Financial & Travel Musings

Probably about the only time any of us even briefly consider exit signs is during the safety run-through just before our plane takes off, if even then.

However, though we might not consider them the vast majority of the time, naturally they are pretty important little items if the time does come when they’re needed. That’s when you really appreciate that there’s all kinds of regulations surrounding them stating things like the minimum size of the letters, how often the batteries are changed and so on.

These days some of them (though not all, surprisingly) even come in braille and, of course, you’ll have seen various combinations of colours being used in them all with the intention of producing a sign that’s readable through smoke and so on.

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Since we’re on the move soon and so in the process of packing things up. Now everything, mind you, as we’ll be back here in the summer all being well but even so it means we’re going through all the stuff that’s accumumated here over the years to sort out what’s to go and what can stay.

What’s surprised me lately is some of the marking sheets for courses that I’d completed a few years back. One in particular I thought that I’d not done overly well at but reality seems a little different in that the marking sheet I came across this morning has a very pleasing 70% on it.

I have wondered what to do with the old course materials though. For sentimental reasons I’d quite like to take them with us but realistically I can’t see me ever looking at any of it. Well, we’ll put that in the “quite like to bring” pile for now I think in case it can be fitted in. What I am bringing though are the big French and Spanish dictionaries. I only used the French one to look up around a half dozen words in each of the three exams but I was using the Spanish one properly for a couple of years (ie outside the exam!).

What may also be on the way to me is the psychology course. It sort-of seems silly to have that posted to me here but seeing as it seems a heavy-hitter of a course it seems prudent to have it in my hands a few weeks earlier than I would get it were I to wait ’til we get back to the UK.

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Yes, it’s that time of year yet again when all good bloggers write a time delayed post to totally clog up the Internet and do their review of the year.

So, what did we get up to this year?

Well, for one thing, this blog was born on February 1st. I’ve actually had the domain for getting on for 10 years now but had previously just used it as somewhere to pick up email and for testing other websites from time to time.

The plan was that it would be a trully personal blog with content that interested me as time went by. One side effect of that is that it’s collected together essentially the things that didn’t fit into my other blogs which has had the result that posts here haven’t been quite so frequent as I’d originally expected them to be. That’s turned out to be a big problem for some other notional blogs notably OnAPostcard.com which we started out well with but which turned out to have just too wide-ranging a remit to stick to. Much as I wouldn’t want to be forced down the advertising led targeted blog, it would appear that some targeting makes for an easier to write blog.

On the non-blogging front, we had a surprisingly good year here in France but are heading back to our UK home in January. Why? Well, we’ve basically ran into the sand with James’ education and it would appear that in this particular area he could only ever expect to fail as the infrastructure to support foreign children just isn’t in place in this area. That leaves the problem of selling this place in what’s a rather difficult economic client to say the least so our game plan is to run here July & August (which generally pull in around 2/3rds of the total annual income) and work in the UK the rest of the year thus, in theory, giving us the best of both worlds. James & John will get their education in the UK whilst they’ll also get the benefit of living in France for at least part of the year. Having said that, it’s not going to be overlly easy as you might expect.

Whilst all that’s been going on I had a surprisingly easy finish to my BA (Hons) Modern Languages degree this year with the English course being considerably easier than everyone had said it would be. In 2009 I’m making a start on psychology with a Child Development course starting this February. With everything else that’ll be going on in our lives I’m not sure that’s a good move but then it’s seemed like that several times during the course of the languages degree too.

All being well the world will manage to get into clearer economic water in the coming year. If nothing else, most of the governments around the world seem to be pulling out all the stops on that front. There is the not so insignificant problem of paying for all that borrowing though if/when all their work does pay off. Still, for now, it’s good to see the world operating pretty much as one for a change.

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