Giving Scotland a Try

We tried so hard to keep hope alive. Finances only permitted visits about every six weeks and then only a weekend or a long weekend. To begin with I flew to Frankfurt and that was about a five hour drive up to Schwerte. It was exhausting for Claudia to collect me and drop me off. She had -and still has - the use of her Mother's car - (it has had about 40000kms put on it since she took it over - another little thing she has taken for granted and that her parents have been very good about.) Claudia visited me twice. It was plain that she did not like Scotland and there were a number of reasons for that. Firstly, she struggled to understand people because the accents were unlike any spoken English she had encountered before. Her first visit was at a bad time of the year and the place does not look good out of season in the Central Belt ( - That grimy urban sprawl that stretches from Kilmarnock through to Edinburgh, South of the Highlands). It is not pretty and we did not have the money to get around much. Everyone was friendly and very welcoming to her, but she was not going to allow herself to settle in.

Perhaps Germans still feel - even just subconsciously- as if they are still being judged on their having initiated the two world wars when they are in Britain. Perhaps you notice dirt and grime and ugliness easier in another country than your own because it jars when you are away and you are conditioned to it at home. Perhaps because Scotland does not exude a feel of vibrancy and dynamism and there is little that is brand new and exciting (- we didn't go to see the new parliament building). Perhaps because the whole 'Chav' look is on wider display than elsewhere. I suppose there were many factors, but at the end of the day, Claudia did not want to come to Scotland.

I stopped building work after a year, with my debts largely cleared when it became clear that things were not working for well Claudia over in Germany. I got an office job at a double-glazing company. The company was the biggest in the West of Scotland and I was the Customer Service Dog's-body. I had an office, a desk and a phone. I had three teams that I had to dispatch for the warranty work that was reported by clients. Now I don't for one minute believe the company was bad at what they did, but they did so much of it and they had for so long. This combined with the industry-standard ten-year warranty meant that I could field up to a hundred calls in a day, book on 40 new jobs while I was lucky if the teams cleared 24 calls in a day. I would have to order replacement frames and glass, check the validity of warranty claims, dig out drawings from old client files, try and source old parts all around the country and then try and call 24 people in a geographically sensible proximity for the teams to visit the next day. Oh, and I had to do the post. I calculated that after twelve hours, my pay rate - being fixed salary- was dropping to below £3 per hour and then I would drop everything and go home. I just knew that I would arrive to find that I had missed something the next morning, but that seemed to be part of the package. I hated the job, but looked at it as a start if we were now going to change our plans and make Scotland a base. I took the time to get a flat that I thought might attract Claudia out. We had considered the possibility of her studying occupational therapy and I had run around doing the homework on that. It was on the Required Skills list for emigration to Australia, it was a sensible step from the degree in pedagogy that Claudia had and it would have been relatively simple to arrange. With this in mind, I rented a flat in Kilmarnock. It was a ground floor, one bedroom unit in a red sandstone building a short walk from the (dreadful) town centre and bus-station.

Claudia came out for her second visit six months later and we had an enjoyable week together, I had the flat but we only spent two nights there, the rest of the time we were up North. We drove to Oban and on up to Skye for a few nights before coming back via Inverness. It was wonderful and the weather treated us well. We met friendly people, ate great food, stayed in hospitable and clean B&Bs and for the first time in a year, felt a bit of the happiness and magic that had once been the normal and everyday feeling in our lives together. I had a 1992 Volvo 440 1.8l that I had picked up for £150 with a year's MOT and three month's tax. "Rusty" was still mechanically perfect and never misbehaved. ( I am starting to mull over the fact that my last two cars have been kinder to me than my last two women. They were cheap and reliable although smelly and not too good-looking - older models that had been ridden hard, but cared for. I should perhaps transfer these criteria to my singles advert!)

The verdict on Scotland was still negative to Claudia, but I felt that I could possibly bring her around to considering it more seriously. Then a perfectly common occurence in the field of air travel was to cause Claudia untold hurt....

Going Downhill.

Once I realised that I was not going to get into anything to do with Apple in Scotland, I knuckled down and started paying off what I had to. I accepted that Hamburg was not going to happen for the time being. Claudia might have known the same before I did. So rather than over-extend ourselves as we may have been tempted to do in taking a punt on Hamburg right in the beginning, we were now hunkering down for a hard struggle. Claudia got a crappy job serving the breakfasts at a nearby inn - one of the 400 Euro jobs that the government had been promoting to try and inject a bit of life into the economy. She was utterly miserable. We spoke daily, but there were times when I could do nothing to cheer her up. She was in tears before any words even came out. It was gutting. I could do nothing to change things. I would get calls through the day while I was in the middle of wheeling barrow-loads of bricks, sand and mortar around a building site. I always stopped to speak to her and I never got annoyed. My employer was very understanding - not a trait one expects to encounter in the building trade. I knew that one of us had to be strong and I knew it had to be me. I tried to sound calm and confident and sure of how things would work out. We would easily exchange a dozen text messages in a day, just silly things to try and keep each other smiling. It was desparate. There would have been few days when we were not talking for at least thirty minutes by mobile phone and then we would talk in the evening by landline. I made suggestions, I tried to push her to be more pro-active in her job-hunting. I kept trying to encourage her, trying to be positive, trying to make her believe that we would get things sorted out, we would be together again, we would find a way to get back into Australia. Shite really! We were not going to have luck on our side again. It was just a completely fucked up period of our lives and it was going to get worse.

