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"LastSpike Craigellachie BC Canada" by Ross, Alexander, Best & Co., Winnipeg - This image is available from Library and Archives Canada under the reproduction reference number C-003693 and under the MIKAN ID number 3194527This tag does not indicate the copyright status of the attached work. A normal copyright tag is still required. See Commons:Licensing for more information.Library and Archives Canada does not allow free use of its copyrighted works. See Category:Images from Library and Archives Canada.. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:LastSpike_Craigellachie_BC_Canada.jpg#/media/File:LastSpike_Craigellachie_BC_Canada.jpgYou must submit to supreme suffering in order to discover the completion of joy.

John Calvin

Wow!

I really am just that little bit too ‘hyper’ to give you the full details right now, though you can be sure that I will have much more to write on the subject in the days to come.

All that need be said right now, however, is that today – after much tension and worry and agonising – our apartment in Buckinghamshire was finally sold!! The monies are in our account and we have already booked the transfer to our Canadian bank at a most advantageous rate.

Our estate agent (realtor) gave us a bottle of chilled champagne from their suspiciously capacious refrigerator when I dropped the keys off this morning and we intend to do it some serious damage!

Joy unbound!……………………..

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Image from PixabayThe antithesis of my love of language is a complete loathing for jargon in all its forms. This antipathy can manifest in different ways, from sitting in the back row at a product launch playing ‘Jargon Bingo‘* with colleagues, to getting into trouble at a high level meeting for snorting derisively and rather too publicly when one of the great and the good insisted that we must ‘get all of our ducks in a row‘. I won’t go so far as to claim that that faux pas cost me the job but I was gone from that worthy establishment within the year.

As you might imagine, ‘box ticking‘ registers fairly highly on the list of management-speak activities that sets my teeth on edge. Box ticking – however – is what the Kickass Canada Girl and I have been engaged in as we attempt to effect our egress from the country without forgetting anything important.

These things have we done in the past few days – in no particular order:

  • Cancelled the landline at our Berkshire apartment for our day of departure
  • Cancelled the broadband circuit at our Berkshire apartment for our day of departure
  • Ensured that we would not be liable to pay Council Tax on our Buckinghamshire apartment
  • Ensured that we would not be charged over the odds for gas and electricity at our Buckinghamshire apartment
  • Booked hotels for the nights between moving out of the Berkshire apartment and leaving for Victoria
  • Arranged an appointment with the bank to discuss our legacy financial arrangements in the UK
  • Spoken with Her Majesties Revenue and Customs (HMRC) to clarify how to get my tax coding changed after retirement
  • Responded to further queries from our purchasers solicitors regarding the sale of our Buckinghamshire apartment
  • Booked carpet cleaners for the Berkshire apartment subsequent to our moving out

This I have not done – though not for want of trying:

  • Cancelled my mobile (cell) phone contract. The contract actually runs until November 17th and would cost more to bail out of than to continue paying until then. However – it can only be cancelled by giving 30 days’ notice by phone, which means remembering to call Vodafone on or around 17th October – by which time we will of course be in Canada. Bah!

Still much to do!

 

* ‘Jargon Bingo’ appears usually to be called ‘Buzzword Bingo’ on the American continent. Same game!

jargon

Oh – I forgot ‘Brand Essence’…

Doh!

 

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VESPERS by E.H. Shepardwhisper who dares
The Kickass Canada Girl and the Imperceptible Immigrant are saying their prayers!

With apologies to A. A. Milne

No sooner had I posted my lament of Sunday evening bemoaning the lack of progress in the sale of our Buckinghamshire apartment…

…than we had an offer!!

I wasted no time in passing this rapidly on to the Kickass Canada Girl who has previous in the field of negotiation – and before we knew it a price had been agreed…

As I have made mention in a long-previous post, buying and selling property in the UK is a very different proposition to so doing in Canada (and indeed in most other places). As a result there will be no chickens counted – and indeed very little said – for fear of offending the fates and invoking bad karma.

Let’s say no more for now – just tiptoe away quietly…

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Image from PixabayWhen I started writing this blog in January 2012 at the ripe old age of 58 – with the intention of documenting my odyssey across the waters to Canada and into retirement in British Columbia – I knew even then that the process would not be an easeful one.

