Three months worth of digging around for information to prove Jen and my relationship and it all came down to one day. Last week Friday, 20th June 2008, was the set date for the application to be submitted by my lawyer, on my behalf. He gets to explain all the goods and bads about the application to the officer rather than myself and that's definitely a good thing because of all his experience with applications such as these. The paperwork was finalised last week when the last steps were taken to send through our passports to him in Glasgow, Royal Mail, special delivery. £5.05 later and I was given a tracking slip that would ensure my package was on his doorstep by 9am the following morning. Would I have trusted two passports and a 10-thick pile of legal documents in South African post? Most definitely not. Was I still unsure of the safety of it even with the Royal Mail special delivery stamp? For sure. It worked out okay though and just as promised the passports were with him the following day, just 24 hours prior to the application. Nail biting stuff.

Of course it was nail biting. Though the repercussions were never completely life or death, there were many parts to our lives that would be greatly affected by the outcomes of this application. If it was denied we would almost definitely be heading back to SA on a plane in August due to my inability to continue working in the UK on my working holidaymaker visa. It meant the loss of many thousands of pounds of potential earnings and savings. Not to mention our six month lease that we just signed in our new awesome penthouse flat, and my mobile, broadband and many other service contracts needing to be cut short. Knowing Britain, ending those contracts short would have been quite a costly exercise, coupled with the fact that... I'm just not ready to leave yet.

I'm not ready to leave it behind. As many posts before this have said, my views on the life that we have made over here have almost always been positive. We have established ourselves in a completely foreign country and we've built up comfortable lives over here even when faced against many difficult struggles. And it didn't just happen. We worked for it. I'm not the type of person who talks of fate, nor luck, very often. Just as I don't believe in our paths being out of our control, I don't believe that things just "happen for a reason". I damn well fought for this. I worked my butt off to make sure that I reached a stable position over here, I never accepted failure and I certainly didn't accept a half-ass effort. The position in life that I am currently in was worked for and wouldn't have been achieved by just sitting and waiting for it to fall on my lap. Our jobs, our flat, our friends, our trips away, our car, our gadgets, our lives... didn't just happen. We made them happen and just as we can take the credit for them, we can also take the blame.

That is why this application meant so much... it was the ability to continue on this path and keep up what we have worked so hard for. To have it declined and sent packing would've been to lose all that we had worked so hard for and just like all the adversity we've come up against so far, I wasn't going to fail. We called in favours, we had to use snail-mail (many many times), we dug through our personal lives, we got other people to dig through our personal lives, we were thorough and I didn't want to think for one second that I didn't do everything I could have possibly done to ensure it's success.

And just like our previous successes. My residency permit was approved. Within half an hour at the home office Richard called me and told me the good news - "We're about half way through the process now, they've just taken your passport and documentation away. It's all been approved." Can I explain the feeling when he uttered those words? Not a chance. For lack of a better saying, it was oodles of weight off my shoulders. Months of stress all bundled in to one package that fell from my shoulders and down the stairs I was standing next to as he told me that my permit was approved. A huge sigh of relief and the start of yet another chapter in our lives together. Another story to tell people about - another box ticked. After all, we worked for it and we succeeded.

(I was going to post a picture of the actual passport but then I decided that it may be a pretty controversial thing to have publicly available. Not to mention that I suddenly realised I would become one of those people who gave all their privacy data away just for a blog post.)