Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘France’ Category

Last week was seriously exhausting!

I’m glad that I arrived back in Belfast the day before the exam. No way was I awake at exam time on Wednesday!

You’d think that we’d be all organised for the exams as that was the third one. Nope. Well, we were all organised but it all fell apart on the day.

Jackie: worth reading for an OU newbie…. The OU are VERY structured in everything. So, when it comes to organising the oral they do it in a very structured way. You get four passages in French a month or so before the big day and on the day itself they give you one of those to present. The selection is supposed to be random but, as noted, the OU are very structured. Sooo, what they do is give the examiner a pack of the four articles and instruct them to hand them out in a clockwise manner so everyone knows (if they think about it) that the first article goes to the person sitting on the left of the examiner, second to the person to the left of the first etc. Anyway, that means that you can basically select the article that you’re doing when you walk into the room. You can even select the group you’re in if you sign in for the exam together and we managed to do that the first year: it worked brilliantly too. Failed miserably to organise that last year so we’d big plans for this but, of course, we all ended up in different groups as we didn’t walk into the building together. Oh well: Jackie can learn from our mistakes. Incidently, don’t forget to tell me your new e-mail Jackie!

Walking out of the signing up room, I joked to one of our group that we may as well get up and walk out if the exam was on the last book (which nobody could understand seeing as it was all in weird French accents). Naturally, the question was on the last book :(( Net effect was that a considerable number of people didn’t even know where to begin. One very, very good student (nope, not me) only wrote 150 words, another didn’t write anything for 90 minutes (and the exam is only two and a half hours). Who knows what the results will be like?

Anyway, Friday and Saturday were shopping days which resulted in an enormous heap of stuff to bring over. So much in fact that a slight bit of underhand repacking was required after checking in. So if any of you are going by Jet2, it’s possible to get away with 20kg checked luggage, 10kg legit handluggage and another 10kg slightly illegit handluggage. I’d recommend a wheeled carryon bag: 20kg is a LOT to carryon!

In said handluggage is the breezeblock Spanish dictionary (yes, Jackie, you should get one of those) for the level 1 course and the German dictionary & grammar for the beginners German. No, I’m not daft enough to do both in the one year but I’m not currently totally decided which of the two courses I should go for. From a practical point of view, I think Spanish is the way to go as I reckon I could get to fluency with that reasonably quickly and also we get quite a reasonable number of Spaniards staying. On the other hand, since we don’t get many Germans staying at the moment you could argue that I should do German so that I could increase our marketing in German (one of our booking sites has the page in German but we’ve not had any bookings from Germans via that site).

What’s missing from the luggage is the four boxes of soap that I bought in Makro (the Perpignan Makro doesn’t have great soap and doesn’t have it very often either). If any of you are coming over, we’d be grateful if you could bring one or two boxes with you.

Bookings-wise, we are getting quite a lot of bookings for the second half of October (usually we only get bookings a few days to a week ahead). We’ve also received our second enquiry re December. This one is a biggie: it would completely fill the building for three days. That’s actually slightly overfull as we’d need to move out of a couple of rooms that we’re currently using to store some things. It’s including all meals too so we’d have some serious cash to start off the new year if we can pull it off.

We’ve also had our fourth South African booking. It looks like he’ll not be able to get here either but he’s really determined and has paid the full balance up front as supposedly that’s required to get the visa. Can’t see him getting it in time though as he’s due here on Saturday and only got to the French embassy on Monday morning.

Got our first “rates” bill this morning: EUR 1250 which ain’t bad considering the scale of this place. Have to fork out EUR 800 for our new sheets and towels too so it’s not a good week expenses-wise. Still, I should be getting the £1.80 for the travelling expenses to the exam from the Civil Service soon to put towards it. Yeah, dopey amount to claim I know and it’s the first time I’ve ever claimed for the exam trip, but I need it to indicate to the Inland Revenue that you guys are still paying me which will affect their decision re my Crown Servant status which in turn affects John’s nationality amonst other things.

Weather: it’s almost the same as Belfast again. I’m still in t-shirt, shorts and sandals but I had to put socks on this morning.

