Choosing a village

 How did you end up living where you’re living? I feel like very few people truly choose where they live, I think most people either live where they were born even if they went away for a bit, or people move to be with a partner, or they move for a job, or they move for uni and then stay. All of those do involve some choice, maybe you want to be near the grandparents or be in a city for a good job, or in an area with affordable housing, but I think not that many people look at a map and think “where do I want to live?”

I lived near Coventry for my first 19 years because my mum went to Warwick uni and then met my Dad who moved to Coventry for a job, he and only intended to stay a few years but they go sucked in for 30ish years. Then I went to Liverpool for uni because my ex-boyfriend went to chester and so I only applied to places near there. We were together at the time, otherwise that would be slightly unhinged behaviour. In my second year of uni we broke up but I stayed another 15 years in Liverpool.

Then we had the privilege of actually decided where we wanted to live thanks to Dan being an EU citizen and a pandemic making remote working a thing. So we looked at a map of France, for the hottest and most affordable bit of France by the sea. And maybe we went a bit too hot, currently only the ground floor of our 3 story house is really habitable for sleeping. Last night Percy couldn’t sleep, he first tried cuddling up to an ice block wrapped in a bag, and then went to sleep on the sofa down stairs when he was asleep Dan carried him upstairs so that the sofa was free for me to sleep on. I bet halfway down France on the Atlantic coast is lovely right now. But anyway my point is we did choose this region based on location we didn’t have any personal connections, but the village we live in is pretty random.

View from our current bedroom window

The village is just a village that had a good house free on the random weekend Dan came to look for a house one month before we moved here. And now that the 3 years is up on that house, and we are in temporary housing, and Percy is about to start secondary school and we know all the areas well, it seems a good time to actually choose a location. I’ve written about this a bit before, we went to see a few places and decided on Thuir being a good place, that’s got a good amount of amenities but still a villagey feel. 

It’s not easy to find houses though, and Dan’s trial period isn’t over until mid august, so in term of getting a house the official normal way that’s a bit late. We started researching Thuir to see if we could get some house views and negotiate something. At the same time a house came up in our village that was very similar to our old house except a bit worse and for 300 euros more a month. That’s how much rents have risen in the last few years. This house also didn’t have an oven, a dishwasher, a fridge or a washing machine. Which is quite standard in France. The walls were perfectly white which most people would love but after not getting our deposit back for our walls not being perfectly white after 3 years, I never want to rent a white house again. This was the only house up for rent in our village and nothing was coming up in Thuir either.

My work is fizzling out at the moment, my school work is only November to May because the school can’t afford a whole year, and everyone keeps cancelling their private lessons for various reasons. I’m trying to just make the most of being here, and chill a bit before I having to look after the boys on my own for 2 months. So I was at the beach having a swim and a roller skate along the promenade, just living my best life and then came home and was in the shower when there was a loud knock at the door. I opened it in my towel and it was the mum of one of Percy’s school friends who told me there was no school this afternoon,  and that while I was frolicking in the sea I should have been parenting. She also asked for Dan’s number because she didn’t trust me to understand stuff, which is fair. (She didn’t say that but it was obviously the reason.)

So Percy had no school because his teacher had a meeting with the secondary school, and what they always do when a teacher is off, instead of getting in a supply teacher, is share out the kids between the other classes if you’re parents are working or ask the parents to get them if they happen to be just sea frolicking and roller skating. Later on that night she came round to talk to the responsable french speaking parent about the thing which I wouldn’t understand.

Recent sea frolics

She wanted to fill in a form so that her daughter and Percy could be in the same class, but you have to do this together and sign a form to say you both agree they are friends. She also told us some useful information about getting the school bus and the day you have to go in to register for school. At first we said “well we’re still considering trying to move to Thuir.” But over the next week we just kind of thought that moving somewhere else and then trying to get into that school is going to be too complicated and too expensive and there was a growing pressure to get on with the Millas school application stuff that he was already sign up to, he had to choose an extra curriculum sport, (he’s considering outdoor cycling, climbing or acrobatics on a Wednesday afternoon and table tennis as a lunch club)  and he had to  decide if he wanted to study Catalan and decide what level of freedom he could have about whether he could make his own way home, its on a traffic light system from do what you like and leave school whenever you have a free period to only be picked up or get the school bus.

