Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘UK’ Category

All being well, I’ll be off to Mount Stewart with the school tomorrow though I’ll not know for sure about it ’til later today.

The problem is that two of the normal class helpers are stranded thanks to the grounding of the planes but then they’re opening up the airways again later today, or at least in some areas they are. Thus, I don’t know if they’ll be back today. It’ll really mess up James if I’m not there though as he’s really set on having either me or Wendy along with him.

One other downside is that the forecast isn’t looking too good for Wednesday at the moment and Mount Stewart doesn’t seem like a great place to be if it’s raining.

Over the last week or so we’ve woken to a white landscape but, so far, the white is only frost with perhaps a very light dusting of snow.

That frosty covering makes for rather slippy pavements of course yet you don’t seem to really get the pleasure that proper snowfall can bring. No snowmen to built, no snowball fights. Just slipping and scraping the windows on the car.

And, yesterday, an unannounced closure of the school for the day. Instead of a final lie-in before school started we’d everyone up early to make sure we weren’t late with the slippery roads and found ourselves in front of a closed school. Oh, sure, if it had been way out in the country we’d have expected that but there wasn’t any big problem in getting to it so it was just closed for no apparent reason.

Still, with the weather forecasts continuing in winter mode for the remainder of the week perhaps we’ll get a proper snowfall one of these days.

One of the oddities of Northern Ireland is that the almost total lack of cross-over between the Scottish descent population and the Irish descent population imeans that complete lack of comprehension in some areas can still exist even now.

For instance, something like seven or eight years ago a colleague in work happened to mention that he was sure I was wondering why he was wearing a poppy. Frankly I’d never even given it a second thought as it was a commonplace thing in that it was in the period just coming up to the November 11th Remembrance Day when, of course, wearing poppies is fairly common. In fact it wasn’t until some time later that I found out that the poppy was considered by Republicans as a British symbol and therefore political thus something that he “shouldn’t” be wearing since he was a Catholic. I’m sure that I’m not the only one from the Scottish descent community who simply couldn’t understand this reasoning at all.

However, just a few days ago Wendy received this as a final statement on a comment on her blog “And for the record, Northern Irish people are not British.”. Well, actually as far as those of us of Scottish descent goes I don’t think anyone even considered that there was such a thing as “Northern Irish” and actually we ARE British (as indeed, at least legally, are those born in Northern Ireland who consider themselves Irish). It seems peculiar that someone living in Belfast could possibly think that nobody in Northern Ireland was British these days, but there you go.

No, not as an asylum seeker!

We’re following European Directive 2004/38/EC which is the directive which gives European citizens and their family members and dependants the right move to any other European country. In general terms to take advantage of this directive you need to be moving your family from one country to another. For example, if you are only British and are living in the UK then you can’t use this directive to get any residence rights for a non-European wife. However, in the special case of those who count as “people of Northern Ireland” it’s possible for a British citizen to exercise these rights by requiring the UK authorities to consider them to be Irish (see the British-Irish agreement).

Who counts as a “family member or dependant”? Basically it’s:

• the European citizen plus their spouse (or registered partner or partner in a durable [2 years or more] relationship) and
• the direct descendants of either one up to 21 (or older if they are dependant on the parent) and
• the dependant direct relatives in the ascending line of either (ie parents, grandparents, etc.) and
• any other dependant relatives or members of the household of the European citizen.

Which essentially translates as anyone who lives in the house of the European citizen in the country from which they are moving, regardless of their nationality (which paraphrases Articles 2 & 3 of the directive).Most people think they must have a visa to move to another country but if you are one of the people covered by the above paragraph then in fact you don’t courtesy of Article 5, paragraph 4 which lets you prove “by other means” that you are covered by this directive. For example, in our own case Wendy has an expired European Residence Permit in her passport thus proving that the directive applies to her so she doesn’t need a visa and neither does she need to go down the “Non-European citizen” queues at immigration control even though she’s Australian.

Now you might think that you’re sure to need a residence permit but even that’s not the case because  Article 25, paragraph 1 also has the option to “prove by other means” entitlement to the rights granted under this directive and specifically forbids possession of a residence permit to be used as a precondition for the exercise of any rights or completion of any administrative formality. Which means that, in practice, you never need to have the residence permit.

But, what rights does this directive actually give? Well, in practical terms it translates as giving anyone covered by the directive almost all the rights that a national of the country would have with limitations only in areas such as national security (eg you probably couldn’t work as a diplomat) and voting (although the European citizen can vote in local and European elections). Thus the authorities are required to treat Wendy as though she were British and had always been British.

That’s the theory, but how does it work out in practice. Well, Wendy doesn’t get any UK stamps in her passport these days and avoids the massive queues at some airports which simplifies our lives no end as we can all go through the “EU Citizen” immigration queues. She already has her National Insurance number from when we were here before but temporary ones are allocated once you start work in the UK if you don’t have one already. One current complication remains in connection with the doctor (and I suspect the dentist) which is that although the doctor’s office don’t have any problem in treating her, the Central Services Agency (CSA) are still asking for copies of her visa and residence permit which, of course, we can’t provide as we have neither and we just found out this morning that because of that they’ve told the doctor to take her off his list. That’s not really a big problem as worst case scenario from the doctor’s office end is that we fill in a temporary resident form every time we go to the doctor. It does have a potentially major upside in that as the CSA are breaking the law we could get quite a sizeable compensation payment…

So, overall, an easy, legal and free way to live & work in the UK.

For me there can only be one place to go and that’s the wide open plains of the American wild west. Yup, the big country.

Motorhomes aren’t things to confine to towns and cities but rather to use on the wide open road and few places get more wide open than the likes of Arizona and Texas. OK, it’s a bit of a struggle for the big beasts to get up some of the hills around the canyons but it’s the modern day covered wagon and the old timers had a bit of a struggle up the very same mountain ranges.

Monument valley is, of course, John Wayne country. That’s the backdrop that you’ll see in countless westerns and even today you can park your rig in one of the remaining indian emcampments. It’s miles from anywhere too so you get to see the stars in the night sky just as the old-time pioneers did.

Move a little further south and you can even tie your “hoss” up right in the centre of Tombstone just a little ways down from the OK Corral. Next morning you can even stroll down the very same wooden sideway that Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday and the Clancys did because that section of Tombstone has been preserved just the way it was in those days.

So where would YOU take your RV?