Commenting on things!

It's a rather grey and damp day. My daily photo posted on Facebook reflected that fact. A friend in not too far away Rawtenstall commented that it was much the same there. Not very surprising! More surprising was my sister commenting that it was also grey and gloomy in El Puerto de Santa María, Andalucía, where she lives. Maybe it's all over Europe!

I'm not letting any of this raise my stress levels. These days I refuse to do stress. I came across a Forbes list thing about stress levels. Forbes seem to do lists of anything and everything. It turns out that the least stressful occupation in the USA is hairdressing. "How stressful is it to be a hair stylist? According to CareerCast, a career information and job listing website based in Carlsbad, CA, it’s the least stressful job in America. “You work one-on-one with people, and you get the satisfaction of helping them,” says the site’s publisher Tony Lee. Hair stylists set their own schedules, enjoy a lot of positive feedback and they tend to make friends with their clients, he adds."

Is being president the most stressful?

In Spain Princess Cristina got way with it. While her husband, the once heroic handball player Iñaki Urdangarín, is facing a prison sentence (how long will he actually serve?) the judge believed that the princess knew nothing about what was going on. My sister, the same one as earlier quoted, comments: "El mismo juzgado que ha absuelto a la infanta Cristina condenó hace un mes a un joven a 3 años de cárcel por robar una bicicleta" - a month ago the same court which found the infanta innocent condemned a young man to three years in prison for stealing a bicycle. No doubt there is a back story behind the bicycle thief incident but there does seem to be one law for the rich and one for the poor. And I expect the Urdangarín family could afford better lawyers!

Today my sister also points out his little fact: "¡¡Qué nadie olvide que mientras se perpetraba la estafa del caso Nóos, la Infanta Cristina disponía de una asignación pública cercana a 100.000€ al año!!... ¡¡La pobre...!!" Basically, she reminds us that while the fraud that became the Nóos case was being perpetrated, Cristina was receiving an allowance of €100,000 from the public purse. After all a member of the royal family has standards to maintain. As she has been disowned by the family, I assume she no longer receives money from the public purse.

With the legal profession in mind, my daughter, a teacher, drew my attention to a company called Match Solicitors who offer help to parents who feel that their child's progress in school is being impeded by the behaviour of some other child in the class. I thought about giving a link to their website but I decided not to give publicity to this latest version of ambulance chasing!

And finally, a friend of mine who is a history graduate, history teacher and writer of history textbooks found some statistics about which degree course works its students hardest. Architecture comes top of the list with History and Philosophy joint second. I have always maintained, indeed I still do, that students of modern languages work very hard. We had to deal with grammar, translation from one language to the other, history, culture, literature, philosophy, phonetics, stylistics, history of the language, all of them subjects in their own right. I could go on and on. Those of us studying two languages had a double dose. We come about fourth in the list, along with Law.

So which degree courses are the least hardworking?

Well, Communication Studies seems to be bottom of the class!