Foreign Perspectives

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.

The sleepy village of Rothbury has largely been cut off from the outside world for the last few days and now finds itself knee deep in TV crews this evening thanks to Raoul Moat being finally cornered in the village.

As you might expect the relief is clear within the village and behind the camera crews there seems to be very much a carnival atmosphere with the end game of this chase taking place just a few hundred yards beyond. That might seem unseemly to some but these people have essentially been confined to their houses and in fear of their lives for several days now so it’s very much a relief to be close to returning to the normality of their sleepy village once more.

The police negotiating team are hard at work. Some might ask why bother but it’s just natural for the police to try to avoid further bloodshed whenever they can. Thus the negotiator will be attempting to build up a sense of trust between them and Raoul through agreeing to simple things like providing him with something to eat and drink. What they’re building to is to get him to hand over his weapon of course but that will take time in what seems sure to be a tense situation so don’t expect major developments anytime soon.

What does seem a bit over the top is the sheer number of police officers and vehicles although that should be set against the growing numbers of press and bystanders rather than the lone gunman.

As we move towards the hours of darkness they’ll be keen to move all those bystanders a little further back. You might think that floodlighting the area would be the way to go but that’s likely to increase tension still further and is therefore something to be avoided.

In that it’s a lone gunman, the final stages shouldn’t be too many hours more. After all, he’s going to have to sleep at some stage. However, that very tiredness will make the negotiations that little bit more difficult especially as we’re dealing with someone who seemed set on suicide earlier.

When the news is largely boring as it often is in the summer months I sometimes flick over to Al Jazeera to see what they’ve to say about things.

Obviously it’s got more of an interest in middle eastern affairs so the mix of news is a bit different. However, for the most part the difference is more of a matter of depth of coverage much as CNN cover American news stories in more depth than the BBC do.

However, where it got more interesting was a week or so back when they were interviewing the boss of NASA.

Whereas most of us in the western world would consider NASA as a purely civilian outfit, the Al Jazeera interviewer seemed almost to consider it as a purely military outfit. Thus, he continually pressed Major General Bolden about the arms race in the 1960s that got America to the moon and about the military satellites which they launch and both of which Bolden evaded answering properly. Overall it seemed a very antagonistic interview.

The thing is though that although Bolden evaded both issues in fact were it not for the cold war in the 1960s it’s unlikely that America would have had the impetus to their space programme to go to the moon quite so quickly. The Sputnik flying unchallenged over American airspace certainly wasn’t appreciated when America had nothing similar at the time. Likewise, although NASA is a civilian organisation by and large, it does launch a number of military satellites and there seems little point in evading that issue. Indeed on their own website NASA are quite open about some of their military launches such as the GPS satellites.

It’s certainly interesting now and again to see just how different a viewpoint some in the Arab world have of what America gets up to.

The Kumon tutor is off on holiday for the rest of July so we were given enough of the worksheets to keep us going for the rest of the month and it’s a frightening heap of paper – getting on for an inch and a half of worksheets for each of our little guys.

Actually, it could have been more but we’re running at half the normal number for the harder of the two subjects for each of them at the moment. In theory we’re aiming to move to full speed during August but we’ll see how July pans out. Since we’ve just moved to two subjects for each of them, we’ve not quite established the new working pattern for the worksheets and, of course, it’s the school holidays at the moment so it would be different anyway.

We’re hoping that the sheer mountain of work ahead won’t put them off. In the normal little weekly doses it doesn’t look nearly so great!