Arnold

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

I’ll start with the itinerary as I’ll be getting going on that next Tuesday:
– Tuesday pm, get the plane in Perpignan and finish up in Belfast in the late evening
– Wednesday am, meeting in town in the morning then open a few carpetbagging accounts for our latest addition and get a few things in town
Siobhan: I could probably catch up with you sometime that day
– Thursday, French exam; we usually get away from that relatively early as they do the oral part in the afternoon
– Friday am, probably working my way down Wendy’s shopping list; pm probably calling in to see the folk in Rosepark
guys: remind me to leave £40 for Eric!!
– Saturday, “at liberty” as they say in the travel trade but more than likely filled up with calling to see folk
– Sunday lunchtime, on the plane to Barcelona to try out Jet2, getting there early evening and back here around teatime

With the departure of our last house hunter on Tuesday a week ago, we were planning on switching to “winter mode” ie getting stuck into the backlog of things that we’ve not had a chance to do since June. We had even made a start on writing out our “to do” list for the winter months. And then we got some more bookings for October which has since started to fill up quite nicely.

We finally picked up a booking from the hotel website that we’re on. I’d really high hopes of that but we’ve been on it since late August and so far only the one booking (though it is for a week). Now that we’ve actually picked up a booking via the hotel site, we found out that they’d a duff room description for our main type of booking room (what did they think a “double shared bathroom shared” was? They’re fixing that now so we should start to get more bookings from them over the winter and, all being well, lots more in the summer. The other little problem that they had was that they’d recorded us as having no rooms available which certainly doesn’t help the reservations. Anyway, we’re getting the room type sorted, have updated the availability and changed a couple of rooms over to “instant booking” from “on request” which collectively should bring in a whole bunch more people.

They’re actually our eighth house-hunter since about mid-July which is a fair old number considering that we’re only one of the hotels in the area. Of those, three have already bought houses in the three villages closest to us, two more are in the process of buying a little further afield and one is in “area hunting” so won’t be buying for a year or so. As you can imagine, all this activity is lifting the house prices and I read last week that the prices in Languedoc-Roussillon went up 28% in the last year, mainly due to the English. Still, we did see quite a reasonable house for sale in Estagel for EUR 50 000 the other week so it’s still possible to pick up a bargain. Funnily enough, only one of those folk booked as a result of our ad in French Property News and seeing as they only stayed two days, we may as well not have bothered with it.

We had SNOW last week!! OK, more sleet than proper snow but even so, it’s not really something that you expect in the south of France in September, is it?

The banks here are really dreadful to what we’re used to. In all ways: the maximum withdrawal limit is around £300 per WEEK vs the £250-£500 per DAY in the UK; they’ve got monthly spending limits on debit cards; they charge for debit cards and the few sort-of credit cards are a) charged for b) have MAXIMUM limits lower than the minimum limits on some UK cards and c) have interest rates getting on for twice the UK rates (the mortgage rates are higher too: so much for lower euro-zone interest!). Way back at the end of June we thought we’d settle in with local accounts so opened accounts with Credit Agricole. The cards arrived in a few weeks but we still haven’t seen any sign of the chequebooks. Anyway, on Thursday a little letter arrived from CA saying that I’d to sort out my EUR 50 overdrawn by Monday or they were blocking all transactions on my accounts. Well, that was that. Off we went to close it and give them a piece of our minds. For a start, the account was to have a EUR 1000 overdraft limit (Wendy’s account came with EUR 450, none apparently for me) and seeing as I needed the chequebook before I could use the account, the entire EUR 50 was all bank charges. Didn’t go down well with CA in St Paul. For a start our “relationship manager” wasn’t there; I said “close it anyway, and the savings account too”. I don’t think people go in and close accounts too often. Anyway, less than 20 mins later we got a call from M Martin (our relationship manager) asking what was the problem. He’s assured us that the chequebook will be with us by Wednesday. We got the impression that he’d told the **** who sent out the letter to wise up: blocking the accounts of somebody who pays several thousand euro a month to the bank for a mortgage when he’s overdrawn by EUR 50 is not a good move.

Oh yeah, the “to do” list… Well, this is what we have so far:

1. Move into print advertising.
We are already listed in “GeoGuide Languedoc-Roussillon” courtesy of the previous owner but will be adding at least one more guidebook (well, a series as we’re shooting for an international listing). The French “guidebooks” are truly dreadful as they are just advertising with next to no editorial but it’s handy from our point of view as we can just pay so many euros and get ourselves in. Most likely we will go with Petit Futé although GeoGuide and Routard are both in the frame. Petit Futé would be around £500 but that’s for three years and also enters us in four or five international equivalent guides as well; we’ve not checked out the prices for the other two although I imagine that they pale into insignificance with the £500 for cheznous. Actually, French Property News isn’t far behind with it’s £60 a month (and so far only one two night booking for £120 expenditure!).

