Day 26

Wednesday March 17, 2021

Maja:

I’m woken up by Sarah entering our room in some state of lovely excitement, bringing me a present. When she woke up that morning, she was a bit chilly, so she got dressed in a jumper. That jumper is an official Gorillaz jumper from their tour a couple of years ago, which lead singer Damon Albarn personally gave out to only musicians and crew. The character on the jumper is Murdoc, the Gorillaz bassist. I’m beyond happy about it. What a way to wake up. 

Gorillaz is the band I’ve been listening to the most this last year, so it’s very fitting. And of course, Murdoc. The bassist. Of course, I play the bass, and Mark is my bass mentor, so what could be more fitting?

Mark:

After a wonderful morning, we’re hit again by reality in the evening as we sit down to really go through visa possibilities for Maja so that she can stay in London. All it pulls up is despair, despair, and despair. The two options we seem to have are by marriage, or something called the global talent plan. We spend three hours forensically going through both, and whenever we feel we can overcome one obstacle in the scores of requirements, we come to another which cannot possibly be met. The whole thing is just looking totally impossible. In fact, we conclude that both routes are deliberately written to set people up to fail. One piece of information in particular that keeps coming up is the need for a sponsor, with no clue at all as to what would constitute as a sponsor, no matter how much we research it.

The marriage road looks like this. 

Maja has a six month visa as it stands right now. She has been here just about a month.

We discover you have to formally announce an intention to marry, and then can’t get married for at least 70 days after that. If we do this tomorrow, that would take us more than three months into the six. But you also have to have a venue booked so even in this hypothetical scenario, that will probably not happen tomorrow. Especially not when you throw Corona regulations into the mix.

Once married, you can apply. 

The application process takes up to two months to receive a reply. That’s five months right there. Oh, and before any of this can even begin, Maja first needs to get a divorce which also has to go through the courts which will take at least another month. If it begins today, which it won’t. So there’s your six months. Minimum. And it’s not even a given that a visa would be granted on those grounds even if we managed to jump through all the hoops and tick all the boxes within the available time.

In a moment of clarity, we decide to solve the Visa problem by deciding we’re not going to depend on it. We’re going to do this by simply not living in the UK. With that we start to look at countries where it’s easier for Europeans to go and live. This leads us to seriously consider a few countries in Asia, South America, to be left for us to look at more closely another day.  

As we’re discuss this and I’m considering an option or two, Maja suddenly stops me cold. ‘Oh, I have an idea,’ she says breathlessly, wild excitement in her eyes. Oh wow. This sounds like it could be something. I exit my train of thought instantly. We’re in a desperate state here and her entire expectant face tells me she’s just about to unleash the magic thunderball that will blast the whole thing wide open. I take a mental step back to allow full space for whatever she is about to say to wash and crash right into. She hits me with it. ‘Will you go traveling in a camper van with me.’ Wow. I didn’t see that coming. But I don’t hesitate. ‘Yes.’ ‘Wow,’ she giggles. ‘That’s a bigger commitment than agreeing to get married.’ Yeah. I guess it really is.

Maja:

I’ve been thinking about camper vans for a long time. As a way to travel around and still keeping my life with me. So why not now? Mark can be in Europe for 180 days a year and I can be in UK for 180 days as well. So we can travel and live that way together. We just can’t work that way, but that is a different problem. Maybe we can solve that in some other way. Only this way, we can stay together. I hope. That’s really everything that matters to me right now.

Mark:

Instantly this has become our fallback option and we’ve now decided not to let the visa thing stress us out at all. If it happens it happens. And even if some circumstances arise which miraculously facilitate a visa solution, we might just follow through with all this anyway. Because, as we talk more and more about it, the whole thing starts to make more and more sense. Almost seamlessly the conversation coalesces into an actual plan for what we really want to do now and what we are now going to do – write songs, tour internationally with them, and write about it.

So far since we met we’ve spoken about kids and marriage. We’ve moved house together. And now we’re committing ourselves to working together as internationally touring, diary writing musicians and songwriters. Can I please remind you, we first physically met less than four weeks ago.