radders
What can I say? A little anecdote not a million miles removed from your own experience: our current local dentist comes from Santo Domingo via Miami; he has a friend living in Birmingham, England, and he was invited to visit there over the Christmas period. His first words to us when we went to see him about some dental problem after his return was this: why are there no English people in Birmingham? As with so much that is written, nothing can make up for facial expressions and body language of the excxhange.
I don´t think you´ll have much fun in Edinburg either - it has/had? the reputation of being Scotland´s drugs capital with all the crime that you´d expect. However, it does have pleasant enough buildings and some reasonable galleries and museums; not that I´m suggesting that Scotland is fast becoming a museum itself, a caricature of its distant past, perish the thought that I would! I do not believe that you will find successive generations have fared any better in Scotland than in England for much the same reasons - life has become a vicious circle of financial need inspired by greed which in turn creates further inflation and further need and so on into infinity.
That sound a little strange to young ears, I am sure, but for the sake of explaining the point, let´s take the 50s as a datum line, if only because that´s the period from where my own memory starts to be reliable. The norm, in middle-class households at least, was for the father to go and earn the money for the survival of the family and the wife would manage the home and take parental care of any children. The system worked well enough, but then cultural changes crept into the equation and women began to seek work outwith the domestic domain. The huge debate ever since, for those interested in such things, has been this: did the women choose to take on external employment because they wanted to escape from maternal duties or did they do so because of financial need? In other words, I guess that I´m probably posing a classical chicken or egg question: did change happen by virtue of need or of desire? Not the same things at all.
But, the result has been catastrophic. Parental responsibility is largely absent with the resulting feral kids (not all from poor homes) owning the streets; ready-prepared meals would seem to be normal as few people have either time, inclination or even the skill to use the glamorous kitchens that they buy; family life as in the tradition of marriage is fast vanishing - hell, the list is endless, but you get the picture. Before women´s lib gets dragged into this, let me say that neither my wife nor any of her friends that I met were ever shrinking violets - none had need of the sorority to promote their interests; they managed very well on their own, thank you.
The result of all the changing factors in modern life has been to create greater appetites and must-have attitudes which can only be financed (in general) via two salaries, to my mind the root of much that´s wrong with contemporary life.
The madness of uncontrolled immigration is probabably the single most talked about topic today in the British media - I need not go there here. (Interesting, that last half-sentence. I wonder what I meant?)
Futt Futt
I assumed wrong? Surely, you mean wrongly? Just teasing. Also, I don´t think it´s fair to include people with dyslexia and other problems beyond their control in this discussion. I have the digital equivalent of dyslexia with my fingers: I seem to hit the wrong keys with almost unlimited abandon these days - you are fortunate not to have to see my posts (except for the last one, written in a hurry and posted as lunch went onto the table, forcing me into an edit after lunch in order to save my blushes).
As for learning the language here in Spain - it depends where you live. In a tourist area as is mine, the problem lies in the opposite direction: try getting a local to speak to you in his language! They all want to improve their English and you become the ideal teacher. Well, sometimes they pick the wrong teachers, but how are they to know?
You mention a desire to live abroad. An admirable though I have to say, but one which you should consider very carefully. I have no idea of your age, though I imagine you to be fairly young - say under thirty-five? Neither have I any idea of your financial situation but let me say this: at one stage in my life I acquired an agent in Barcelona. He came over to the island to meet me and I mentioned that I´d been thinking of moving to Barcelona because of the model agencies etc. and he was horrified. He looked around my property here and informed me that to find something similar there would be beyond my reality as a photographer. Hardly surprising, really, just the same as was the situation when I lived in Scotland: my home, complete with purpose-built studio and parking for five cars (which we certainly did not have) would probably have bought a garage in London, a very convincing argument for staying where we were.
For what it´s worth, I think the ideal way to travel is on commission. You don´t have to slum it, you don´t have to worry about money - if you quote correctly - and can see life abroad at comfortable levels. That was very much an incentive for me all my career; however, it seems that since the advent of digital and suicide stock agencies, foreign asignments are becoming fairly rare.
I wish you luck with your ambitions - the only way to find out if they will work is to do it!
Ciao - Rob C
