I love Liverpool

Week 2 of my 6 weeks of touring the Uk was in Liverpool. I will always have a special place in my heart for this city. When I’m in France and people ask me where I’m from I always say Liverpool and then if they’re British I have to follow it up with “I went to uni there and I lived there for 16 years but I’m not originally from there,” to explain the accent. I guess adopted children who are a different race to their adopted parents have to do the same thing. “Yeah she’s not my biological mum but this is the mum that raised me” that’s how I feel about Liverpool, it’s not really where I’m from but it’s the city that I choose that made me who I am. And I don’t really have many ties with my birth city Coventry anymore.

Someone recently asked me about why I didn’t want to sell my house in the Uk. They said “do you think you’re still emotionally attached to it” and the answer is yes I am, and I don’t really mind admitting that. There were years of stress and homelessness that went on before we got that house? Our previous house was in a really bad area someone was murdered right outside. I spent so long decorating every room of that house that we still own. So yep I’m emotionally attached, and also I think it makes financial sense not to see it.

I was really greatful that a friend who was going on holiday let me borrow her house. It was a beautiful house as well, she had so many plants and some many artefacts from around the world, and it was in a lovely area called aigbirth. (If you’re not familier its pronounced “egg-birth” other cool sounding Liverpool, places are “old swan” and “the dingle” ) this week was the only week we had a house to ourselves and it would have been pretty relaxing, had I not scheduled in seeing as many people as is humanly possible.

We arrived on a sunny Monday eve and after stocking up on food, driving through made me so happy and also a bit sad that I wasn’t still there, its got everything you could want from a city really. Apart from the stuff we moved for I guess: sun, mountains, and a sea you can actually swim in. We drove along the river past the docks to a climbing place called awesome some walls. 

My kids hardly remember Liverpool and I kept pointing out places I had lived or worked or done comedy which is a lot of places and by the end of the week they were sick of that. Climbing was really fun, and a perfect way to start the week. On Tuesday the romantic bubble surrounding Liverpool burst when Liverpool was grey and I had to go to the Argos in St John shopping center which, since they built Liverpool One (shopping district) is just a weird dystopian mix of terrible shops old people and despair. 

I got to see a lot of people, current people count of people I’ve intentionally seen including their children is 59, I think. In Liverpool I had Grace over for a meal, she has been on a similar journey to me, she moved from Liverpool to Cornwall (or Devon) please just assume any time I say Cornwall I mean somewhere in the south that isn’t London. Anyway she bought a house with her partner Laura and then it didn’t really work out and they are now in the Wirral, after having many of the same stressful moving situations and finding new friend dilemmas as me. I met Danni my old housemate from 2009-10 who now has a very cute one year old, and it’s so lovely seeing her being a mum after years of her thinking it might  never happen. I met up with Katie in the inflatable park that we got pretty much to ourselves because the Uk kids were in school. I saw my Godson Ben and he’s just turning 13 and is taller than me! In fact my boys and Ben and his sister Elodie played a fairly complex board game and me and Steph the mum didn’t have to supervise at all we just got to have a nice chat. I realised how far we’ve come from the day that Percy and Elodie were babies and we could never say a whole sentence at once.

2015 and 2025

I wanted to see my friends Zac and Jude who have boys a similar age, but since it was still term time they weren’t very free to hang out. So Jude suggested that on the Friday, which was her kids last day of term and they finished early, we could go to a trampoline park together. Her kids were actually invited there for a party, but we assumed the whole class would be there and no one would notice my kids being there as well. We were wrong, the party was the birthday boy, Jude’s boys and one other family, so we very much were noticed. The mum of the birthday boy was so welcoming though, she offered the boys party food and when I declined she insisted. My kids did not pick up on the weirdness and were happily posing for photos. The poor birthday kid is going to look back at these photos in years to come and wonder who these gatecrashers are. 

 I went to my old church Saint Stephens and saw a lot of people I used to know, unfortunately the boys hardly remember these people. I also went to see my old man old neighbour Geoff. He told me had had Cancer but he only whispered it because he didn’t want the kids to hear. Unfortunately I said “what?! You’ve got a hamster?” I wish I made that up for comedy but it’s true.

On the Saturday I organised a big picnic in Sefton park, but being England it was raining. It’s frustrating that all the good weather is in France and all the people I want to meet up with are in the land of rain. But we did it anyway we sheltered under some trees and we were near the cafe for if things got really bad. So many people came that I hadn’t seen for ages and you know they are your real friends if they come to a rainy picnic. The weather did cheer up and we had a great time, I just feel bad that I didn’t get to talk to everyone for that long. 

I saw keshia, who was a good friend when Percy was young, her daughter was 2 weeks younger than Percy and we hung out a lot, she even had Percy a day a week when I was working. When we became mums I was 28 and she was just 19 and single. She was a super good mum then, she read a lot more about parenting than me and she knew a lot more facts about breastfeeding and stuff. People assumed I knew stuff that I didn’t know, and they probably assumed she didn’t know as much as she did know. It must been really hard for her in many ways, it was hard enough for me aged 28 with a supportive partner. Now she’s almost 30 and has had another baby with partner Jamie and doing so well, I just feel really happy for her that things worked out for her, she’s actually in the process of buying a house round the corner from my old house that I still own, and I’m slightly gutted we won’t get to be neighbours.

Me Steph and Rachel went on a big night out, the relive our student days.  It was raining of course and I didn’t have an umbrella so I chose to tuck my hair into a sun hat the preserve the curls. And of corse it looked super cool. 