It wouldn’t have been impossible to move to Thuir, I’m sure they let kids in last minute, it could all work out, but I didn’t want it to all be last minute, I wanted him to be able to tell his friends where he was going, and I wanted to give a difinitive answer to the mum of this girl. So we decided let’s just stay in this house and let Percy go to the school he wants to go to, and give this mum an answer. Once he starts that school we ideally don’t want to move him so we might end up living in this village for the rest of our lives just because this mum pressured us to fill in a form! 

We still have to move out over the summer though because the house will be an air bnb to holiday makers so were busy moving all our stuff in to storage again, half of it is already there, the furniture and winter stuff like skis we moved to storage the last time we moved house in April, but we have to move everything were currently living with which does include some 3 chest-of draws, 3 bikes and 2 big desks up to the loft stage in the house and put everything back to how it looked 3 months ago. It’s hard work in the ridiculous heat.

I also went to take down my exhibition last Friday, and it was so hot that my phone was overheating and didn’t want to use the sat nav. The air con works ok in normalish heat but above about 34 degrees it’s just pumping out warm air. My friend Hawa who is Spanish/ Sénégalaise came with me to see the exhibition and help me take it down, she offered to put her sat nav on which was Spanish so then she was translating the Spanish into French (we can only communicate in bad french) we were both sweating buckets we gave up on the air con and had the windows down, the car said 43 degrees, it was not a relaxing way to travel but I did learn the Spanish word for roundabout.

I’m so happy that I sold some of the paintings a couple to friends and a couple to strangers. I also did a workshop which was so fun, art workshops was my main job in England and I miss it a lot, and this was a lot easier than when I’ve done schools workshops because everyone had chosen to be there and everyone had enough space and good quality materials and no one threw a chair at me (that once happened when I worked in a pupil referral unit.) 

If anyone in England (or anywhere) wants some of the left over very post-able art let me know and I can bring it to England when I come next week. Here’s a few examples they’re all A4 20 quid including postage. You can see the full options on my Instagram (@artisthannahjones)

I’m coming to England on Saturday, and I’m pretty excited about seeing lots of people and being a normal temperature. Dan is a little less excited to be staying to work. He’s hoping to do a few fun things at weekends, the first 3 weeks he’ll be right in the south and he’s going to see if he can hire a mountain bike and cycle to Spain, its really just the other side of the mountain. Imagine that is your normal life, and then for the one week he’s got a holiday in August he’ll be spending it in Preston. 

My Exhibition

Hello, my last blog was one of the least read blogs I’ve ever written with 49 views. No one cares that I went on holiday, and fair enough. I remember having to watch videos my granny made on her camrecorder and copied them onto VHS of her cruises round the world and they were dull, I get it. Mainly we did just have a nice time which is boring. Compare that to a blog I wrote this time last year called “double bad news” that had 374 views. 

374 minus 49 = 325 people that are only interested in bad things happening to me. If you’re one of them sorry but you will be disappointed by this blog. Other than getting told off by a librarian and getting a massive bruise mainly everything was fine. So quit now if you like.

But for the nice people still reading I’ll tell you the story of my first solo exhibition. We got back from holiday on a Tuesday afternoon and we had a ton of things to do. The next day I was putting up my exhibition, but because it’s a Wednesday (so no school in France) I teach a little group of kids English in my house. We are currently making a video of the story of Goldilocks and the 3 bears. 

After my English teaching I rushed off to the gallery and got there just before they closed for a 2 hour lunch. The French love their long lunches, but it’s super annoying when you can’t even use your long lunch break to get some useful shopping done because loads of shops close for lunch. Once when I had French lessons the person in charge apologised that we only had a “very short lunch” of one hour. Anyway I got to the library 5 minutes before lunch which meant I could stay locked in working on the exhibition over lunch time. The paintings all clipped onto invisible strings, so the small ones were fairly easy to sort. I needed help doing the massive one. It’s really hard to put up a painting together when there’s a language barrier. When I got home I asked Dan what the French word for diagonal was. He told me it was “diagonale” and I was fuming. As well as the big paintings I had these little A4 lino prints and gelli prints. And then I had some of my print making things to display to show the process.

The private view (which I think is badly named because it means the opening night that anyone can normally come to) was on the Friday. The library lady told me on the Wednesday that she had all the food, and drink for it. Which was kind of annoying because a few weeks earlier Dan had gone to Spain to get a load of cheap wine and snacks for it, and paper plates and everything. I just assumed I had to provide that, and it was lovely that I didn’t have to, but it would have been better if we hadn’t made a whole trip to another country to stock up. We served all their much nicer wine so I still have a lot of cheap wine to drink. I also made a lemon cake and cookies because the French don’t really think of that kind of thing, they just had a lot of charcuterie stuff. 

