European travails

THEY SAY THE THREE MOST STRESSFUL THINGS you can go through are divorce, death in the family and moving house. I can’t speak for the first two, but there is a qualifier missing from the third. The most stressful thing you can do is move house to the First World.

My family has relocated seven times now. The last one was a treat: Shanghai to Beijing. Sure, it doesn’t cross a national boundary, but it may as well have. Everything from work permits to health insurance had to be cancelled in the one and redone in the other, thanks to all the provincial regulations.

But of course, with my luck, no sooner had we settled into Beijing than work took me to Europe instead; Moscow through London is now my beat. So this time the wife and kids are trotting off to the Netherlands. We are the very model of a modern globalised family. And we’re starting to realise how stressful and expensive that can be. Globalisation may be great and labour may be mobile, but it isn’t half as easy as they (probably the same they that came up with the stress list) make it out to be.

The least of it was de-registering everything in China – and that has left me not just greyer around the top, but with substantially less to turn grey. The stress, the effort, and the expense, however, come with living in limbo.

We absolutely had to be out of China by the last week of June, because that was when our permits ran out. The same permits that had to be de-registered even though they are expiring and could not be renewed. No, I don’t know either, but clearly the bureaucrats have their reasons even if no mortal can fathom them.

Yet we can’t actually move into the Netherlands yet, because the bureaucrats there insist that you may not set foot in their country during the residence application process – which takes three months if you are lucky.

We couldn’t start the application process early, because fi rst we had to know that the kids were accepted by the schools they are to attend, and second we had to fi nd a house in the beautiful Hilversum, just outside Amsterdam. School applications could only be processed from the middle of April and all the details could only be settled by mid-May. That left us with just less than six weeks to cut our paper ties with China; and only then could we ask the Netherlands to let us in.

This presented a conundrum. We were welcome in neither China nor the Netherlands. We couldn’t return to South Africa, or I would have had to either abandon the family or spend just about every waking (and many sleeping) hour on some form of aircraft.

So, when the school year ended in mid-June, we packed the kids off to Cape Town to, ahem, spend the holidays with my parents. The wife and I went to Brussels, where we now have a small apartment that serves as home base. I can get where I need to be, and the wife can organise everything in the country next door – the one she isn’t allowed to set foot in.

Things were starting to get a little tense towards the middle of July, when I could mercifully go on leave and reunite the family in the fairest Cape.

We were hoping to get into the Netherlands by the end of July, giving us two weeks before the school year starts. But delays have started mounting again, and we’ll now be lucky to make it a week before that. So, here we go again, arranging temporary accommodation and transport, making sure our cardboard-packed lives can stay in storage in Rotterdam. It’s not the moving house that causes the stress, I’m starting to think, but the endless time you spend not being settled anywhere at all.

It is also a rather expensive process, in more ways than one. You want to talk about carbon footprint? I don’t even want to begin to calculate how much fuel we’ve burned on this miniature odyssey.

All just to move to the civilised world. I sure hope it’s all it’s cracked up to be.