Diary of a returning expat

2004-02-04T23:31:00.000Z

Well, what a week, real snow, but just enough to tempt the boy child into thinking he might be able to go sledging, but then it all disappeared by the weekend. I'm longing for a winter holiday. I went on a ski trip once, but due to a slipped disc the previous year, couldn't actually ski, but I still had a great time. Anyway, now the snow's all gone, and in it's place we have floods, but not round here though, the Irwell is generally OK, probably because it rains all the bloody time anyway. The other rivers are just soft part time efforts, the Irwell's well hard.

House purchase is on a pace, survey's done, money from the other house in is the bank, endowments are cashed in, and for the first time in a long time, we have no debts! Credit cards are totally paid off, no overdraft, no loans, and currently anyway, no mortgage (though that will change in a few weeks hopefully). Now we're trying to set up insurance and assurance in case of the worst. It's quite depressing finding out how bad a risk I am, having high blood pressure, back problems, both parents with diabetes and one dead of heart failure at 62. These people are professional gamblers - they know the odds better than anyway, and they're giving me very short odds indeeds.

We're even going to have enough over to buy a car - probably outright, so we've been round the Mitsubishi showrooms looking at Spacewagons - a beautiful car, and with enough room for us, the kids and grandparents, or alternatively, with all the seats out, ideal for trips to ikea and/or the tip. Group 12 motor insurance though, which is a bit hefty, and I have no no-claims bonus, being as how I've been living in Holland where you can cycle everywhere.

I'm looking forward to negotiating over the price of the car, after all those right car - wrong car programs where they drive the salesman down so much they're weeping, we've got cash after all. I've worked out all my lines, and I've found 3 places which have got the car I want, so I can be choosy.

2004-01-15T14:04:00.000Z

WooHoo! Bought a new house this morning, we saw it on Tuesday (only the 3rd one we looked at), and went back this morning to see it in daylight, then made the offer, and it's been accepted. Now we just have to see if we can get a mortgage, we've got a financial advisor coming round tonight, and he's going to advise us. Altogether thinks are going too badly (touch wood) with our financial affairs. We have credit cards (thanks to our friendly neighbourhood bank manager), and it turns out we haven't needed the loan yet, as we're happy(ish) with our cheap and nasty cars, the year's insurance was higher than the cost of either car.

My next task is to find myself some life assurance, as we're not going to go for an endowment mortgage again, this might be tough being 40, overweight, with high blood pressure and a history of heart disease in my family. Maybe this is the time to go on a crash diet, the last few goodies left over from Christmas are dwindling now, and the new house has got tons more room, including 3 cellars, so I could set one up as a home gym, and finally start using my rowing machine.

When I've tried using it in the living room, both children inevitably want to come and climb on and play boats, which doesn't help.

2004-01-06T17:18:00.000Z

Well, it's growing, we now have 55 sites using the DMOZ database and therefore showing links to Moneysupermarket. Though it turns out that we missed out on the last import of the DMOZ database by Google in November.

My own quest to become number 1 for the search term "Chris Smith" seems to be going nowhere fast. I'm not even in the top 100 as far as I can tell, and it's so boring trawling through the pages to find where you are. I blame 'the gay MP' Chris Smith. He might as well change his name to 'Gay Chris Smith', even if he retires from politics, he'll always be 'gay ex-MP', or perhaps he'll make it to the top and be 'gay PM Chris Smith'. Of course, then I'll have no chance of being ranked highly at Google.

If you do put a link out to this site, then please make it's got the words 'Chris Smith' in the URL somewhere. You can use the name as the linked text, or put it into a TITLE attribute of the <A tag>.

As I'm suffering from more back trouble after a relatively long pain-free period, I'm going to enrol in a Pilates class tonight, though I'm not sure how swashbuckling is going to help. Which reminds me - finally, my all time favourite piece of radio has emerged as (appropriately enough) an MP3. Radio 4 makes me feel proud to be British, and there's not much else that does.

