Christmas and Sickness

I really wanted to get this blog out in December, but sickness and a bit of laziness stopped me. But welcome to the 16th year of this blog. Last month we’ve been trying to just get on with our normal lives and put to the back of our minds the questions of what country we’ll be in in a years time, what we want to do with our lives and what we’re doing on this planet anyway.

It was a busy time. I’m gradually getting more and more people to teach English to which is great, although some of it is quite location specific, like the group in my house, so that’s going to be a pain when we have to leave in April. I’m enjoying teaching teenagers as well as younger kids now. If all French teenagers can be judged by the 3 French teenagers I teach then, French teenagers are the most polite and self-motivated teenagers in the world, and I’m looking forward to my own kids becoming as delightful as these young people. I really do enjoy teaching English when it’s just finding fun ways to chat rather than teaching grammar rules that I don’t really know.

I’ve been busy flogging my French colouring books all over our region.  I actually have both my books out on Amazon now.

here’s the France one.

and here’s the Merseyside one.

I finished my Kickstarter project this month too, that was the only way I could think of getting a printing press. People generously donated towards this beauty:

And in return they got given some prints that I made with the press. It was hard work trying to get them all made in time to post when I was back in England. Some of them have several layers that each take more than a day to dry so if you mess up the 3rd layer you’re several days behind. I’ve still got a couple more to finish, including a bespoke one. But I’m still happy to make up more if anyone else would like one.

Some example work

We went to England for Christmas, Dan and the boys hadn’t been since last year. The day before we left we wanted to have a Christmas family fun day. We let the kids open their presents early, because I’m not lugging a pair of roller blades to England just for Eric to open on Christmas Day and bring back again. 

So we opened some presents on the 21st and drove up to the mountain for some snowy fun, on sledges.

The next day we were up at 5 to drive to Barcelona for our flight to Manchester. We booked the bargain parking. We used it last year for the first time and it did seem dodgy, you park in a underground supermarket car park and then give a teenager your car key and they drive you in a bashed up people carrier to the airport. And you do worry the whole time that you won’t get your car back, but then it’s about 50€ cheaper than the official airport parking and we did get our car back, yeah maybe it was used in a few crimes in between but that’s only fair. This time we needed to be at the airport at 8am so we turned up in the car park and it was shut. We pressed the barrier button to speak to someone and they said it opens at 9am. So we had a little panic which we had to hide from the kids. That is an annoying thing about kids aged 7 and 10, they’re too aware of what’s going on so when you’re stressed and panicking at the same time you have to pretend everything is fine. Anyway it was fine, we just had to pay almost double for legit parking but I actually think it was a blessing in disguise because if our flight was an hour later and we could use that car park, I bet when we returned at 10pm on New Year’s Eve our car would be stuck in there. I think we’ll use legit car parking from now on.

It was lovely to see all the family, we had 3 new babies within a year. Dan’s sister Rebekah had baby Ada a year ago, my sister Jo had baby Miriam who is now 19 months and my other sister Sarah had baby Murphy who is 10 months. I think Jo and Rebekah have strict baby photo rules so I’ll just share this one of me and little Murphy.

The UK is so grey! I don’t want to go on about it but it’s like you’re all using those crap energy saving lightbulbs that my mum insisted on using in the late 90s. Yeah you’ve saved on your electricity bill well done, but you actually can’t see so you’re really just paying for half a product. For days and days it was just fog. And then we did get a few nice days.

We stay in my parents boat when all the family are round, that way we don’t have to get up at 5am with the babies. Our boys are now old enough to be put to bed on the boat and they have a walkie-talkie to contact us if they need to while we’re in the house in the evening, and then we sleep on the boat too.

One of the day me and Dan got the train to Manchester to see the musical “come from away” which was great by the way. I miss being able to see stuff like that in English. We got our timings all wrong though and were served chips about 15 minutes before the musical was meant to start. Dan wolfed his down but I packaged mine up and sneaked them in, and a guy behind me said “I can smell chips” I’m sure he could see me eating them too.

Chips in a box in a bag in another bag in the Lowry Theatre.

The funniest but also most horrendous part of the whole Christmas time was supposed to be a fun little game of taskmaster that Jo organised. Task one you have 30 seconds to make her very serious baby laugh. Sarah was doing funny sneezes while holding her own baby who was laughing his head off, but Miri refused even a smile. And then task 3 “what’s the most surprising thing you can put in a mug?” I can’t say online, but let’s just say that a root around in my parents room revealed something very surprising, and so mentally scarring that I think I’ve almost suppressed that memory. If I see you in real life and you don’t really know my parents I’ll tell you.

