Dispatches from the North: My Anglophile Story

I usually keep my blogging pretty safe, even in my personal blog I tend to avoid the intimate and personal. I write to inform, to relate my observations and to entertain. Putting my feelings out there is just too exposing, like giving someone your diary to read. However, emotion is a huge part of my Anglophile story and I guess since I have been writing for Anglotopia for nearly a year its probably about time I told it. My story isn’t really one of events and places, its a story of dreams and changes. These are the things that brought me here, and in turn being in Britain has changed who I am in many ways and redefined me, all in just over a year.

I have made two “big moves” in my life, and the two moves were so completely different. I graduated from Michigan State University the day after my 22nd birthday and 6 days later I was in a hired U-Haul on my way to Chicago. I had decided before I started my Senior year at MSU that was where I was going. I arrived in Chicago with a goal, and a perfect plan for how I was going to achieve that goal. To make a long story short, my perfect plan had a major flaw. That major flaw was that the Chicago advertising industry didn’t want new graduates. I had to get two years agency experience, but the catch 22 was I couldn’t get a job to get the experience without the experience. Today I only know one person who was able to break into a Chicago ad agency and she did so through family connections (oh, and she hates her job). So I made a career change, got myself in at the ground floor and quickly proved myself and got what I didn’t even know was my dream job until I got it.

My career in Chicago was one of the most satisfying experiences of my life, so its a testament to how meeting my husband changed me that I left that job and made the second big move of my life. This move to Britain in no way resembled my move to Chicago. I had no plan, I had no expectations, I had no dream. I had a visa and ten boxes which carried all of my earthly belongings. I came to Britain completely free of goals, open to possibilities. For me, this is completely unheard of. I sit here today, and after 15 months in Britain my dream is still forming itself. Its one of those hazy, foggy dreams. It in no way resembles my crisp, vivid and vibrant dreams, the dreams that ultimately carried me to places I didn’t know I wanted to go. The difference is, this is the dream I know will come true. Its the dream I am working the hardest on forming, and its the one that is coming out of what my life is and not what I want my life to be. Its more of a premonition than a story, which I guess is the reason it is so fuzzy.

This first year in Britain has shaped me in ways I didn’t know were possible in a year. I learned to keep in touch with the people who are important to me, I learned how to be a good friend. I learned that I am capable of handling pretty much anything and doing the right thing. I am confident in who I am, and it is this very alien experience that has made that happen for me. My dreams in the past have always taken me to a place I didn’t want to go, first to a career I didn’t know I wanted, and then to a country I didn’t know I wanted to live in. It is only a matter of time before my dreams catch up to my life, so what is my new British dream going to be?

I’ve been thinking lately about two things, the first being starting a family and the second what I want to do with my career. I have started looking into getting my teaching certificate, its only a year course and because of my degree I could teach up to the Sixth Form College level. Sometimes I step back from my life for a moment and look at it, and I don’t recognize what I see. If you had asked me 4 years ago if I wanted a family and if I would consider teaching as a career, I probably would have been insulted at even the suggestion. Now maybe its just plain growing up, but maybe it really is that Britain has changed me because teaching and having a family are things that just seem to fit for me here. I decided to look into teaching because living in this town I see kids who I think really need some inspiration and who could benefit from my experience. I would love to be that person who encourages a kid to enjoy reading, start writing or even to inspire a kid to go to university and get an education that will take them to new places.

I don’t attribute these changes in me to plain old growing up, I really do think they are direct results of my new environment. I finally have found a place where I can see missing pieces around me and these are spaces I want to fill. Instead of getting the feeling like I need to carve out a place for myself, in some ways it feels like maybe there was a place here for someone like me. Out of all the strangeness around me, at the end of it I find I that I fit in here more than I have ever fit in anywhere. Maybe I will be wrong again and this new dream of Britain will once again lead me somewhere I didn’t know I wanted to go, but I have a feeling this dream is going to be the one that sticks.

