English: Qantas Airbus A380 (VH-OQA) takes off from London Heathrow Airport, England. The main and nose undercarriage doors have not yet closed. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
It’s now only 5 weeks before Hubby heads off to the UK to find the all important job. Until he does, I will be a single Mum. Yippee.
It’s not that I haven’t done it before in short bursts. Living in WA, there’s a good chance that one half of a partnership is involved in the mining industry and that usually involves the notorious FIFO and our family is no exception. That’s Fly In Fly Out to anyone not familiar with the acronym. You fly into the mine sites, do your work over how ever many days your contract has you working, then fly home again for a break. But soon, for our family, it will be just FO.
One of the problems we have hit during our planning to live in the UK for a couple of years is me getting a visa. OK, so I’m Australian. But all my great grandparents came from the UK. And the Queen of England is still our head of state! But does that mean anything? Nope!
My hubby was born in the UK, so it was no problem for him to apply for a UK passport. With their father born in the UK, it was also no problem for our kids to get UK passports. But me? One too many generations Australian to qualify. All I needed was one, just one, grandparent to be born in Old Blighty and I’d be fine. No such luck.
The Brits have really tightened up on non-British spouses entering the country. I was a bit shocked when I read the Home Office website and saw questions like “have you ever met your husband?” However, after wading through the myriad of baffling pages online, I still had no idea of what the best way was for me to proceed. I suspect that it has been obscurely written to eliminate people with poor English skills from applying. I’m an English teacher and even I couldn’t figure it all out.
Alternatively, it is written so you have to ring the enquiries number, which, strangely, is located in New Zealand for Australians. $12 thank you very much. But the lady who answered knew what she was talking about and I finally figured out the best visa for me. Actually, it turned out to be the only one I could get.
So here are your options if you are in my position.
1. Apply and get a job in the UK. At least, as a teacher, I am on the list of professions allowed to do this. Not an option for me, because we need to know where hubby will be working before I could apply. No point in him being in London and me in Manchester.
2. Deposit close to $100 000 (varies with the exchange rate) into a bank account for 6 months. I wish.
3. Be a celebrity or sports star. Enough said…
4. Have your spouse get a job offer for a position that will pay over 18600 pounds per annum.
We’ve gone with 4. So it means that he has to travel to the UK and get that all important job offer before I can apply for my spousal visa. Then I will be allowed to stay in the country for 33 months. Of course you can’t apply from the UK on a tourist visa, so I’m stuck in Oz with our two kids until the visa arrives. They advise you not to book flights until it does arrive, so you can see the dominos all lined up, just waiting for the push to get everything rolling.
Deep breath….
Without the job offer, I can’t apply for the visa, we can’t book flights for the me and the kids, we can’t give a date that our house can be leased, we can’t lease a house in the UK (until we know where we have to be living so hubby can get to work in less than an hour) so we don’t know what furniture to send over and what to store, we can’t apply for schools (because you need a leased property before you can put an application in)…and so it goes on.
So in five weeks I will be a single mother when hubby flies out to start the job search. I don’t know for how long. Then I have the joy of packing everything up once we know what and where we are going to and then get us all over there. As I said …Yippee.
Follow my journey…or breakdown…as we head into the unknown:-)
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