Foreign Perspectives

We sometimes despair of ever getting completely out of the French tax system.

It wouldn’t be so bad if they even acknowledged our letters to them but we have only once ever received a direct reply from them and even that place has started writing to us once again. That’s the basic problem really: all correspondence we send just seems to be ignored.

We’ve been trying for over six years to get a tax refund from them. The tax people we spoke to in France agree that we’re due the refund yet nobody seems able to process it. In fact, they even sent a bailiff once who also agreed and helpfully pointed out that the tax in question was now centralised and that we should be writing to the office in Clermont Ferrand. We wrote to them and they said that it’s actually dealt with in the office in Montepellier who we’d been writing to for the previous couple of years, forwarded our letter to them and, of course, that’s the last we heard about that.

Most laughably is the habitation tax and TV license who are quite content to send their letters to us in the UK yet neglect to take on board that the change of address letter also quite clearly said that we don’t live in France.

Mind you we did read some years ago that to really move out we need to provide a document from our local mairie to say that we now live in their commune. Since there isn’t a local mairie (and, no, the city council doesn’t count) and we don’t live in a commune, it’s not possible to provide said document and the advice to the lady enquiring about it was to just let her mail redirection run out.

Looking back on it now, it was remarkably easy for Wendy to settle into life in Northern Ireland 10 years ago. Back then, she could sign up for a doctor, get a UK driving license and even a National Insurance Number wasn’t that difficult.

This time around she already had the NI Number although it turned out that there was a non-obvious form that needed to be completed to tell the tax people that we were now living here rather than in France. She had the driving license too and didn’t even need to get her photo certified as we thought she might have had to.

The doctor was a touch more difficult as they struck her off after about three weeks as they didn’t believe that she intended to live here. That’s one notable difference in the health system from the rest of the UK. Elsewhere you just need to be there to register, in NI you need to prove you intend to continue to live in NI (and, yes, that does, or rather is intended to, apply even to those moving from England to NI).

Social security is rather more difficult and as a result we ended up in court with them last Tuesday as they simply don’t believe that she is legally here at all. It looks like the critical document is going to be one that all concerned totally overlooked but more on that anon as the matter has still to be decided by the judge.

It’s billed as the science of the senses and that’s what’s behind it all though the emphasis on the various senses changes as you move through the course.

Each of the study guides starts with a pointer to what you’ll need to know to understand each section of the course. For instance, for vision you need to know the physics behind how light works as well as bits of biology to understand how the receptors in the eye work and some psychology to understand how the image on your retina is interpreted as a scene. For taste and smell you need quite a bit of chemistry to understand what all the chemicals that they discuss are. Overall, it’s mainly biology and psychology that you need but at times there’s quite a bit of physics and chemistry so, depending on your scientific background, you’ll find that the difficulty in following the course varies quite a bit along the way.

One consistent hassle is that the assignments are far from clear in what they’re asking for. I basically muddled along never being able to predict what my results would be with anything like the accuracy that I usually can. That’s not just me either as a number of comments on the course mention that aspect of the course. I’m not sure why that should be but perhaps it’s an aspect of it being an inter-disciplinary course and maybe they should be more explicit about saying that “the question is on biology” or something like that although even that would be quite difficult as a number of the questions run across more than one discipline.

It’s quite a large course though you wouldn’t necessarily think that from the volume of books that it’s made up from. Where the problem arises from is that there’s a fair chunk of stuff on the DVD and the reader is very, very variable in readability as it’s written by lots of different authors. The study guide points out a number of chapters in it that are particularly difficult. It’s not really that clear why the reader is there as most of the time it covers much the same ground as you’d have already read in the course text, sometimes in more detail but sometimes not. As became clear in my revision, it’s not particularly well integrated with the rest of the course.

Overall, I have mixed feelings about the course. It was in a little more detail than I’d covered in previous biology courses but I didn’t feel that it added an awful lot to that existing knowledge so it didn’t come across as fascinating as I’d expected it would be. For instance, prerequisite courses had already covered vision in almost the same amount of detail and proprioception which was new to me wasn’t really covered in a great deal of detail. On the whole, I wouldn’t really recommend it if you’ve done human biology courses before as there’s not an awful lot of truly new material.

With the hectic pace of things over the past 12 months, I’ve not had a chance to take much time out for tidying up nor for catching up in quite a while. Net effect is, of course, that there’s a backlog of things in both categories.

What really needs caught up is the new entries on my holiday accommodation listings sites as I’ve only done the paid entries for several months now which means that I’ve now got over 100 of the free entries to get through. First up on that front will be those that don’t need tidying up. I’m constantly amazed at how little effort some people put into advertising their property. I can forgive (or, rather, correct) the odd spelling or grammatical mistake and I’ll tidy up the layout for people but why bother with an advert that’s just one sentence long and all in capitals? If I’ve time to spare I’ll drop the too short entries a line to say that they need to add a lot more text and some do really up their game when asked. If it’s otherwise good, I’ll even retype the all-capitals ones but generally they’ve got dreadful spelling and grammar too so I just delete them.

Also needing done is the upgrade of the Android applications. Those were put on as a trial about six months ago and are pulling a steady stream of downloads so the planned upgrade should improve on that somewhat as it’ll be a really major upgrade in terms of quality and usability.

Ongoing is a lot of administration which I’m starting to make some inroads with but there’s a long way to go.

And, of course, there’s the things that have been tootling along in the background. This afternoon for instance is a trip to the hospital with Mum to see about her upcoming operation.

Finishing the Signals & Perception (SD329) course a few weeks felt very much like throwing out the anchor to stop as the exam on the 15th marked the final day of my over-study period that started last October. The original plan had been that it would be a fairly full year but things rapidly got out of hand as the 12 months progressed which made it something of a hard slog. A very interesting slog mind you but hard going none-the-less.

So I now find myself all of a sudden just doing a single 20 point course. Well, to be fair, I have some pre-reading for the upcoming molecular & cell biology course (S377) to do over the next couple of months but even so it’s a radical change of pace from what was pretty much a whole year of more than 120 simultaneous points throughout with 180 points for fairly significant periods of time. The rapid change of pace meant that I ended up doing 3 weeks worth of the 20 pointer in four days so I had to stop work on it for a while as another week at that pace would have seen me up to the second assignment which is just too far ahead.

What it’s also let me do is to start catching up on things that I just didn’t have any time to do over the last year or so. It’ll take me another month or two to get back to “normal” but at least I’m heading in the right direction now. One of those “normal” things is, of course, the writing of the blog was has been rather neglected over the last year and I’ll be aiming to get back to my daily entries gradually.