Turning 40

 I’m about to be 40, an age I could never imagine being when I was 20. 

I was 34 in this photo but I had just completed
40 days of live crafts for kids in lockdown 

I feel like I suited certain ages better than others. I suited the ages you can climb trees at.

At 10 climbing trees was cool.

At 14 climbing trees was childish.

At 21 climbing trees made you a cool fun student.

At 30 climbing trees made you an irresponsible mother of the baby you left in the pram at the bottom of the tree.

At 39 climbing trees makes you a fun mum to a 8 and 11 year old.

I’m still going to continue climbing trees as long as I can, I think it will get not cool again pretty soon and then maybe it will be cool again when I’m 80.

So this is how my thirties have gone.  If you’ve read my blog a lot over the past decade you know all this a so feel free to skip:

 At 30 (2016.)

I was married with one baby living in a little house in a bit of a murder district. I had a fun job as a community artist and I was doing comedy as hobby. I had just done my first one hour show which was about my school days. My only goals were to move to a better house in a less stabby area and have another baby.

31 (2017)

I achieved all those goals by age 31. Although it wasn’t easy, 3 days before we were about to move into our new house, the seller decided that she didn’t want to sell and so we ended up lodging with another family for 9 months before buying a different house that we moved into just before I gave birth to Eric.

32 (2018)

I had survived the hardest bits of the newborn and toddler phase, and I started thinking about having a creative outlet for things I was experiencing in motherhood. At first I started drawing cartoons of situations I was experiencing. But drawing them was very time consuming, and I did not have much free time. After I finished breastfeeding I was suddenly free to go out in the evenings. So then I started doing comedy again, I was working on a new show about parenting, and so I enjoyed writing little bits of it and testing them out at different comedy nights.

My second hour long comedy show

This year I also found out I had cancer, and (spoiler alert) I survived. I performed my parenting show that I was really proud of and the week after I had to have an operation and then recover in bed for a month. During the recovery I spent a lot of time in bed on my laptop applying to do comedy gigs in my mission to actually try to become a comedian.

33 (2019)

2019 was one of my favourite years, it was not the most restful year, but it was a year that I did a lot of comedy and my kids were peak cute. I set myself the aim to get a paid comedy gig within the year and achieved it in a few months. I also started my own comedy night which was sometimes incredible and I was really proud of it, but was sometimes not a great night and I felt a lot of pressure that my friends were coming and paying to see comedy and it wasn’t always as good as I wanted it to be.

We also took a holiday in 2019 our first holiday as a family of 4. We flew to Nice and hired a camper van and drove to Barcelona. It was the first time I’d ever seen that bit of the south of France and it was very beautiful. We talked about how we could live in France but it seemed impossible because even though Dan is half French and spoke French well, we didn’t think he couldn’t compete for jobs with people who are fully French.

Exploring Nice

34 (2020)

We all know what happened in 2020, I was a bit gutted that I had some great comedy gigs lined up including a paid 20 minute spot at the Comedy Store, but I was also relived to have a break from everything. Once you’ve started trying to be good at comedy any time you take off you worry that people are going to advance quicker and take your place. Unfortunately I couldn’t do my work in schools and I had to homeschool so it wasn’t exactly a break, but I enjoyed doing live craft videos that kids could join in with from home. It was cool to build a community and it was a lot less pressure to do these videos where no one was paying for me to be funny, and I was just trying to do something nice. 

The highlight of that year was holding the first Jonesfest, a festival in my garden in a brief relaxed time between lockdowns. By the end of the year I was working 5 hour evening shifts for the Royal Mail in a big warehouse full of other people who had lost their jobs and were also Christmas temps with me.

35 (2021)

The year began in lockdown homeschooling and not being able to work. But I ended it having loads of work because all the schools wanted to do fun projects. We started talking about moving to France and Dan asked his boss if he could move to France (seeing as he was working remotely) but they said no because of tax and stuff. But it got us thinking that getting a remote job that was based in Europe would be the way to move to France. Then he got made redundant, and he started thinking this is his opportunity to either join the police, which was something he was always interested in, or to look for a remote job based in Europe. By the end of the year he had a new remote job based in Europe and we were getting all our paperwork ready to leave.

The 2nd Jonesfest (2021)

36 (2022)

I had one of my favourite birthdays ever to celebrate being 36. It was a roller disco, I was maybe at my happiest. I had amazing friends, work was going great, both kids were in school, Dan had a great job, we had a nice house that we had been slowly doing up, I was doing comedy a bit but not so intensely. Sometimes I think I should have just stopped there and enjoyed my life, but I had the optimism of a person  that everything had worked out well for. 

