Cheers!

This lovely girl smiles at me from one of my computer screens when I am working.  Today I raised a toast (or, at least, a cup of tea) to her, in recognition of the amazing job she did in preparing my dossier for French naturalisation.

I had a one-and-a-half hour interview with an official in Toulouse, where my dossier was successfully lodged and opened.  I have a handful of documents still to acquire and send on, and it will be complete.

My interviewer was a very charming and personable young man who himself holds dual nationality of Spanish and French.  The one thing they required (which I didn't have) that puzzled me, was my parents' birth certificates.  He explained that when you are granted French citizenship, you are given a French birth certificate, and all French birth certificates carry the date of birth of your parents - ergo they needed to verify when my parents were born.  So today I will spend time on the Scotland'sPeople website to track down and order up officially franked copies of my mum and dad's birth certificates.  My mum would have been 100 this year.