Foreign Perspectives

Physically disabled people obviously need a bit of a hand in the ever larger car parks outside major supermarkets these days but the problem is in identifying those people who actually need that bit of a hand.

At the moment, the identification is purely through possession of one of the “disabled parking” badges on a car. The problem is that these seem to be handed out like confetti with many people possessing them who clearly don’t need them but get them purely through reason of them being old. Yes, some old people need them but those are disabled old people, not those that are simply old and see it as their right to have one of those disabled badges. It’s as bad with the parent and child (formerly mother and child as it remains in some places). Yes, you need a wider bay to unload the kids into a pram, but you don’t need a wider bay for teenagers (unless they’re so stupid that they just swing the doors out).

What’s really needed are two stickers: a “parking close” one and a “wide bay” one.

At the moment, there seem to be very few people in our local supermarket who would need the “parking close” one which is as you would expect. After all, even if you parked in the closest disabled or child parking spot to the door, you’d still have to travel several hundred yards within the store to get to the back and would probably end up travelling something like a mile or more if you went round all the aisles. Thus “disabled” people who claim that they need to park close to the shop really only need to do so if they have a wheelchair in which case they actually need a “wide bay” sticker.

It’s obviously different in smaller shops but for supermarkets it appears that a massive reduction in the “disabled” slots (and probably in the parent & child ones too) would help those people who really need them.

In theory my course decisions for the next couple of years should be very easy in that I spent time on working out my overall course schedule a couple of years ago.

Now, to be fair, the OU messed me up by changing the goal posts last year and cutting short all the named science degrees. However, that simply resulted in a change in the sequence of the courses rather than a change in the overall strategy. Now that I’m actually getting going on the courses it’s introduced a few more thoughts.

To begin with my overall plan was to do both a physics and a psychology degree. In practice, I ended up started on the psychology degree last year though once that was underway it turned out that it was sensible to add in a biology course which I’m in the process of finishing off. Then, thanks to the OUs cancellation of named science degrees, I needed to get going on the physics hence I’m in the midst of the astronomy course right now.

Overall, this has the effect that I’m effectively in the midst of a psychology, biology and physics degree or rather courses from all three. The problem is that I’m finding that the biology is both much easier than expected and extremely interesting too. On the other hand, I’m finding that the astronomy isn’t as interesting as I’d expected it to be. Strangely I now find myself wondering if biology rather than physics would be the way to go for me. Thus, I’ve not yet gotten around to signing up for the major physics course starting this October.

Ordinarily, this would be fine but with the withdrawal of all named science degrees kicking in over the next couple of years it means that when I choose either physics or biology I definitely won’t be able to do the other one.

By the time the shorter holidays swing round we seem to have built up a massive list of things that we should take the kids to. Summer isn’t so bad as there’s a couple of months to play with but it can get pretty bad during the shorter holidays like Easter.

In fact, Easter seems to be the worst of these. Not only do the kids and ourselves have a list of things that have accumulated since Christmas but there’s a whole host of activities going on aimed at kids all over the place. Almost all of these activities fall from the Saturday through to Easter Monday though so there’s not so many that you can actually get to and, on the whole, we always miss out on at least a couple that we’d have liked to have gotten to.

Over that Saturday to Monday period we always seem to end up with both of the little guys pretty much totally worn out and this year has been no different. Saturday ended up relatively quiet but we made up for that on Sunday and Monday with all day trips to Castleward and Portrush which left them both exhausted.

Still, at least we’d fairly grim weather on Tuesday which gave them (and us!) a bit of a chance to get some rest.

One of the most striking things about the Gordon Brown entourage this morning was just how staged it was.

Although he passed numerous people along the way, strangely his entourage of supposedly the normal public were about as diverse a mix of races as you could possibly manage to collect anywhere in the UK. Of course, they weren’t really the normal public at all: the majority of these were labour party supporters bused in especially to make sure that Gordon Brown came across as being attractive to all races represented in the UK today.

Incredibly cynical, wasn’t it?

Yes, the UK is now, as it has been for centuries, a multi-cultural country but do we really need artificially created entourages to try to show one party or another is the one to best represent the UK today? I think not.

The mechanics of UK government are a little peculiar in the period between governments.

This morning Gordon Brown finally asked the Queen to dissolve parliament so that the election period could begin. In practice, of course, the process of government continues but with the small problem that no major decisions can be taken because there’s technically nobody in charge for the next four weeks. Thus the civil service continues to run the country as it always has done but can’t head off at a tangent and needs to be mindful that a different party could (probably will) be in charge next month and thereby acquires in effect a veto power that ordinarily it wouldn’t have.

In that no-mans land period the various parties should be finding themselves kept somewhat more informed as to what’s actually happening within the government machinery. After all, if/when the new lot take charge it’s an overnight change of power unlike the more laid back timetable of the American changes of administration. In effect, the changeover of the administration or rather the preparations for a potential change of administration begins today. Let’s hope that no really big decisions need to be taken in the next four weeks!

The first fruits of that have already been noticed with the arrival of the security protection for the conservative leadership team and, behind the scenes, confidential briefings. There’ll be more, of course, in the weeks to come. After all, labour no longer form the government and so in this interim period there needs to be a balance since the former labour ministers should no longer have the advantage of having the trappings of government if those aren’t similarly on offer to the former opposition party too.

So what next? Expect the annoying arrival of party political broadcasts on our screens and politicians on our doorsteps and a massive increase in junk mail from them all.