I chose its appellation carefully – the sense of danger, of striving, of progression and adventure implicit in the journey into a new world balanced carefully by the anticipated glacial progress of the process itself. The Kickass Canada Girl and I were about to embark on our short-lived experiment in living five thousand miles apart and – even though I was at that point expecting to retire in 2013 – I knew that this relatively brief span would feel like a lifetime.

I had – however – no idea just how imperceptible progress towards our ultimate objective would turn out to be.

Should you ever determine that you have a problem with impatience – an intolerance of prorogation – then let me recommend to you as a form of therapy an application for Canadian Permanent Residency (PR)… or an attempt to sell a ‘quirky’ property in a buyer’s market. As an exercise in having absolutely no control whatsoever over the outcome of said venture, neither of these can be beat.

To be entirely fair, when I submitted my application for PR at the very start of June last year the Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) website was indicating that the average time to process such would be around eleven months – which period is not strictly up until next week! Such details don’t help much for those having actually to endure this interminable wait. The fact that almost no indication is given at any point as to current progress only makes things worse.

Until my sponsor – the Kickass Canada Girl – was approved almost two months subsequent to the original submission there was no indication that the application had even been received. The listing on the Electronic Client Application Status portal (ECAS) thereafter read ‘Application Received’  for nearly eight months until it suddenly flipped to ‘In Process’ in mid March this year. Word on the various expat fora is that one might hope for a decision within three to five weeks thereafter, but it is now at the furthest extent of that range and there has been as yet no word.

Naturally I check ECAS daily. Naturally I pore over the London spreadsheet on the British Expats forum to see if anyone from the same cluster as me has heard the good – or indeed any – news. Naturally I rush to check the post to see if anything has magically arrived from CIC.

Nada!

We first placed our Buckinghamshire apartment on the market in the spring of 2011. Though it has been on and off the market since then, over that four year period we must have had dozens of viewings. We have yet to to receive a single offer! This is – of course – somewhat dispiriting… to put it mildly. We have taken much advice. We have adjusted the price diligently at the behest of our agents (realtors!) and thus far elicited only the reaction that no-one knows why it hasn’t sold…

Hmmm!

As the deadline for our departure for Canada approaches with all the subtlety of a runaway train we must keep our faith, our belief in our good fortune and our fingers firmly crossed. The universe is surely planning for everything to pan out just right – at just the right moment.

If nothing else we will have learned a heck of a lesson!

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you are here“The three most common expressions in aviation are, ‘Why is it doing that?, ‘Where are we?’ and ‘Oh Crap.'”

Unknown quote

It has been quite some while since I last issued an update regarding the progress toward our transit to Canada later this year. There is a good reason for my reticence on the subject: progress has been glacially slow!

Things are moving but – just at the point at which we would really like to be seeing an acceleration toward our ultimate goal – we find that we must just continue to be patient, patient and ever more patient!

It is now around ten weeks since CIC happily relieved me of the Right of Permanent Residence Fee (RPRF) – the request for which I took at the time (as indeed I still do) to be a splendid omen. Reading further on the various fora to which other similarly incipient ex-pats subscribe it would seem that one should expect the wait from RPRF payment to final approval to be anything from eight to sixteen weeks. Naturally I am expecting my approval notice to arrive at any moment! Naturally I am repeatedly disappointed when my daily progress checks again prove negative.

The start of the year has seen much movement regarding our apartment in Buckinghamshire. At least – much movement when it comes to viewings, second viewings, detailed enquiries concerning management structures and so forth. Sadly there have as yet still been no offers.

We paid a visit to the apartment a week or so ago, en route to a meeting with our estate agent (Canadian: realtor!) and we were somewhat put out to discover that some of the rooms there were in fairly urgent need of decorative refurbishment. We were not at all pleased that neither our tenant nor the agents – who routinely show prospective purchasers around the property – had deemed it worth their while to brief us regarding this sub-optimal situation. I have now arranged for a decorator to visit with a view to carrying out the updates, but it is quite distressing to think that some prospective purchasers might well have been put off by their first impressions of what is actually a quite lovely – if somewhat quirky – apartment.

I feel sure that there is a good reason for all such delays and disruptions to our forward momentum. Certainly the recent increasing strength of the pound sterling against the Canadian dollar makes me exceedingly glad that we did not find a buyer last year and then ship our capital out to BC at that point. We must simply believe that all such delays result from similar purposes on the part of the universe, and that all will become clear as things progress.

