A bit of excitement on Cleveleys Road this week. Late one night my housemates with rooms at the front of the house heard some shouting and commotion in the street. Apparently a couple of guys got arrested in relation to a murder at or outside a "social club" a couple of blocks away. The next day our street was blocked off and police were taking the names of everybody who came and went. The day after, half the street was still blocked off and a cop told me they were still looking for "a few things"--the murder weapon, maybe? (Or have I watched too many police shows on TV.)
Apparently there's a Turkish gang war going on in this part of town (again, according to what the cops are saying). It's probably stupid of me, but I find myself taking some comfort in that. It seems less random, more targeted. Yes, I know, people get caught in the crossfire, and every thug is some mother's son, but I feel less threatened than if there were some solitary madman out there. It also seems that police must be hovering out there all the time, ready to come out of the woodwork and swarm a neighborhood when something like this happens. It's kind of impressive, really, but seeing how at least a rowdy few of the Metropolitan police force got out of hand at last spring's G20 meeting here (one man was dealt a fatal blow by a policeman, unprovoked), "impressive" also can have an ominous aspect to it. London's a curious city. It seems pretty safe overall, even when there's been a murder around the corner, but you're also repeatedly aware of how many CCTV cameras there are. Word is that you're almost always on a TV screen somewhere when you're out and about.
I mentioned the other day that the beginning of school has been delayed into November. The reason is that the Home Office--kind of like the State Department, if I understand correctly--determined that all schools that admit international students had to be reaccredited this year. Some apparently were schools in name only and thus served as an easy way for us foreigners to get into the country. In the US, you'd expect such an action would be out of fear of some perceived terrorist threat. Here I think it was more because of the bad economy. "British jobs for British workers" has been an occasional rallying cry on the right, and among unions. Anyway, several thousand schools had to be reaccredited, including Lispa (the i and s stand for International School; most of the students come from outside the UK). Accreditation involved lots of paperwork and a site visit, then the Home Office decided it too had to do a site visit for each of the 4000-some-odd international schools, and then the slow-grinding mills of bureaucratic paperwork have to churn out a certificate. Cud moves faster through a cow.
The upshot of all this is that people like me can't even start the process of applying for a student visa or the extension of one till the Home Office issues a certificate to the school. We're still waiting. I'm here legally until my current visa expires, three weeks from tomorrow. So long as I can file the forms to apply for a renewal before 31 October I'm OK to stay. But pity the incoming students from outside the EU. They can't even start the process to get their visas till we all get the letter that opens the door to the process. And if they don't already have a visa, they can't enter the UK till they get the whole thing processed and returned to them. How one buys an airline ticket in advance in that kind of situation I don't know.
The other part of this is that, according to new and related legislation, by applying for a visa or visa renewal, all of us are applying for a national ID card that will have certain biometric measurements encoded in it. Whether I'll need to carry that with me at all times is unclear. Then again, I was surprised that the cops who were blocking off my street the other day didn't ask for any ID at all, just my name and address. After a year here I had just that morning stopped carrying my passport around with me. But I suppose once I get this ID card I'd better have it with me.
No comments:
Post a Comment