The Home Office nearly deported my husband

What I remember about preparing to leave for my husband’s appointment with the Home Office in Croydon in 2007 is hysteria. A tizzy was not unprecedented; in our household, it’s always the man who’s in a dither, seeing to last-minute primping and chronically unable to get out the door on time. But on this occasion I, too, was rattled, snapping impatiently as I double-checked an enormous bag of documents. A fair bit was at stake.

An American, I had acquired my own Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) — a grand designation for ‘residency’ that only the British would coin — during a looser era of the Writers and Artists Visa, long ago eliminated. So the hoop-jumping that the Home Office had come to require for gaining the same status was new to me.

To continue to live legally with me in London, my American husband Jeff had already sat the ‘life in the United Kingdom’ test.