Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘French & Spanish’ Category

A little birdy tells me that you guys can’t believe the admin hassles that are part of daily life over here. You ain’t heard the half of it!

It’s rare for a week to go by without us receiving some mail from the French authorities. Turns out that once you’re registered for business in France, that registration is picked up by an endless stream of government and quasi-government outfits who just take the registration at face value and proceed accordingly as though the world outside France didn’t exist.

For instance, the pension scheme… Whilst pensions are generally regarded as a “good thing”, the French version is an accident waiting to happen. Sorry, one that’s already happened, they’re just ignoring it. As far as I know, all French pension schemes operate on the “pay as you go” system which means that the pensions of the people currently retired are paid by the people currently working and there is no savings element to it. Net effect of this is that, as a result of the ageing population, pretty well all of these schemes will go belly-up within the next 20 years or so (it varies by country: Germany & Italy already have problems, Ireland may be OK as it’s got a generally younger population). That being the case, I really don’t want to be flushing my money down the pan by paying into such schemes and I also know that because a) I already have a pension scheme in the UK (which I can still pay into) and b) the european freedom of movement legislation, they can’t compell me to join the French schemes. But then this is France, so when I just ignored the requests for information about my membership of a French scheme (because none of their letters asked for any information that actually existed), they just signed me up anyway and sent me a bill. They did this by recorded delivery letter which, in France, means you’ve to cancel it by recorded delivery letter (another EUR 4 down the pan). Thought that was OK in July but there’s another scheme that just sent a bill (with no prior notice) in August, at least not by recorded delivery so it was cheap enough to tell them to clear off.

Essentially their problems stem from a) they like their documentation in France b) most of what they want in terms of documentation simply doesn’t exist outside France and c) they don’t really recognise that there is a world outside France.

The no-mans ground that I’m in with the Crown Servant status is getting to be more complicated by the day. We’ve now got our applications in for both Child Tax Credit and Child Benefit for John as there’s a cut-off date for claims on both. I figure it’s best to whack in the claims on the off-chance that we might be eligible as I’d be seriously annoyed if it eventually turned out that we were eligible and missed out. As usual, we appear to be breaking new ground on this one. The query with the Inland Revenue in Lisburn has gone up to the Inspector now and he doesn’t know the answer as nobody has pointed out before that all the Civil Servants on career breaks are actually still employed by their Department. More to the point, anyone abroad would appear to have Crown Servant status which has a whole lot of knock-on consequences. I, of course, make things even more complicated because I’m still getting paid as well. I suspect the whole thing is an effect of how I think they created “career breaks” within the rules in the first place ie as basically very extended periods of unpaid leave (I reckon that because of that, they probably shouldn’t be issuing P45s to people going on career breaks).

Back in France, the social security people have been merrily ignoring my letter to them way back in August to say that I may not be in their system at all. Well, they finally acknowledged it this morning but they have kept sending the bills. Natually, their letter asks for documents that don’t exist. But, hey, what’s new? Anyway, the reply will help my written French no end.

On the health front, we have only just received Wendy’s health card. The hospital rang yesterday to say that they wanted us there pronto with it to pay the bill (or rather so that they can claim it back). Snag is, that it’s in the name “Wendy Stewart” and the health people reckon that the hospital won’t be able to accept it so they’re re-issuing it (another couple of weeks). Still, we’re off to hand it to the hospital tomorrow.

So far, we’ve just started up the restaurant on a not-too-serious basis over the summer and have completely ignored any registration required for restaurants although we are planning to become a bit more legal over the next few months. We are properly registered to serve food, but as a table d’hotes so strictly speaking we should only be serving food to people who stay with us although you’d think that somebody would have inspected our kitchen before now. We’ve also been flogging wine in the shop now and again and it seems that, although we are licensed to flog anything up to and including hard liquor in the restaurant (we gather that we can even run a bar although we know diddly about that so we aren’t bothering), we don’t have any kind of license to flog it in the shop. The previous owner didn’t either but then he was mainly flogging his own wine which I gather is a bit different.

We’d yet another family staying who were looking to buy a house here (number 7 I think). I just read this morning that the property prices here have gone up 28% in the last year as a consequence of all the English moving in. So if you’re thinking of buying, get the chequebook out soon!

I see that Jackie has finally completed the tunnel. There’s gonna be nobody left that knows me at this rate!

Can’t remember if I said, but we’re running up a website for the Mas Camps vineyard (I think it’ll be the first one for any vineyard in the region). We’ve been busy taking the harvest photos over the last week or so for it. The vineyard owner will be writing the descriptions in French once we get the harvest out of the way and we’ll be adding a bunch more pages over the coming months to complete the vineyard version of the hotel pages. As usual, we’ll be running with a bilingual site (possibly trilingual a bit later) but this time, the French will be fairly good and the English will be rubbish (well, what do I know about grapes?). However, you can peruse the initial photos at www.mascamps.com/cave/en.htm now. We might even venture out into the online sales in due course once we get our act together. It’s hard to judge how much it’ll bump up his sales but if it’s anything like the hotel business, just having the site will increase his sales by getting on for 50%.

