November

Back in July I wrote a blog called “losing a job and finding a job” about Dan losing the job he had when we moved here and me finding a little job teaching English. (They were in no way equivalent, Dan’s was well paid full time and mine was 4 hours a week.)

Then the last blog I wrote was about Dan starting a three month trial working for an english speaking magazine, unfortunately the trial ended after just a month because she didn’t feel like it was working. He’s not sold enough advertising, but he’s never worked in sales before and he’s not been given any training, so it’s hardly surprising. She’s now refusing to pay him the full amount which is only minimum wage anyway and is asking him for an hourly breakdown of everything he did in November. What psycho can remember what they were doing at 2pm on 3rd November? It turns out he’s actually joining a big group of people who have all had a bad experience of working there. Not a fun club to be in.

We began the month of November so full of hope, it was still sunny - I was out roller skating with Eric just wearing a t-shirt. (And bottoms of course I’m not a flasher.) Imagine roller skating in JUST a t-shirt! 

I started another new mini job at a school in Prades (towards the mountains) just on a Tuesday morning. The school has the best views, one morning all the kids were out in the playground facing the mountain doing yoga, what a cool way to start the day.

Anyway I now have that job teaching English in a School, I teach 3 old ladies (which I really enjoy) and I teach at two different Wednesday English/fun clubs. There’s no school on Wednesdays so kids are free to go to extra circular stuff like sports clubs or English. So my work is going ok, with all the planning and doing TEFL it felt full time but in terms of hours I’m being paid for it’s not really. But it felt like we had turned a corner, I had work, Dan had this new trial job everything was going to be ok.

Except it wasn’t. Without wanting to over share too much, it’s not going well at all, we’re living off our rapidly disappearing savings and something needs to change. We still have received no help from the government because we haven’t quite been poor or French long enough. The irony is they have such a good and generous system for people who lose their jobs. It’s kind of too good, good enough for people to get a contract job and then not do it well and be looked after by the state at a cost to businesses. But if you’ve not been here long enough or you’re self-employed there’s no safety net.

This week a load more things have gone wrong too, I got my first ever speeding fine for doing 86km/h in an 80km/h zone and I have to get a point on my licence and pay a fine. We did something wrong on a form and now we don’t get free health care, and the car got a flat tyre today. It’s been a mad week.

I remember feeling a bit like this at Christmas time 2016. A different situation, we had jobs but no house, we had been living with a family since May after buying a house had gone badly wrong. I was heavily pregnant and Percy was 2 years old. We had found a different house to buy but it was taking forever and there were many stressful complications. It felt like we would never move. When I was clearing away my Christmas decorations from our bedroom in January 2017 I wrote myself a little note to find the next year. If I thought I was ever going to share this I would have written more neatly. 

In 2018 as I got out the decorations and pulled out the note that I had totally forgotten about, I cried! Maybe I need to do it again this year. (Except for the fact I didn’t bring any Christmas decorations stuff here it’s all in my parents loft) I hope next Christmas we can look back on this time and feel blessed with what we have. Apart from money right now we are very lucky. We live in this incredible place, our kids are so happy here, we’re making friends and meeting people. I don’t feel like we need a lot more to be happy and when things do start looking up for us I really want to embrace life, do fun things and live in the moment. I’ve been reflecting on our time here when Dan still had his job, and even though there were loads of amazing times, where I felt very grateful, I also often thought about what times would be like if we were still in England. I went through phases of missing my job or my friends or being a comedian when I should have been just enjoying the fact I was in the south of France, not having to work because Dan’s job allowed me to spend over a year just learning French and making art. I do need to work now and that’s ok, even if we didn’t need the money it wasn’t ever the long term plan for me to not work. But when we can I want to embrace everything that’s great about our lives because there really is a lot to be thankful for.