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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 'society'
Overlapping course for the first time
Up to now I’ve stuck with one course per year in my time with the Open University which has given that time something of a pottering along feel to it all. However, I managed to let myself get talked into thinking about overlapping courses over ...
My Dad
My Dad died a year ago today so I thought it would be appropriate to write a little about him a year on from then. People still ask me if I miss him. The funny thing is that I don’t. I’ve thought about why that is off and on over the last...
Isn’t is it annoying the way thieves trash your place as well as stealing stuff?
Sadly, we’ve just heard the news that some ******** have broken into our house in France and trashed the place. What seems pretty much a cert is that the things that they took (seemingly less than a dozen things in total although we need to do ...
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...
Have they picked a set of Big Brother housemates that’s just too weird this time?
When a show has been running for a while it generally needs a bit of a refresh to keep the viewers interested but in a change to this approach Big Brother has largely kept the same format but seems to have gone for a different approach in selecting t...
Personalised tourism around the world… for free!
Wouldn’t you like to have a personalised tour of the holiday destination that you’re going to rather than being herded around by some impersonal tour? I’m sure that many people would but figure that it’s bound to be too expens...
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...
When Vanessa George can get away with child pornography, what’s the point of the Criminal Records Bureau check?
When we got back from France it wasn’t long before James was set to go on a school outing and the school were asking for parents to volunteer to come along to help with looking after the children. So, we volunteered or rather we tried to becaus...
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,...
How DO you measure the effectiveness in attracting traffic of a change in your website?
The number of hits that myself and Wendy have been picking up on our main blogs has gone up quite dramatically over the last month or two and, ideally, we’d like to know why that is but, of course, the problem is that we’ve not just done ...
Would you, should you or can you advertise on Twitter?
Although you might not think there was a whole lot of scope for advertising in a medium that only gives you 140 characters to play with, there are a growing number of ways to advertise through Twitter although whether or not they’re actually ef...
Just how do you go about making a sci-fi prequel?
Once the original Star Trek series started to do really well in syndication after it had been canceled it was obvious that “something” would be produced to follow it up although it was probably not so obvious that so many “somethings” would b...
Just who is “the media” these days? Legally it DOES include bloggers or at least those based in the UK
There’s been an ongoing debate for a number of years now as to whether or not bloggers are the same as journalists some of the time, all of the time, or never but thanks to moves from an unexpected quarter that debate is starting to become a mo...
The Arnold & Wendy diet plan
As you may know we’ve been gradually ramping up our weight loss programme over the last couple of months and are just about to step it up another gear. What we’ve been doing so far is to reduce our sugar and salt intake by changing our di...
Aren’t diet pills confusing?
Now that I’ve started thinking about going down the pill route to jump start the transition to a trimmer me, I’m all confused! OK, so fat burners are presumably about speeding up the use of fat within your body. Easy, though sometimes wit...
Slowing down for Christmas
We’re in the midst of our customary Christmas closing and generally lazing around at the moment. Boxing Day brought us our first serious bought of snow for several years and for a while it was looking like we’d be snowed in for quite a wh...
