Foreign Perspectives

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.

Whilst the trip out to France seemed like a rather long trek at the time, the trip back was considerably shorter thanks to rethinking of the route and being able to be more organised before our departure.

Thanks to the courtyard we were able to space out the packing of the trailer over a week or so and managed to fit so much stuff into it that we’re still trying to find places to put it all over here! Funnily enough, the trailer wasn’t nearly as heavy as I’d been expecting that it would be which in turn meant that we were able to make much better progress on the motorway than expected.

This time around we’d one stopped at Clermont-Ferrand which was around the half-way mark and not quite so far along as we’d planned initially (thanks to a very, very late departure). The second day it was straight on to the ferry at Le Havre for a reasonable crossing to Rosslare. Compared to the alternative of driving all the way up England and then across Scotland this was definitely by far the most relaxing way to go and with a fairly quick Rosslare to Belfast drive at the other end it was overall an easy trip to do.