Dispatches from London: How I Googled My Way to Being an English Lawyer in London

Me and Law School Friend Winter 2006

I was a college graduate working a low-level but upwardly mobile assistant position (can you say Devil wears Prada?) at a major corporation in Boston and was in the midst of a bitterly cold winter in 2005. I spent a lot of time on the computer between tasks Googling a way to be anywhere but where I was. As I had a English boyfriend that I spent most of my days desperately missing in that way that you can only miss a love on another continent. He wanted to move to America so I Googled “English citizens moving to America” extensively and realised that it was a dead end with his lack of qualifications, money and martial status.

Next, I tried to figure out how I could go to England. I set up a few informational job interviews for that February. My main grasp of the interviews was that the job market was going to be more difficult than I expected as I would need to be on a “graduate scheme” for most careers starting in September and the applications were already in. Also, no one was willing to give me, as a recent grad, a work permit. I looked into the possibility of a fiancée visa and, gulp, a UK marriage visa.

My boyfriend didn’t have the haphazard approach to marriage that I had in my early 20s (think: “if Britney can do it, why can’t I?”). On our next holiday, he proposed and we were then engaged to have a normal engagement and wedding rather than a rushed one to bring us to the same continent. As one cannot work on a fiancée visa, this left me with only one choice for entering the UK without a wedding band and having something to do with my days: back to school.

Returning from the trip in February, I resumed my post Googling my way to a future abroad. After eyeing the cost of graduate degrees ranging from $20k-$60k for a year I was becoming increasing disheartened. Then, like every other good political science graduate in America I thought, “what about law school?”

Now this seemed remarkably easy: if you already have an undergraduate degree it only takes 2 years to become a lawyer (split into two types—solicitors and barristers) in England and Wales. The application cost was £5 and I happened to have a five pound note left over from February so I attached it to the simple one page application, added an international stamp and poof! I’d applied to three law schools in London in the course of an afternoon. Do not pass Go. Do not take the LSATs.

Further research showed me that while law school was easy to get into if you already had a degree, the tricky part was getting someone else to pay for it and that’s where something called a Training Contract (solicitors) or Pupillage (barristers) came in. If I were to get one of those, not only would the firm or chambers granting them pay my way and give me a small stipend, they’d employ me for two years when I finished school. Sign me up, I said!

In March I heard that I had been accepted into law school and in April I heard back from several firms granting me interviews. I lined up in the interviews for a week in May and flew over for a stressful few days. Two weeks later I received an email from my current employer telling me that they were offering me a contract and I accepted.

Four years down the line it’s strange to think of sitting all those miles away dreaming of working in London and that it’s actually what I’m doing now. Certainly things haven’t gone the way I’d planned then –the least of which being that the English fiancé never materialised into a husband. I’m very happy with my London life and having found a career and law firm that I love from Googling my way through that long Boston winter

Introducing Bluegrass Girl in London: The Move

Editor’s Note: We’ve got another columnist starting this week at Anglotopia! We’ve managed to get another American Expat living in London to blog about life in London. Her name is Katherine Kern and I met her at Blog Indiana, of all places. After some time at home in America – she’s returned to London with her new British fiance and starts off her first post by telling us all about her first move to London two years ago. Welcome Katherine!

Just a little over two years ago I moved to London to go to grad school.  Although it had always been my dream to move there, I really struggled with the decision.  When I visited Cass Business School I knew it was the place for me.  But even though I was accepted to the program and received scholarship money, I wavered a bit when it came to actually committing to giving up my life in Cincinnati and moving to London.

I had always loved London and jumped at every chance to visit.  My mum was born and raised in London and I spent many summers there visiting family.  Every time I went to London I fell even more in love with city.  But when it actually came to leaving home and moving there, I was slightly terrified.

I spent a good two weeks going back and forth, trying to decide rationally if it made sense.  Everyone was telling me to go, reminding me it had been my dream forever.  But it was easy for them to say and hard for me to do.  Until one day I realized I couldn’t NOT go.  I could argue my way through either side of the decision, but when it came down to it, I had to go, because I couldn’t not go.  If I didn’t move I would always wonder, what if?  I would always think about what might have happened if I had gone.

