A blog from FCDO's Consular team
12th December 2012 London, UK
Nicky Hewitt, 34, born in Melbourne, grew up in Surrey Although I was born in Melbourne, I moved to the UK when I was just 11months old so I always considered myself to be British. When I was 12 years old, I went to Victoria, Australia, with my family on our summer holiday. While we […]
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12th December 2012 London, UK
Steve Grant, 54, from Portsmouth My daughter, Lacey, met Osama in the UK. Osama is from Oman but grew up in England. They had a good relationship and in 2004 they got married. After having been married for a little while, Osama wanted to move back to Dubai. Lacey was excited about the prospect of […]
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12th December 2012 London, UK
Alexander Khan, 37, from South Coast, England My parents come from very different backgrounds; my father is from Pakistan and my mother is English. They married in the late sixties at a time when mixed-race marriages were not widely accepted. The relationship was put under considerable pressure by my father’s family, who were unhappy that […]
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11th December 2012 London, UK
The following is a post by Naomi Cowan, Vice Consul, Tokyo. Christmas cheer, trip to Tokyo, big night out, a few too many, punch a snowman… six days in a police cell… is how one British national spent the run up to Christmas last year. Japan is a good example of how behaviour abroad has […]
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10th December 2012 London, UK
The following is a post by the FCO’s ‘Know Before You Go’ Team in London. Christmas can be a wonderful time of year to travel – to beat the weather and find a bit of summer sun, to travel to the frozen north with the family to visit Santa, to catch up with family or […]
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22nd December 2011 London, UK
Nick Latta Former Deputy Head of Mission and Consul General, British Embassy Tripoli Last Christmas Eve, my mother came to visit us in Tripoli, via Tunisia, bearing the strange story of a man there who had set himself alight in protest at police intimidation and his own poverty. Little did we imagine how that sad […]
18th October 2011 London, UK
Jonathan Marshall, Head of the FCO Prisoners Team The last person executed in Britain was in 1964. It doesn’t seem that long ago does it? Whilst we no longer have capital punishment in the UK, what many people don’t realise is that there are a significant number of British nationals overseas who are facing the […]
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14th September 2011 London, UK
Karen Harris, Consular Officer, Mexico. There are always two sides to the story when it comes down to the breakdown of a relationship, and achieving an amicable separation can be even harder when children are involved. Custody disputes can cause much anxiety for parents and inevitably emotions run high leading some parents to take the […]
14th August 2011
My day at the Sziget Festival started with participating in a press conference together with the Deputy Police Chief of Budapest. Our two British police officers, together with Netherlands, German and Polish counterparts, were present. I spoke about our long-standing bilateral police cooperation, going back to the early 1990’s. There was media interest in what […]
13th August 2011
The Sziget Festival crowd are starting to look tired after several days here, but by tonight the adrenalin rush will have them partying again. On the Main stage today are Hadouken!, Kate Nash and the Kaiser Chiefs (we won’t worry about the non-British bands). While tomorrow we look forward to white Lies and some traditional […]