Foreign Perspectives

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.

Or rather, it SHOULD be a commercial loan.

The problem is that for it to be a commercial loan rather than a personal mortgage, the business would have needed to be created no later than the day that I signed to buy the place. After all, if the business didn’t exist before then, it wouldn’t be possible to make the loan to it, would it?

Seems obvious, doesn’t it?

Unfortunately, it wasn’t obvious to either our former accountants nor the bank. Net effect being that the accountants didn’t register the business ’til about two months after we’d bought the hotel and therefore the loan is a personal one and we can’t count the loan repayments as business expenses.

Actually, we can but only if I rent the hotel to the business so I’ve started billing myself rent each month.

This is a bit of a nuisance as I need to write out a cheque from the business account, deposit that, wait a week for it to clear then write out a cheque to the business account. So, I thought I’d ask the bank if we could set up a standing order to the personal account and move the direct debit for the loan to the personal account.

As it’s France, that requires a meeting with our counsellor so three weeks went by as I was off in the UK and he was on holiday.

Nope. He won’t do it. He insists that it’s a commercial loan and that can’t be paid from a personal account. The only way he’ll do that is if I set up a company to run the hotel and do it that way. Unfortunately, that’s rather expensive and besides it won’t work so I’ll just have to continue with the cheques each month.

Of course, the reason that he insists it’s a commercial loan is that, if it is a personal loan (and it is) then he and everyone in the bank associated with granting it will be suspended from work by the Banque de France for providing an illegal personal loan. So, for once, we understand his reasons (even if he won’t state them).

So, if you are getting a loan to buy a business here, make sure that your accountant has actually set up the company before the day you sign to accept the loan.