Claudia Steiger -Back in Dortmund

Claudia went straight home from Thailand, as anyone would do, since it had been so long since she had seen friends and family. Circumstances made it difficult for her to avoid getting into a rut and badly bogged down. In Germany you have no proper state health cover until you are in employment for six months - unless you are on one of the 'guest-worker'- type visas. Like-wise if you are a German citizen you need a similar time in employment before you get access to any welfare benefits. I have always managed without benefits (a pride thing), but then I have sailed a little closer to the edge of disaster than was sensible. Claudia, realistically needed a bit of money to, at the very least, fill the tank on a borrowed car so she could job hunt, etc. It got worse for her: where was she staying? - at her parents. What do welfare states do to make it seem like they have every loop-hole covered? They means-test the parents of welfare applicants, regardless how old they are (the applicants, that is) . So even if you did not want to sponge off the wrinklies, you are forced to. The state is not going to give out any welfare benefits if your parents have any savings, they are expected to spend their savings looking after their kids, regardless whether they are retired or the kids are over eighteen. Welcome to the European social model. This was a very depressing and humiliating situation for Claudia, a woman in her thirties, to be in. To exacerbate this, some friends and family members felt she had just spent the last four years on a merry holiday in Australia and done nothing. This was perhaps an impression created by the very active lifestyle we led in Australia - she always had a story to tell of something new we had done or somewhere new that we had been. She was miserable immediately with all these other factors piling up against her. Things were not looking good.......

Starting in Europe

Europe was to mark the death of our relationship. It is a place where neither of us could ever be happy in the medium or long term. I had learnt that there are better places to live and work, I have no ties to the Europe and I despise the blinkered tribalism; and Claudia - well her reasons were similar I suppose, but then she was at least German.

I went Scotland because I knew people there who I had not seen for five years and I was reasonably certain I could start to work immediately. This was not Apple-related work in any way; in fact it had nothing to do with IT. I was building - labouring really- and I was doing it because there was no realistic chance of getting into what I had been doing in Brisbane. The 'Old' world just does not move as dynamically as the 'New' and nowhere is that more true than in Scotland. People stay in jobs far longer than they would anywhere in the 'New' world. Roles that in the New World would be occupied by young people will be held by someone a good deal older who has been there since Noah was a lad -and who is quite happy to stay there. Hell, just look at the police in Europe. There is no shame to being a mere constable over forty, whereas in Australia it would be seen as a failing. One couldn't avoid being labelled a thicko, someone a bit simple, kept on because there would be some benevolent corner of the force where they could service cars, staple papers together or talk to children. (After all isn't that what public service is all about? Ahem!) So, how do young people get jobs in Europe? Well, it seems like they can only manage by having a degree or a trade and a Magic Bit extra. That Magic Bit is either experience they were lucky to get somewhere (in the 'New' world more than likely), contacts (invaluable anywhere), good luck (ditto), or an edge provided by further study. Meet up with a group of Germans in their late twenties and you will be surprised at the number who are almost thirty and yet still living an impoverished student's life as they complete another degree. Twelve years out of their parents house and they are still studying and working at some shitty job! That is almost halfway through life towards retirement and they are not contributing meaningfully to society. Not yet paying off the cost of their subsidised studies, not yet saving the deposit for a house, breeding only by accident and in de facto relationships, not saving for their own retirement yet knowing well that they are going to be the ultimate victims as Europe's nanny-state crumbles and they have to pay more for their own health care. In that same group, you will find that most are still supported to some extent by parents who have already retired! Now how bad is that, sponging off the wrinklies retirement fund! But such is the social fabric of contemporary Europe. The emperor's new clothes springs to mind. I see a future that is pretty gloomy there - nowhere near as gloomy as Africa's (where I come from, if you're wondering), but still not a place I enjoy enough to want to stay. Oh, and the obsession with soccer gives me the shits. Twenty two overpaid, millonaire drama-queens diving over a piece of leather, worshipped by clans paying allegience by purchasing overpriced merchandise, tickets, and satellite subscriptions and obsessing over the lurid gossip pedalled by a media leviathan that wouldn't know how to do a back page or sports bulletin if the word 'football' didn't get a mention. Don't get me started, I have opinions!

So I was in Scotland working in the building trade. It was there, it kept me busy and I quite enjoyed it. But it did not pay well - of course it wouldn't. Who was I? I had no trade and no experience and generally a local in the same job would be in a cheap council house and not have too many overheads. (You think that Eastern Europe was the only place that did ugly public housing - check out Scotland. The grey rough-cast used to coat cheap bricks that would not otherwise stand up to the harsh weather has to have created some of the ugliest housing estates ever. But I won't go there either....). I chipped away at the credit card balances steadily and waited for Claudia to come up with a place to stay and a job that would enable me to come over and set up. It was to be a long wait...........