PPR Date: 20 Dec 2017
Passport Sent Date: 22 Dec 2017
Courier Passport Delivered Date: 27 Dec 2017
CGKey approval date: 18 Jan 2018
Return track activated: Still waiting
It looks like they are finally processing passports delivered on the 27th. Cheers to all of us!
As far as I am concerned (and I've been through a similar situation when I applied) you can use your freelance work experience as long as you can prove it was a significant workload. That would involve sending reference letters several clients along with your application, as well as providing...
Honestly, I wouldn't hold my breath for it at the moment. It's taking approximately a month or so to process, it seems. Wait until mid January. Don't stress it :)
For what I've read to this point, it looks like there's a significant delay over there due to the Holidays. I'm on the same situation and I'll wait at least 2 weeks (mid January) before I take any action.
Here's what I did to get the barcode (using gmail on Chrome)
Click to print your email directly
When the print page shows up, roll to the Annex and drag-select it
Print as PDF. Chrome will print ONLY what you selected and you get a full page with the Annex perfectly aligned
Sure, the process is kind of messy. Printing from email never looks good, a lot of page breaks.
What I did is I printed everything as it was, then I copied the Annex A to a PDF document and printed it separately so it looked a little bit better.