2. Get going on maintenance
We’re planning on restarting our “live in a room for a night” programme with a view to sussing out what needs done to each room. The biggest problem is the gite which, although it’s the newest “room”, looks incredibly basic in comparison to the rest of the hotel. We don’t really book it much as an apartment so in parallel with sprucing it up a bit, we’re hoping to create a little suite by adding a door between two of the rooms. That will also give us a lot more flexibility in coping with larger groups: we had to turn away several groups of four during August when the gite was full; in principle it will also let us book the gite as a gite rather than as a hotel room although we did very well over the summer just booking it as a hotel room.

3. Visit the neighbours
We just started doing this when the bookings took a jump; the plan is to work our way around the various vineyards, say “hi”, and maybe expand our wine list for the restaurant by buying a box or two at each place. We’ll be using these visits to try and build up a group of vineyards for our proposed wine tours.

4. Build up the guide
Our regional guide at www.mascamps.com/region/en.htm isn’t bad but I’d like to beef it up some more as we get a lot of hits via it and also because it should encourage people to stay a bit longer. We’ve the easy places done already so this will probably mean quite a bit of travelling around and combing the local tourist offices for information. I’m also hoping to make the event list (www.mascamps.com/event/en.htm) a whole lot more comprehensive although that will be far from easy as they are simply dreadful at promoting any kind of event or festival over here.

5. Tidy up the “house”
The hotel was and is tidy but the house side of the place needs a LOT of work. We could do with some furniture for a start and we could do with sorting out a lot of new lightbulbs as it’s getting to be too dark now.

6. Get the admin sorted
This has been sidelined for several months now so it’ll take me a while to catch up with it all. We also need to get ourselves properly sorted in respect of the French authorities with the stuff that I talked about earlier. It probably wouldn’t do any harm to track down our drinks license.

7. Build up the activities list
We’re hoping to have a reasonable number of activity-breaks built up over the coming months. So far, we’ve used the “specials” facility on the hostel booking site but we’re hoping to add those more directly onto our own website and also on an activities booking system. We haven’t had a lot of direct success with these but have made quite a bit of money through people seeing the “special” and booking direct with us (we don’t have to pay commission that way). At the moment we’ve several variants of our “Ryanair seat sale” package online to cover the whole period of their seat sale up to February but it’ll be another week or so before that appears on google so we’ve not had any takers as yet.

8. Website development
The next “big thing” will be the arrival of the vineyard pages, probably with the initial version online by late October. I’ve been taking more photos for that during the week. I’d liked to have had it live before Michel goes to the wine fair but that’s not too likely as I believe that’s early October. Oh, he (and possibly us) might be on French TV by the time you read this. Seems that his “separator thingy” for the grapes is the only one in the region and the local paper (the Independant) was here on Thursday to do an article on it. The harvest pages will be the first to go live as the sheer volume of text in them should get us a reasonable ranking in google. Haven’t really given much thought to the structure of his bit of the site yet but there will, in due course, be a www.mascamps.com/cave/en.htm page corresponding to the existing www.mascamps.com/hotel/en.htm page. Once his pages are up and running, we might run up a totally new www.mascamps.com/en.htm page to act as a gateway into both halves of the website but ’tis early days for that.

9. Website promotion
I’ll be restarting my “Sunday Searches” again to find free/cheapo places to promote the site. Have to see how to go about promoting the vineyard section as well. You would be amazed at how many different places you can pick up in two or three hours searching. You’d also be amazed at how many websites charge astronomical amounts of money for incredibly naff listings. We actually only paid for one site listing this year (all of £30) which has given us a really impressive looking entry with them (www.greatbedandbreakfast.com), lots of enquiries and no paying customers. At the other end of the scale, £200 on www.cheznous.com has, so far, given us one hit, no enquiries and no bookings. We’re actually going with cheznous again but this time we’ll be in their printed brochure (another £500!) which should hit the streets around Christmas (that’ll be their last chance).