Here it be, me hearties, a tale of pirates bold who sails the Spanish Main armed only with swords and a SWOT analysis, aarrr!

2004-01-05T17:11:00.000Z

Well, the move went as well as expected, i.e. I spent days incapacitated because of my back. Next time we're paying for proper removal men.

We're finally free of all that Dutch stuff now, at least I hope so, but knowing Dutch bureaucracy, I'm not entirely convinced. At least though, in Holland, they have a decent website for finding a house. Here in the UK, it's appalling, there are a couple of big websites but they're both crap. More at the BBC website.

Estate agents don't seem to have taken to the web at all, which is surprising. In my long career on the internet (8 or 9 years now), I remember various conferences where speakers would tell us about the future of the WWW. Usually house buying would come up as an example. We were told that when buying a house you'd simply tell your intelligent agent what you wanted, and it would trawl the web for you and provide you with not only photos, but videos, maps to your place of work and/or school for children, the crime rate, the occupations of your potential neighbours.... All this on your web enabled fridge.

I got quite overwhelmed with all this stuff. I used to kid people telling them about a project I heard about which was the web-enabled toilet which would analyse your 'output' and contact either your virtual doctor if it found a serious problem, or your supermarket to adjust your diet if it found you weren't eating enough fibre. It would also connect to your personal agent which would nag you about eating more fruit, or drinking more water.

Most people believed me, and I'm sure that before 9/11, someone was actually working on such a device.

Anyway, I did expect that the web would have enabled me to find a house efficiently by 2004. Instead, it seems most estate agents still want to send you their entire listings by post whatever you want.

No single estate agent is going to produce a useful site, no-one cares which agent they use when buying a house, it's the house that matters. I don't want to trawl around 20 different sites each week to check them.

All I want is one single database of all the houses, with sufficient detail in the database so I can sort them by a couple of criteria such as number of bedrooms, price and area (and by the way you arrogant London nazis - 'The North' is not a sufficiently small area for a meaningful selection).

Before I came back from Holland in June I went to a meeting of newspaper websites where the above mentioned Dutch site - www.funda.nl, which is owned and run by the association of Dutch estate agents - gave a presentation. The gist of this was - every single house placed with an estate agent in Holland is on our site, so we don't need newspapers anymore - Byee. Not advertising in newspapers would save them thousands of pounds of course, so it would also make sense for the newspapers to launch such a site before the estate agents get together and do it. Meanwhile the buggers insist on phoning me! What is this, the 80s?

Anyway, enough ranting. My SEO work continues, and after finally getting my employer's site Moneysupermarket into DMOZ, it's fun to see that it's finally propagating around the web as people download the DMOZ database. They don't do this very often though a new version is available each week, mind you it's a humungous size. I downloaded it once, and because it's not actually a database, but a weird type of XML, you have to have specialist programs to parse it into something useful, so I'm not surprised.

Today there were 54 sites who were using the copy of the db that we're in, I'm intrigued to see how this will grow.

2003-12-22T18:11:00.000Z

Well, back to Holland over the festive period once more. This time it's the last time, hopefully. We have to go and collect the rest of our worldly belongings from our old house, which will be sold from mid January. While we're there we'll get the last load of Dutch goods from the shops that our family have ordered.

One of my 1000s of money making schemes is a moving what's in demand in one country from another. In the case of Holland, as far as ourselves and my family go, that would seem to be Dutch pea soup, with big chunks of smoked sausage, a type of biscuit called stroopwafels (which are big round biscuits with toffee in the middle). Possibly the nicest sugar free chocolate milk in the word - Chocomel, another type of biscuit called Jewish biscuits, and if we have room, a Dutch Apple Cake or 2.

Everyone takes home different things from different countries. It's always a good idea to buy saffron when you're in Spain, as it's so cheap, likewise Wine in France, although it's getting cheaper here now. It's intriguing what foreigners buy in bulk, like the English people buying 10 x 5kg boxes of French washing powder, or the chinese women in Amsterdam buying up the entire, well, stock of chicken Knorr cubes. I had this picture of them back home saying 'Look, this is fantastic, you don't have to boil up a whole chicken each time'.