There was a mad kind of sit-com moment one morning when we decided to all go for a walk in Delamere forest, but for the tiny people there’s a lot to pack and think about, everything has to be planned around nap times and breastfeeds. I remember a specific holiday when we had tiny kids and the others didn’t and they had no idea how annoying it was for them to just say, “we’re going to the beach now” and expect us all to be ready in 5 minutes. After that holiday I said, “I can’t wait for about 6 years time when we’ve got easy older kids and they have babies.” But bringing that up just before going out to the woods wasn’t appreciated, and I didn’t get a heartfelt apology from the parents of babies who did now fully understand how long it takes to leave the house. 

My sisters were running round collecting nappies and wellies and prams and stuff while I was trying to get a nice photo of all 5 cousins together. Dad then thought it would be lovely to get a group shot of everyone so messaged a neighbour to come round to get the photo. He forgot that on the way to the forest Sarah’s husband had to be dropped off at a train station so there was a time pressure. We don’t have a car in England so we were all discussing who would go with who and who needed a car seat. This is when Jo piped up with, “legally under 12s need a car seat in the Uk.” Which didn’t go down well with my 10 year old who stopped using a car seat a while ago. We were all still running around and my boys were negotiating how many chocolate coins they could take on the walk, Dad cancelled the neighbour coming round and I got in the car with Sarah and Luke and baby Murphy to go to the station. As Sarah started the engine we realised we were blocked in, so I went to find my brother-in-law to move his car, he was holding his toddler who then had a to be left screaming with uncle Dan, so we could get to the station on time. I love a bit of adrenaline before a family walk though.

Another bit of family drama happened the night before my sister Jo’s birthday. Us 3 sisters had planned to go and see the film Wicked while the husbands and grandparents looked after the kids. On the night before the kids were all in bed, my Dad said he wasn’t feeling great and went to bed and the others were in the middle of a game when we heard my Dad puking up. Then the room became something from a GCSE drama class if a teacher had just asked us to “dramaticly state how a vomiting grandfather will effect yourself and your plans.” 

“I can’t deal with my baby getting sick again!” 

“It’s my birthday tomorrow!” 

“We have a plane to catch!”

“I said we shouldn’t have booked the cinema in advance!”

Then we all discussed new bed arrangements, and my sisters discussed if it was worth waking their kids up to immediately leave the house. Sarah, who has dealt with her baby being constantly sick, decided to immediately leave, and that was unfortunately the last I saw of her. But she did save her baby from the sickness bug. This freed up a bed for my mum not to sleep next to the ill man. I hope somewhere in all this someone remembered to check on my Dad and ask if he needed anything.

We had no option to leave, and I felt like we were a little more protected on the boat, (spoiler alert I was wrong.) The next morning we all felt ok and had a special pancake brunch to celebrate Jo, and then me and Jo went to the cinema to see Wicked, my mum took Sarah’s place. It was a good film but I’m not a mega fan. It didn’t need to be as long as it was. Anyway we all survived the evening without getting sick and at least poor Jo managed a bit of a birthday celebration. If you’re thinking of having kids don’t conceive them in March it’s really not fair on anyone one.

Jo and family left that evening, but we were staying one more day and getting an evening flight on the 31st. It was the cheapest. But that morning me and Dan were both not well, luckily I was kind of ok while he was not ok and vice-versa. We had to do some very strategic packing that invoked wearing all our heaviest clothes and stuffing our pockets. Does anyone else remember the days when packing a hand luggage bag was just a case of thinking “what do I want on the plane with me for entertainment?” You didn’t have to get scales out or do maths or put small liquids in a plastic bag. We stretched the limit of what you can take on as hand luggage to the absolute limit, all so that our one big bag was under 20kg.

Just before heading off to the airport my face was hovering right over a toilet seat ready to vom. But I managed to keep it in all the way to Spain and back to France. Dan and the boys were at the back of the plane and I was on my own at the front in a window seat, the guy next to me was in the middle seat and could have moved to the empty aisle seat but didn’t, he kept trying to peer out the window and I offered to swap seats with him but he declined. If he gets sick it’s his own fault.

So I welcomed in the new year in Spain near Girona trying to not be sick while Dan drove. We saw a few fireworks but not many. I was happy in the morning when I woke up, that we’d all managed to make it back in one piece. And sunshine was streaming through the windows in a way that it doesn’t quite do in England. It’s going to be a weird year for us 2025. I hope that if we stay we can enjoy lots of outdoor adventures and that if we leave we can just have a lot of fun time and parties with the people that we miss.

Happy new year to you all. 

From me and the back of Eric.

Agenda Reveal

Hello and welcome to another, “what shall we do with our lives now?” blog. There’s been a few over the years. There was the time I was seriously thinking about having a 3rd child, the time when I made the decision to try properly at comedy, that time when we were homeless and thought moving abroad would solve all our problems and then the time we actually moved abroad, because it was the only acceptable way of getting out of Eric’s class WhatsApp group.

