Foreign Perspectives

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.