There will be more exciting news as the weeks pass – so do continue to watch this space…

I always wanted to say that!

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deja-vue-all-over-again-yogi-berraTwo years ago to this very day – on April 22nd 2012 – I posted this entry to my then still fledgeling journal. The jist of the epistle was that we had just placed our Buckinghamshire apartment on the market (for the second time) and that – though the market was as flat as a flat thing – we were nonetheless optimistic that we would eventually find a buyer. As it turned out – of course – those optimistic inclinations proved to be somewhat – er – optimistic!

As can be discerned from this only slightly later post I was at that time also contemplating the start of the process by which I would achieve Permanent Residency status for Canada, prior to my intended retirement to BC last summer. Regular readers will know that that process was aborted at the last moment when the Kickass Canada Girl’s job in Victoria evaporated in a puff of smoke and we had to reconcile ourselves to a slightly longer domicile in the UK than had originally been planned.

Well – here we are – two years down the line and we find ourselves right back where we started!

Last week our apartment in Buckinghamshire went back onto the market. Third time lucky and all that – but it has to be said that the omens do appear somewhat more propitious this time round, with the UK property market – particularly in the south east – doing its level best to inflate itself into an even bigger bubble than before. Anyway – let’s not startle the horses… so ’nuff said!

I am also kick-starting my PR application again. Modifying the paperwork to reflect the fact that two years have passed is not difficult. Much has changed (the Girl now lives and works in the UK – we have been married for twice as long as we had in 2012 – I am now a pensioner!) – and the forms need to be re-written to reflect that.

What will take time and effort – however – are the elements that must be re-done from scratch. I will have to apply for a fresh Police Certificate and I will need to take another medical. I will also need to acquire another set of visa application photographs. Some of the previous set vanished into the process – never to be seen again – and I am in any case now sporting a facial embellishment that was not previously extant.

Revisiting the application has been interesting. I can see now that I misinterpreted several of the questions the first time round and it is good to get those sorted out. I also notice that some elements of the process itself have been improved. You may recall the trouble that I had persuading my chosen clinic to carry out the medical without prior submission of my PR application? Well – the documentation on all sides now makes it clear that the medical can be carried out ‘upfront’ in family sponsorship cases – and indeed that so to do can help to accelerate the process.

I will – of course – let you know how it all goes…

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Baby_feetBob:    I can’t do that. It’s too big!
Dr. Leo:    Baby steps Bob. Baby steps.

From the movie: “What about Bob?”
Written by Tom Shulman
Directed by Frank Oz

The illation of this post from January of this year – wherein I pondered the next steps in our glacially slow progress towards a new life in British Columbia – was that all depended on our being able to sell our property in Buckinghamshire… which objective would – in consequence – be our main focus over the coming months. The first landmark along this route was to be the date in March on which the tenants currently occupying our apartment could be given notice to quit –  after which we could move to bring the property once again to market.

On Wednesday this week such notice was duly served.

We are currently in discussion with several local estate agents with a view to establishing a fair and reasonable price for the property – subsequent to which we will stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, take a deep breath and return to the affray! Fingers – and much else – firmly crossed…

Now – because selling a property in the UK is such a big, grown-up, scary prospect we have decided – instead of taking the risk of biting off more than we can reasonably chew – to sell the apartment bit by bit!

Well – no… of course we haven’t really – though just at the moment that might appear to be the case!

I’m being cryptic! I will stop at once…

We are in the final stages of selling a brick built bin store that is located behind the main house. There are four such stores – assigned to four of the seven apartments into which the original residence was divided – in a row abutting the rear wall of the estate. The roofs of these stores had – of late – fallen into such a state of disrepair that urgent remedial works were required. Naturally the Kickass Canada Girl and I were reluctant to invest further monies into a feature of the property that adds little or no financial value to the apartment as a whole, so a deal was done with one of our neighbours. She will pay the costs of the roof repairs in return for the transfer into her name of the store itself. She can use the space – we can do without the expense!

It would – of course – be really good if the rest of the sale were to proceed as expeditiously and smoothly as this. Let us be optimistic and assume that this will indeed be so.

 

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Image by Damián Navas on Flickr

If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it.

