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News and editorial on life from the south of France, a regular series on how to move here and some random musings too.
Recent Posts Tagged With 'politics'
A good start for the new OU vice chancellor
I’m generally a message in a bottle kind of person as far as political activism goes rather than being that proactive with firing off letters to all and sundry as Wendy tends to do. However, I thought that I’d drop the new Open University...
A note to the new OU vice chancellor
Unfortunately, Martin Bean has been appointed in what seem sure to be “interesting times” for the OU thanks to the ELQ funding fiasco that’s going to start hitting them particularly hard quite soon. Sadly, there seems to be little t...
Some thoughts on avoiding the ELQ fee sting
The more I read about the ELQ debate, the crazier it seems to become. At the moment, I’m actually exempt from what might be crazy increases in university fees as I live in Northern Ireland which is one of the minor exemptions in the grand scale...
So what’s this ELQ business and why’s it such a big deal for the Open University?
The first time I came across ELQ (Equivalent and Lower Qualifications) was a year or two back when it was mentioned in one of the rare rallying cry type emails that come out from the Open University. What’s it all about? Well, basically the gov...
Are there any Northern Irish people out there?
One of the oddities of Northern Ireland is that the almost total lack of cross-over between the Scottish descent population and the Irish descent population imeans that complete lack of comprehension in some areas can still exist even now. For instan...
Now that Nightjack’s blog identity has been sprung and bloggers are no longer anonymous anymore, perhaps it’s time to “out” the anonymous newspaper correspondents and sources too?
Thanks to the Times it seems that bloggers no longer have the priviledge of anonymity. To be fair in the case of Nightjack the police who he worked for were closing in on him and would probably have worked out who he was fairly soon even without the ...
Are there any sensible lessons being learned following the Baby P fiasco?
So much went wrong in this particular case that it’s hard to know where to even start. The social services have an awful lot to answer for in this one. For a start, although they didn’t directly kill Peter clearly their inept actions cont...
Just what SHOULD you be allowed to carry on a plane?
Not so long ago the list of things that you could legitimately carry on board with you was long: a case (up to 110 cm total dimensions) plus an assortment of “personal items” which included such things as a handbag, coat, umbrella, walking stick,...
