I’m finally in posession of an IR-1 immigrant visa, which affords me permanent residence status in Uncle Sam’s garden shed for ten years or so.

And ain’t that been a long time coming.

Life only throws up a few momentous cliff-hangers and I suppose emigrating ranks slightly above exam results and driving tests but a touch below births, marriages and deaths.

Anyway, here’s how the medical and visa interview went for anyone needing to know:

THE MEDICAL:

When you’re sent the final packet informing you of your interview date, you’re expected to organise a medical with the U.S. Embassy’s preferred choice of medical practitioner. This means a little trip down to London approximately a week beforehand to blow £160.00 at the Alliance Medical Imaging Centre in swanky Marylebone.

It’s about twenty minutes on foot from Euston Station and even less if you take the tube to Regent’s Park or Bond Street. In fact, this map shows exactly where they are (with pictures no less).

Once inside, it’s simple a case of having a word with the first receptionist who’ll direct you upstairs to the second receptionist in charge of taking most of your details.

After a quick chest x-ray and a check to see if all your vaccinations are in order (well worth pestering your local GP about before you go as you’re expected to pay at the centre) it’s time to see the doctor.

The fella in question I had to see bore more than a passing resemblance to a junior Herr Lipp off League of Gentlemen.
Herr Wolf Lipp - Queen of Duisburg
Herr Lipp – the Queen of Duisburg

After a few general health questions, an eye test and a blood sample to see if I had aids or syphillis I was asked to defrock down to my whippers and lie down. Everything was going relatively peachy until we got to taking my blood pressure.

Having pumped me for a while he claimed in his slightly effete German accent: “Your blood pressure is a little high. Perhaps you are a little nervous, yes?”

Perhaps I was, but the problem had more to do with him inadvertently pressing his groin against me with each pump of his little rubber thingy. I was so horrified at the thought of me thinking that he thought I might be going all a flutter that I instantly incorporated a zen breathing technique as he moved himself outside of my immediate proximics.

By the time he’d finished I had the heart rate of a hibernating mud-skipper.

Once my state of paranoia, which comes to the fore every time I visit a health professional, had subsided we had a lovely little chat and I was ushered back outside to the receptionist to pay £160.00 for the whole privilege with a solemn promise that my results would be with the U.S. Embassy in time for my interview proper the following week.

THE IR-1 VISA INTERVIEW.

For some extraordinary reason the train was going to cost me just over £200 a week after it’d only cost me £12.50 each way. So I decided to drive. On paper it’s a doddle: M6 to the end of the M1 then take the Edgeware Road until you reach Marble Arch and the embassy is a couple of streets away. In actuality it was even easier having set off at an ungodly hour and finding a cheap car park before I entered the congestion zone. (For once I’d paid the damn thing beforehand after being on the wrong end of various clampings and fines in the past.)

The U.S. Embassy is relatively easy to find as you can see the two queues of confused visa applicants a quarter of a mile off. I joined the longer queue on the right at 10.20 am and waited. And waited. Apart from an embassy official trotting about with a clipboard grumbling to herself about the length of the queue not a lot was going on other than a Securitas van wailing and screaming something inaudible. Believe you me there was more grumbling, wailing and screaming from the assembled hoards as the time dragged and the line shrank slower than your average glacier.

US Embassy London
As one queue turns to mecca sneak in on their blind side.

As midday approached the same official began looking at various appointment letters, telling certain folk to join the other, shorter line or to come back later. With an impending sense of doom I fully expected her to tell me to go and waste a bit of time at Starbucks. Essentially I didn’t mind as what was another three hours compared with the three years I’d already waited to get to this stage. However, as soon as she saw I was ‘immigrant’ I was immediately ushered into the other line which was the one actually going places.

Twenty minutes on and I was through the first checkpoint and sent down to the x-ray hut. I’m fully aware that the world is currently on critical exploding cream alert and that profiling is a bit of a contentious subject, but are these people taking the piss when they ask a baldy man like myself if I’m carrying hair gel?

Anyway, once you’re in the building itself you’re given a ticket number and told to park your backside whilst you wait for your number to be called on their rather impressive ticketing screen system thingy. As I took my ticket I noticed it was number 610 and also noticed that they were only up to processing number in the early 300s. Even though they seemed to be calling numbers every few seconds to go to one of the 24 teller counters I expected another elongated wait.

Twenty minutes into my wait I saw that the screen was showing only three immigrant visas being processed amongst the whole lot and the numbers pending were 018, 019 and 020. I knew for certain that I was an IR-1 immigrant visa and checked my ticket again. And what’s 610 if you turn it upside down? Yes, 019.

Before I had too much time to inwardly berate myself for my numptiness, ticket number 019 was called to window fourteen. Off I bounded with my two tagged folders of required documents and supporting evidence to face the music.

The chirpy-ish cockney fella simply went through my visa application asking for various documents such as birth and marriage certificates and placing the copies within the wad of paperwork. After handing all the documents over as he asked for them and taking my fingerprints I offered my very best poker face as he informed me that the $380 fee had already been paid. Splendid.

With everything in order he passed me my chest x-ray which was to be presented to the INS officials at whichever airport I was to enter and a pink form to fill out back in the main waiting area. I attempted to offer him my court records for a drink driving conviction in 1995 but he fobbed it off as a misdemeanour and suggested for me not to do it again Stateside.

The pink form was nothing more than an exercise in address filling so that the courier could deliver me my visa, passport and documents a couple of days later. I hadn’t even got to my postcode and I was recalled to window sixteen for my main interview.

Behind this particular window was a young American lass who managed to grill me with the same aplomb as a wet bbq. She assumed that my father-in-law, Kelly, was my wife and failed to ask me what I was going to do for work over there – I honestly get asked more taxing questions about the move every time I’m up the Shooters. A quick raise of the right hand to swear I’d told the truth and she ended the short interview with the immortal words that shall forever remain ingrained on my memory. No, not “Welcome to America,” but “That’s it.”

I must’ve asked her four or five times with increasing incredulousness whether that really was it, but decided to scarper whilst the going was good, remembering just in time to pick up my chest x-ray that I’d left at window fourteen.

All that remained was to pay the £13.50 to the courier service and then I could scuttle off back up north with far less of a burden than I went down south.

And I leave these shores on the 4th of September.