The Last Lap

Well, it's been three days beyond the limit of two weeks the immigration doctor said it would take to collate my medical test results. On that basis, I've got to presume everything was OK. Today, I've been to the bank to get the Right of Permanent Residence Fee, and have stuck it in an envelope with copies of my medical receipts and a (probably unnecessary) copy of my 2010 tax return final notice. It's now winging its way to Los Angeles as fast as the esteemed Canada Post can get it there......

By the time it gets there and is looked at, it might be 3-4 weeks from the date of my medicals and they might be in the system by then. They say "don't contact us", but I'd like to give them a friendly poke to get their attention and see if they'll look online to see if my medical results have been received/approved; I don't want there to be another three month delay before I hear from them again. All being well, I might get my passport request in a month to six weeks. Maybe it might come faster, but if I've learned anything throughout this whole thing, is that pigs might fly.

Oscar Winner

A week is a long time in football, they say. Certainly, from last week to this the mood around Valley Parade has changed appreciably, but it's funny what a couple of wins will do to lighten the mood of the supporters. Saturday saw an apparently very good performance against Barnet, coming from a goal down to win 4-2, and there were more happy faces making their way home from BD8 tonight. The first round of the much-maligned Johnstone's Paint Trophy saw the Bantams at home to Sheffield Wednesday, and televised to boot. Being in immigration limbo meant that I could spend a leisurely lunchtime watching it over the internet. 

Quite often when we end up playing a side from a higher division, there's a school of thought that says "just don't get beaten heavily". That certainly applied to the game against Leeds three weeks ago. However it would be fair to say Sheffield Wednesday weren't taking things quite so seriously as Leeds did, when they took their keeper off after just 80 seconds, without looking too injured. The conspiratorial smirks on the bench suggested this was entirely expected; it was quickly speculated both online and in the commentary box that this was a way of Wednesday circumventing the "6 man' rule which states that teams must start six men from their last league game. This was pretty much confirmed a little over ten minutes later when two more subs came on, again to amusement from the visiting dugout. It didn't go down well with their supporters on twitter, and I can't blame them. What a slap in the face to the 700 or so travelling supporters that had to brave the M1 and M62 on a Tuesday night to get there. 

I really wouldn't expect anything less of a team coached by Gary Megson, purveyor of numerous artless, route-one sides down the years. I often think back to his West Brom side in 2002, who blindly hoofed the ball long for 90 minutes, couldn't create a chance worthy of the name, and then had to resort to one of the most blatant bits of cheating I've ever seen to get them promoted into the Premier League. The Owls side had more of the ball in the first half, but created almost nothing of note, chance wise and the home side should have opened the scoring on the stroke of half time when Hanson headed wide with the keeper all at sea. City improved in the second half. The second showed more of the same from the visitors, but a bit more cutting edge from the home side; Compton should have scored in the opening seconds of the half after a slip from a debutant central defender who had played in the Owls infamous 14-0 preseason defeat to the mighty Alfreton Town.

City had the ball in the net in the 66th minute as giant defender Luke Oliver headed Chris Mitchell's free-kick goalwards and a defender headed the ball out from inside the back of the net. A clear goal, but as per usual, the standard of FL officiating left a lot to be desired. Ritchie Jones was denied a goal late on by a fine save from the visiting sub keeper O'Donnell, and then Oliver hit the crossbar in injury time. The home side deserved to win on the balance of chances created, but the deadlock meant straight to the lottery of penalties. City had won two shootouts two seasons ago and we were hoping another loanee keeper might make a name for himself. Swedish keeper Oscar Jansson, on loan from Spurs saw the first attempt from the useless Clinton Morrison balloon over the bar, before saving from Chris Palmer. Jones and Michael Flynn buried theirs, Wednesday's Giles Coke scored his, boyhood Wednesday fan Ross Hannah netted, before Jansson saved a really very poor effort from  Chris Sedgwick to win the game and get his reward of a giant pile-on. An ultra-cynical reading of the shootout and the level of spot-kick taken would lead you to speculate they were trying to miss those as well. Maybe that's a bit harsh. Maybe. 

Ultimately, Megson got his wish. I would hope there's a disrepute charge or something winging his way somewhere pretty soon. For many lower division players (and fans), the chance of a Wembley day out is pretty much limited to the Play-Off final; if he feels he can in clear conscience deny the supporters a chance at that, as well as the significant financial boost that comes with it, then he's even more of a pillock than he showed himself to be tonight. As for BCFC, I was impressed with the work-rate (just as I was in the Leeds game), but tonight, there was a much greater solidity to the team. Luke Oliver was something of a figure of fun last season, but he has apparently been very good this season and was commanding tonight. Jones in the midfield was also very good I thought. Two good performances under Colin Cooper make me hope that the club will keep him on in his coaching capacity, he gave a very impressive interview on the radio after Saturday's game about the length of time he has taken since his playing career to get his UEFA coaching qualifications. Given the new approach of trying to find diamonds-in-the-rough, the club needs coaches of his calibre.

Trouble at t'Mill. Part 3454

Being a gentleman of leisure at present - dictated by the whims of the Canadian government's immigration system - means I can get up fashionably late in the morning. So it was something of a shock to turn the computer on today to find that the Bantams are yet again without a manager. It all seems very odd; Jackson spends all day yesterday trying to sign new players, watches our next league opponents last night, takes training this morning and gave interviews to the local media ahead of the weekend. The actions of a man about to resign? Hardly. 

