Getting sorted

To be able to live and work in the UK, you need a few things. And you need them in the right order, or the sky falls down on you.

The essentials are: a signed contract for employment, a signed contract for a house, a UK phone number, a council tax bill or utilities bill sent to the UK address, a bank account, a NI (National Insurance) number. Then you are good to go (if you are from within the EU, otherwise you'll have to jump through some more hoops).

The interesting thing is that the easiest parts were the contract for employment and the contract for the house. The contract for the house was on the verge of falling through because of the lack of a UK bank account though, which would have been fatal, as you cannot get a UK bank account without a UK address. Did anyone say Catch 22? I got that a lot...

Getting the bank account proved to be close to impossible. I applied online as I thought that was going to be the most efficient, and even got someone to chat with me to apply for the proper account. A few days later, a welcome pack arrived with a note telling me to finish the application at the branch of my choice. I chose the closest branch to work to be able to sort it during a lunch break and brought the items necessary according to the welcome pack; the job contract, house contract and passport.

In the branch, the advisor told me that I had applied for the wrong account, and that I needed to re-apply. I could do that the next day.

Next day, I wandered into the bank, happily thinking that I would soon have a UK bank account. It didn't work out quite so easily...

The nice advisor, Jasmin, went through my application for an hour, until we came to the crucial bit - proof of identity. I had my various contracts and passport. It wasn't enough. I needed my employment contract to be addressed to my UK address. No problem, I got a new one with the correct address on and went in again. That time, I needed a utility bill to prove my identity and address. The next time I needed a bank statement from my previous bank, then a bank statement sent to my UK address. And finally they found a spelling error on my gas bill, that rendered it invalid as proof of address. During the month I went back and forth to the bank, I saw more of Jasmin than of my own family... Not a good sign.

Finally, with Jasmin on well-earned holiday (I guess she was as exhausted as I was), I got every possible piece of paper together, and got my bank account. Two minutes after stepping out of the bank, I got a phone call from them saying that I had got the wrong kind of account and that I needed another... I nearly dropped the phone in exasperation.

A week later I got a call from Jasmin checking that everything was ok - I guess she missed me :-)

I finally got it! The magic debit card!

All the rest was a walk in the park. Getting to pay for gas, electricity, tv license and council tax is not difficult - getting them to spell a name correctly on the bill is a bit more difficult.

I was told that getting the NI number was really difficult, but that proved to be really easy, and I got it in less than two weeks, by booking an appointment with the Job Centre in Woking, rather than in London.

I'm moving in

The Swedish house when I moved.

The house sale turned out to be too good to be true - the buyers got cold feet when they realised that it requires quite a lot of hard work and money to keep an old house from falling apart, regardless of how charming it looks...

In the middle of this process, I moved without the family. First to an apartment on High Holborn, which was quite ok and a nice ten minutes walk from the office. Then a flight back to Sweden to pick up the car and some furniture so that I could take possession of the house in Guildford. 

My brother and I made the drive (almost 1000 miles) in the annoyingly slow family Renault in a day and a half using Google maps print-outs to guide us, and assistance from home in finding a b&b in Gent in Belgium. The landlady was much impressed with us having a call-centre back home to sort us on the way - we were quite thankful to Mel that we didn't have to sort it ourselves... And apart from it being very close to the Red Light district in Gent, it was the perfect place to stay.

A 1000 miles...

When driving out of the diesel-smelling belly of the Calais - Dover ferry, my greatest worry was going over to the wrong side of the road... It turned out to be quite easy, and a signpost at the slip-road for Maidstone service station actually told to keep on the left side of the road in Swedish ("Kör på vänster sida av vägen"). I guess quite a few Swedish people pass by, and forget which side to drive on...

Having moved into the house, I have been living here for about two months with one bed, one chair, one table, one lamp, a coffee machine and a kettle as my only companions. That has been an interestingly spartan way of life, and it was quite a weird place to go home to after work...

The Guildford house in its spring splendour. The confused man to the left is me.

Getting ready

I got the fantastic opportunity to move from a good position within the Danish part of Valtech to the UK part.  That is all going as it should, and I won't mention work again.

I moved to the UK in May 2010 after a two months of getting everything ready for the move - finding a house in Guildford as the first step. First - finding the location to live in. All that mattered was finding a spot where the kids could go to a good school. This, we were told, was not as easy as it should be. According to friends in the UK, most schools were crap, and finding a good one was indeed quite difficult. We used Up my street and looked at some 200 Ofsted reports before selecting Guildford as base - mainly because all schools in Guildford had good scores in the reports, and most other places had lots of schools with bad scores in the reports.

That done, we could focus on finding the right house in the right catchment area (a catchment area being where you have to live in order for your children to be able go to the school you want). A road movie in its own right, involving us racing between all the houses for rent in Guildford during one day in Foxton Dave's Mini with its skeleton paint job, selecting one house, regretting the choice, wriggling out of the offer, and signing the proper contract on day two.

You can probably imagine my head being the head of the skeleton - it actually looked natural to passers-by...

Next step was selling the Swedish house. That was an interesting experience I don't want to go through again. After numerous trips to the tip and lots of trips to the local Bauhaus to get the stuff needed to make the house look nice to the potential buyers, the circus began.

After the first viewing, the price skyrocketed and we didn't know what to think. Three or four days after the viewing, we were signing the contract with a much larger sum at the bottom line than we had dreamed about getting for the house.

Introduction

I don't really want to write a blog. Especially not a personal blog, as I am sure that other people couldn't care less about my actions or thoughts. But as the stronger person in this household has got her own blog (in Swedish) there was some pressure on me to provide another perspective to our family's life as Swedish expats in Guildford.

So here goes... Follow me if you like. I can't promise it will be fun, or educating or anything else.