Where were we going to live? Where were our kids going to go to school? In the US, the answer to the first question typically answers the second but that turned out not to be the case in Britain (sometimes?). I strafed random schools with emails to see if we could get in somewhere. Given the wildly uninformed nature of my questions, the answers understandably did not clarify the process very much.

Finally I called the council office and spoke to a very patient man who explained Manchester geography and its implications for school registration.  At the end he said “Now go have a lie down." I had not considered the cost of this international call and was later billed $80. In the end we discovered that a public school run by the Catholic church will be so happy to get two bona fide baptismal-certificate-holding Papists that they would reach across the Atlantic and gather us in without bothering with the minor particulars of our address or immigration status.