We had a few cocktails on 2 different places on blood street. The toilets in Albert Schloss were the highlight of the whole night.  We attemped to go out to our old spot “Hebbie jebbies” but unfortunately it wasn’t open. So we went to this place called “Teddy’s” instead which was fun but not quite enough party atmosphere for a big Dance. It was a rainy Sunday night outside of term time to be fair.

I finished my week in Liverpool with a Brunch on Lark Lane, I love lark lane, so many quirky shops, we went to Milo lounge one of the places I’ve done comedy before and the boys were made up to have a stack of pancakes Eric had it with blueberries and Percy had it with bacon.

 They were also chuffed with how long it took me to pack and tidy the house I was in because they had a very long time playing the switch. So long that we got to our holiday home near Blackpool about 4 hours later than I intended to get there but it was all fine.

This week just gone we’ve been in the holiday house with my extended family and then to my cousins wedding in Shropshire but I’ll write about that next time. 

My Uk tour begins

 I’m currently on tour, I’ve even made myself a tour t-shirt. It’s like I’ve given being homeless a rebrand but before I talk about that I need to talk about the last week of school which for us was the first few days of July.

It’s Percy’s last year of primary school, and it was a weird feeling getting to this point for many reasons. In the UK he would have another year at primary school which is a weird mind trick that’s kind of making me not accept that he’s leaving. Like this is just some kind of alternate reality, that doesn’t count. In the real world he’s still in primary school. There’s no prom like they have in Uk schools and no leavers assembly, they went on a school trip on a sailing boat all day, and then they had a graduation, where their teacher who is lovely and has been their teacher for two years, did a personal speech to every child. And a lot of the kids were really emotional. I was emotional too, we had promised Percy he could finish school here and we wouldn’t move and at times when we had no house and no job it seemed like it might be a real challenge to stick to that.

 I was also really sad when he left his school in England, it was a shame to think he wouldn’t be with those friends all the way through school, and he was doing so well in school there, we weren’t sure if we were going to mess everything up by moving him. But the teachers in France were saying how they just feel so lucky to have him which is super nice to hear, especially when you sometimes see UK headlines saying how immigrants our ruining our schools. I know if half the class don’t speak english as a first language, in a deprived area it’s not the same as one foreign kid joining a village school, but it’s still nice to hear that it’s been a positive for the teachers.

But he’s done so well with the language, he’s completely caught up with the reading and writing levels of the other kids. He’s super good at maths too, he told me he has a “black belt” in maths. And I laughed in his face, but then he explained how they did this kind of test and the highest anyone else got was purple belt which is two levels below black. I hope he never brings up his black belt in maths in a fight though.

On the last day all the kids in school form a kind of tunnel and the school leavers walk out through it and all high 5 the other kids. It’s so cute. As an end of term treat we went straight to the inflatables on the lake for a hour of mucking about jumping in water, going down slides and attempting to run over wobbly floating stepping stones.

The next day was a boring day of packing. I had spent the week moving all our stuff into storage in the loft of our air bnb for our return in late August. Dan took us to Carcassone airport for our flight to Manchester. On the way we drove past a pretty serious wild fire and Dan had to drive back a different way which took almost twice as long. 

The flight was annoying , it was delayed and then when we finally got on we had to wait for the plane to get fuel and then in Manchester we had to wait absolutely ages for our bags. We were next to another family in baggage who’s kids were losing it, it was around 9:30 or 10 at night UK time, even later french time, and we managed to engage this kid in a game of travel connect 4 to kill the time which was nice. Not as nice as if our bags were there and we could leave but it is nice to make the wait less boring if it’s possible.

The first week I was with my parents but I kept doing trips to see other friends, in that first week I went to Sheffield to see Ruth and Birmingham to see Bex, Ruth and Bex are my only 2 childhood friends that I’m still in touch with properly and it’s lovely to see them both with their own kids now between the 3 of us we have 7 boys and no girls. Here’s some funny quote from their kids:

Me: what kind of things do you like to play with?

Ruth’s 3 year old: I like to play with wheat.

Bex’s 10 year old: we listen to a podcast when we go to sleep, but if we’re naughty we just have to listen to the sound of rain.

That kid Zech got on particular well with my boys he was very encouraging, he taught them how to make stuff on Minecraft and then said to Percy “that’s so good for your first time bro” 

Me and Bex grew up as next door neighbours and sometimes I wish our boys could grow up next door neighbours too. 

The weather was great in that first week and I got to go out on my parents river a lot. As a birthday present from my mum to my Dad, Dad had half an hour on a jet ski, and he thought it would be a bit boring on his own so lucky me got to also go on a jet ski and the boys rode on the back. It was a lot of fun and even 20 miles an hour feels really fast.

I’ve been doing a lot of shopping as well, shops are just not that good in my bit of France so I much prefer to buy clothes here, and I still get the majority of my underwear from M&S. I’m also making the most of english food that is hard to get in France. So far I’ve been enjoying Mini Chedders, cherry Bakewells, sausage rolls, scotch eggs, and pick and mix - a healthy diet.

This week I’ve been staying in a very lovely house of a friend who is away on holiday but lives in Liverpool.  And yesterday I invited everybody I know to a picnic (if you didn’t get an invite sorry it wasn’t intentional) But I’ll write about that next time.

The tour t-shirt that I spent ages making but I’m a bit embarrassed to wear.

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.