Gaining perspective is perhaps one of the greatest benefits of the travelling business life. Take our education system, where current hot topics are class sizes, funding, and whether four year olds should be taking exams. Compare this to French universities where classes are so large that a second room is used with a CCTV feed from the first in order to fit everyone in.
Equally, if our funding is so poor, why does every classroom up and down the country have an interactive whiteboard with a projector and PC, and why have most schools got cutting-edge digital signage, video conferencing facilities, and armies of specialist teachers for dyslexia or just about any other minority need? We are remarkably well catered for. My biggest fear is being outsmarted and replaced by some 18 year old — ironically, the product of an education I helped pay for.
Weather is another example. After an inch of snow in Hampshire we go to DEFCON 1, with imminent threat of apocalypse. When explaining to my Swedish colleagues that I was a day late due to bad weather, they looked at me with disdain as though I’d called off sick with a paper cut.
Sven’s revenge was to offer assistance when parking outside their office. Apparently the six inches of snow was ‘soft snow’, so as long as I took a run up, my little hire car would cream through it with ease. As opposed to the space over the road, which had ‘hard snow’. The Swedish for broken suspension is ‘bruten upphängningen’. I intend to send them out for tartan paint next time they visit. Even our practical jokes are poor.
As a chronologically enhanced chap who used to dress in green for Queen and country, and consequently benefit from tax subsidies, I’m used to a pint of stout costing 90p. Find me in a pub today and there’s a good chance I’ll be moaning about the price of beer (or diesel), alongside other famine-resistant blokes doing exactly the same. In Norway, a pint under £8 is dubiously cheap, such as ‘God Lager’, a classy exported beer — exported, that is, all the way from Sweden. I now only moan about diesel prices when in a UK free house — all because of perspective.
Our road network is plagued by boy racers overtaking on blind corners and ‘people’ doing their make-up in the rear-view mirror rather than looking at the road. During my road warrior days, these things caused unimaginable fury. However, the number of road deaths as a proportion of the total population in the UK is among the lowest in Europe. Driving in the Baltic States, for example, makes bungee jumping look sensible. Venture further out of Europe and I can assure you the topics of pub conversations will dramatically improve.
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