Immigration woes...

So what do you write about on a very lazy Sunday afternoon when the weather is inclement? Does that mean that you can have clement weather too? Hmm ah, yes you can, but have you ever heard anyone say ‘My goodness isn’t the weather very clement today’? Clement weather is pleasant because it is neither very hot nor very cold

OK enough rambling.

We came back from a short cruise recently, nothing unusual there I hear you say. Well read on and you will see where I am going with this one. No. Not another travelogue, keep reading.

Passports at the ready I sailed through the border control, well mine is a British one isn’t it. The chap at the border took one look inside The Man’s NZ passport and with a beckoning finger took him off out of my sight to another office. ‘Go and wait over there for him love’ said the other border chappie, ‘He won’t be long.’

It did seem to be rather a long time until The Man was directed back to me.

So what was the problem?  Hmmmmmmmm

Seems that his entry into the UK has expired!!!!! And technically he is overstaying.

But, and thankfully there was a but. As the border control in Belgium, our last cruise port, had allowed him both in and out they would too. Not sure of the reasoning behind that one, but that was what The Man said they told him.

I was sure that his multiple entry visa was for three years and that it would need renewing in March 2013, how wrong was that? After the internal panic died down, mine  not the immigration folks, we checked out the UK Border website.

Seems The Man needed to fill in some forms, organise the right sort of ID and make an appointment at a local office. Easy.

NOT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Appointments have to be made online. Well I guess that can’t be hard, can it?

Guess again.

Standard type of webpage where you fill in the dates you might be available, The Man put ‘all’ for both time and date, hit the enter key….. And Hello, no available appointments. The date frame available runs for just three months, and not a day longer. Must have entered something wrong, try again, same result. Hmmmmmmmm. He tried that for a couple of days, thinking that perhaps the website was having problems. Several days later, with a rising frustration level things had not changed.

Nothing for it, I said to The Man, but to take all your paperwork and turn up in person, and hope that things can be sorted out face to face. How wrong could I be?

Chap behind the counter took one look at The Man’s passport and in a fairly rude tone said, ‘You should be arrested and in jail, for overstaying’ Same rude man wouldn’t even look at the paperwork. Gave my man the number of a form to complete and told him to fill it in and them make an appointment online. Now my bloke kept his cool, and said that he had tried for several days to make an online appointment but there were none available. Answer was, ‘Go online at midnight, and just keep refreshing the page until you get one.’  I wonder how you would get on if you relied on the free computer at your local library or worse still were not at all computer savvy?

There is quite a lot more to this saga, but to keep you in suspense I will write about it another day.

On a nicer note, The Man and I are off again, yes again.

 Tomorrow morning we will be on a bus heading north. You’ll have to come back tomorrow and find out where to.  :)