Foreign Perspectives

There’s been somewhat of a death in posting activity over the past few weeks, not because we’ve not had loads to say but rather because the ADSL line still hasn’t been installed yet (supposedly it’s another week or so away). Anyway, that delay has given me the excuse to buy one of those really neat little mobile broadband gadgets which has always been on the “would love to have but just can’t justify it” list. However, whilst it’s been on said list the prices have been dropping dramatically….

In that my mobile surfing will almost certainly be limited in duration the ideal plan for me is very much T-mobiles daily one. All of £2 a day on those days which I use it which means that the non-use charge is effectively £4 a year as you’ve to use it at least once every six months. Although most of the time such a deal seems sure to be a ripoff in fact you can change the topups on this one to a monthly £20 which is little more than “normal” mobile broadband charges these days and, for me, will be substantially cheaper.

On other fronts, we’re now in a minor battle with the Central Services Agency (CSA) over registering Wendy for healthcare. It appears that they have a rather flakey grasp on how residency rights actually work in Europe so they issue health numbers to any French that arrive when they should be requiring proof that they’re eligible to live here (European citizens generally need a job to gain the right to live in other European countries) and they’ve been insisting on all kinds of documentation from Bulgarians when they’ve been in Europe for about six years now and have the same documentation requirements as would the French. Wendy, as always, is unique as, despite the CSA insisting that she provide a visa and/or residence permit, she doesn’t have to provide anything other than her passport thanks to changes in European freedom of movement legislation over the last five years. Oh, and the CSA think that “freedom of movement” is just that: you can move, not actually live: in fact it’s both!

Anyway, all being well they will reject her application as the current rate of awards for such discrimination is over £20,000.

One of the high points of the language courses was always the tutorials which were always useful.

It’s quite different with other types of course as I’m now having confirmed by the recent psychology tutorial. For one thing the tutorials are only two hours rather than the four hours of the language classes which obviously means that less work is done during them.

However, whilst the first tutorial of each of the language courses always had a certain amount of “real work” involved during them, the first of both the English and the psychology courses is really just an overview of the course presentation itself and it’s the second tutorial that will be going over the first assignment.

Thus, I’ll not really know what a real psychology tutorial will be like for another three weeks or so.

We figured that getting back into the UK health system would be a doddle and so it seemed to be initially. However, several days after handing in the simple “signing up to a doctor” form to our former doctor, we were told that in fact we need to fill in the slightly more complicated one for people coming from overseas and to provide birth certificates for everybody too.

In our case, the form isn’t quite so simple to complete as it might be in that when it asks if I’m making National Insurance contributions I’m not sure what the correct answer should be. OK, right now I’m not contributing in that we’ve just arrived here a few weeks ago but on the other hand chances are that I will be contributing by the time they get around to processing the form.

That “non-contribution” aspect prompted us to think about signing on for unemployment benefit (Jobseekers Allowance as it’s now called). So, starting out from the premise that all we really needed was access to the health system we now find ourselves making a claim for unemployment benefits that we’d not otherwise have bothered with. Silly, or what?

Still, at least it’ll give us some kind of proof to the French authorities that we’re not in their system anymore.

Did you ever think that somebody was out to get you?

The riots across France last week were right at the time we’d have ordinarily been driving up to the ferry.

The ferry that we’d have been going on was the one that ended up with a lorry hanging out the back of it.

And, last week the whole of southern France was hit with major league storms which have knocked down a couple of our trees!

With our previous problems of settling into France at the start we thought that we’d make an early start on getting into the education, tax, social security, etc. systems.

On the education front, we were anticipating problems in that whilst there have been oodles of new immigrants to Northern Ireland and lots of new houses have been built, there haven’t been any new schools built. It turns out that this isn’t a problem in the primary schools but is very much a problem in secondary education depending on what area you’re looking at. As always, immigrants start off settling near the capital ie Belfast and further out there don’t seem to be the problems.

One interesting contrast with France is that it’s the state owned schools here that have the extra resources to deal with special needs kids like James rather than the private schools. “Special needs”? Well, thanks to him not really being educated at his school in France he can’t read or write properly and, of course, not in English thus he’s going to need some extra tutoring to get him back on track.

Obviously we’re still getting tax and social security bills from France so stopping them and getting ourselves into the corresponding systems in the UK is going to be our next priority.