Financial & Travel Musings

I’m not really into dancing but live in a household where missing Strictly Come Dancing is a major crime. Even though we could time-shift it, that’s not seen as an acceptable option.

Anyway, net effect of that is that I end up not so much watching it as sitting in the room when it’s on. So, I look at different things and wonder how the few bits of cloth (”dress” hardly seems the word sometimes) stay up and observe that it’s probably the only place where tuxedo shirt seems dressing down. And why on earth they bothered getting Ronnie Corbet last week.

Marginally more interesting sometimes is wondering where on earth the judges get their marks from when some really naff dancers get 5s but I guess it’s to do with keeping up viewer interest over the course of the series.

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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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Well, of course, my hobbies are perfectly serious, it’s your hobbies that are peculiar, aren’t they

Whatever your hobby is, I can confidently say that you’re spending more on it than you would do if you had to cost out the benefits to you of it. Many of us would baulk at the amount the horsey set spend on equestrian clothing but that’s just a more obviously non-cost effective spend as hobbies go. Even at the really cheapo end of hobbies such as Tai Chi many find themselves buying the clothing yet it’s not as if you can’t do Tai Chi in the t-shirt and shorts that you already have, is it?

At the end of the day many of the things that we lump under the heading of “hobby” are really just to fill in the day. Nothing wrong with that, of course, and anything you call “hobby” is usually something that interests you and that you like doing which makes the money spent on it something of a side-issue.

Except for those collecting classic cars. Now, there’s a seriously expensive hobby!

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