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Waiting

Thursday, December 30th, 2010

Barcelona gets as much sunshine in January as London gets in September.

Last September I thought the sun was shining down on my new life in London. Perhaps it is symbolic that I’m going to Barcelona at the end of the first week of the new year.

But the first week of the new year feels oh so very far away from where I am now, just past the wrong side of Christmas. This season creates its own hell and it feels as if it will never end. It feels as if the sun has set over London for good.

The damp cold creeps through my coat and up my bum from where it rests on a wet wooden bench in Finsbury Park. The morning fog brightens as if someone has turned up a dimmer switch. There is no visible light source, yet the effect is sudden. Dark one moment, bleak daylight the next.

It’s not yet eight, already 7:49. Too early, and too late.

*

8:06 and this weird milky day doesn’t have the decency to end, even though mornings and evenings look exactly alike.

By now the sun will be shining brightly over Barcelona: 3 hours and change more of it each day than London gets.

I have written about and documented my travels since 2004 and penned a few novels. I’ve had close to 100 rejections for various short stories, tried and failed to run a sandwich shop and ditto to train as a chef. None of this means that I contribute. I therefore do not belong in this twilight zone.

My early memories are sunnier, all the way back to when I was young and fresh-faced and took on the challenge to live in another country, and another culture, for the second time in my life. That was back in 1987, 23 years ago and change.

Teachers have to be good at explaining things. I never was—I’ve never had the patience—but I’ve learned how to speak slowly once, into a microphone, in front of an audience.

As my Sensei put it, twenty years later: “It’s all theatre.”

That’s all it is.

I should be just fine.

Going to Barcelona

Friday, December 17th, 2010

I’ve just booked my flight (January 7th) and accommodation for the course is sorted. All that remains is to complete the pre-course task and to pack.

I keep telling myself that I’m not going to a Gulag. I’m going to the world’s top beach city. Barcelona gets a hundred hours more sunshine per month than London, year round. In January, it will be as sunny there as it is here in September.

I should be thrilled. I love to travel, to explore other countries, and nothing rejuvenates the mind more than learning another language and adapt to another culture. I would be over the Moon—if John was coming with me.

But John is not coming. This isn’t an adventure, a couple of months or years in the sun until we return home, full of tales and ready to face a contented future together. John is already home, but I am not.

I’ve lived in the UK for twenty-three years—exactly half my life—but in all this time I’ve never asked whether I could stay. I was already here when we met and got married and kind of … just settled in.

It never occured to me that I couldn’t just do that. Thankfully it’s not too late. My sister, married to a Brit, is applying for her ‘voluntary’ permit to remain, and eventually ILR and citizenship, while she is still working, and before she finds herself back in Germany sans her husband, because she has fallen on mis-fortune, ill-health or old age.

I do not have that option because six years in Tadley mean that I haven’t been working and therefore cannot apply for a permit. I’ll have to start all over again. And since I will have to retrain—and with the job market being what it is—I may as well go down the TEFL route. Perhaps there is work in Spain. I hope so. If John finds work in Barcelona or Madrid for a couple of months we could then apply to return to the UK in an orderly fashion, with me as the duly declared spouse of a returning EU national.

But this won’t happen for a while. I’ll have to go first. I’ll have to hope that I can find enough work in Spain to cover national insurance and qualify as a resident, at least for the time being.

This isn’t a trip.

This is exile.

All Change

Sunday, November 28th, 2010

New Cross Station
When I got married to John, back in 1989, they didn’t declare national holiday, and 21 years later the system has seen fit to annul our marriage.

Until recently we’ve been living in a small town where there were no prospects and where I never really integrated. All this was supposed to change when we returned to London.

At long last, I might get around to apply for British citizenship, integrate fully into society so that I could join my politically-inclined friends in their Facebook banter. After all, I’d arrived back home.

What followed is a shock: I can’t remain in the UK unless I work.

I haven’t had a job since shortly after the treaty changes came about in October 2000 which wiped out my past. Before then it had never occurred to me to ask for a residence permit or indefinite leave to remain as these formalities were regarded as strictly voluntary.

Surely this could not be right. I showed the woman at the citizenship checking service my 21-year-old marriage certificate.

“That means nothing,” she said.

Turns out that she is right. Being an EU citizen married to a Brit means nothing. John is not regarded as an EU national because he is not exercising his treaty rights in his own country, and therefore the EU convention on human rights does not apply to him (or by extension to me, since I’ve also not been exercising my treaty rights).

I don’t want to hear the snorts of incredulity, the “what, really?”s, the bleating of the young ones who wonder where they, or their girlfriends, stand. I’ve been here since deep time, spent half my life here—so much of it that I could only ever hope for it to be a quarter at most, more likely a third. I’ve grown up in this country. And now I have to do it all over again.

I may be 46, but I put 24/11/2010 as my birthday on my application form, as if I would only be born the day after the TEFL interview, once I’d been offered a place. And that is how it feels: all fresh and pink. Raw and unable to make any sense of the language, the country, the food, or the fact that, in Spain, the almond trees will blossom in January.

It’s not like I’m going to a Gulag, or even to prison. It’s just the separation that hurts.

Right now, I’m not quite sure how I will introduce myself to the bright young things waiting for me to join them on the forum and, in a few short weeks, on the course in Barcelona.