When we lived in Holland, and would visit the UK in our car, we always stocked up with English cereals, the Dutch are very severe in their culinary habits, there idea of breakfast is a piece of bread, with some cheese or ham, and a boiled egg perhaps. Cereals were available, but very few of the frivolous child-enticing kind, although in the last year or so CocoPops has made its way onto supermarket shelves.

We would come home with around 20 boxes of Cranberry shredded wheat, Golden Nuggets, Golden Grahams etc, and eke them out until our next visit, or trip to France, where we would tour the Hypermarche with a bulging trolley, loading it with french versions of our favourites, including the sadly no longer available 'Crispy Sea'.

We're still trying to get out of this obsession with cereals and hard to find English foods, so we, well, at least I, still tend to feel slightly desperate if we get below 10 boxes of cereals, or 200 teabags (obviously you can get tea in Holland, but it's completely shite).

So if anyone needs anything just let me know.

2003-12-19T11:31:00.000Z

Work goes on here at Moneysupermarket. We're all in the Christmas mood at the moment, and despite a scrooge-like decision to ban christmas lights for 'health and safety' reasons, people and their workplaces are looking very festive. There's a competition for the best decorated desk today, but we in the framework team are too cynical and cool for all that nonsense. Anyway we're peeved that our lights had to come down, so we're boycotting it.

We did consider making a statement by doing it in the style of the Grinch or Scrooge or the nightmare before Christmas, but as I say we're far too cool.

Here in software development, we don't get the perks of those responsible for making big orders. Bottles of champagne and hampers are arriving continuously for those select individuals who sign the invoices. In my previous job when I was in this position, I always made a point of giving them on to my employees. It always felt too much like bribery.

I'm kind of running out of things to complain about, which maybe means that I'm getting in the Christmas mood, but I'm sure I'll be back with a vengeance when it comes to buying our new house next year.

I'm going back to the Halle this weekend, to a Christmas Carol concert, with our Sam who's 4, my mother, and grandmother. I would recommend the Halle concerts to everyone, it's a whole different experience watching an orchestra, rather than listening to classical music alone.

This promises to be even more accessible, with audience participation. I'll just mime though, as, blessed as I am with a multitude of talents, singing in tune is not one of them. Apparently though I'm in good company. Stephen Fry lists being able to sing as one of his missing talents too.

2003-12-14T00:52:00.000Z

I went to a pantomine last night (Oh No You Didn't!! - Oh Yes I did!) for the first time in about 30 years I think. I actually quite enjoyed it. I took my son of 4 years old of course, I wouldn't have gone on my own (though quite a few adults seemed to be there without children - I can't understand why personally). Though it was quite amusing, the best part was my son's reaction.

The jokes were appalling, but that's what you expect, it's not high art after all. I can definitely recommend this panto "Cinderella" at the Opera House, in Manchester. Someone called "Brian Connelly" is the star apparently, I've never heard of him, but he's a bit like Bruce Forsythe, but funnier.

More art today, although a bit more refined, we went to see the Halle Youth Orchestra at Bridgewater Hall, they were doing one of my favourites - Dvorak - Symphony No 9 from the New World. It's better known (at to people of my age and older) as the theme from 'the Hovis advert', and it's possibly because of that association that it always make me feel homesick and nostalgic, wherever I am. I don't know why, I did grow up in a street very like the one featured in the Hovis advert, though I never wore a flat cap. It's a strange thing, the power of music, I was sat there with tears streaming down my face just because of that one refrain on the cor anglaise. Choirs and orchestras both make me really proud of the human race, they put so much effort into something as fleeting as a piece of music, and each person contributes such a very small part (except the guy playing the kettle drums of course).

