Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls - By David Sedaris Page 0,72

I would offer a silent, nondenominational prayer of thanks. I honestly believed that my gratitude would keep me safe, so imagine my surprise in late November 2011, when someone broke into a place I was renting with Hugh and my sister Gretchen and stole my computer bag.

I thought of my laptop—a year’s worth of work, gone!—but my real concern was my passport, which had been tucked into an interior pocket alongside my checkbook. Its loss was colossal because it was my only form of ID, and also because my Indefinite Leave to Remain sticker was in it.

This is the British equivalent of a green card, and getting it had not been easy. Before Indefinite Leave I’d had visas, and those had taken some effort as well. The rules have changed since I first applied, but in 2002 it was possible to qualify as a writer. All I had to do was fill out a great many forms and prove that I had published a book. Hugh, by extension, was granted a visa as the boyfriend of a writer. This meant that when crossing into England, I would be asked by the border agents if I wrote mysteries, and Hugh would be asked if his boyfriend wrote mysteries. No other genre was ever considered.

We had to renew our visas every few years. This involved going to the dismal town of Croydon and spending a day in what was always the longest and most desperate line I had ever imagined. It was also the most diverse. I thought I was good at identifying languages, but it turns out I know next to nothing. Surely they’re making that up, I’d think, listening in on the couple ahead of me. The woman, most often, would be dressed like the grim reaper. Her husband would wear a sweatshirt with a picture of a boat or a horse on it, and the two would be speaking something so unmelodious and dire-sounding I could not imagine it having the words for “birthday cake.” If Hugh and I were denied extensions of our visas, we would have returned to Paris or New York, while they’d have gone back to, what? Beheadings? Clitoridectomies? What they had at stake was life-and-death. What we had at stake was Yorkshire pudding.

The nuisance of visas and having them renewed was something I left to Hugh, who’s a whiz at that sort of thing. There was nothing the authorities demanded that he couldn’t locate: our original birth certificates, a hank of his grandmother’s hair, the shoes I wore when I was twelve. People think it’s easy to leave home and resettle in another country, but in fact it’s exhausting, and purposefully so. The government’s hope is to weed out the lazy, though all it really eliminates are those who can’t afford an immigration lawyer. Had we not been native English speakers, and had Hugh not loved the challenges, we’d have hired one as well. As it was, we renewed our visas the requisite three times and then applied for Indefinite Leave. Aside from the mountain of paperwork, this involved reading a manual called Life in the UK and taking a subsequent test.

Hugh sat for it on the same day I did, and we spent weeks in the summer of 2008 studying. During that time I learned the difference between the House of Lords and the House of Commons. I learned that in 1857 British women won the right to divorce their husbands. I learned that people below the age of sixteen cannot deliver milk in the U.K., but I don’t think I learned why. It was just one of those weird English injustices, like summer.

Before taking the real test, I took the fake ones provided at the back of the study manual. “What do people eat on Christmas?” was one of the questions. Another was “What do you do on Halloween when someone comes to the door?” It was multiple-choice, and possible answers included “call the police” and “run and hide.”

I laughed, but these weren’t jokes. If you were from Chad, you’d likely freak out when children with panty hose over their heads showed up at your house demanding that you give them candy. As for the Christmas-meal question, do I know what they eat in Nigeria for Eid-el-Kabir or in Beijing for Qingming?

Another of the test questions asked why great numbers of Jewish people immigrated to the U.K. in the early part of the twentieth century. I don’t recall all the possible answers,