Abraham Lincoln

 

January is just about done. It is the time of year to put aside retrospection and to engage instead in a little gentle anticipation. Time to make a plan…

Our approach in this instance will be subtly different to that which we previously pursued. On that occasion our grand strategy was launched with due ceremony.  ‘Full steam ahead’ was the command and away we sailed – all guns blazing – only to founder on the ragged rocks of an unfriendly shore and to slip slowly beneath the waves – lost with all hands.

This time – with the memory of running-before-we-could-walk fresh in our minds – we are taking things one step at a time.

Step one: Sell the apartment in Buckinghamshire. Until this has been accomplished nothing else can be done – thus nothing else need currently concern us.

The good news on this front is that the market has picked up appreciably. The UK economy has now enjoyed four consecutive quarters of growth and a considerable number of new jobs have been created – many of them in the corridor between the M4 and M40 motorways to the west of London. Our humble apartment is located slap-bang in the middle of this area.

Even better – we hear through the grapevine that one of our ex-neighbours is also selling her apartment, which happens to be the one immediately below ours. As far as we can tell it was only introduced to the market around Christmas time, but it is already under offer and the asking price – which I imagine has pretty much been achieved – was considerable. We can’t put our apartment on the market until the point that we are able to give our tenants notice (toward the end of March) but we are – naturally – now eager to get things moving.

Further on the positive news front… the good old Pound Sterling has itself also been doing jolly well of late against the Canadian dollar. When I started tracking the exchange rate around two years ago it was hovering around the 1.55 mark. It is now slightly above 1.8 and is – apparently – slowly but surely still rising… as are house prices in the south east of England! I am not going to excogitate this scenario further for fear of jinxing the whole kit and caboodle but – as you might imagine – we now have fingers, arms, legs, eyes and everything else crossed. We must look pretty damned funny!

 

There is actually one other thing that we do need to get on with at this point. Regular readers may experience a strong sense of deja vu as I revisit the subject of my application for Canadian Permanent Residency. You might recall that the whole process ground to a halt when the Kickass Canada Girl returned to the UK the Christmas before last. Well – figuring that our delayed move is now likely to take place within the next two years it is essential that we re-ignite the process. Otherwise I might find myself in British Columbia but unable to stay there.

The process will – of course – be somewhat different now that the Girl is based in the UK rather than in Canada. I will update my previous musings on the subject (here, here and all points west!) so that those lighting upon this post in search of useful information regarding permanent residency will be able to get the complete picture.

 

“So we beat on…” – though unlike Fitzgerald’s protagonist we are in this case carried onward toward the future…

…and our motto for the day shall be “Softly, softly, catchee monkey!”

 

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Photo by Andy Dawson ReidReaders may recall – and those who do not may refresh their memories here should they so wish – that the Kickass Canada Girl and my very first scheme for moving to British Columbia – even before she was offered the job there – involved us moving out of our home in Buckinghamshire into rented accommodation, selling our apartment, purchasing a property in Victoria, letting it and then using the income to cover our rent in the UK until such time as we could move to Canada. The chief purpose of this little scheme was to enable us to leave the UK quickly when the time came and to have a property ready and waiting in BC on our arrival there.

As will be clear by now neither this nor any of our subsequent schemes worked out at all as planned. When it became apparent that we were not to be able to sell our apartment in short order we had to re-think. Rather than move back to Buckinghamshire we decided to seek a tenant to occupy the property and thus to cover our rental costs until such time as we were able to find a buyer. This was, after all, exactly what we were planning to do in Victoria – so where was the difference?

Well! All I can say is that the experience of our first year as landlords (or more properly as landlord and landlady) may well have put us off the whole notion for life! Nor does it does take much research on the InterWebNet or elsewhere to establish that anyone who lets property for any length of time ineluctably accrues their own horror stories. We just have to hope that our inchoate experience was anomalous and that our next time round will prove more propitious.

We seem to have suffered a particularly infelicitous run of bad luck when it comes to expenses. The Girl and I had spent a considerable amount renovating the apartment over the previous few years, which enterprise had included the installation of a complete new kitchen designed to a high standard by my brother – who makes his living thus. He is not cheap but he is very good!

Imagine my consternation, therefore, when – over the course of the year – I was obliged to:

  • replace the fridge/freezer
  • spend a considerable amount on oven repairs
  • call an engineer on several occasions to fix the washer/dryer
  • purchase a new control module for a gas fire
  • arrange for the ailing heating system to be looked at on more than one occasion.

This latter culminated in the eventual failure of the boiler (‘furnace’ – for Canadian readers!) requiring a complete – and expensive – replacement.

