And it always makes me wonder: You guys realize independence from who is being celebrated in America on this day, right?

Maybe, all of those places that advertise their 4th of July deals are owned by expats, and I’m just not aware of it…

The temperatures have been pretty high in London the last week or so. Not too hot. Warm-to-hot, cooling down nicely overnight. But in a house without any air conditioning, it gets quite noticeable in the afternoon, stuffy, especially on the upper floor. I seem to remember days like these here or there during summers past, but somehow not so many in a row. It must be the impending move to the States that has me pining for the wonders of A/C.

Becky, meanwhile, is out of the house one more time, this occasion being an immersion French study trip to, well, France. She already called us from there and left a message in French. So, I suppose I’m getting my money worth out of it…

We ascertained through various conversations with fellow parents that our daughter is likely the only student at the school to have participated in all various overseas trips this year: Iceland, China, France. Since all trips were at an additional cost to tuition, the misguided implication of our financial wealth available to be spent on our offspring gave us a definite boost in those parents’ eyes.

I suddenly stumbled upon a recently-added TV channel called “ESPN America” in my SkyTV lineup. It has Yankees on! I watched Mariano’s 500th save in a replay, and almost stayed up to watch the Mariners game last night… Common sense won, but I am cancelling the service in a week’s time, just when I discovered it… It would be a pity if not for the fact that there is much more Yankees where I’m going to. Not so much football, though.

A curious bit of British trivia that did not get much of direct mention in the past (although, I indirectly alluded to it in this old post). What happens when a police officer stops you and demands to see your documents, and you for some reason do not have either your license or your car registration, or both, on you? In the States, you’ll get an assortment of fines, if not arrested if the officer is too zealous. In England, as long as you have any form of identification on you – say, a credit card, – you are ok. The police officer will use any document that you can produce to check the database, verify that you are licensed to drive, verify your car ownership, and, of course, cite you for whenever offense you were stopped while committing. But you will not get separately fined for “driving without a license”.

On the one hand, such accommodation begets indiscipline. An acquaintance of ours was recently in a small car accident, and she had her purse with her, but neither her license nor the car registration paper. I am quite positive that she never bothers to check whether she has those documents with her.

On the other hand, a legislated fine for not carrying a specific document along in an age when your privilege to drive and your ownership of the specific vehicle can be easily verified on the fly is something that grates on my libertarian sensibilities. Or, maybe, having your information available for a police officer to check is a step towards complete control of the state over its citizens; Britain, with ubiquitous CCTV cameras and the national identity scheme, is quite far advanced on the path towards entrenched police state…

Finally, another acquaintance recently obtained a doctor’s recommendation to stay away from work because of fatigue. Four paid weeks of convalescence. The job will be his when he comes back. Can this ever happen in America? I’m sure a sabbatical can be arranged by a mutual agreement between a valued employee and an accommodating employer, but in general, I can’t imagine someone having the balls to unilaterally take time off for being fatigued and not paying some quick consequences with their job.

Maybe I’m a closet workaholic with little imagination.

The only country that I’ve repeatedly entered as a foreigner is, unsurprisingly, the United Kingdom. And, as my rotten luck would have it, it is likely the country with the world’s second most-stringent border checks. There are landing cards, one per person, that the border agent has to write upon and stamp; there is requisite passport scanning and stamping; the agent invariably chats you up, sometimes asking formal questions (where do you live? what do you do? are you still with the same company that sponsored your work permit?) or sometimes just engaging you in a non-committal chit-chat. I understand the need, I do not bemoan the thoroughness, I actually do feel safer knowing that it is not easy for a persona non grata to enter the country where I make my home.

What I have a problem with is the accommodation, or lack thereof.

There are normally a handful to a dozen of agents in any given airport border control hall dealing with long queues of disembarked passengers. Those assigned to the UK/EU desks keep their lines moving by giving a quick look-over to each passport and waving people through. Those at the non-EU desks are the ones who need to be very thorough and deliberate. Of course, every other passenger that they see either does not speak any English or has a red flag among his visa stamps or, for any number of reasons, behaves in a way that suggests the need for in-depth interrogation.

All the way while I’m stuck in the queue.

In a large stuffy room that is not properly air-conditioned.

With a tired 8-year-old who has to go to the bathroom.

Next to a bunch of nice folks whose views on personal hygiene are incompatible with my sensibilities.

You see, there are no “non-EU permanent resident” desks, which would be similar to what I remember a standard “Green Card holders” lane in the US airports. Instead, it does not matter to the border agency that I make my home here in the UK. When I show up at the border with my US passport, I don’t get to differentiate myself from other non-EU citizens who happen to be visitors to Britain.

Hey, I pay taxes in this country. You might even guess without me expressly pointing it out – but I’ll do that anyway – that what I pay in taxes is considerably above what the average UK citizen pays. Why don’t I deserve the courtesy of having a speedier procedure for entry!?

Ah, but there is one way to expedite your entry into the country if you are a permanent resident with non-EU credentials. It is called IRIS and I first mentioned it two years ago. When you are registered and the system is operational, it literally takes 20-30 seconds for your retina scan to confirm your identity and grant you entry to the UK. There aren’t long queues either.

Except, children are not eligible to register for IRIS, due to some nonsense about ensuring that “every child’s welfare is considered by a human agent at the point of crossing”. I travel for leisure a lot more than I travel for business. When I travel for leisure, I have my kids in tow. I don’t have any choice but to get into the stupid queue.