And last, but not least, the OU exam is fast approaching. October 7th at 10am in Stranmillis to be precise. Anyway, I’m off to sunny Belfast on the 5th. Wendy’s shopping list is getting longer by the day so I’ve not booked the flight back yet. So far, we need soap (the local Makro never seems to have any; stop all those jokes about the French!!), HP Sauce, assorted makeup, magazines (if you’re ever coming over, bring lots of mags!), big Spanish (and possibly German) dictionary, pork sausages from Sainsbury… I’m hoping to call into Rosepark at some stage while I’m over before y’all go to pastures new.

Our washing machine is on it’s last legs so we thought we’d get ourselves a new one before it keels over altogether so it was off to Darty. Thought we’d get a make that we’d heard of as supposedly it would be more reliable but seeing as the cheapest one I’d heard of was EUR 439 and the cheapest cheapo make was EUR 199 we figured, “hey, so what if it breaks down after the two year guarantee; we’ll just buy another one”. Anyway, el cheapo washing machine should be turning up sometime tomorrow. And even better, I got to use my brand new Amex card! Yes, we have now found two shops that take it. Not exactly the most useful card to have in France although it does look very pretty.

Seeing as it looks reasonably likely that the assorted Inland Revenue offices will consider me as a Crown Servant I figured that we’d best get the tax credit & child benefit claims in for John in case there’s some limit to the backdating of payments. It sounded a good enough argument to the child tax guy who was all set to pay us the tax credit but our record is currently locked (those guys gotta get a new computer system!) so that’s certainly sounding promising. Child benefit are debating the issue as supposedly you need to pay national insurance in the UK to get it but, assuming that the main tax office accept the Crown Servant status, that’s where I’d be paying it so I guess it’s a matter of waiting for their decision. Snag is that the French tax year ends in December so I need them to decide pretty soon. The biggest plus point would be that I could ditch our **** French accountant, all being well I’ll be looking for a UK accountant very shortly.

Also thought it was time to regularise Wendy a bit so it was off to the work permit place (for reasons which are even more complicated than I could possibly describe here). Anyway, after a very long chat there which which brilliant for my French, we now have to go to the Mairie to see about getting the residence permit which should have been here a month or two ago.

Oh, nationality again… the Paris guy reckoned, no, John wasn’t British because the new nationality legislation of 2002 still isn’t in force yet (despite it having gone through parliament over two years ago!). However, as I queried a few things he dug himself into a hole and now has to consult HQ. To summarise the state of affairs: as the old nationality legislation is still in force, I can’t pass my nationality on to John (they define “father” as “husband”). However, children born to Crown Servants (a rather significant status) are treated as though they were born in the UK. Were he born in the UK, Wendy could actually give him British nationality as she has a residence permit which is automatically renewable (next month in fact) ie she can live in the UK “without limitation” which means that in Belfast we could get a passport, so adding that to the Crown Servant status means that…. our man in Paris can’t answer the nationality question but he now realises that he’s given me enough rope to hang him! So, it’s possible that we could just apply for a UK passport for him in Paris (or indeed in Belfast when I’m over). Laughably, we can now get James a British passport so perhaps we’ll manage a consistent set some of these days (we’ve been pulled up twice in the airports already as it looks very suspicious to have a British guy and an Australian girl taking an Irish child abroad).

We’re now up to five separate groups of people who’ve stayed here since July and are buying houses. Latest arrival is a couple from Bristol who are off househunting as I write this. We haven’t actually noticed the prices going up and you can still get quite a reasonable place in the next village for about EUR 50,000. However, we did notice a similar property to ours (though about half the size) on sale for EUR 900,000 last week which is getting on for twice what we paid and seeing as our place is more than twice (possibly as much as triple) the size of it, I guess ours is worth more like EUR 1,500,000. Hmmm, almost enough to sell up & retire. Seriously though, if there were a way of getting the place valued over here, we’d be quite keen on having that valuation to take along to the bank.

I guess now and again it comes across that it’s a complete nightmare living here with all the bureaucratic nonsense that they get up to sometimes and the last week or two has certainly been one of those times when it’s end to end bureaucratic dead-ends. But then we sit back and think: hey, it’s September, it’s 30 in the shade, we’ve a really serious suntan, we own a hotel (that definitely falls in the category of phrases I never expected to be uttering, in spite of the odd joke after Roger bought the restaurant), and whilst we may have the French bureaucracy to deal with now and again, we’ve none of the daily hassles of working for anyone else. And aside from anything else, running a hotel is dead on: the guests are only here in the morning and evening so we’ve pretty much the whole day to ourselves.

Almost forgot, it looks like Mark C has relinquished his title of the “tightest tourist” (jointly held with Norman H and my Mum) and will be venturing over next year. Although, I’m sure he’ll be pushing for discounts when he gets here… He’ll also be making his second TV appearance, in France this time (naturally all costs being met by someone else!).

Arnold