British Expat Newsletter

16 November 2005

Hello, and welcome to those who have joined up since our last newsletter.

In this issue

This week: Time
On the website
Virtual Snacks
Sponsor
Bizarre Searches
Joke and quotation

This week

Time. Where does it go? By the way, we're sorry we missed last week's newsletter. We were in transit coming back to Thailand after a marathon visit (6 months) going through the selling up process in the UK. We're back in the beach hut now, though, and are doing our best to catch up. So, on with the show!

How important is your time? More to the point, do you ever feel as if other people don't value yours? I've come across this "my time is more important than yours" attitude quite a lot recently. Dentists (if you can get one in the UK) and doctors are a case in point. You make an appointment, you may even make a big effort to arrive on time, but invariably they keep you sitting in the waiting room for up to an hour before you are seen.

When we lived on-compound in Delhi and I had an appointment to see anyone, I would only wait for five minutes. After which I would walk out saying, "My time is too valuable to spend it sitting here. You can phone me when you're ready." Of course, you can only do that when you live a two minute walk away. But still, I felt I'd made my point.

Other people seemed to think it was odd that I valued my time in this way. How about you? Do you just put up with others wasting your time or do you take action to prevent it?

Some people don't seem to take time seriously at all. You expect this in Asia as it seems to be a cultural thing.

Social occasions are different too. In Britain it seems to be "correct" to turn up five to ten minutes late for a dinner invitation - "fashionably late". Yet we were often perplexed in India when people would turn up ten minutes early. And we weren't ready for them!

There are lots of sayings and proverbs about time. It waits for no man. Procrastination is its thief. And tempus fugit. Yes, doesn't it just! This brings me back to my orginal question: where does it go? And is it really true that time goes quicker as you get older, or does it just seem that way?

I've always wished that the transporter beam idea in Star Trek would become a reality. Imagine no more delays or hassles at airports. I think I'd like going through a few black holes too (and I don't mean the loft in our London house!) and exploring other time dimensions. I'm not sure where I would go. I quite fancy a trip to the time of the Raj in India. There again, I probably have a romanticised view of it, despite knowing much of its gory history.

Where would you go if you had a time machine? And why?

Does time matter where you are? Do you have anything to say about this topic, or do you have some suggestions for other issues we might discuss in our weekly email? Why not tell us about it on the forum?
British Expat Forum: BE Newsletter discussion

On the Website

As I mentioned above, we've been moving back to Thailand from the UK and have been getting back into the swing of things. However, we have added one new article: a feature from our friends at Tate Online on the enduringly popular British artist, J M W Turner. You can find the article, together with a Turner self-portrait and perhaps his most famous work, the "Fighting Temeraire", here:
Tate Online - Turner

We've also renamed our "Photo of the Week" feature. It's now "Pic of the Week", and will include artwork (for instance, pictures kindly provided by Tate Online) as well as the excellent photos from BE readers which we've been using up to now. The first is the Turner self-portrait, which you can see in all its dark glory here:
Pic of the Week

All the new articles and features are listed on our What's New page:
What's New on BE?

Each week I delve into the dark cavernous interior of the BE website to see what gems I can unearth - good things you may have missed first time around. Here are my picks for this week:

Remembrance Sunday has just passed and it seemed like a good time to look back at the related themes on the British Expat website:

The British War Memorial Project: some time ago we featured the excellent work of this organisation. "They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old." Please have a look and see if you can help by photographing war graves.
British War Memorial Project

On a similar theme, have a look again at Bletchley Park Post Office feature. BPPO was the home of the Enigma project, an attempt to bring an early end to WW2. They've recently issued some new covers to celebrate the winning of the Ashes.
The Magic Enigma

And finally, read our review of Ivy Alexander's excellent book, "Maid in West Ham". It's an autobiography of Ivy's formative years (1924 -1946) in post war London's East End. Calling it an autobiography doesn't really do it justice. The book is a well-researched and fascinating piece of social history.
Maid in West Ham

If you're looking for travel features on the site, a good place to start is our Expat World page.
Expat World

Virtual Snacks

This is interesting. A family photgraphs themselves at the same time every year. See how they've changed from 1976 up to the present day.
Zonezero.com: Time

A Walk Through Time. Here's a site which talks you through the history of clocks and time-keeping.
US National Institute of Standards and Technology: A Walk Through Time

And finally, for a bit of fun. Don't build your house upon sand as it won't last. But some sandcastles may have greater longevity. These are amazing!
funnies.com: Sandcastles

Sponsor

Offshore Companies House offer fast online registration of offshore companies in the British Virgin Islands, Belize, Dominica and other tax havens, as well as quick and easy setting up of multicurrrency bank accounts. OCH, through their offshore services, will provide you with the full necessary support at each stage and will always try to offer the best possible prices. They offer attractive and inexpensive offshore packages, and their reliability and quality of offshore service say even more for them than their prices. Most of their new clients - over 15,000 in the last ten years - are referred by previous satisfied customers. However, if you can get the same service, or an offshore package which is a genuinely cheaper offer, they promise to match it!
Offshore Companies House

Bizarre Searches

Some strange search terms which have led people to visit British Expat recently:

free online virtual model of me
cows sport venue
babyface cricket
toilet pepper
invisible iks an lemon
llanfairpwllgwyngllgogerychwryndrobwllyantsllyogogogoch (Particularly bizarre since this isn't even the correct spelling, which is: llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch)
seahorse spiritual
greek vases defecation
steal gladys kabila
how to smoke smarties
how do they mack monye sudan
bamboo masturbating

Till next time...
Happy surfing!

Kay
Editor
British Expat Magazine

Quotation

"Don't say you don't have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson and Albert Einstein."

H. Jackson Brown, Jr., US author

Joke

A little old man in a nursing home walks up to a little old lady and says, "Hey, guess how old I am!"

She unzips his fly, reaches her hand in, and fondles him for a couple of minutes, then announces, "You're 72!"

"That's amazing! How'd you know?"

She says, "You told me yesterday!"