Gelli prints

People started arriving half an hour before opening, just random local old people who must come every time for the food. It was weird seeing them looking at my art and taking photos, someone was even writing notes. Some of my friends started arriving after a while and I went to poor one of them a drink and got told off by the librarian! Apparently the bar is not open until I have made a speech in front of the mayor. I had to sneak my friend a water because she was so thirsty! It’s not the first time I’ve been told off by a librarian of course. Librarians are kind of the opposite of dyslexic art students and if you are going to give dyslexic art students a photo copy budget of 100 quid then you should expect to find them sprinkling glitter and bits of string into the photo copier. We’re certainly not going to waste that budget photocopying books, because we all hate reading. 

Anyway I made a little speech about my work which Dan translated into French and then we could finally drink something. Quite a few people wanted to talk to me, which resulted in me getting none of my own cake and cookies that I’d spent the whole day making. But other than that it was a lovely night. I sold one of the mountain canvases and my painting on 3 stones, to a woman who’s kid once painted a stone that she loved but then it went missing. Something like that, but she was very emotionally attached to this stone paintings. I felt like a fraud selling the stones, I don’t even really own them, I stole them from a beach and then painted them. I also sold 3 lino prints.

Painting the rocks

The next day we went to the water park. Since coming back from Corsica Eric has been desperate to swim because he missed out on the holiday, so we went on the opening day of Frenzy water park. It was warm, like 25 degrees, but a bit grey which meant there were only 20-30 people there for the first couple of hours. Last summer we went to a different water park where you had to queue up to an hour for each of the big slides, here the most we waited for one slide was 5 minutes. They had loads of big slides but unfortunately the boys were too small for many of them. They could go on the inflatable obstacle course, the body board slide where you go on your front and when you hit the water you skim it for ages, the slide that throws you up in the air and 3 of the water chutes. 

My favourite slide 

The bruise maker

I went on one slide with Dan where it’s a normal water chute at first you, do a bit of a spiral in a tunnel and then you go very fast nearly vertically into a big half pipe. I’ve never seen someone so scared yet so repressed as Dan, he said “crikey” a lot. We also both had a go on the one that throws you into the air, there were different levels between 1 and 8, I found I had no control of what happened or how I would land so one time smashed the water so hard I got a big bruise on my leg.

 But all in all it was fun, the boys actually just loved watching people do the big throw you in the air slides. I wish you could join a water park like people join gyms and just go on your lunch break or whatever. Talking weird lunch breaks, even the water park closed for lunch! Not all of it, but all the big slides were closed for an hour for Lunch. That’s weird right?

Recently I’ve been trying to make a bit more effort with French. I’ve signed up to some new online classes and I’m trying to do more jobs that previously I would have let Dan do, because he’s better at French. Partly because I have to because he’s out at work all day now and partly because it will help with French. My Spanish friend (who speaks to me in French) challenged me on this recently. She came round for lunch and it was the first time she’d come without translator Dan being there. She speaks very good French enough to have a French job in a clothes shop, and she just learned by talking. She said when she moved here she had to do all the admin and go to all the meetings you have to go to when you’re trying to find a job and a house and a school for your kids. She was saying how I should have been the one to go to the hospital with Eric when he needed stitches. But it always seems like it makes more sense for Dan to go if possible.

This week I’ve done a lot though. At the exhibition I spoke to a lot of people in French then I went out roller skating at the beach and then for a meal with my roller skate club, where I’m the only English person. I have previously avoided socials because I just think they’ll be awkward. I then went to an estate agents to ask about houses to rent, and I was really proud of myself that I had a good conversation with that guy. I also took the boys to get a hair cut, that was fairly awkward, because I tried to subtley say to the hair dresser that she knows how to cut hair better than an 8 year old so please don’t listen too much to his instructions, but I couldn’t quite say that well and would you believe my 8 year old would not translate that sentence for me.

And then this is less fun but I had to go to the dentist for a filling. I don’t enjoy the combination of doing something horrible and adding in my embarrassing French, I don’t know dentist specific words like “filling” either. She spoke to me a bit in bad English she said she would put me to sleep and I was pretty surprised and then she said “not you, I will put your teeth to sleep” which is a cuter way of saying I’ll numb the area. Then she got really confused between the words tooth and teeth and I explained it for her. Anyway my teeth had a nice sleep and woke up all better.