God I wish I could play. Sam and Morgan are definitely going to learn instruments, in fact, I think at 4, Sam's ready now. I'm not sure which is most likely to get them into an orchestra though. Definitely not piano, you have to be really good, and then it's not a permanent member of the orchestra. Violin should be good, they always have loads of violinists, and the same with chellists. Perhaps though there's too much competition, as everyone has violin lessons. Maybe they should learn more obscure things like the bassoon or perhaps even the cor anglaise, then they could reduce me to tears whenever they wanted something and I'd give in.

2003-12-09T11:59:00.000Z

Got to go to my son's school's nativity play next week. I was delighted to find out he had a part in it, but it turns out that all the kids in his class are in it. I don't think this is political correctness gone mad, but a ruse to get all the parents there. I wouldn't be going if he wasn't in it of course, but now they're trying emotional blackmail, I've no choice.

I hope he doesn't get star-struck and end up wanting to be an actor, unless of course he's successful, and earns millions of dollars. If so I hope he'll remember that I took the afternoon off work to watch him build a snowman.

2003-12-08T23:25:00.000Z

I'm really confused. Having lived in Holland for 7 years, I first of all had to get used to the Guilder (about 3 to the pound), for a while you go around doing that calculation ("hmm, that's 40 DFL, or about 13 pounds, so that's reasonable) then of course, along came the Euro, which I had to convert into Guilders (2.2DFL = 1 Euro), now I'm having to get used to the pound again, and finding I'm having to convert it to Euros for it to make any sense.

I don't have a very good grasp of the value any more. I feel outrage that a chocalate bar is 40p one day, then I think, no that's fairly cheap the next. I feel like I'm constantly on holiday, trying to calculate the real value of 349 Pesetas, Lira or whatever, then giving up and just buying it, not sure if you've 10 times as much as you should have.

When I was a student some 20 years ago, I used to have a good measure of the true cost of things. I would also think of a value as a number of Bottles Of Vodka it represented (then around Â£6 each), I think the 18 year old me would be amazed that I am about to get a mortgage for 30,000 BOVs, owe 400 BOVs on my credit card, and just bought a christmas present for my 4 year old costing around 6BOVs. In fact, as we're having the whole family (16 people) around for Christmas, we've just ordered a single piece of meat costing around 7BOVs.

Probably most amazing would be that I no longer actually drink bottles of vodka, but would happily pay more than 1 BOV for a bottle of wine.

2003-12-07T02:27:00.000Z

I was meant for this blogging lark. I realise now what's been missing in my life. It's a chance to get down on paper (well not literally obviously) my thoughts, and I realise that it doesn't really matter if no-one is reading it. I wonder if journalists feel this way, or are they always acutely aware of their audience. Thoughts are a very fleeting thing, and it's easy to assume that they're in safe keeping in your head. However, I was watching a program the other night about people who, for various reasons, don't have what you or I would call memories, and how they cope, and I realised how precious memories are - and I'm not just talking about photographs.

In my quest to be ranked one for 'Chris Smith' in Google, I've been looking at my presence on the web, and considering the not inconsiderable work I've put into it, there's not much. One thing I did find was something I wrote 4 years ago, at an excellent website, called 'Birth Stories'. I would urge anyone, mother or father, to write down the story of their child's birth as soon after as they can. I wrote the story of my son Sam's birth a few days after it while I was still in a highly emotional state and I got down lots of details which I know I would have forgotten otherwise.

I'm not the first to recognise the importance of capturing your memories of course, and there are various attempts to give people the facilties. People's history is one fantastic opportunity we have now to put right the biggest problem with history - it is the historian's versions that we read, and it's always been the individual's point of view that we lack. You see a little glimpses into the personal every now and then, in the ruins of Pompeii, or the analyses conducted of the stomach contents of an uncovered stone age warrior. I'm fascinated by the second world war, and I've put some time into the BBC's WW2 People's War site. My Grandfather, who died around 20 years ago, was in the army at the time, and my mother and father were born just before the war started. I've been adding some of the stories I've found out about my parents grandparents during that time, and it's quite fulfilling. I see it as a resource, not particular for the nation (the stories aren't that interesting) but also for my own kids later in life.