So I moved.  I said goodbye to all my friends and family, several times.  I went back and forth between being excited and being scared to death.   I whittled everything I owned down to two 50 lb. suitcases and a carry on.  I didn’t sleep the night before I left and I felt like I was having an out of body experience as I boarded my flight to London.

My cousin and aunt met me at Heathrow when I landed and helped me to my new place in the City of London.  When I checked in to the residence hall and found my new room in a shared flat, I was depressed.  I had left my beautiful apartment on a square in Cincinnati and moved into a small white cell that I wasn’t allowed to decorate.  My aunt and cousin did their best to cheer me up, telling me I would love London and that I was near family.  As we walked around the city that Sunday, looking for a place to eat, I wondered several times what the heck I was doing there.

Anyone who has spent a Sunday in the Square Mile will tell you that it is beyond quiet.  The usual black suits and hustle and bustle were nowhere to be found.  As someone who hadn’t spent very much time in the city, let alone a Sunday in the city, I was shocked to find cafes and shops closed.  Again I wondered what exactly I was getting myself in to and how I would survive the year.

As we walked towards Smithfield market, I saw that even Starbucks was closed and my despair deepened. I wondered how soon I could get a flight home.  But as we turned the next corner, upbeat music wafted towards me and I saw people spilling out of a restaurant and onto a sidewalk as they drank bloody mary’s and mimosas in the (rare) London sun. We sat down and ordered our full English breakfast, surrounded by the buzz of people rehashing the craziness of the night before. The restaurant I was in was Smiths of Smithfield, known more commonly as SOS. It was surely a sign, this wouldn’t be a big deal to many people, but at that moment it was a message to me… I was going to be ok and, more than that, I was going to love living in London.

Britain’s Door to Close a Little Tighter

Bad news for Anglophile dreaming of working in the UK one day, it’s going to get a lot harder.

They’ve already changed the laws this year to make is much more difficult (and expensive) to consider working in the UK. Now, they’re going to get even tougher.

A government committee recommended today that Britain restrict the flow of migrants even more and increase the qualification necessary to work in the UK.

From the Guardian today:

Tighter restrictions over the flow of skilled migrants from outside Europe are to be put in place to safeguard the position of British workers at a time of rapidly rising unemployment.

It is expected that the recommended changes put forward by the government’s Migration Advisory Committee today will cut the annual flow of 50,000 skilled non-EU migrants into Britain by 5,000 – about 10%.

The changes to be implemented under the points-based immigration system will include higher earnings and qualification thresholds, longer advertising periods for vacancies before they can be filled by a migrant and changes to the regime for internal international company transfers.

Read the rest of the article here.

Yet again, the British government is going to make it harder for skilled Americans to bring their earning potential to the UK. Grumble grumble. I can only hope that one day, they reduce these onerous restrictions.

What it’s Like to Become a British Citizen

Iconic London Blogger, Diamond Geezer recently wrote a very interesting post about what it’s like to attend a British Citizenship ceremony.

From his great post:

Most of us take being British for granted, having had no say whatsoever in the country of our birth. But, for some people, choosing to become British is a very big deal, and not to be undertaken lightly. There are a lot of hoops to jump through. You have to have lived in the UK for at least five years (various technicalities apply). You have to be able to speak English (other home nation languages acceptable). You have to pass a ridiculously difficult “Life in the UK” test that 99% of British nationals would fail (go on, try it). You have to be of good character (no nasty criminals please, because the Daily Mail wouldn’t approve). And you have to want to reside in a country full of fish and chips, queues, drizzle, wonky teeth and various other national stereotypes. At £720 per application, plus costs, only a solvent Anglophile would ever apply.

I think it will be many, many years before I’m able to live in the UK and even longer before I could consider citizenship. However, holding that scarlet passport is on my bucket list nonetheless.

Read the read of Becoming British here.

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