{"id":3513,"date":"2018-06-23T09:41:28","date_gmt":"2018-06-23T08:41:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/pelerinage2016\/?p=3513"},"modified":"2018-06-23T09:41:28","modified_gmt":"2018-06-23T08:41:28","slug":"semigration-stocktake-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/pelerinage2016\/semigration-stocktake-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Semigration stocktake 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

In two days I’ll be hopping on Cerise to belt down the mountain road hairpins and catch the train from Aime to bring this first pathfinding snippet of semigration to an end.\u00a0 Oh, sorry, you don’t know Cerise, I never was very good at proper social introduction stuff.\u00a0 She’s my semigration bike.\u00a0 I’m not 100% sure that’s going to be her permanent name, I’m not 100% sure of her gender but leaning to female for reasons I’m utterly unable to explain.\u00a0 Hey, who wants to be crassly binary and gender rigid these days?\u00a0 Anyway, seeing her ‘photo the family said she was pink, hence the name and it’s sort of stuck for me despite the fact that she’s actually a slightly odd orange.\u00a0 I’ll introduce you properly at some later date when I’m back up here and she and I know each other better.<\/p>\n

I left the UK two weeks ago today and a lot has happened so it seems time for a stocktake and I think I should start by reminding myself why I’m here:<\/p>\n

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  1. I am hoping to get French residency and that it will generalise to the young ones giving them a small protection against the restrictions Brexit puts on their options.\u00a0 One way or another we’ll probably know about that around the end of March 2019 when there will either be a negotiated separation or, perhaps looking increasingly likely, a default exit with no agreements\u00a0 … or even, but this seems to look increasingly politically un<\/em>likely, the UK has a rush of sanity and we don’t leave.<\/li>\n
  2. I am hoping that it will start something more solid for all of us in the nuclear family giving all full EU citizenship rights. I am increasingly clear that’s the secure thing to aim for and the only sensible route to that which seems fairly clear whatever happens with Brexit is for me to keep semigration going and do everything else necessary for French citizenship and hence full EU citizen rights … which would, barring some other tragic and radical political madness, involve five years semigrant residency and some other things.<\/li>\n
  3. Making a statement, a bizarre one maybe, of my personal, and my family’s shared, anger about Brexit and petty nationalisms of all sort.<\/li>\n
  4. Having the pleasure of living in France for over half the year.<\/li>\n
  5. At the moment, the particular pleasures of being over 2000m up in the northern French Alps.<\/li>\n
  6. Perhaps thereby having a less busy or mad life and achieving more of the work things I want to achieve before I pop my clogs.<\/li>\n
  7. Perhaps thereby having a less busy or mad life and, despite #6, having a more balanced and pleasurable life while I am still around (see #4 and #5 above particularly, but also #3 I think!)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    OK. That’s quite a list.\u00a0 But a quick visual diversion.<\/p>\n