Here are pictures of my kids

2003-12-06T10:09:00.000Z

We're off to a continental Christmas market in the centre of Manchester this afternoon. We went a couple of weeks ago and it was, I must say, very nice, with a lot of the stalls you would expect at a genuine Germanic style. I've been to the real thing in Vienna and Switzerland, and apart from the fact it wasn't absolutely freezing, it was a fair approximation, with Bratwurst and Glühwein.

I quite enjoyed myself, and it's certainly saved us having to go back to Vienna again to experience one. Which actualy is a bit of shame. I went to Seville a few years ago, and for the first time in a number of years of international jetsetting, found it actually felt foreign. The kind of international jetsetting I used to do mainly involved going to conferences in posh hotels, and the only time you'd get to leave this hotel was to go to the conference venue, usually in a taxi, and out for a meal. So in fact, it's not like you're really visiting a city, just its hotel and catering industry. When you do get out during the day, it's kind of of depressing to find the same shops everywhere, with the same things in them. Of course, Starbucks and MacDonalds are everywhere, but it's not just them. This homogenisation is what my gripe is really, it takes the fun out of travelling - wherever you go it's just like here, but with, in some cases, a different climate.

Of course, for some people that's precisely what they want - hence the Costas and restaurants with pictures of English food, but when I go away I want completely alien cultures, with very different food and way of life. This is why we're arranging our holiday for next year in France.

Now, it seems, we're all going to standardise our Christmas experience, we've all adopted the Coca Cola Santa, even in cases where they still have the original version, in Holland he's called 'Sinterklaas', and he's definitely still a bishop, he's got the hat and everything. You see advertising there of the 2 characters together. It's a bit like that episode of Doctor Who when the 4 incarnations of the Doctor got together.

So I'll go to this continental Christmas market, and get merry on glühwein and have a Bratwurst (these 2 things are sadly the zenith of German cuisine - apart from Mullers Fruit Corners) , but I can't help wishing I was in Vienna or Aachen doing it instead, now we've imported it and are making it part of our own Christmas tradition, there's less incentive to go abroad, which I can't help thinking is a shame.

2003-12-04T15:42:00.000Z

I've decided that I'm going to become the number one search result for 'Chris Smith' in Google. There's a lot of competition already, here in the UK we have a gay member of parliament and a cricketer with the same name. There's also some mad scientist using the name, and he has some website called 'naked scientists' - the fame loving tart - I mean! Anyone could get to number one for 'naked chris smith'. I bet everyone who knows me is typing that into Google daily anyway just in case.

No, I want just plain old 'Chris Smith'. (That's the phrase, with quotes, which means that Google has to find the words next to each other. If that quest goes well, then I'll try for the unquoted phrase, which Google will interpret as the 2 words occuring anywhere on a page. Also I'm just aiming for sites in the UK at first. You have to leave yourself something to aim for).

If you're reading this Blog, and I know that there are already 100s of you out there, then please consider giving me a link. It's a tough life being a Smith - always feeling slightly guilty when checking into a hotel or getting money for whatever reason. Most of the time you expect people to snort 'Yeah, right' when you say 'Smith'.

It also takes people hours to find us in the phone book, because there are 200 pages of Smiths in the average phone book.

Life has been especially cruel as 'Chris Smith', a fact of which I'm reminded now we're nearing the festive season. The jokes became intolerable once I had the kids. If I hear, 'so now you're a FATHER CHRIS SMITH ' again, I'll kill the person who says it (although that might provide for some 'amusing' headlines and perhaps give me some ranking for a short while, I'm looking to get to the top and stay there).

You can imagine what a relief it was when 'Smith's Crisps' finally became 'Lay's Crisps'. (I've got no idea why they would want to change that, but they also changed 'Jif' to 'Cif', apparently because various swarthy mediterranean types couldn't pronounce it properly. At least 'Yif' didn't sound like a venereal disease or a drug though.