As though all of this were not enough our initiatory tenant proved to be a total nightmare. Quite apart from demanding a rent rebate whenever the slightest thing went amiss, this lessee eventually seemed to absent himself entirely from the property, only to be replaced (according to reports from our erstwhile neighbours) by a friend of his to whom he was ‘lending’ the apartment (the lease prohibiting him from sub-letting it). Our former home was thus now being lived in by someone of whom we had no knowledge or information at all, and who proceeded to upset the neighbours with noisy late night comings and goings and – ignoring our blandishments to the contrary – by smoking out of the windows. Matters eventually reached the point at which we were obliged to give the appropriate notice and the tenant – and his friend – finally moved out just before Christmas.

That was not – sad to say – the end of the matter. The tenant – whom we believed to be a very ‘house-proud’ fellow – had on taking up the lease enquired as to whether he could redecorate some of the rooms in neutral tones. We had no objection to this and at the end of the year were expecting to get the apartment back in good order. We were, therefore, upon receiving the check-out report from our management company, stunned to discover that the tenant had – without any consultation! – replaced a perfectly good neutral toned carpet in one of the bedrooms… with a black one!

Astonishing!! What sort of behaviour is that?!

As I write there are decorators and carpet-layers in the apartment restoring everything to a sensible state with a view to attracting fresh tenants. The cost of all this will hopefully – following the usual haggling, horse-trading and possibly arbitration – be recovered from the tenant’s deposit. I have no doubt that he will fight every inch of the way – because that is just the sort of unreasonable man that he is.

It takes – clearly – all sorts!

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Given that Kickass Canada Girl and I lead what, in the main, what can only be described as a charmed existance it would seem somewhat churlish – if that is a strong enough term for what I am about to do – for either of us to whinge or otherwise complain about it. Indeed some might find such behaviour reprehensible or even – given the manifold ills of the world as a whole – somewhat offensive. My nature is to be an optimist and to look on the bright side – but there are times when even I feel beaten down by things and am moved by the urge to unburden.

To cut to the chase – what I am saying is that if the very thought of my grumbling on about  our lives turns your stomach – look away now! Click through to another, more upbeat posting maybe.

<Grumble on>

The Girl has gone back to Victoria. Boo!! She and I will not see each other again until early in November – which sorry inevitability really is proving pretty tough to bear. As posited in a previous posting on Long Distance Relationships – and is definitely turning out to be the case for us – these repeated partings are becoming more difficult with repetition rather than easier.

The Girl – having been away from Victoria for some time on a combination of leave and foreign work trips – faces what she knows will be a tough period back in the office. She is well aware that things are difficult all over at the moment, but as she is still relatively new to this particular challenge she is finding it all rather daunting and would much rather that I were there to support her (as would I!) instead of being 5,500 miles away.

I have started my last full academic year at work. This should feel good but it has been a very tough and chaotic summer – not just for those of us in IT but across the School as a whole. There is going to be a mad scramble over the coming months to try to get everything working as it should, with the further threat of an inspection hanging over us throughout. There is clearly more to do than can reasonably be accomplished in the time available, and the very thought of heading into the winter – with my commute and long days of work – makes me feel almost resentful that I have to do this final year.

The housing market is flat. The various statistics available online for our area suggest that the average time on the market is in excess of two thirds of a year and that very little is selling. Our apartment in Buckinghamshire inevitably does not fall into the ‘average’ category – in terms of selling if no other. The longer it remains unsold – and with no indication that the market will pick up anytime soon – the more worried we become that a vital element of our plan will simply fail to materialise. There is also the ongoing expense of being the landlord of a rented property. There seems always to be something needing to be done!

I do not much like the autumn. I never have. Spring is my time of year – when new life is appearing and all is being born afresh. Yes – I know that the cycle of death and rebirth is natural and essential, but that doesn’t always help my mood.

Wonderful as it is for the Girl and I to meet each other whenever we can, the cost of flying around the world like this really is unconscionable – let alone being the slightest bit ‘green’. I can’t wait to be settled in one place and to put what monies we have left to some more fruitful purpose.

 

You know – I think that is quite enough of that. This is making even me a bit queesy – and if you have read thus far I am sure that you are feeling the same.

Deep breath – and…

<Grumble off>

 

Sorry about that. Normal service has been resumed…

 

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