the joy of planning

By alice | August 24, 2007

eiffeltower.jpg

Apparently the best view of the Tour Eiffel is from underneath- good.

It’s getting towards the end of the official summer, with US schools going back next week and UK ones the week after, and this year I’ve hit on a great way of avoiding the end-of-summer blues: planning a proper trip for asap, which happens to be the British autumn half term- around Hallowe’en, great for Euro bargains as the weather is so vile, nobody even wants to go outside.

(American schools hardly have any holiday time at all between the end of August and the following summer vacation- just a couple of weeks in the winter usually- which I think might be one of the biggest reasons why homeschooling is so popular here. From what I can gather, it’s nearly impossible to get permission for time off to travel. You can unregister then reregister, but that’s a lot of messing with beauracracy, which is never to be recommended.)

So before this vacation is over, I am studying the Lonely Planet Guide to Paris, finding places to brush up my French online, and checking out accommodation and travel info well in advance. It seems that the Eurostar works out cheaper than flying now, presumably because of the British tax hike on previously-cheap air travel. Weird. Also, I’m reading blogs from Paris, like Polly Vous Francais?. There are lots of English-speaking bloggers there now. Brilliant.

In fact I may even try reading some French ones. Although before getting round to that, I’ll probably be back in the term-time routine of painting all day, at which point the risk of abandoning all of the above might arise. Hopefully not, because being prepared is really essential for getting the most out of time-limited trips with children. But even if so, I’ll still be about a hundred times better prepared than my family could have known before taking us kids on holiday in the 70s and 80s.

(Is anyone else scared about what the internet revolution will do to people who don’t keep up? I keep thinking of all the middle-management unemployment in the 80’s and early 90’s recessions. Another thought however: are most of the pen-pushers these days are doing their irrelevant jobs in government instead of corporations? Maybe they are doomed instead.)

(addendum: Adriana posts about the sort of person whose future might seem less than assured. And of course, it’s daft to care. Duh.)

3 Comments »

3 Responses to “the joy of planning”

Jackie Danicki Says:
August 25th, 2007 at 1:15 am

The real bonus of going Eurostar is that you bypass all the horrendous airport hassle, and save time on both sides. I wouldn’t dream of flying to Paris or Brussels from London.

BTW, if you are going to be there on a Sunday night, let me know. There is a very cool, semi-secret event that has been happening in Paris for more than 30 years (John Lennon and Indira Gandhi made it there before I did) that I think you might enjoy. lot of fun. The man who runs it is one of the founders of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. I took Clotilde from Chocolate & Zucchini a few years ago and it was a lot of fun.

Theocritus Says:
August 26th, 2007 at 1:03 am

People who manage to suckle from the government never have to worry about job security for government doesn’t work that way. The first instinct of government it to protect itself and serving the people is done only well enough to avoid dismemberment by the people. I am a firm believer that our Second Amendment serves mostly to permit the citizens to show government the business ends of guns when government gets too intrusive. We learned this from King George. And you’re in Texas, where the closest thing to a state religion is the right to keep guns. Even I, who dislike them, have one, which I got when Mrs. Clinton said that she was going to control guns as part of Hillarycare. I knew what she was up to.

Back now. Sorry. I have worked closely with government all of my life and have found that in no case has government viewed its job as you and I might do–it does not need to make a profit so long as it has compulsion, and it does. It exact taxes under menaces, with the annoying self-righteousness of pretending that opposing it is somehow mean. And I’ll stop going there, I promise.

If you believe in Darwin, who has explained more than anything else except possibly my simple sums, it follows that any organization that you cannot fire does not care about you. And this culture of immunity is granted to every worker there.

The only worry that an entrenched pencil-pusher has is losing a bureaucratic war, but even then those wars virtually never result in the loss of a job, merely reassignment. Cf. The Peter Principle. They have instituted a culture of protecting their own. It is paternalistic, isolated, insulated, and condescending. And turns some very nice people into pod people, even worse than a huge corporation.

As you can tell, I’ve always been an entrepreneur.

alice Says:
August 26th, 2007 at 10:42 am

I suppose some organisations only die out when nobody wants to belong to them anymore. It’s hard to imagine Gen Y being as happy to push pens around as their predecessors. Hm.