Where are our customers coming from anyway? Well, it’s hard to say as the mix has changed significantly since April. April/May/June most customers were driveby (though the most profitable was via the website), early July was a mix of phone and driveby and August/September have been almost evenly split between phone, website and Ryanair (with virtually no drivebys). For the coming months, it looks like we’ll be mainly getting people from the Ryanair site though we’ve been getting significant numbers of enquiries via the website and should be having our very first repeat booking in December. In practical terms, we work on the assumption that the bulk of the phone reservations are effectively customers of the previous owner which means that for this summer we’ve had getting on for triple the customers that he would have had and that doesn’t seem too far off the mark as we know we had more reservations than both of the local competitors put together from mid-July through to the end of August (that’s the entire period for which we had their figures). If we can manage to keep that up we should do pretty well if next year is more normal (this year was dreadful for hotels all over France) and, of course, we are still increasing the number of places that list us.

10. Sort out our registration
In an ideal world, we’d like to be listed as a “hotel restaurant” but we’re not sure if that’s possible in one jump so we will be making enquiries to see what we’d need to do to acquire that listing. The plus side is that we could then legitimately run the restaurant but on the downside we would, over time, need to redo a lot of our existing registrations: cheznous wouldn’t take us anymore for a start (OK, so that would save £500 a year). We’d also need to change the Ryanair entry to move onto their hotel pages which may or may not be a good idea: we’ve only had one booking from our proper hotel listing (on www.venere.com) yet got our first booking from the B&B/guesthouse/hostel listing the day after it went live and have done very well with it ever since.

11. Have a look at Spanish
I’ve already got the pre-course course for the OU Spanish diploma but need to have a look at that to see whether or not I could realistically start the diploma in February. We get quite a lot of Spanish guests so it would be useful. On the other hand, we get next to no Germans so perhaps I need a German language website? Hard to say, as I’ve already got a German version of the Ryanair mini-site and we’ve yet to get anyone booking through it (a friend of a friend translated it for me).

Anyway, most head on to get ready for the Danish folk who should be here in another hour or two. They always quote 6pm arrival times but it just ain’t feasible to get from Denmark to here in a day and arrive that early. I reckon 8pm will be closer to the mark.

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

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.

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

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

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

I’m sure you’ll all have gathered that this was a bit of a busy week!

Last Sunday we were doing quite nicely with our first couple of days of having the place to ourselves since sometime in July. Wendy had a bit of a rough night of it and after breakfast announced that we should maybe make our way to the clinic. That was at 10.23. Not in a rush or anything: loads of time to get shaved and all that. We were driving along at a nice pace ’til we passed Estagel (the little village next to us) when I started getting strangled and got told to call the clinic right away. As it turned out, that wouldn’t have been a great move and instead I went a whole lot faster (well, John, we now have proof that there aren’t any speed cameras along this bit of road!).

We pulled into the clinic car park just about 11am when she announced that her waters had broken. I thought that was an appropriate time & place to call the maternity folk. They’re not really geared up to people calling them from the car park so by the time they’d wandered down, Wendy had hobbled in and was almost at the stairs. Don’t know why, but we never did find out how to work the lift so she’d to head on up the stairs which is far from easy in her state.

We figured it was best not to “ring & wait” at the door of the maternity unit and headed straight for the “salles de naissance”. I’m sure that the Ulster Hospital would have been telling us that it was probably just a urinary infection as they did with James. No time for any messing around wiring her up as by then John was well on the way and we found out that our visit to the anaesthetist was a waste of time as things were too far on to do a spinal or epidural (they don’t do “gas & air” over here).

Anyway, cutting out the gory bits, John Philip Anthony Stewart made his appearance at 11:08. Yeah, it was that fast.

We did the checking in bit afterwards when the first “little” problem arose. Seems that thanks to my (soon to be former) accountant, I was the only one with any health insurance or at least the only one on the Carte Vitale (health card). So, they wanted me to go to health place and sort that first thing on Monday.

Monday, Orasanté (the health place for self-employed folk round here) said that they couldn’t cover her as the (soon to be former) accountant had registered the business on May 1st, not in February as he was told to do, and because Wendy had her “declaration of pregnancy” dated April 26, nothing doing. However, the CPAM would do it.

Off to the CPAM. No, you’re not covered. What about my e111? Off for behind the scenes discussions for 30 minutes. Nope, you need to get an e111 dating from before you are pregnant. Can’t. The UK only issues them from “today”. What about the european freedom of movement legislation which allows for pre-existing conditions? Off for another 30 minutes. We’ll have to refer it to our international people. Anyway, a very good opportunity to practice my French.

