After about a year of living in France I finally learnt what Deja Vu literally meant. “Already seen.” The same with Prêt À Manger. One day (the day I learnt the word Prêt) I was like, oh that makes sense it means “ready to eat” not just “pretentious sandwich shop”. Anyway I am having some kind of déjà-vu with where we are now compared to last September. Last September Dan had been made unemployed by his job based in the Czech Republic (did you know it’s now called Czechia?) I know someone who’s still calling it Czechoslovakia. Anyway Dan had no job and I had one job on a Wednesday. A year went by, loads of stuff happened, we both got more work at different times. Dan got screwed over with a job that didn’t pay him, then there was a nice 3 months where Dan had a good job, we thought everything was sorted and we bought skis, and then it all came crashing down and we’re back where we started.
Except this time we are getting some good benefits, because we’ve been poor for a year apart (from that 3 months where we were living it up). French benefits are eventually really generous. We didn’t get anything last year, we just used up all our savings on the very dull task of staying alive. There were probably some things we could have got, but we didn’t understand the system and you have to be poor for at least 3 months before they care. Now I almost feel bad to be receiving so much more than the UK would ever give. (Except for the fact our silly car just cost us 800 euros in repairs.) Dan gets 56 euro per day for 150 days, and we got this August back to school payment that we just missed out on last year, which is over 400 euros per child for us to spend on their back to school stuff. And 100 euro per child for clubs which are already very good value. For example, Eric’s roller skating club is 180 euros for the year. It’s so generous that one day I might even be able to afford a keyboard with the euro symbol.
I was thinking I would have plenty of work for September but unfortunately, one of the jobs I was going to do (homeschooling 2 kids who are here for 6 months) has not materialised. Even though I met the kids and the mum and it all seemed a definite plan. And then my Wednesday afternoon English teaching is not going to happen anymore due to less kids signing up, so I’m going to try starting my own little English classes in my house for kids of this village.
Dan’s still thinking about his options. He’s still applying for jobs of course, but financially there’s no point him taking a minium wage terrible job right now. He’s got a bit of time to learn something or do something. He’s thinking about either learning computer programming or doing a bus drivers course, he’s going to a bus driving open day tomorrow. It’s not the most exciting job but it’s a job in demand, and today we were talking about how maybe one day he could train to be a train driver. And I said driving “le petit train Jeune” has to be the ultimate train driving job. Everyone is on it for the views and a good time. If there’s delays you’re never going to get angry commuters wanting a refund.
I’m so happy the kids are back in school! They are happy too. The summer is too long, we were all going a bit crazy with no structure. Percy is going into his final year even though he’s only nine. In England he was one of the oldest with an October birthday but in France he’s one of the youngest, because they do the year from January. He wants to go to secondary school here in the next village and live here forever. We have no clue what we’ll be doing in a year or even where we’ll be, we have to leave our house in April. You can’t rent another house without a good job. Our worse case scenario plan is we stay till April and then put our stuff in storage and live in our friends empty house from April until the end of school in July and then move back to England and try and not be grumpy about it.
There was a time when I was 19 and I just came back from an amazing time volunteering in Palestine, and had a month in my leafy village of Burton Green before I left for uni in Liverpool, and I was really grumpy about it. I hated everything about that village for a month, I will try not to do that if we come back. But I will find it hard to enjoy Crosby beach. I know someone who has lived in the Caribbean and they find it hard to enjoy the Mediterranean. I guess the lesson is, never go to nice places. If I do go back I’m going to hold the biggest jonesfest ever and I’m going to try and be a comedian again. But our best case scenario is we somehow both find amazing work, and we buy a house here and put on a jonesfest here. Either way I promised at our leaving party a big Jonesfest in 2026 when I’m 40 and it needs to happen!
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| Jonesfest 2021 |