Next week I’ll have more chance to practise French at a meeting at Percy’s new secondary school, but I’ll write more about the whole weird French school system and how we dropped the ball on school admin, resulting in a parent knocking on our door next time.

Corsica

For a long time I’ve been interested to go to Corsica, we even considered going for our honeymoon. It’s a beautiful island of beaches and mountains owned by France or part of France or something like that, they speak French but apparently they don’t like to be called French, like the welsh. They hate it when you call them french. 

Anyway for our honeymoon we ended up just seeing what flights go from Manchester on the afternoon after our wedding and we ended up going to Crete. It was the only time we ever did a normal hotel with a pool kind of holiday. But a few months ago when it seemed like we were going to be moving back to England we decided we should take our chance to go to Corsica. It’s pretty annoying to get to from the north of the UK. Flights are only from the south and only on a Sunday last time I researched, but going from where we live in France we could just drive 3 hours 30 and drive onto a ferry.

I’m a big convert to ferrys. They are magical. They literally ferry you about to the place you want to go, while you sleep! It’s so relaxing compared to flying (especially when someone else is driving.) You can pack whatever you like as long as it fits in your car. We even saw someone bring a dining table on top of their car! You don’t have to worry about liquids, and if you want to bring a razor on board to shave your legs you can. Has there ever been a ferry based hijacking? Let me just google… Oh yes once. 1974 in Singapore, 5 hostages, no one died. We’re well overdue another one in my opinion. 

Security was lax, on the way they asked if we had any paint, we said no, but I did actually have some posca paint pens, they should be more specific because I bet you can take watercolour paint. On the way back they did look in the car boot but they didn’t open any bags. I feel like when I fly now it’s just the boring thing you have to do in order to get to your destination, whereas the ferry did feel like part of the holiday. We did have a cabin though, maybe if you were sleeping on the floor it wouldn’t feel so holiday like. People brought sleeping bags and slept together in little friendship groups and it looked pretty fun, I would like to see if you could get away with bringing a tent. And a camping stove to use on deck, that would be so cool.

The holiday would have been perfect if it wasn’t for Eric’s stitches which he couldn’t get wet. Any other time it would be no problem to not swim for 10 days, but this was such a water based holiday. We stayed in an Airbnb that had a pool and was a 5 minute walk from the beach. 

The first morning we got in at 8am in Propriano in the south west and drove down the most southern point Bonifacio. It was a beautiful city with a load of millionaire super yachts to look at. My Dad spent his 21st birthday there helping his millionaire uncle to sail his boat there, and for his birthday he bought my Dad a bowl of 21 scoops of ice cream.

My Dad on his trip round the med in 1978

From there we went to the most beautiful beach, the water was that perfect turquoise that I associate with the Carribbean. Me and Percy got straight in. The doctor who stitched up Eric’s knee said he can’t go in the pool because of the risk of the wound getting infected but that the sea was even worse. I put this special splash proof plaster on Eric’s knee, it was basically sticky back plastic. But because it was his knee not a flat bit of him it did’t stick well. I said he could stand in the sea and play ball, it was really hot so he wanted to cool down. I forget 8 year olds aren’t like adults though, once you say he can play he gave very little thought to his leg and it was stressful to watch. Then he fell over in the sea and while the splash protector did help it didn’t completely protect him. He said, “don’t worry I feel fine.” He didn’t understand that there are no immediate consequences to the leg getting wet, but days down the line there could be. 

We had planed to go canyoning, which looked so fun, but obviously not something Eric could do. I had this book called Wild Swimming France and the absolute best looking places in the book were in Corsica, so on the second day we headed out in search of them. We had bought Eric a gift of a “Perplexus” (a big complex maze ball) so that he had something fun to do while we were playing in the water. He was very excited for this. We drove inland from where we were staying into the mountains and it was so beautiful but in a different way to the mountains where we live, the rocks were red and the trees were all pine trees. We came across a beautiful bit of river and we should have just stopped there and swam and had our picnic but we didn’t because I wanted to find this specific place from the wild swimming book. 

