Foreign Perspectives

We’ve had a Decathlon card since our time living in France but since we’re into our second year back here we’ve obviously not used it for a while. Almost two years in fact.

Anyway, Belfast happens to be one of the first places that Decathlon has opened a UK store so we thought we’d pop in. It’s very much a French Decathlon that happens to be in Belfast with seemingly all the same products and even the very same trollies which, of course, can’t be used as they need a euro in them rather than a pound. Even the prices seem much the same which makes it one of the more expensive stores around unless you pick something up on one of their 60%+ off opening offers.

Amazingly it’s even French to the point of being able to use my French Decathlon card which is a level of internationalisation that’s very, very rarely seen which is quite a surprise. The website isn’t 100% in English yet but I managed to change the address of the card to here which is also something that’s rarely considered when a company goes international.

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One of the problems with the paperless age is that you don’t have a little piece of paper to prove that you did whatever you said you did.

Despite having left France at the start of 2009 to live in Northern Ireland again, we still have problems with both tax and social services administrations. Today it was time to tackle offices in two different countries once more.

First off was the French taxation people who basically seem to have the view that nobody leaves France and that even if they do, the rest of the world is basically just an extension of France. I came across this several years ago when someone posted a question about it on one of the French forums. Basically her problem was that she had left France almost a year before, her post redirection service was running out and several French departments wouldn’t accept that she’d left so were therefore continuing to send her assorted bills (and benefit payments). As it turned out, the only proof that she had really left which would be accepted was a Certificate de Residence from her mairie. Unfortunately, there aren’t any mairies outside France the the closest equivalent (ie her local council) had no such document that they could give her. In the end, she had to just let the redirection service run out and leave the various departments to work it out for themselves.

I’m merely at the first off-ramp from that particular road at the moment so today it was the turn of the French taxation people to have another form sent back to them pointing out that I haven’t lived there for well over a year now. Somehow I don’t think they’ll take any notice of that as they didn’t last year but I guess it’ll be out of my hands soon as my own redirection service is running out.

On the other side of the fence, getting fully into the UK system is proving to be equally difficult. This time last year the health service were refusing to believe that we intended to live here and were merely health tourists. Quite how one proves one’s intent to live somewhere (which is what they wanted us to do) is still beyond me but we wore them down in the end. Child benefit was particularly difficult and instead of the “couple of weeks” quoted initially it turned out to be closer to four months. The particular problem with that is that you need the Child Benefit number for other forms and the lack of it complicates life no end. The other little problem is that we just couldn’t work out a way to tell the French child benefit equivalent that we’d left and they should stop paying us and I wouldn’t be surprised if they were still paying us.

At the moment, we’re working on the Child Tax Credit people who said last October that they couldn’t process our claim without a Child Benefit number, then they said almost two months ago when we finally could give them the Child Benefit number that it would take a “couple of weeks or so” to pay. Now they say they’ve no record at all of the claim!

Still, it’s nice to see European harmonisation of the taxation and social security systems. It would have been better to harmonise upwards in quality but I guess you can’t have everything.

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Selling a house in France is much, much worse than watching paint dry. If you think the selling process takes a long time in the UK, take the longest possible time that you could imagine it taking from getting your buyer and getting the cheque, triple it and you might arrive at a time that’s close to half the time such things take in France.

Still, we do seem to be more or less heading in the direction of getting said cheque within our lifetime now so we’re starting to think about the house removals company. Just thinking mind you as the recent volcanic ash problems have thrown something of a box of spanners in the works in that respect. Now you might think that it would just be a matter of getting stuff from there to here but, of course, there’s the matter of getting us from here to there to finish off the packing and that needs a flight. Moreover, the prices of any kind of long distance transport have gone through the roof.

Next up would normally be setting up arrangements to get the money transferred but we thought that we’d be at this point a long, long time ago so we’ve that bit already done although it’s so long ago that we’ll probably end up having to review the arrangements.

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