The few months leading up to the move were incredibly stressful, as I tried to get rid of everything we owned while getting the paperwork for France done, and getting our kitchen redone for our tenants. It was really sad to tell people we were leaving and to stop some of my work projects that were going well. We made a major visa error which meant that after one month in France I had to come back for a whole month on my own to wait for the visa. But other than that things did go pretty smoothly, we found a great house, the kids settled in well to school and we enjoyed exploring our beautiful region. 

Looking back now I wish I just enjoyed myself because difficult times were ahead. And I was enjoying myself, but I did keep comparing myself to the year before, when I had a fun job and friends and the ability to speak to people. I started painting my surroundings partly because I had no friends to hang out with.

Celebrating bastille day in our village

37 (2023)

At the beginning of 2023 I thought this is going to be a great year. 2022 was a bit much with moving countries but this is the year we’ll explore and get settled, and learn french. But actually it was one of the most stressful years of my life with Dan losing his job and me not having a job and not having very good job prospects. We were also caught between systems because we hadn’t been in France long enough to claim benefits so we just burnt through all our savings and were sad.

38 (2024) 

Was not much better. Towards the beginning of it Dan did find a new remote job with occasional travel to Toulouse and for a few months we thought ok everything is going to be fine. We bought skis and booked a summer holiday road trip because we were sure we were staying. I had started a bit of English teaching and life was good again. Until we found out that not everyone passes their work trial period and after three months of work Dan was unemployed again. This was made worse by our landlord wanting their house back and our inability to rent a new house due to our lack of jobs. We ended the year last Christmas having no idea where we would be living by the summer but returning to England seemed pretty likely. But one positive was I did a successful kickstarter campaign and bought a printing press. We also did try and make the most of what we thought might be the last summer in France with a big road trip.

Vallon pont-d’arc on our France road trip

39 (2025)

2025 started in our nice house preparing to leave it. We had no idea how things would turn out so we found an air bnb just for the short term. As time went on I started to prepare for moving back to England as it seemed the most likely scenario. We had a few days in Corsica because we thought this would be our last chance to go. Then we got into the situation where Dan had an interview and if he got the job we would be staying and of he didn’t we would leave. He got the job which was a huge relief financially, but we still didn’t have anywhere to stay in the summer as our house was going to be an air bnb for holiday makers. So we made a plan for me to come back to England with the kids and for Dan to stay and work and live in random places. It was a weird summer but I had a lot of fun. We attempted to move back to nicer rental accommodation but failed, so we’re back in the airbnb but are starting to look at options to buy. In this last year  I’ve realised if we’re staying here I need more French and more friends and to do and sell art more. I can’t do comedy here and that makes me really sad, but this year I had a big solo exhibition and I intend to do more of it next year.

A piece for my exhibition

That takes us to now.

Who knows what my 40’s will hold. I’m scared of having teenagers, the menopause and my parents dying, but I’m hoping we find a nice house and more community and go on some more adventures.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

New car, new house, new friends?

 Hello people who still bother to read blogs even though better things have been invented. Thank you for bothering, I think I will still carry on writing it, because occasionally I like to look back at them and remember stuff I forgot at the time. Looking back at photos only gives you a snapshot of one second in time when you were probably doing something nice, but sometimes you want to remember funny things people have said or how a whole situation played out. And it’s nice sometimes to read about stressful times when you know that in the end it all worked out fine. When I look back at photos from 2020 I think the kids were so cute, and we were having the best time. But if I was to read my blogs I think it would give a more truthful picture.

Since last time I wrote I have got colder, I moved here because one of my top hobbies is being warm. I like to be sunbathing or be in a bath or snuggled up in bed with a hot water bottle. And although the temperature might average about 10 degrees more than the UK our house has no heating and it is freezing! Our pervious house also had no heating but it got a lot of sunlight which warmed it up in the day and then we had the wood burner for evenings. This house has very little natural light and it’s normally colder inside than it is outside. I borrowed two plug in heaters from a friend and I sit right next to them every evening and then every night we all have hot water bottles. I’m considering getting an electric blanket but I worry I would never get out of bed. The positives are the sky is still mostly blue and it virtually never rains, but I’m looking forward to enjoying some british central heating soon.

