2007-09-17

Do novih pobjeda radničke klase

I have just been informed that the Home Office has reversed its previous decision and decided to issue me an HSMP visa. Next steps: applying for entry clearance, making travel plans, and getting my butt over to my fab new job. After that, I must learn to say things like "flat" and "cor."

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

Congratulations - now for the UCL bureaucracy....

Anonymous said...

Delighted - something must be working right there, or you've got the magic touch!

Eric Gordy said...

I think it was luck, and writing to the head of BIA. Thank goodness I didnt have to go to the instance above her, because that would be the deputy Home minister for security, whose name is "Lord West of Spithead," and I can't even type the name without falling down laughing.

Anonymous said...

What a nightmare. A lot of the Yorkshire Ranter's rants make more sense now.

Anyway, congratulations on your successful appeal.


Doug M.

Anonymous said...

YES!!!!
Blog name will have to change to East (End) Ethnia I guess ... and add "and its colonies" to the bit about the United States!
Čestitam (aka cor blimey guv)
P

Anonymous said...

Eric,
Congratulations on having finally succeeded in gaining the bureaucratic nod for your journey to the East.

I guess you can count yourself fortunate not to be attempting the same feat in the westward direction. America's stalwart bureaucrats are not in the habit of revealing their reasons for rejecting applicants (lest such reasons be challenged), nor are they willing to acknowledge that their decisions were ever in error.

You may have read about the sad tale of British musicologist Nalini Ghuman, barred from the US and from her teaching job at Mills College by the State Department and Homeland Security, without ever having been told why.

As the NY Times reports:

Few believe that her book in progress, “India in the English Musical Imagination, 1890-1940,” or her work on Elgar, best known by Americans for “Pomp and Circumstance,” could have raised red flags in Washington. And if it were a question of security profiling, nothing in her background fits.

She was born in Wales. Her mother is a British homemaker, and her father, an emeritus professor of educational psychology at the University of Wales, was born in India to a Sikh family and moved to Britain in the 1960s. Last semester, Ms. Ghuman tried to teach her students by video link. This academic year, she is on an unpaid leave of absence.


Another example, as Bard College president Leon Botstein wrote in a letter of protest to US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, of "the xenophobia, incompetence, stupidity and then bureaucratic intransigence that we are up against." And even though Condi is an even higher instance than Lord West of Spithead, on these benighted shores the appeal has apparently fallen on deaf ears.

'Tis a far, far better place you go to...

AR

Eric Gordy said...

Andras, I know it, believe me. And we have a lot of friends who simply will not come to visit because of the way visa applicants are treated.

Anonymous said...

I never thought it could be so dificult to get a visa to work in the UK!!!


congratulations for not having given up...

Eric Gordy said...

Sarah, I've just been admiring your photos. Many doggies!

Anonymous said...

Spithead is pretty regular kind of name - an area of the Solent bay off Hampshire. Site of the review by the Royal Navy where a large fleet of warships gets reviewed by the Queen/King. Plenty of dafter names in the US, I'd say...

Eric Gordy said...

I look forward to learning them!

Katja R. said...

congradulations"!