Walk out to find that by now the car had been towed as a 5 minute appointment had now run to over an hour and a half. The pile of bills for the (soon to be former) accountant is mounting up… so far EUR 50 not being paid for the registration which is wrong in every key aspect, EUR 100 for reconnection of the phones because he hadn’t done the registration on time and now EUR 130 to retrieve the car. That’s not even counting EUR 200 of lost bookings because we couldn’t accept the French equivalent of accomodation vouchers due to his mistakes in the registration and who knows how much for the week that the phones were disconnected.

Phone call… CPAM international. Yes, you are covered. By Orasanté. Doesn’t matter that the (soon to be former) accountant hadn’t registered you before April 26. You were pregnant before you got to France and covered for 42 days before the birth therefore it’s Orasanté’s problem. Nope, I don’t know what happens if you arrive pregnant and drop junior before 42 days elapse.

Tuesday went in attempting to retrieve the car which is far from simple as everyone “knows” that it’s in the place behind the train station. It’s not even close to the station.

Wednesday we finally managed to get Wendy and John home. Didn’t manage to register him though which was becoming a larger and larger problem (you “must” do it within three days of the birth in France and by now we were on the fourth day). The place was closed by the time we got there so we finally managed to get the registration done it was day five (ie Thursday). We’d quite an argument when we left the clinic without paying. All maternity cases are paid 100% in France and the admin people in the clinic know that but simply won’t accept it without having an “attestation” to that effect. Attestations take at least 2 weeks to produce yet they wanted it that day (and they know that they can’t be had in less than 2 weeks). This was the best opportunity yet that I’ve had to practice arguing in French. You just can’t put a price on lessons like that!

Had another go at the health registration on Thursday with John’s paperwork. Seems that the attestation will be here in a few days because we applied for it about two weeks ago. However, it won’t list Wendy as being 100% cover as they said on Monday that they (Orasanté) weren’t the place to cover us (see above).

Anyway, more anon on the above saga as we’ve to call into the clinic on Monday…

There’s a big photojournalism and photoreportage festival on in Perpignan up to the 12th of September so just about every hotel in the place is full of Reuters, BBC, etc. We’ve started to fill up ourselves as a consequence of that (we’d have been full except that we only really got onto the booking systems during July). For next year, we’re planning on running a package deal for the thing but at the moment we have the usual problem that we don’t know why people are here ’til they come. Anyway, we’re currently ferrying two guys from the Times of India (one of the world’s largest circulation English papers) back & forth, we’d one of the award winners in a few days ago and there’s a few more groups coming over the rest of the week.

Remember the saga of getting a British passport for James? Actually, quite laugably, he can get one from Paris no problem. Well, I need somebody to sign the forms to say that the photo is a “true and fair likeness” but that’s the only problem. We start John’s saga here…. fired off an e-mail to the embassy in Paris a while back who said that I need to check with the Home Office how I go about proving paternity as per the new immigration & nationality legislation; they promptly referred me back to Paris, who, of course, have jursdiction. Another e-mail early in the week came back to say that he isn’t British and needs to be “registered” first. Nope, ’tain’t right as the new (as of 2002) legislation (very, very specifically the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 part 1 section 50 9(C)). They’ve not replied yet.

Oh…. could someone check if any of our Foreign Office colleagues know someone in the Paris embassy who could speed this along a bit for me? We’re hoping to get a little holiday soon-ish and would be needing a passport for him.

American Express are weird. Just before we left I thought that it would be a good time to finally get around to applying for one as I figured that if need be I could just transfer the account over here (although in practice it looks like hardly anyone takes it here). I fired off the application for their blue card (I’m too stingy to pay the money for their charge cards) and it came back “no”. Never thought any more about it until I got the maildrop from William at the end of July when I found buried in that a “60 second” application for their gold card which was addressed to me at my parents address (which I’ve not been living in for years now). Well, less than 60 seconds later, I’d filled it in for the laugh and off it went. Just got the latest maildrop of credit cards that I’ve not gotten around to changing the address of and what should I find but my brand new gold American Express card! So you apply filling in your proper address and they don’t give you it. You fill in an address from years ago and they send you an even better card. Weird. Still not very useful in France but it does look very pretty as the whole card is a gold hologram. Oh, and I’ve even got a free sportsbag for applying too!

I think that it’s safe to say that next week is very unlikely to be as eventful as this one!

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