Foreign Perspectives

Most people will drastically underestimate that number because they’ve installed a spam filter and they just delete any dodgy e-mails as they come in. In fact, over the peak season the real number is probably several per day ie around a couple of hundred over the course of the summer.

However, in amongst those ones that people have deleted are a number of genuine bookings that just look dodgy.

From the spam filter, we find that we get something like one or two genuine enquiries a week that are blocked by it from normal people and one booking site gets all their e-mails to us blocked by it because of the method they use for sending out enquiries (no, it’s not possible to whitelist it).

From the dodgy e-mails we have had some of our largest genuine bookings. For example, would you have considered something along the lines of “i represent a traveling theatre group and i to book want 10 rooms for 2 nights. do you take bank cheques?” from a yahoo address? In fact, it was quite genuine, despite all the “red flags” (bad grammar, large booking, bank cheque payment).

So the question isn’t so much how many fraudulent bookings that you get, because that’s sure to be hundreds, but rather how many have you tagged as fraudulent but which were actually genuine booking enquiries?

There’s a couple of the banks here that have offers of FREE MONEY when you open accounts for your kids. Red rag to a bull, of course…. Sadly, Societe Generale operates on a nationwide basis here so there’s only EUR 16 going on their EuroKid account.

However, Banque Populaire are one of the regional banks here with something like a dozen separate banks over France and the local bank is offering EUR 15 per child. Soooo,… nah, ’twas too good to be true: only the local bank seems to have that offer at the moment.

Just about everyone that moves here either has or opens very quickly an account with Credit Agricole. It’s certainly the simplest choice as they’re in every village of any size in France and they also have an English speaking branch in Normandy (you can use their accounts in the other Credit Agricoles without any real bother). It’s also an expensive choice: since they “improved” their computer system a few months back they now charge over EUR 5 per month just for the priviledge of having an account with them. Oh, plus the EUR 40 or so for their debit card. Anyway, you’re looking at EUR 100 a year just to have a very basic account.

Once people are here for a while, they tend to say “WHAT?” to the bank charges and change banks. I’m told that “the” one to go for is currently Banque Populaire where you can actually get a fully operational account for all of €20 per year.

Anyway, we’re doing a little more checking to confirm things then closing all of our personal accounts with Credit Agricole and moving to Banque Populaire (who, in these parts, seem to have branches just about everywhere that CA do).

American Express are weird.

Just before we left I thought that it would be a good time to finally get around to applying for one as I figured that if need be I could just transfer the account over here (although in practice it looks like hardly anyone takes it here). I fired off the application for their blue card (I’m too stingy to pay the money for their charge cards) and it came back “no”. Never thought any more about it until I got the maildrop from William when I found buried in that a “60 second” application for their gold card which was addressed to me at my parents address (which I’ve not been living in for years now). Well, less than 60 seconds later, I’d filled it in for the laugh and off it went. Just got the latest maildrop of credit cards that I’ve not gotten around to changing the address of and what should I find but my brand new gold American Express card!

So you apply filling in your proper address and they don’t give you it. You fill in an address from years ago and they send you an even better card. Weird. Still not very useful in France but it does look very pretty as the whole card is a gold hologram. Oh, and I’ve even got a free sportsbag for applying too!

For reasons which all my regular reasons will know I’ve been following the progress of British nationality legislation over the last few years.

Quick summary to bring ‘yall up to speed…. Pre-1982 children born in the UK took their nationality from their father. However, from that point children took nationality from their mother and could only take their nationality from their father if he was married to their mother. This was recognised as being discriminatory and in 2002 a new law was passed which removed that condition (ie that the father needed to be married) but that particular section wasn’t implemented until 2006.

How could they do that anyway? After all, the sex discrimination legislation forbids discrimination like that, doesn’t it? Yes, but there’s an exemption for public bodies which, of course, includes the people who handle UK nationality. However, COUNCIL DIRECTIVE 2004/113/EC of 13 December 2004 removed that exemption as of April 6th 2008 when it was implemented in UK law.

Interestingly though, the nationality people are STILL saying that children born pre-2006 can only get nationality from their father if he was married to their mother.

What’ll be interesting is their response to my recent application for James’ passport which quotes the various laws above and points out that they are breaking the law. (The EU law directs national governments to abolish any laws, regulations and administrative provisions contrary to the principle of equal treatment).

Simple really… anything and everything to do with money which means how to get it, how to save it and how to spend it.

Whilst we’ll obviously be covering the “how to get it” with an Internet slant, we’ll also be touching on how to get it and get more of it in all kinds of fields along the way.

Under how to save it we’ll be looking at how to save it in banks but also how to save money when you’re buying things too.