It’s a week since Brexit.
I’m not any happier with the result, but not being the type of person to sit around and let something like my country ripping itself apart hinder me for too long, I’ve had my planning head on.
I actually think I’m way further ahead with my Brexit strategy than the government, the opposition, the Bank of England, the City and the rest of the EU put together.
They’re all still too busy slinging mud at each other, running away, wringing their hands in despair and generally just falling apart to even be thinking about getting a plan together.
That much has happened in just a week, this has surely got to go down as the weirdest week in politics ever. I’m just wondering what next week has in store.
But every cloud has a silver lining. This one seems to be cheap tin rather than real silver, but at least Brexit has kickstarted me into action and made me realise I have to get serious about planning for my future.
So last Sunday morning I made a To Do list.
I thought long and hard and came up with 3 key To Dos:
- Get an EU passport
- Start earning in dollars and euros
- Become Prime Minister
First I worked on getting an EU passport. I rang a couple of single male friends with EU passports and asked them to marry me.
The first laughed – he obviously knows my feelings about marriage all too well – but didn’t actually say no. The second said yes straight away. So I have a Plan B.
I don’t actually want to get married which is why that’s Plan B. Ideally I’ll get an EU passport in my own right.
I checked out the Irish Embassy website to see if they were showing sympathy to Brits about to lose their EU passports and lo and behold! … okay, it didn’t really have anything to do with sympathy, but the rules for applying for an Irish passport have changed since the last time I tried to get one.
In my gap decade when I was travelling a lot I thought an Irish passport would be really handy and looked into getting one. They said no because my dad was too young. He was born in Northern Ireland in 1929 – if he’d been born before 1922 or if my grandparents had been born in the South I’d have had no problem.
Looking at the criteria on the website last Sunday it seems the rules changed around 2005. Now it talks about the ‘island of Ireland’ and says if you have a parent born anywhere in the island of Ireland you are automatically an Irish citizen.
That’d be me then.
Only problem at the moment is that they’re so inundated with applications they’ve run out of forms and queues at the Embassy in London are round the block. The Evening Standard reported that they’d anticipated this and taken on 200 extra staff, but even that doesn’t seem to be enough.
It looks like over the next couple of years the population of Ireland (or at least the number of Irish citizens at large in the world) is set to increase phenomenally.
If I can’t get an application form over the next few weeks, I’ll go to the Embassy when I get to Stockholm and see if I can get a form there. Maybe they won’t be so busy.
That many people have asked me to pick up a form for them I’m going to be in danger of having excess baggage on the way home. I wish I’d thought of this before and stockpiled Irish passport application forms. I could have sold them on Ebay and paid for my summer in Sweden.
So, with the whole EU passport thing ticking along nicely and Plans A and B in place, it was time to work on points 2 and 3 on my Brexit Strategy To Do list.
Getting my website up and running and finishing my book are ways I can start earning in dollars and euros. It’s even more important now that I make a success of it and to that end I’ve been doing lots of extra research.
I’ve watched around 30+ hours of online webinars as part of a Book, Business and Brand Building Summit and heard some really good speakers. It was put together by Lifestyle Entrepreneur Jesse Krieger and was full of really good tips. I’ve made nearly 100 pages of rough notes and as I get them organised and start to put things into practice I’ll share some of them on here.
My Kungsleden book is sitting in draft on my computer and has been on hold ever since I started putting this website together and trying to catch up on blog posts. Spending the summer finishing the trail will motivate me to finish it as I’ll then have a sequel to write. Is it normal to plan a sequel before the first book is finished?
I’ve also got ideas for a couple of shorter books and lots of ideas about marketing.
Earning money in dollars and euros might take me a bit longer than getting an EU passport, but at least I have a strategy to be working on.
Third on my Brexit Strategy To Do list is to become Prime Minister. This originally seemed as though it would be the hardest to achieve and so I allowed myself 5 years.
As the Government is in disarray and the Labour Party is falling apart I’m reassessing my timescale. At the rate things are going I could be PM before I even get my Irish passport or finish my first book. A friend suggested I just turn up at Parliament and announce I’m there on Supply. Jeremy would probably be very glad to see me and welcome me onto his Front Bench.
I do actually have a more detailed plan for becoming PM, but I’m not going to give all my ideas away here. However, I will say that I’m very pleased that the new Shadow Secretary of State for Education is my local MP. She’s the third one this week. I just hope she sticks around a bit longer than the three days the previous one lasted (that’s got to be some kind of record!) as having my MP in this position feeds nicely into my cunning plan.
So that’s where I’m up to with my strategizing so far. I’m still angry and upset about Brexit, but I’m feeling a lot more positive now I have a plan.
What are your post-Brexit plans? Share in the comments below.
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