Anyway, all I have to do now is figure out the way-du-jour that Google is using to rank sites. This has all changed recently, with a big shake up in the world of shelving. Apparently, all I need to do is get my name mentioned on a page residing at a university somewhere and I should shoot up to number 1.

For some reason Google has decided that pages of 18 year old adolescents who still think that Robot Wars is better than sex have more 'authority' on a subject than the world's leading websites with 100,000 times as much traffic going to them. (http://www.isedb.com/news/index.php?t=reviews&id=573).

Google is scary: It has enormous power. Here at moneysupermarket, we've just spent thousands of pounds optimising our pages to get a better rank at Google. The trouble is, Google don't just go ahead and tell you what you should do, you have to try and guess, or see what those ranked higher than you are doing and emulate it. It's a bit like worshipping a very fickle god. You spend weeks building a tower to reach him, only to have him smash up all your good work and make you unable to communicate with each other.

A friend of mine, Bill Thompson who's seen as a technology guru (mostly because he's a fantastic self publicist and very fond of techno-toys), recently suggested that we need an agency to regulate search engines, like the water services watchdog (OfPis) I think it's called. I completely agree, the trouble with Google is that you don't see the results that it doesn't give you. Duh! you might say, but everyone blithely goes around saying 'Trouble is, Google gives the best results' - which is nonsense, of course, because you can't check

(Incidentally, Bill is numbers 1 to 3 for his name WITHOUT THE QUOTES and WORLDWIDE, see what I mean about self publicity?).

2003-12-04T13:07:00.000Z

A Teacher at my son's school showed us this the other day, which is quite amusing, but also quite a big insight into the way your brain works:

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe.

As a former proofreader, I'm always amazed how easy it is to spot mistakes, I can literally glance at a page of a book and see a spelling mistake. It's like the way you open a newspaper and your attention jumps to a mention of your name, town or company without you having to read every word.

It's the same kind of brain function which allows you to see a familiar face in the crowd I suppose.

I had a 'senior moment' last night. I thought I'd just pop in to one of those very american style arrangements of around 10 very big shops that are open late. I'd been there several times before, when we lived in Manchester 7 years ago, and I was pretty much sure I knew where it was, but could I find it? Well yes, I did eventually, but I realised that I had no real idea where it was geographically, and they've made so many changes to the roads, I found myself completely lost.

I was determined to get there though, as the thought of having to enter the centre of Manchester at the weekend with the 2 kids (2 and 4) in tow, is too depressing to contemplate. Finally got to Argos and found all this high tech stuff, where you type the numbers of the item directly in via a touch screen, and pay with your debit or credit card at the terminal, and then it tells you the estimated time it'll be at your service point, and all the orders are showed queing up on a display screen. It's very impressive. The only fly in the ointment is that they still rely on 17 year olds to get the stuff off the shelfs and deliver it, so the estimated time of 8 minutes was way off. They did call me up to the counter at that time, but then I had to hang about there for about 15 minutes more because though my item was delivered to the shelves behind the counter, it had been labelled with the wrong order number. That's the problem with technology IMHO, at some point along the line it relies on humans interfacing with it, and that's usually where the breakdowns occur.

DMOZ/Latin Words
One small hobby of mine (and I recommend it to anyone of an anal retentive nature, is being an editor for DMOZ). Some of the world's greatest ARs and pedantic giants are involved. These are the sort of people who are willing to aruge about semantics for weeks and use the word 'actually' a lot, usually (you can tell - even online) with a smug grin.

One particularly annoying thing they do is refer to 'forums' as 'fora'. In case you're unaware of this, many words in English come from the Latin, such as 'Forum' - as in 'A funny thing happened on the way to the forum'. The thinking goes like this, because in Latin you form the plural of word ending in '-um' by replacing the 'um' with an 'a', so 'referenda', 'media' and 'fora'.

