on the scene not to mention the magnetic stripe on many tickets. I wonder when it’ll occur to IATA to revise this?

What is a real pain is getting everything into the one bag. As you read this I’ll be struggling to get a weeks worth of clothes plus assorted items for my OU summer school into a bag: white coat, big lump of a course book, computer, etc. I’m sure that there’s room for a “how to pack a carry-on bag” course!

Well, perhaps not all of them but by the sound of it the food in Nottingham University is absolutely dreadful. So bad in fact, that people who have been there before are planning on either doing their own cooking or living on sandwiches and whatnot sold by one of the shops in the students union.

However, there is another option which is the staff canteen, at least at lunchtime. In the evenings it sounds very much like DIY is the way to go so I’ll be doing a little stocking up on Saturday afternoon before the course starts (there’s not a whole lot of time to do that once it gets underway).

Oh well, at least the view from the halls of residence is quite good.

That’s one of the questions that you get asked in the abbreviated test for dementia that doctors sometimes use.

I’m sure that it sounded like a sensible question when the test was first devised but it was devised by people who work “normal” Monday to Friday jobs which, of course, is something entirely different to the kind of activity pattern experienced by the, usually, retired people it’s intended to assess. When you’re retired, by and large, every day is very much like Saturday is to the rest of us with the sole exception of Sunday for church goers.

Another is “who is the Prime Minister” which also isn’t quite such an obvious question in these days when there’s a whole plethora of prime ministers in the UK. And, of course, we’ve just got a new couple at the helm. Thus, not such a valid question after all.

What about asking what year it is? That makes a lot of sense when you’re working but realistically isn’t something that matters a whole lot when you’re retired and don’t work to a calendar.

Which just goes to show how difficult it can be to devise even an apparently simple test.

As expected, the various posts on the Child Development (ED209) course from last year are once more rising in popularity as the next contingent of students reach the same point (ie blind panic) as me and my co-students were a year ago.

The odd thing about that is that over the course of that year there don’t seem to have been any more ED209 bloggers whereas last year three of us appeared on the scene where none had been before.

Anyway, the net effect of that is that the two ED209 revision blogs (ie mine and Tim’s) started picking up hits on the revision topics as from about a month ago and the number of those hits has been rising each week. Presumably the same thing will happen next year with the addition of Tim’s DD303 notes and my own SK277 notes.