The Wonderings of Wibble: Double Bad news

I don’t know what our future plans really were, but this wasn’t it. After a few months of a relatively stress free life where we recovered from 6 months of unemployment emotionally and financially, Dan has lost his job. He started this job in March, and was on a 4 month trial but after 3 months he was told he wasn’t quite right for it. I thought you had to do something bad to lose a job. When he got this job I thought all our problems are over now, let’s just enjoy life. We booked two holidays, we bought skis in a second hand sale, we even bought smoked salmon once. But it turns out it is quite common for people in France to not get through the trial period. The problem is that jobs in France are actually too good. Once you have an ongoing contract, called a CDI, you have all the rights in the world, you can be a complete idiot and still get paid. And if they want to get rid of you it takes forever and you get really good money for ages. But because of this, they are very hard to get in the first place. And if you don’t get through the trial you wont get good unemployment benefits. The same as last time, we don’t fit into the right categories of people who will get help.

Dan’s got 3 days left at this job and he’s already applied for a load of other random things, this time of year is good for getting random summer work, but not great for proper jobs. I also have very little work over the summer and the kids will be off school for 2 months, and we have visitors, so it’s complicated. We’re open to almost anything work wise, I’m doing a days work at a winery tomorrow. Dan’s messaged people about night shift work, cleaning work, teaching english to business people, but we would still like to keep our holiday which is in July. We’ve already paid for it, and if everything goes bad and we have to do our emergency plan B living in my parents canal boat, at least we will have made the most of this summer.

Sunrise last Saturday

I was so positive going into June. One of my jobs (teaching in a school) has stopped for the year and so I thought June will be a bit more chilled, I’ll find a bit more time for exercise and art and learning French. I haven’t really learnt much recently because since Dan lost his job the first time I’ve been focusing on earning money, but I just signed up for a new online course that I do on Tuesday nights. It’s run by a French lady who lives in Manchester who misses all her friends in France and is jealous of me for being in France. I can relate. I miss all my friends in the north west too but at least I’m in the sun, imagine missing all your friends and being in Manchester.

My first reaction to this news was to just feel like “I can’t be bothered.” I’ve not had enough emotionally stable time to go back to this taking over our lives again. There are a few positives. Dan does have a good French CV now and we do understand a bit more about the benefit system and places we need to go to get help, and we’re a bit more connected than last time so there’s a few more people we can ask for random work.

Painting on a beach my dream day.

I found all this out last week, so I’ve had a bit of time to process it and then tell a few people before writing this. But then this afternoon we got a message from our landlord, she would like to come and live in our house, because I guess it’s actually her house. This is not until April 25 so she’s being kind to give us a lot of warning but it adds a lot of complication. Firstly Percy will finish primary school in July 25 so not ideal to have to move just before that. It’s also really hard to find places to rent, we were super lucky to find this house, it was a bit of a miracle, and at the time Dan had a good solid job, we can’t find a house to rent or buy without a solid job.

Originally we were thinking about whether it would be possible to buy something here, but now it seems almost impossible for Dan to get a job and get through another trial period and have enough savings for a deposit, and buy a house for April. It’s a bit reminiscent of that time we were homeless for 9 months when Percy was a toddler. Check back to the blogs of May 2016- Feb 2017 if you want to read about that fun time. (It was actually fun for about 3 months) and it did work out ok in the end though, so who knows what will happen here. But to Mum and Dad please have the plan B canal boat ready for April.

Wanna help us out? Want a bargain holiday? We’re away 7th - 17th July, we have a nice enough house, a 3 bed new build, in a lovely sunny bit of France. You’d probably need to hire a car, but then there would be loads of great places you could visit, beach, mountains, city of Perpignan, it’s beautiful. And if you could donate a bit towards our holiday so we can go out for a meal or two we would be very grateful. You can fly direct from Leeds or Birmingham or Stansted. Also I’m going to be flogging a load of stuff soon, I’ve been designing T-shirts, and my colouring book of my region of France (the Pyrenees-Orientales) is in the final stages. I’m getting some simple very postable art on Etsy or something like that soon. And if you know of any work going that we could do remotely, Dan does words and I do pictures. That’s the briefest joint CV I can write.