Media is now common parlance, of course, but I think most reasonable people with a life would draw the line at 'fora' and even 'referenda'. I mean it's not like we do this will all foreign words? We have 100s of words of Dutch for example 'etching' and 'gangplank' but we don't say 'etchingen' or 'gangplanken' for their plurals, do we?

Possibly 'children' is one case where we do have the 'en' plural from a Saxon or Norse root, but I really don't know enough about etymology to be sure.

It's pretentious and superior to pretend you know Latin in this way. Most of us didn't have the hideously bad fortune to study Latin, and we shouldn't have to mess about considering what the root of every English word is. I think once we've nicked it from another language, it's our word, and we can do what we like with it.

2003-12-03T23:46:00.000Z

Just in case you're confused, my reference yesterday to feeling like I was 'in Brazil', was not a slur on that great country. (I'm sure it's NOT a bureaucratic nightmare at all, I bet you can bribe your way through the red tape with no problems). No, in fact, it was a reference to possibly the best film ever made. Certainly Terry Gilliam's best. For some reason it wasn't much of it hit, but that's usually one of the requirements for a cult classic.

In the film, an innocent man is picked up by the police and tortured to death because a fly falls into a printer while it's writing out warrants and gets the name wrong. In fact it should have been the name of the character played by Robert de Niro, who plays a renegade plumber. When the dead man's neighbour tries to help reclaim his body, she is passed around from desk to desk with demands that she first complete and have stamped, form U3022B/A or something.

In fact, England is nowhere near as bureaucratic as Holland. When we first moved there we tried to get our 'verblijfsvergunning' - residency permit, but to get one you needed have set up your medical insurance first. To set up your medical insurance, you had to pay them with direct debit from your bank account. To get a Dutch bank account you had to show them your verblijfsvergunning. The only way out of this impasse was to persuade the medical insurance company to allow us to make a one-off transfer for 3 months payments from our UK account: Kindly they graciously accepted that we could do this.

Our passports, birth certificates and marriage certificates were not enough to get us a verblijfsvergunning though, no, because they hadn't been stamped to say that they were genuine. My wife had to make a special trip to London to the Foreign and Commonwealth office to have them stamped by someone who didn't even look at them.

The whole process is either designed to keep out foreigners very subtlely, or to keep roughly half the population employed. When you go to the 'Alien Police' to be interviewed for your residency (though it's supposed to be a formality for EU citizens) you first get a numbered ticket, but not from a machine like in the deli, oh no, from a real person at a desk. Then you wait half an hour and find out the ticket is for the queue to get the form. Then you have to get another ticket and queue to hand it in. Why the person at the desk can't just give you the form I don't know.

I know the argument is going on here about having identity cards, and I'm certainly against them, in Holland you do have to carry this verblijfsvergunning everywhere, because all sorts of people will demand to see it, they really don't believe you are who you say you are until you show it.

Enough complaining though. The great thing about being back in the UK is Christmas. On Friday in Holland is the feast of Sinterklaas, this is the original version of Santa Claus of course, and it's the big present exchanging day in Holland, Christmas is just a meal really. It's a little bit nasty, Sinterklaas, traditionally, you write a poem to your loved ones to go along with the gift, telling what's wrong with them. The first one I went to, this guy's friends were all telling him (in verse) that he was using a bit too much coke for his own good, and he stormed out shouting at them.

Also, children are told that if they've been bad during the year, Zwarte Piet (who's a very un-PC character, blacked up like a black and white minstrel), Sinterklaas's helper, will put them into his sack and take them off to spain. A bit more of a punishment than not getting a bike, I think you'll agree.

