Foreign Perspectives

Looking at before I signed up for it, it looked like book 1 was chemistry and book 2 was biology. That’s what it is on paper but in reality “book 2″ is the main book and the chemistry is slotted in as needed along the way with the final chunky section a medical science one that seems to be tying all the other bits together in a fashion.

As with all the modern science courses there’s a lot of it online, mostly for economic reasons rather than educational ones. They could put that final section of the course on a DVD (or at least make it easily downloadable) but they don’t. You can download it but you need to go through the online study guide and online modules to download each of the videos and texts contained within them. That makes it a bit of a nuisance to work through unless you either read ahead and download everything in advance or have Internet and DVD access available everywhere you study.

It fits in really well with S377 really well, so much so that when I’m reading the book for one I sometimes forget which of the two I’m reading.

One downside of it that I’ve just discovered is that it seems I won’t be able to count it in any degree unless I can slot it into one by 2016 as the new-style OU degrees don’t acknowledge courses that aren’t 30 or 60 points. So, rather than lose the points, I’m having to change the courses I was meaning to do over the next couple of years with the running order for my “miscellaneous interesting courses” degree looks like being S346 Drug design this October, A326 Empire: 1492-1975 the following October and finishing with AA318 Art of the 20th Century in October 2015.

We sometimes despair of ever getting completely out of the French tax system.

It wouldn’t be so bad if they even acknowledged our letters to them but we have only once ever received a direct reply from them and even that place has started writing to us once again. That’s the basic problem really: all correspondence we send just seems to be ignored.

We’ve been trying for over six years to get a tax refund from them. The tax people we spoke to in France agree that we’re due the refund yet nobody seems able to process it. In fact, they even sent a bailiff once who also agreed and helpfully pointed out that the tax in question was now centralised and that we should be writing to the office in Clermont Ferrand. We wrote to them and they said that it’s actually dealt with in the office in Montepellier who we’d been writing to for the previous couple of years, forwarded our letter to them and, of course, that’s the last we heard about that.

Most laughably is the habitation tax and TV license who are quite content to send their letters to us in the UK yet neglect to take on board that the change of address letter also quite clearly said that we don’t live in France.

Mind you we did read some years ago that to really move out we need to provide a document from our local mairie to say that we now live in their commune. Since there isn’t a local mairie (and, no, the city council doesn’t count) and we don’t live in a commune, it’s not possible to provide said document and the advice to the lady enquiring about it was to just let her mail redirection run out.

Looking back on it now, it was remarkably easy for Wendy to settle into life in Northern Ireland 10 years ago. Back then, she could sign up for a doctor, get a UK driving license and even a National Insurance Number wasn’t that difficult.

This time around she already had the NI Number although it turned out that there was a non-obvious form that needed to be completed to tell the tax people that we were now living here rather than in France. She had the driving license too and didn’t even need to get her photo certified as we thought she might have had to.

The doctor was a touch more difficult as they struck her off after about three weeks as they didn’t believe that she intended to live here. That’s one notable difference in the health system from the rest of the UK. Elsewhere you just need to be there to register, in NI you need to prove you intend to continue to live in NI (and, yes, that does, or rather is intended to, apply even to those moving from England to NI).

Social security is rather more difficult and as a result we ended up in court with them last Tuesday as they simply don’t believe that she is legally here at all. It looks like the critical document is going to be one that all concerned totally overlooked but more on that anon as the matter has still to be decided by the judge.