17 February 2007
HSMP hysteria
January got off to a fairly slow start. The weather was fairly miserable and we hadn’t seen a flake of snow at all, not much of a winter. School started back at the end of the first week of January and I was back to travelling the county of Devon teaching at various out-of-the-way schools. Overhanging us all month was the growing need to submit Chris' Highly Skilled Migrant Program application. We had so many bits of information to gather and we were basically there - just waiting for one or two documents to arrive...
As a Christmas gift our friends Chrissie and Dom had bought us tickets to go and see an Exeter Chiefs rugby game at the new rugby ground, Sandy Park. On arrival at the ground we were issued with a TRY card (why do they call it a ‘try’ when they succeed in putting the ball in the right place??). The back of the card had instructions on how to behave when ‘our’ team scored and when the other team scored. It was a fun afternoon despite the fact that Chris and I know very little about the rules of the game… my uncle will be disappointed for sure to read that.
Not much else happened in the middle of the month, we went to the Quay one sunny morning with Ben and Dayna. Chris and I joined a free Red Coat Tour around the Cathedral Green – they are a series of free walking tours that you can go on to find out a little more about the history of Exeter. There are some really interesting things to find out and each tour is guided by a keen volunteer (ours was called Clive). We had to buy a new bird feeder after donating our old one to the French bird-feeding effort. We walked out our front door one morning to find a man and a woman eyeing our feeder. After we explained it was ours they asked if he could have it to take back to France – apparently you can’t find a good feeder there! We agreed and considered it our good deed for the day.
One big thing that did happen (finally) towards the end of the month was that Chris submitted his Highly Skilled Migrant Program application. It is the visa that we are hoping to return to England on when the Holiday-maker visas we are currently on expire in March. It’s a point’s based system which seems pretty straightforward on initial reading but is in fact a right pain to apply for. The amount of documentation required is amazing – when I took it to the post office the scales said it weighed 1.6 kg. Far out. Once it was in the post the waiting began, we’d heard stories about the application taking 5 weeks to come back and the miss rate being pretty high. We only had about six weeks until lift off to Canada and Australia when we posted the application. Nothing like a little January adrenalin!
“The Napoli was deliberately grounded off the Devon coast on Saturday 20 January amid fears it would sink in deep water, after holes appeared on either side of the vessel two days previously” - BBC. The news was reported around the world. Many containers fell off the listing ship and washed ashore near Branscombe leading to widespread scavenging. It made for some amazing news footage. On the 26th I was working the morning at a school near Branscombe so stopped in at the beach on my way home. By this time the police had stopped public access to the beach and the clean up operation was well underway. They are slowly taking the remaining containers off the ship and have pumped the fuel out of it to prevent further spillage into the ocean. The beach was an amazing mess and they say it will take months to clean it all up successfully.
We finished January by going to see a unique band play in a small village hall. The band was Jiggerypipery – an amazing mixture of drums, guitar, fiddle and bagpipes! It was a fabulous night with much jumping and jigging and highland-flinging. Ah, trust Kate to take us to the sort event you would never believe if you hadn’t been there yourself! They were so good we had to buy their first CD when the gig was over.
As a Christmas gift our friends Chrissie and Dom had bought us tickets to go and see an Exeter Chiefs rugby game at the new rugby ground, Sandy Park. On arrival at the ground we were issued with a TRY card (why do they call it a ‘try’ when they succeed in putting the ball in the right place??). The back of the card had instructions on how to behave when ‘our’ team scored and when the other team scored. It was a fun afternoon despite the fact that Chris and I know very little about the rules of the game… my uncle will be disappointed for sure to read that.
Not much else happened in the middle of the month, we went to the Quay one sunny morning with Ben and Dayna. Chris and I joined a free Red Coat Tour around the Cathedral Green – they are a series of free walking tours that you can go on to find out a little more about the history of Exeter. There are some really interesting things to find out and each tour is guided by a keen volunteer (ours was called Clive). We had to buy a new bird feeder after donating our old one to the French bird-feeding effort. We walked out our front door one morning to find a man and a woman eyeing our feeder. After we explained it was ours they asked if he could have it to take back to France – apparently you can’t find a good feeder there! We agreed and considered it our good deed for the day.One big thing that did happen (finally) towards the end of the month was that Chris submitted his Highly Skilled Migrant Program application. It is the visa that we are hoping to return to England on when the Holiday-maker visas we are currently on expire in March. It’s a point’s based system which seems pretty straightforward on initial reading but is in fact a right pain to apply for. The amount of documentation required is amazing – when I took it to the post office the scales said it weighed 1.6 kg. Far out. Once it was in the post the waiting began, we’d heard stories about the application taking 5 weeks to come back and the miss rate being pretty high. We only had about six weeks until lift off to Canada and Australia when we posted the application. Nothing like a little January adrenalin!“The Napoli was deliberately grounded off the Devon coast on Saturday 20 January amid fears it would sink in deep water, after holes appeared on either side of the vessel two days previously” - BBC. The news was reported around the world. Many containers fell off the listing ship and washed ashore near Branscombe leading to widespread scavenging. It made for some amazing news footage. On the 26th I was working the morning at a school near Branscombe so stopped in at the beach on my way home. By this time the police had stopped public access to the beach and the clean up operation was well underway. They are slowly taking the remaining containers off the ship and have pumped the fuel out of it to prevent further spillage into the ocean. The beach was an amazing mess and they say it will take months to clean it all up successfully. We finished January by going to see a unique band play in a small village hall. The band was Jiggerypipery – an amazing mixture of drums, guitar, fiddle and bagpipes! It was a fabulous night with much jumping and jigging and highland-flinging. Ah, trust Kate to take us to the sort event you would never believe if you hadn’t been there yourself! They were so good we had to buy their first CD when the gig was over.