Whatever was said, and by whom, in the board meeting this afternoon has turned the place upside down again. Just when you thought that the club had found the right path, and had a plan and were going to stick to it, it gets thrown out of the window three weeks into the season. I'll be very interested to see what happens tomorrow regarding any statements the club makes. Let's be clear: I believe today's statement about the goings on about as much as those emails from Nigerian princes who want to give me twenty million dollars. The club's PR is catastrophic sometimes and it seems virtually none of the fans buys the club's line, and Radio Leeds don't seem to buy it either.

The more things like this carry on, the more my belief is retrenched that this club won't progress one inch until every last member of the front office has cleared their desk.

They're Alive!

As I mentioned two posts down, I'd been getting very annoyed with the lack of general progress from the Canadian Consulate in Los Angeles. That said, I'm sure I wasn't the only one. And it's nice to see that they have finally got cracking with lots of people's cases who had heard nothing for months. All of the highlighted cases (in grey or dark green) have had contact in the last couple of weeks, whether medical requests or passport requests.

All will have different tales to tell, and have different personal circumstances, but each applicant and their families will have had the same distraction/paranoia for the last 18 months or so, and so it's nicer for all of them to be closer to the end than the beginning. The most recently updated case is at the very top, one of the early November applicants. Cases from November onwards were processed differently, with medical requests coming long before their letters of acknowledgement, and it seems to result in much faster processing. There were, according to the tracker (only the cases sent to LA are shown here) an outlandish number of cases submitted in March/April 2010, causing a huge backlog. It's Sod's Law writ large that I should end up getting stuck behind the backlog, and then them changing the rules for cases submitted a month after I applied to speed things up!

Weird Weather

Last night we had the latest in a series of thunderstorms. We must get one or two a week, always in the early evening after a warm day. Even so, last night's one was an odd one, with bright sunshine shining in from the west and some utterly weird clouds. Here's a photo taken by a reader of the Calgary Herald. It reminds me of the scenes in Independence Day when the alien spaceships appear. Except, in this case, there is no need for Jeff Goldblum, Randy Quaid and Mister President.

Scary Government Envelopes

I'd been threatening to write a fairly bad-tempered entry about the lack of activity in my permanent residence case, which had seen nothing happen since mid-May, while others who applied weeks and months after me were at the point of passport requests. Last week, however, my address disappeared in my online status login, which was supposedly a sign of something happening. But after three whole months of nothing happening, and nearly five months since my last contact from them, the trip to the mailbox was done on autopilot, expecting nothing but bills, magazineas and junk mail. So you can well imagine my shock when I went downstairs this morning to find a plain white envelope marked "Canadian Consulate General: Los Angeles" addressed to me. A very nervous trip back upstairs followed; it felt too thick to be a single rejection letter, and so it proved. 

Instead, it was a request for me to take an immigration medical as soon as possible. There was no sign of a letter saying "you pass the eligibilty criteria" so I have to assume that I have done. There is the form (with the photo of me taken across the road 10 months ago) which I must present to the doctor, in addition to his forms which I have to take with me. I will arrange my medical exam with an approved doctor in the morning now I have found out which is the nearest to me. The form on his website shows a very fairly long list of questions to answer. Then follow a chest x-ray and blood and urine tests. If I can get them all done in one day, then the delay in collating the results will be minimised. If everything goes well, hopefully the last step, the Canadian security check and passport request will get here in the coming weeks.

There is possibly some light at the end of this tunnel.

Ankle Update

Tomorrow will be eleven weeks since I hospitalised myself in the name of the beautiful game, and four since I had the cast removed. Time flies when you're, er, sitting immobile on the sofa for weeks on end watching daytime TV. Things are now coming together a little bit. I've now had five sessions with the physiotherapist; she says things are going very well, and makes lots of positive noises each time I go. My ankle now looks like an ankle again, with the features gradually re-appearing from under all the swollenness and scar tissue and so on. It still turns bright red and swells when I'm on my feet for more than 15 minutes. I can walk reasonably well (I would put it at about 70%) when I walk slowly (far more slowly than I would normally), but it looks a little bit more silly when I try and walk faster. I'm now more understanding of what I can do in a day, and what is overdoing it. But there has been definite progress in the time that mum and dad were here, from limping pronouncedly when I met them in the airport three Fridays ago, to being able to move freely when I saw them off on Sunday.

The number of exercises that I get to do increases with every trip to physio, and by my count I now have to do fourteen different ones three times a day, and have to sit and make circles with my foot (or spell the alphabet) when I'm not doing that. There's also the evening drill of putting my foot/ankle into a bucket of hot water for a minute, then a cold one for a minute, and repeating for 10 minutes which often gets forgotten about. I'm also learning other new tricks to do with apparatus/props at physio that I can't take home. There's still a long way to go, another seven or eight weeks, but I can see the progress from one week to the next. And possibly only eight more times to be hooked up to the machine that passes a current through my ankle via two electrodes. That's really not a fun way to finish each session. But today the therapist said that I can swim again. That'll be fun to get back into.

Talking of getting back into things, I went on in a post below about fitting into old suits and so on. I really couldn't commend the 'breaking your ankle while living off savings' diet to anyone, but less activity = less eating, as well as better eating, and less in the booze column too. So it went that the weight fell off, and I would hope it will carry on in the same fashion. I finally managed to buy a cheap set of weighing scales this afternoon on the way back from physio. This time last year, if mum and dad's bathroom scales are to be believed, I weighed 15st 5lb. I was thinking that I might be somewhere around the weight that I came over here at (bizarrely, it's one of the things you are asked by immigration in the airport when you arrive to get your work permit). It was a very pleasant surprise to find out that today, I am apparently 34lb lighter than last year, at a much better 12st 13lb. Hopefully the swimming will see some more weight come off.