Foreign Perspectives

For instance, we were heading off to the UK for a while I thought that it would be an idea to get a little modem for my Sharp SL-5500 Zaurus. Anyway, a quite hunt round e-bay turned up maybe a half-dozen compact-flash modems. Would they work though?

A quick search on google revealed next to nothing about connecting such things to the Zaurus. Anyway, I figured that the HP modem would be pretty standard and at £5 wasn’t a massive outlay either.

So, what do you need to do to install it? Nothing, just plug it in and off it goes. That’s how Linux handles such things. So no need for the CD that came with it to add the Windows drivers.

Of course, as we’re in France, it’s not quite so simple to start surfing. We used to use tiscali as a backup dial-up service but they’ve now ditched that so I’d to sign up with freesurf before I could get surfing with the Zaurus.

As Ryanair consider anyone over 2 years old as an adult, we’ve managed to amass a potential 100kg luggage allowance between the four of us. Not that we could actually carry quite that much! However, what we’ve been doing over the last few weeks is to use my parents house as a delivery point for Amazon and Ebay purchases to save on postage so it must be something like Santa’s grotto by now!

Wendy’s planning on taking over an empty suitcase to bring at least some of that stuff back but that’s not even counting the stuff we’ll probably pick up whilst we’re there.

We’re still looking for books & magazines for the little guys, so if you’ve anything suitable around the 2 to 6 age range, let me know as we should be able to pick it up while we’re there. Wendy wouldn’t say no to girly magazines either…. Heat, Cosmo, Hello, etc.

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.

Even people who’ve been living abroad for decades and plan to live out their days here still consider “home” as being where-ever they came from.

Is that realistic though? After all, someone who’d moved to France even as recently as 10 years ago would find difficulty in discussing a number of topics with the people “back home”. Even aside from the changes in the political landscape over that time, there would be sigificant changes in the road layouts and even new words that they wouldn’t know.

Take Belfast as an example. In just three years there has been massive construction in the city centre and in another year or so the centre will look very different than it did when I left. The road layout hasn’t changed much but there’s a lot of work ongoing with various roads and it won’t be long before it does change a lot. Even the aiport has changed its name and the signs say George Best Airport rather than Belfast City Airport.

So how long before “home” isn’t home? I don’t know that there’s a set time but after as little as four or five years, it would certainly take a period of settling in to move “back home”.

Not only are roads getting worked on in a fairly major way but everywhere there are houses and office developments under contstruction. And, for the first time every, you see signs along the lines of “development opportunity” just about everywhere. In fact, they seem to be almost as thick on the ground as they are in London. In some places it seemed as if every property on a corner site with a bit of land had “scope for development” and presumably prices to match.

Of course, the downside of all this work is that it now take ages to get anywhere in the city.