We eventually found this bridge, packed up and continued our journey on foot up the riverbed like the book was suggesting. The book said this was a 20 minute easy walk. They didn’t have instructions for how long it would take with a kid who A) can’t get their knee wet and B) refuses to bend their knee. Percy happily scrambled off ahead hopping from rock to rock but it was slow for Eric. We had to be next to him to make sure he didn’t trip and when it got to a bit where you needed to step a bit in the water we gave him a piggy back. He was trying hard and I know it would have been annoying for him, he would have loved to run off like a free mountain goat but that’s how he got this injury in the first place.

After over an hour we needed a break and we all sat on a big flat rock to eat our picnic. I ventured a bit further and found it opened out to a beautiful bit that you could actually swim in that was pretty deep. It wasn’t the place photographed in the book. I’ve no idea where that was meant to be, but this was a lovely bit of river that we could have completely to ourselves, so why not go a bit further. We found Eric a spot he could sit and dip his feet in and then we all swam.

 I enjoyed it a lot, apart from when I heard the sound of a wild animal, something cat like, but not just a cat. It was pretty creepy sound but we never saw anything. They do have wild bob cats in Corsica so maybe it was that. There was a cool deep bit that I could jump into and I took some photos on this disposable underwater camera I have. We didn’t stay too long because Eric got bored and it was a long trek back.

After beginning to wade back through the river with Percy while Dan was carrying Eric, Dan spotted a path! The journey that had taken over an hour of scrambling, carry Eric and being really careful not to let Eric’s leg get wet was just a 5 minute walk on this path! We couldn’t believe it! The next morning we went to our local beach, our Airbnb host had apologised to us that this beach was not as beautiful as Saint Guilia the very turquoise one. Just look at this hideous beach we had to endure. 

We had it pretty much all to ourselves because no one else would want to come to such a disgusting beach.  We also went for a lovely little walk round a peninsula and played some crazy golf. I was very bad at it.On the last day we went back to the beautiful beach and hired a pedalo with a slide, unfortunately Eric still couldn’t go in the sea but he had fun on the boat. 

And then we went to get the ferry back. The crossing on the way back was longer because we left from the east coast, we also had no idea it would be stopping at Sardinia. It was about 9pm and we were just getting ourselves to bed, because when we share a room we just all go to bed at an average of our bedtimes. But then I got to go out and have a little glimpse of Italy at sunset which was a bonus. 

In the morning we arrived at Toulon around 9:30am but before that we saw a dog having a wee on the carpet outside of the lift and then a woman stepped in it, and a big crowd were watching and the dog just kept on weeing everywhere. We also saw a woman wandering around with a cat in a special cat backpack. You just don’t get this kind of fun on Ryanair. I wonder if you are allowed to take any pet on a ferry? Can you take a snake? Can you take a horse? Could you take a hamster?  

We had so much to do when we arrived back. Eric had his doctors appointment to take the stitches out, I had to do a food shop and then do my lesson planning and last minute preparations for my exhibition that I was putting up the next day. Plus the normal unpacking and washing stuff, so not a relaxed end, but I’m very grateful we got to see such a beautiful place.

Next time I’ll write about my exhibition and going to the water park. A bientôt. 

4 stiches

 Sorry to leave you on a cliff hanger last night. Here’s the story of our Mother’s Day in A&E. 

It was Sunday and often we go to church but this morning we hadn’t and maybe this was God’s vengeance (jokes.) The day before we had actually tried out a new church, the church of our landlord. In the summer they meet outdoors and they always have food at the end. Percy commented that this more like how Jesus would have done church and since Jesus was always right, this was the correct kind of church. So if anyone is doing church another way you are definitely wrong. 

So Sunday morning was Mother’s Day in France, the boys gave me some cute cards they made and Dan went out to get pastries so I could have a cup of tea and a chaussure au pomme in bed. My Mother’s Day treat was ridding a horse, I’m not big into horses but I might have been if my parents had had infinite wealth. When I was around 12 I had two friends with horses, so I got to go on horse rides a bit and it was really fun. I don’t think I’ve done it as an adult, and I don’t have the time or money to do it regularly as a hobby but I really wanted to just have one horse ride as a treat. So Dan had booked it in for 4pm that day.

It was a beautiful day but the weather has not been very good in general in the spring here, I feel like England has done better than France this spring. Our house has no outside space, so I really wanted to get outside before the horse ride at 4. Normally when I suggest things like this the boys always say they want to stay in. Sometimes I try and argue that if they like being indoors so much we should move back to England where I can speak the language. What’s the point of being in France if we never get outside to explore all the great places there are here? But it was Mother’s Day so I didn’t have to do any persuading I just made them go because I get to choose.