I realize it sounds like such a trivial thing, but with our relatively frequent escapades abroad, crossing UK border has become one of the things I hate the most about living in England. I’ve flown into a dozen European countries – some, like Italy or Spain, many times over – and I’m treated as a visitor at their borders better than I am treated as a resident at the UK ones. (Only once on our travels, in Poland, we were inexplicably subject to a lengthy copy-down-all-of-the-passport-information-by-hand border crossing procedure, but I’m willing to discount that as remnants of cold-war suspiciousness, and I lack enough of a sample in Eastern Europe to confirm or refute that generalization.)

I wish I lived on the continent instead. In any case, there is only one time in the foreseeable future that I will have to get into that queue again…

The first few times in London, I went to an office of a Russian dentist in a fairly remote part of the city from where we live. The dentist was a swell guy, but the dental hygienist in his office was a brusque Englishwoman whose work I did not enjoy. Sitting in her chair for 20-25 minutes was very much approximating a torture. At least, she cleaned my teeth quite well. The visits cost me £45 each, partially reimbursed by the private insurance from work.

I’ve gotten fed up with that lady eventually and went to a local to us private office instead, where the doctor and the hygienist were both a much more pleasant Englishwomen very gentle in their work. They were also thorough, cleaned my teeth extraordinarily well, and made the half-hour procedure as bearable as it can ever be. The visit cost me £90, about a sixth of which was later reimbursed by the private insurance.

This year, we made a decision to drop private insurance from our benefits. It cost us quite a lot in premium deductions, and all we had to show for it were minuscule reimbursements for a handful of visits a year.

For my first cleaning of the year, therefore, I was going to an NHS dentist. The visit there is not free, as some may surmise, but only costs £18. 90 versus 18 – there is a difference, especially in this economy.

Here is how it went:

Came in for an appointment five minutes before the scheduled time of 10:45am.

Sat in the waiting room for 40 minutes in an enjoyable company of several families from a certain slice of the society: The kids screamed and splashed their dribbling snot around, the mothers ignored them while exchanging local gossip, with an F-bomb heard twice in every sentence and at least three times in a sentence longer than 6 words…

Was called into the surgery room at 11:25.

Discussed my history and teeth-cleaning habits with the seemingly 18-year-old doctor and her assistant for a few minutes.

Walked out of the office at 11:35. In the intervening few minutes, the dentist looked at my teeth, recorded whatever measurements dentists record, performed some cleaning maneuvers for about 90 seconds, and sent me on my way with a “we removed some of the plaque – more frequent flossing would not hurt”.

I came home, looked in the mirror, and everything that I hope to not see after a dental cleaning is still right there.

Guess what are the chances of my return to an NHS dental office. I’d rather go and pay five times as much and get a reasonable service in return.

I hate socialized medicine.

This throwback practice is still very much in use in rural parts of the country, but even in central London, every respectable building is likely to have a name proudly displayed above the entrance or near its gates.

In our suburban neck of the woods, many streets are full of named houses. As I have been regularly strolling around the neighborhood streets of late, trying to justify the purchase of a pedometer, I inconspicuously took snapshots of some of the house signs with my pocket camera. Please feel free to click each picture to embiggenate.

    
    
    
    

X-ray technician: Are you pregnant at all?
Natasha [after a pause]: No, not even a little.

This is one of those linguistic differences that we explored elsewhere. Brits insist on adding “at all” to questions very frequently, and that throws us off. We view that as a suggestion that there are degrees to which the answer can be positive or negative. With answers that do not leave any middle ground between a simple “yes” or “no”, it sounds comical to our ears.

Are you married at all? Do you have children at all? No, but my friend over there is slightly pregnant.

[update] I suddently realize that there is a vague inference from the above that Natasha may be having some medical issues. Not at all (hey, this is a case where I normally use that construct). The office was, in fact, dental, and the X-rays were part of a regular check-up.[/update]

Let’s forget for a second that the intent might be to warn people to protect their possessions. (While on some level I understand the preventive benefit of drawing people’s attention to something they may not be actively paying any mind to otherwise, I imagine thieving “operatives” going, “Damn! We’ve been exposed! We’d better move operations elsewhere”. And then, eventually, “Oh no! These signs are everywhere! We can’t do no business no more!”)

No! The important thing is that you should refrain from smoking. Because, you know, we are concerned about the health of thieves who operate in this area.

I heartily agree. Thieves are people too. How would you like breathing in somebody’s cigarette fumes while trying to pinch his or her wallet?!

  

I suppose in this day and age everyone – and their grandmother – has a mobile phone on them. And if someone who needs to park on that street does not, I’m sure that getting a parking ticket will provide enough of an incentive to get a mobile, if only for parking convenience. Mobile operators benefit too, to say nothing of drivers with no spare change in their pockets.

Well, Q.E.D.

It took a bit over two and a half hours to do everything that I needed, and most of that time can be explained away by me being somewhat tentative on my first try.

I more or less needed just three numbers, found on two forms that were sent to me at the end of the tax year in April: My gross earnings, total taxes withheld and the combined value of any taxable benefits. At the HMRC website, I then needed to provide my personal information, answer a couple of dozen Yes/No questions about what types of income I did or did not have during the year and what kinds of “reliefs” I expected to claim. After that, it was plugging the aforementioned numbers into a form, proceeding to happily review the amount of money I’m owed back, and clicking the Submit button.

Ok, it was a little bit more involved than that, primarily because as a not ordinarily resident I can exclude a portion of my salary earned while on business outside of the UK from the tax bill. Figuring out that one number took the lion’s share of the time spent on the return. But overall, the process approximated the idea of doing your taxes on the back of a napkin as close as anything else that I know.

Next year, it should take 15 minutes.

It’s just one underground pedestrian passage that’s out of commission, not the whole subway system.