The Consulate has learned, with the pleasure such news affords, that the French community of Syldavia, long settled in the Kingdom, has given itself representatives of its own. The Kingdom has long been home to citizens of many nations; it is gratified to see one of them so settled as to find a voice.

It reads their preoccupations with sympathy, for they are anyone’s who keeps a life astride a border: schooling for the children, access to one’s rights, work, and the wish to stay close to a country one has left without quite leaving. To these are added the usages of Syldavian administration, for which a newcomer is seldom prepared: that a declaration may require a witness, duly registered; that it be set down in regulation blue ink and no other; that the relevant office close for a feast which the calendar alone could have foretold. Not hardships, but an apprenticeship Syldavia spares none of its guests.

The Consulate knows these cares from experience. From Bangkok it attends to Syldavians settled in Thailand who, between Klow and Krung Thep, likewise seek a school for their children, a visa to renew, the thread of a culture grown distant. If they find there an administration as fond as Klow’s of the stamp and the form in triplicate, they are scarcely far from home: the noble art of esoteric bureaucracy has its devotees on both sides of the desk. To them it offers what a consulate is for: passports, civil registration, attestations, and a patient hearing when a stamp proves elusive. Those services are set out in full here.

That this community should organise and choose its own spokesmen is its affair alone; the Consulate takes no part in the political life of its guests, and refrains. It observes only that there is no surer sign of a country well-lived-in than the wish to be counted in it. To the French community of Syldavia, it extends its most cordial good wishes.