We went to a place called Castelnou which is 15-20 mins away, but instead of going to the castle and the little village we went behind that to the hills that look over the castle. We were climbing up rocks to get to this viewpoint  and the boys were having a great time. 

Me and Dan were saying how we should do this more because the boys like it when they’re there. We took some photos at the view point and then went in another direction so we could get a view of the sea. Eric started running and then he tripped and screamed.

I looked at his knee and at first it wasn’t bleeding but it looked really weird because there was a chunk of flesh missing. As if he was made of plastercine and a pencil had scraped a chunk out of him. I actually looked on the ground for the missing bit of flesh but there wasn’t any. Then the blood came and Dan carried him back to the view point he was at before. 

We asked a woman for some tissues and then Dan ran down the hill to get the first aid kit we had in the car. Eric was very good, after the initial screaming he was pretty calm. When I looked at it again I felt a bit sick and dizzy I’ve never had that response before but I haven’t seen much stuff like that either. We cleaned and bandaged the knee and Dan carried him all the way down the hill. What a hero.

We had never been to french hospital before, but I have head good things about it. We had to go home to get Dan’s carte vital to prove he can get free health care. He actually has to pay and then claim back after but it’s not like America where I’m sure you would pay thousands of dollars which I think would make you risk not going in a situation like this. So we went and got the card and some food an Eric’s cuddly panda. And Dan took him while I stayed at home with Percy. Percy was a super lovely big brother it was his idea to get the panda, and he was really sweet with him. Eric was seen fairly quickly and got an anaesthetic injection in the knee so they could do the 4 stitches. He was there about 2 hours in total. And the cost which we should be able to claim back was 19 euros. How do you think that compares to the UK? Do you think the wait would be longer? After tea back at the house we went out again just to enjoy a bit more outside time while it was still nice and I swam in the lake.

The really sad thing is that we are going to Corsica on Thursday it was going to be a holiday full of swimming were staying in a little air bnb with a pool and we were planning trips to some beaches and wild swimming places that look amazing. But now he can’t get his leg wet! Gutted for him. I even bought a disposable underwater camera in anticipation of all the water based fun we were going to have. At the moment he can’t walk properly either, he won’t bend his knee so he kind of hobbled to school this morning. I hope he’ll have a bit more movement by the holiday on Thursday. 

Very thankful that we can use hospitals and we can stil go on our holiday and that it wasn’t more serious. But I hope he’ll have a great scar that he’s proud of. I started a facebook album a long time ago called “my worst injuries” and this will be the first photo of a new generation. So you know, that’s exciting. 

Hopefully I can ride a horse another day.

 Thanks for reading the whole saga!

The new job FAQs

Frequently asked questions:

1) what’s Dan’s new job again?

Marketing for a swimming pool company, writing google ads and stuff.

2) How is it going?

In general its going well, the work is fine, his team is very nice, but it has been a big adjustment going into an office 5 days a week and wearing office clothes, and sharing a car with me means he sometimes cycles which can take up to a hour because it’s far!

3) Can you get me a discount on a swimming pool?

No, but we could buy a pool for ourselves at cost price. (If we had a garden to put it in)

4) Are you moving house again? I thought you just moved.

Yes. We had to leave our house we were in for 3 years, because it was the end of the 3 year contract but we couldn’t rent properly because Dan didn’t have a job (and my work is self-employed) so in order to stay in the village we moved into an airbnb. But that is only until the 6th July because over the summer the landlord wants to charge holiday prices. So that’s why Dan will be living at different peoples house’s in France all summer and then I will be doing my fun UK tour. Which so far includes such exotic places as Liverpool, Birmingham, Staffordshire, Preston and Blackpool. Maybe I should get tour t-shirts made.

Infrequently asked questions.

1) can you think of a great way Dan’s new company can make more money?

Yes water slides. They already make all their pools from fibreglass, surely it makes a lot of sense to include fibreglass little water chutes as an option. Why do so many people have swimming pools in their garden here without slides? That’s the real question. 

2) If you are in a couple what percentage of hair (head only) do you individually have? 

I think me and Dan would currently be about 99% / 1% max 98/2. But I was quite a bald baby and he had hair so in summer 1986 we might have been 99%/ 1% the other way round. Yes it’s not relevant to anything else I’ve written but it is a question we discussed recently.

But back to real life. Although I am really glad Dan has a job now and I’m looking forward to the summer, planning for September is going to be very complicated.