No, we're looking forward to a nice relaxed Christmas at home. One of the disadvantages of being an expat so close to home, is that we've basically had to spend the last 7 Christmases bar the last one travelling around the UK visiting relatives. This nomadic existence is not relaxing and is very expensive. Last year everyone came over to us (16 houseguests at once is challenging to say the least). The trouble is, lovely as it is to see your relatives regularly, you don't get to have them lovely moment when the last one finally shuts the front door and you can sigh and have a moment with your feet up, and make just one or two cups of tea for yourselves instead of having to wash and use every cup you own. We've felt uncomfortable imposing on people, and now we don't have to, we can pop around for a couple of hours, eat all their mince pies and chocolates and then come home again. Ah Bliss.

2003-12-03T13:46:00.000Z

Work continues, our house has now been sold in NL, so we can begin the process of finding a new one here. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the housing market in NL, we find ourselves with no capital for a house purchase, so are facing saving up for a year or so, or getting some high rate 100% mortgage, or else getting a loan for around 5% which could be expensive.

The housing market has changed quite a bit since we left the UK 7 years ago, prices are something around 300% of the prices then. We find we can't afford to live in the slightly nicer areas of Manchester. The only places we can afford a decent sized house mean that we'd be paying almost double for car insurance and home insurance - which doesn't give you a good feeling about setting up home there with 2 small children.

Now that we've got some credit history, credit card companies are falling over themselves to offer us creditcards - where were they when we first moved back here and actually needed a lot of short term credit eh? We received another ludicrous offer this morning for a store card - only 21.9% APR!

I'm intrigued as to who is actually dumb enough to sign up for a store card, they're such rip-offs. Me I'm happy with my new Co-op card, no fancy and complicated deals, just a very low rate (8%) and they're ethical. I'm not sure about the ethical bit, I have very high standards personally, but I know someone who works there and they have very good conditions for their staff. Plus I'm from Salford, so it's a local company for local people.

I just found out which cartoon character I am - Tweety Pie apparently. I was expecting to someone a bit more cred, like Butch the bulldog, or at least cool and smart like the Roadrunner, but at least Tweety always ends up on top.

Should I blow a few hundred quid and go to Barcelona for my birthday in Feb, or should I put it towards this deposit? I'm really torn, Easyjet are offering flights for around £15 return (plus £15 in taxes) and hotels are quite cheap also. I'm getting a condition the Dutch call 'Beroepsdeformatie'. I have become deformed by my job - and currently I'm working on a travel site which finds the lowest fares, and of course while I'm testing I end up typing in destinations I actually want to go to.

Saw a program recently on the architecture of Gaudi, so it looks like there's lots of things to do in Barcelona for free - basically wandering around taking photographs of fantastic architecture.

2003-12-02T10:56:00.000Z

Well, now been back in the UK for 6 months, and finally getting my life in order. We've finally got a bit of credit history again, and managed to get new bank accounts and better still mobile phones. Considering they seem happy to give them to 5 year olds, we've had a great deal of trouble getting ours. Considering we've both had mobiles from Vodaphone in NL for around 5 years, and are trying to get a Vodaphone account here. The ancient cry of "it's a different department" is now all too familiar.

For some reason, our seven years of excellent credit history in the Netherlands doesn't count here, and we're treated like lepers. Couldn't get a loan, or a credit card, and we've not even considered getting a mortgage yet, we just don't show up in the 'NET'. I feel like Sandra Bullock in that film. If it hadn't been for us knowing a bank manager who was anxious for our business, knowing we're both high earners, we would be in even worse trouble.

So much for the open market of Europe. Not even our no-claims bonus from NL counts here, so we had to pay top whack for car insurance. The worse problem is that applying for these things (credit cards, loans, mortgages, car and home insurance), almost inevitably, you come across a box which asks for the postcode of your last address, and it'll only take UK postcodes. In those moments when I don't feel Sandra Bullock in 'The Net', I feel like I'm in Brazil, screaming at the bureaucratic nightmare.

Luckily the job I got back in the UK was at Moneysupermarket, so at least I have a lot of information at my fingertips. Still, the fact that we're all Europeans now doesn't seem to have registered with the financial institutions of this country at all, and they can't cater for someone who's live outside the UK for more than 3 years.