We definitely want to move house in 2026, even though we moved house kind of twice in 2025. We are actually going to view our next door neighbour’s house tomorrow! It’s much bigger than this house and it has a nice garden and it has reversible air con (hot and cold) in every room! I don't know if we can afford it, we’re in the process of getting a man to tell us how rich/poor we are, (he’s a mortgage advisor not a psychic by the way) It would definitely be a stretch but we’ll see if we like it and whether it’s possible and worth stretching for. The move would be easy, but do I really want to live in this tiny village forever just to save about 60 euros on van hire? The kids would be over the moon to stay here with their friends but imagine being here as teenagers. It’s just like Burton Green the village I spent my teenage years trying to escape from. On the other hand, it’s not too far from town and it’s cheaper than living in the places that have more going on, meaning we could have a bigger house with space for friends to stay.

We finally decided to get a new car last month, well our old car decided for us that it was time for her to retire. She had so many things wrong with it that if she was a dog they would put her down. Every time I drove I feared this might be the last journey she or I ever drove. We spent a long time trying to work out what car to get. We debated whether we should get another 7 seater which does feel a bit mad given there’s only 4 of us, but it is nice when people visit, and its great that we can get at least 2 bikes in the car with the kids as well. Yes we could get a bike rack but if I had to screw on a bike rack every time I wanted to take kids to the pump track I would never go. So we got a 2018 citroen C4 Picasso in blue. It’s an automatic which I’ve never driven before, I thought they were just for losers who are too stupid to drive, but they’re actually amazing! Why are we changing gears all the time if we’ve got the technology not to?! It’s exactly the same thought I had when I started taking the pill continuously. Why are women bothering to have periods when we’ve got the technology to stop that? If you’re driving a manual car whilst on your period, you are not living you best life hun. You might as well be still going to the reference section of the library when you want to know something, or learning an instrument because you like to hear music. Or reading this blog when you could be watching TikTok.

The last few weeks I have been trying to do creative things on Thursdays, my workday on Wednesday is very full because all the french kids are off school and want to learn english. Or their parents want them to learn english. Yesterday was the maddest day of trying to do Christmassy stuff in my english classes. I taught two groups of kids what a Christmas pudding was and then we made a rice crispy cake version of this, because I didn’t think making a real one would be a good idea. A Christmas pudding can kill you in so many ways: you could die from choking on a coin, being burnt while it was on fire, obesity or alcohol intake. (Like if you were already drunk and that last bit from eating a Christmas pudding tipped you over the edge and then you fell down some stairs or off a cliff)

The rice crispy version was stressful enough. I hire a room with no kitchen facilities and I can’t park near it, so the lightest thing I could carry to melt chocolate was my raclette machine. I did consider my batik  pot but like the ancient proverb says “you should never mix chocolate and wax.” Anyway giddy kids that I can’t communicate well with, having knifes and hot raclette pans was enough stress without me setting fire to anything. So yeah after full day of lessons, its nice to have a more relaxed day of creative stuff, I’ve been doing a comisssioned canvas for a woman writing a book and then I used the painting to be the book cover. I’ve also been doing Christmas windows, this year is the first time I’ve done them professionally.

I went round a few cafes back in October and one got in touch. I had agreed to do them on the inside mainly because it would be warmer for me, but because he was half a hour late on the first day I started on the outside and then it took me 9 hours or working in the cold windy street to finish them. I did one in someone’s home to which was a lot more fun.

(This is not the whole thing I spent 9 hours doing btw)

Last weekend we went to visit our friends in Montpellier, they are our board game friends who we met when we hadn’t been here long. Aurore is french and Marie is German but their shared language is English, they sadly for us have moved, but it was a nice chance to visit Montpellier for the Christmas markets and hang out with them.

We stayed in a hotel walking distance from them and had a buffet breakfast where the boys took full advantage of combining all their options Percy had ham and Nutella on a waffle and was very happy about it. 

We got back just in time to catch the eng of the school Christmas fair at sunset:

This coming weekend we are seeing some brand new friends for board games, and I feel like we are cheating on our old board game friends. I met Sam in the french class I go to which is run by Ukrainians on his 4th day in the city, and we bonded over not being from the Ukraine. Then him and his Finnish/ French wife Emma and my family all went on a little trip out towards the mountains, which was a lot of fun. They are really interesting people who have been living a very cool digital nomad life in Asia for the last few years. I’ve met a few new english speaking people recently, and I really am putting time into getting better at french, so I can have French friends, but it is so good to connect with english speakers. 

Thanks for reading.