We don’t have a house and we can’t rent a house in the normal way until the end of Dan’s trial period which is mid August. Also if he doesn’t pass the trial period like last time we are screwed. We can’t move back to England and get our house back for another year so it will be another year of doing random jobs and job hunting living in limbo and being poor, Bla bla bla boring. We have to just assume he is going to pass this time, I don’t have the head space to consider the alternative. 

Wherever you live that’s where you have to go school in France. In general I think that’s a good principle but right now it’s making things difficult for us. We were wondering about moving village, although our village, in particular the school is nice, there is nothing there! We didn’t ever really choose it we just went there because we found a house there. So this is our chance to actually choose, before Percy starts secondary school. But you can’t just say please let Percy join a school in this town because we will try and move there one day.

Here’s the map of  some of the areas in the 66 region and the dots show where you have to go to secondary school if you live in that area:

So if you live the middle of nowhere mountain village of Fontpedrouse you must go to school 32 minutes away in Prades not 25 minutes away in Font-Romeu. Are you wondering what the little blob of white is surrounded by the green a red area? That’s a little blob of Spain that got lost from big mummy Spain (I think most people would call that mainland Spain). 

Me and Dan took a little recce to some different areas that are a bit nearer to his work and with a bit more going on. First we visited Saint-Esteve which is 5 minutes from Perpignan city centre. On paper it seems perfect. Halfway between where we currently live and Dan’s work, nearer to town which also means nearer the beach, loads of shops and cafes there too, but when we were wandering round I just didn’t love it. It wasn’t very pretty and I just didn’t feel it. Then we looked round Rivesaltes which was way more pretty than I imagined and very close to Dan’s work, but apart from one person I don’t know anyone who lives there and it felt just a bit far out from all the places and people I know. Dan asked me what kind of thing I was looking for and I said a place with some shops like a boulangerie and a supermarket, but that is also pretty and has a nice sense of community. I said like Thuir (you pronounce it twee-er) but Thuir is just as far if not further away from Dan’s job. Dan said that isn’t everything, we need to have a nice community and I need to feel settled there and you never know how long he will stay at the job he’s just got. So we have decided either to stay roughly where we are or move to Thuir.

But the really complicated thing is schools. If we want Percy to start a secondary school in Thuir we have to have a rental contract in Thuir. Which we can’t get till after the 3 month trial ends. So Percy might not know on his last day of school, if he is going to go to secondary school with his friends or not. We would consider buying a house here but that is also really complicated. I don’t want to sell our house in England but I’d be up for remortgaging it and taking that money out as a deposit on the house here. We definitely  can’t buy a house by September so we will have to rent but normal French renting rules say that if you rent for a year your house would be furnished, which is annoying if you already own furniture. At the moment half of our stuff is in storage because we’re in a furnished airbnb but we will have to move it to a bigger storage place in the summer when we’re all living out of suitcases. I know this is first world problems but owning things is a real pain sometimes.

Next blog coming very soon will be the story of today, French Mother’s Day that ended up with a trip to A & E and 4 stitches. With gruesome photos. 

But just before that we were having a lovely day….

Birthdays and a new job

What a mad week we had last week! We knew going into the week it was going to be the week where we found out if we were going to be staying in France or leaving, based on if Dan got a job or not. We were told we would hear at the beginning of the week (Monday 28th April) it was also Dan’s birthday on the Wednesday and Eric’s birthday on the Saturday. I was a bit worried that Dan might get bad news on or just before his birthday. So they phoned on the Monday and instead of saying yes or no they invited him for a third interview on his birthday! His birthday was sort of weird, he had already found his birthday present. It’s very hard to hide things when you’re moving house and every box gets moved and looked in.

One day Dan said, “why has the landlord left brand new roller blades under the kids beds, they’re in my size too!” Happy Birthday! He’s going to join me and Eric in the skating crew, we just need to get Percy on board now. So the birthday morning was opening a few cards, and then I was getting ready for my kids group that comes round on Wednesdays to learn english, and Dan was getting ready for the interview. I then had an online lesson to teach and then I had a good few hours gap before I do an in person lesson in the evening. So in that gap we ate out next to the beach as a birthday post interview treat. Dan said the interview had gone well and it was down to just him and one other person and that they would tell him on either Friday or Monday. 

Thursday was one of the many random bank holidays in May. So we had more of a proper Dan celebration and went to the wake park. Me and the boys just watched and hung out in this cool little cafe area while Dan had a go. It’s pretty hard wakeboarding, we did it together once in Croatia and I fell off a lot.

