Foreign Perspectives

Things were working out quite well with them but the girl that had been specifically recommended to us left the accountancy firm late last year. As she spoke quite fluent English and knew how accountancy worked in the UK, the firm had used her to attract a lot of English speaking clients.

Unfortunately, when she left they found themselves with a whole lot of English speaking clients of which the majority don’t have good enough French to be able to use a normal French accountant. They in turn don’t speak good enough English to be able to deal with them properly either. Net effect? Well it seems that they decided not to bother doing anything with the clients that she had brought to the firm.

We only found this out last week after we received what is now a growing pile of penalty notices from various organisations due to our books not being done and called them to see why these were arriving.

Anyway, after being told that “this firm is in a bad way”, we’re now looking for yet another accountant.

As with leaving the last accountants, it should be “interesting” to leave this lot. We already have penalty charges which exceed the bill that they sent us recently so I’ll be forwarding a bill to them.

As usual, when we want to get away early the last guests didn’t check out until the very last minute so we didn’t set off for Sitges ’til noon. That worked out pretty well as with a break for lunch at the nice little café on the border we pulled into the hotel around 4pm.

Sitges is a very lively resort in the Summer months but is a good deal quieter once you get into Autumn. Although the majority of the shops were still open, the town had a feeling of closing down for the Winter about it with a number of the more upmarket shops already closed up and the much lower number of tourists limited the extent of the promenading pretty much exclusively to the central section of the beachfront.

I was quite disappointed in the old town as it’s almost entirely taken over by various government offices and has a very “restored” feeling about it.

There’s a fantastic Australian-owned restaurant called the Beach House which Wendy wanted to try out but I guess it may be one of those that closes up for the Winter as we couldn’t find it.

As we went a little bit out of season, the selection of accommodation was massive of course. We ended up staying in a very nice four star aparthotel which is normally EUR 400 odd yet only cost us EUR 70.

So, quite a nice town to walk round, but you’d need to go closer to the main holiday season to make the most of it I think.

With them, you need to attach each course you do to a qualification so I attached the French to their general degree and also to the French Diploma.

Of course, although I was fluent enough by the end of the first course, momentum tends to get you to sign up for the next course in the sequence and by December 2004 I found myself the proud owner of a Diploma in French. I still get it out now and again in case it was all a dream!

Well, by that point we’d been picking up a growing number of Spanish guests so I figured that I should do a little Spanish to help me speak to them and to improve what was a dreadful Spanish translation of the website. Yet again, momentum carried me on a bit and, all being well, next year I’ll have a Spanish Diploma.

Remember that general degree that I was attaching all the courses to? Well, the French and Spanish diplomas added together are enough to get it!

Of course, now that I’ve reached that point, I’ve started thinking about the degree itself and it seems that by doing just one more course I can get BA Hons Modern Languages.

The other thing that I’ve noticed is that there’s a whole raft of degree titles that I could get by doing just one or two more courses…. A friend who did the French with me is close to having options such as BA Hons Humanities, BA Hons European Studies, BA Hons Humanities and European Studies,…..

In fact, the very first OU course that I did wasn’t the French but a small astronomy course. That course wouldn’t count towards the language degree of course so would be left over after I pick up the degree which may create a little bit of momentum to use that as the start of a future BSc degree….

On the other hand, there are many like us who have a French car, pay UK tax, etc. but who would still probably consider home as being somewhere in the UK.

Even the authorities seem a little confused by the question. Almost three years after moving here, the French have continued to send tax bills to our former home in the UK whilst the same office simultaneously sends other tax bills to us here. The UK tax people are even worse if that’s possible with Inland Revenue regularly sending mail to here, our old house in the UK, my former employers in the UK and even my parents house sometimes! Where they consider is home for me is anyones guess.

My driving license is expiring shortly and I thought that perhaps I’d have to swap it for a French one because the UK form states quite clearly on the front page that you can’t get a UK driving license unless you are resident in the UK. However, they go on to define in detail what they mean by someone being resident in the UK and I meet all their requirements!

In fact in most cases it is still much easier for me to prove that I live in the UK than to prove that I live in France, to the extent that not only have we been able to get credit cards but even a mortgage! Interestingly, despite telling everyone official that we live in France, we have yet to receive any request to pay the Taxe d’Habitation so it would seem that officially we don’t really live in France after all.

So it would appear that, officially at least, “home” for us is actually still the UK.

PS We’re off to Spain for a short break this afternoon so no more FPs ’til at least Wednesday.