Friday, January 27, 2017

BREXIT: The word all British expats in France will come to hate.

BREXIT : Now that is a subject I will really have to deal with. 

I was more or less kicked out of South Vietnam forty odd years ago.

Will I be kicked out of France and arrive in a strange country called what?

The United Kingdom of Great Britain & Northern Ireland. That was the place I left. Well by the time I arrive perhaps it will be reduced to the Disunited Kingdom of England.

It’s over 55 years since I left the UK. I have rather a feeling we won’t even be able to communicate. My English dates from the 1940’s in the days when one did learn to pronounce one’s vowels and use a very precise and clipped English.

Anyway I’m allergic to most of the things the English take for granted, things I dare not even mention here. Free speech is one of the casualties of whatever madness has taken over the UK. Even if I’m not arrested for saying what I think the bin police will get me for doing something wrong.

I could of course opt to stay in France. I went down to the Town Hall the other day to try and clarify my status. Very charming lady remembered me from twenty years ago but said I had to go to the Prefecture. So off to the Prefecture where an equally pleasant young lady said I had to go to a certain annex.

I then remembered that I had been there 35 or 40 years before when I needed a residence permit. 

The small room with a dozen foreigners had been changed for a very large room full of dozens, no scores of foreigners from everywhere in the Middle East and Africa; not a European there. Of course not, why should there be, they’re all members of the European Union now.
So I was told to take a ticket and wait my turn to then make an appointment with someone to begin whatever formalities one had to go through.

Well all I wanted was to ask a few questions. I mean after 40 years one doesn’t want to be treated as though one had just arrived from God knows where and needed to regularize one’s situation. 35 to 40 years ago it was not easy. It would appear the situation has been going downhill since.

So do I make up a packet of sandwiches and camp out in the Prefecture for the day just to ask a question?

Perhaps I can find it on line but that’s difficult enough even when you know there is an answer but finding answers to hypothetical questions is not the internet’s strong point certainly not when it is a French Government Administration involved

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