This was the knee board that he tried before the stand up one that I didn’t manage to get a photo of.

We didn’t hear anything from the job on Friday so we just got on with preparing for Eric’s 8th birthday, he wanted a cake of a specific Pokémon. 

This is Snorlax in case you were wondering

On his actual birthday he went go karting with 3 friends. They had a lot of fun although they had to wait ages to do it, they were much more patient than me. There was another birthday group there that had birthday banners and themed ballons and little back and white flags (you know chequered flags) then they had a nice picnic table set up with a cake and sweets. I didn’t bring anything and I regretted it. But we did go home to a feast including a chocolate fountain that didn’t work, so we just handed out small bowls of melted chocolate to the kids instead. It turns out the fountain is the least important thing in a chocolate fountain.

On Sunday night I said to Dan, “if it’s a no I think we’ll have to go back to our old house in Liverpool.” I was happy to do that, I love that house, but Dan was not pleased about that idea and was wishing he had spent more time on looking for opportunities elsewhere in the UK. The problem is we would have to tell the people renting our Liverpool house off us pretty soon if we were going to return, and without a job this house was our only option for housing. I had weird dreams all night about the fact that our whole lives were being decided tomorrow. That night I dreamt that Dan got the job but his new boss was Harry Hill. As if Harry Hill had just decided that he’d had enough of show business and wanted to be a manager in a swimming pools company in the south of France.

It was hard trying to get on with normal life stuff like lesson planning while waiting for this phone call. I considered listening to a French podcast at one point, but then thought what’s the point if we’re going back. By lunch time I was annoyed they hadn’t rung, they must know right? They can’t still be deciding. Then by 5pm we thought we’re not going to hear today, and I was expecting another night of struggling to sleep followed by weird dreams. Then just before 7pm Dan went for a poo, and mid poo they phoned to offer him the job!

The job, which he starts on Monday, is digital marketing for a swimming pool company. Writing google ads and all that kind of stuff, in French, but English is a plus because it’s the international language and some documents and stuff are in English. I hope he will get to use my favourite French word a lot. “Piscinable.” It means could put a swimming pool in it. In English you would use it in the sentence, “Oh yeah this garden is totally swimming poolable”

A few people have asked me if I’m ok about staying, and I do appreciate being asked because I’m not really sure long term if I can stay here forever. I am sad about the things I will miss out on, like career opportunities, seeing all my nieces and nephews grow up, being not far from grandparents and doing comedy. But I know if I was in England I would struggle to ever swim in the sea again and I would miss the mountains and skiing and I would be sad watching my kids forget how to speak French. So I’m trying to see the positive side. In the short term it is all positive, we can relax about money and enjoy the warmer months and then over the summer, because our current house is an airbnb I will go back to the UK with the boys and see all my friends and family and Dan will stay and work. (But he’ll visit for a bit.)

Maybe check I’m ok in November, when it’s just normal boring life and it’s cold here. But for now I’m going to try and enjoy life. We’re going to Corsica at the end of the month, somewhere I’ve wanted to go for ages and from here it’s just a 3 hour drive onto a boat and then a sleep on the boat and wake up in Corsica. Shortly after that I’ve got my art exhibition which I’m excited about, and I’m working hard at the moment to get ready for it. I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase “live every day as if it was your last” for me that’s taking it a bit far. I imagine my last day will mainly be spent crying and trying to remember internet banking passwords, so I don’t want to live every day like that. But I think “live every year as if it was the last year in that place” makes sense. That’s why we booked Corsica, because we thought it would be the end of our time in France and we really wanted to go. 

Some of the work that will be in my exhibition:

Tomorrow me and Dan will be having a little recce round a couple of possible areas to move to, so we can try and make the decision on whether to move nearer to Dan’s new job or not. France has a strict school system where everyone goes to their nearest school, which in general is good but can be annoying. For example if we wanted to stay in our current village Percy would go to the secondary school in the next village that’s a bit bigger and 5 minutes away, but if we were to buy a house in that village (because there are hardly any houses for sale in our village) then Eric would have to move primary schools even though we would be more than happy to drive 5 minutes for him to stay with his friends. It’s possible he could get permission to stay but the Mayor would have to approve it and normally they say no. 

Happy VE Day. It was another random school holiday in France and we went to the lake with some English and Irish friends. These are the moments that make being here seem worthwhile.