It’s been a big month of emotions since I last blogged. I had a couple of weeks of thinking, “I really do want to go back to England, I just can’t see myself living here for the next 10 years. More money and a house that was ours (and more French lessons) would help me feel better about being here, but I don’t know if I will ever be at the stage where I can actually make friends properly with most people in this country.” And I don’t understand the systems, there’s not many jobs I can do, I’m just not a full adult person here. 

But the thought of going back is odd too, and Dan and Percy 100% don’t want to go back. And it is incredibly beautiful here, and the weather is so good. It’s cold right now, but there have been many days this month where we’ve had warm 20 degree sun for a few hours in the middle of the day. 

If we don’t have enough work, we have to go back, there’s no debate really. It’s if we have some ok work or remote work that it’s actually more complicated. At the moment nothing is off the table, is that a phrase? Everything is on the table. The table is piled high with weird life ideas. Here’s some of them, in order from quite sensible to ill advised:

1) Go back to our house in Liverpool. Dan is going for a meeting tomorrow with a guy that should be able to give him work, some of which is here but he has much more work in the UK.

2) Stay here. There’s still time for Dan to find a job, rent a new house (we have to leave this one in April) and it all to work out here.

3) Find a job in another area of France. We’ve talked about Paris or Toulouse, I might enjoy being in a bigger city so maybe it’s a good compromise. For example I know there’s some English speaking comedy nights in Paris, that could be fun.

4) Move back to Britain but not Liverpool. Dan wants mountains and countryside so maybe North Wales, or the Lake District or the Peak district.

5) Move to another country. We talked about Malta because it’s Mediterranean but English speaking, and Canada, we could live in the English bit and then just visit the French bit sometimes to keep up our languages. We also did a, “where shall we live?” test. I got Portugal, Greece, Italy or Costa Rica. It’s a fun test, they ask you about climate and political views and stuff. Do the test here.

6) Use all our savings to buy a camper van, travel round the world and homeschool for a year before Percy starts Year 7 in 2026. This was actually my back up plan if we didn’t go to France. I was just going to save money and then take a family gap year when Percy was in year 6.

7) Toss a coin, Pyrenees-Orien-tails or Liverpool pier-heads.

8) Liverpool but Dan gets breakfast in bed every day.

9) Perpignan but Hannah gets a pet donkey. Someone was once giving away a donkey FOR FREE in our region and mean old Dan didn’t let me take it.

10) Me and Eric move back to England, Dan and Percy stay in France. 

I also suggested than when we’ve come up with a plan we make a cake and do an, “agenda reveal” (credit to my sister Sarah for that name). So we’d have friends round and maybe some people could join by video link and we would live cut a cake to reveal the flag of the chosen country. And then everyone would be either happy or sad but they have to congratulate us just like in a gender reveal. 

If you have any other suggestions let us know!

November beach picnic

Some things to promote:

My colouring book of the Pyrénées-Orientales is final done! I’ve been working on this project since last Christmas. You can buy it from Amazon here. The Merseyside one will be available soon.

Example page Céret

Example page Liverpool Hope street.

Thanks to everyone who gave to my Kickstarter after my last blog. I’ve more than reached the target, but if you want some original Hannah Jones art posted to your door, have a look at the options. (There’s only 9 days left.)

I’ve started a Redbubble shop with some of my designs on it, see some things you can buy here.

I bought myself a new phone cover with my water fun design.

Mumaversary

I’ve just celebrated my mumaversary, one whole decade since I pushed a human out. 10 whole years of keeping it alive, and some selfish people are taking my glory away by referring to the day as “Percy’s birthday”.

Here he is on every birthday so far….

Percy got a card this year saying, ‘double the digits, double the fun” which has inspired me to design cards for 100 year olds that say, “triple the digits, a very small fraction of the fun”. 

This year he decided to celebrate by going to “Arriba Arriba” the climbing wall with a Mexican restaurant. We tested it out in the summer and they had a lot of fun, so it was chosen as his birthday destination. He invited 5 friends and 4 said they could make it. The week before one of the friends said could we give them a lift, and we said yes. My parents were going to be visiting at the time so we already had 6 people but we do have a 7 seater so technically, yes, we could squash another child in no problem. Then on the night before the party, just before Percy went to bed, 2 of the parents messaged to say they didn’t know how they were going to get there. They were working or whatever and hadn’t thought about lifts. We put them in touch with each other to see if they could come up with something, but they couldn’t. 

We talked about many solutions. The place is 25 minutes away and not really accessible by public transport, we sort of felt like it shouldn’t be our job to fix the problem for the parents that hadn’t thought about this until the night before, but on the other hand Percy would be really sad if 2 out of 4 kids couldn’t come to the party. Eventually we offered a mad plan for my parents to get a train into town really early, because that’s when the train was and then they would get a taxi to the place. This would free up 2 spaces to bring these other kids, but the mum of one kid still didn’t agree because the kid would have to leave the non-compulsory holiday reading lessons that the school were putting on half a hour early. So that kid didn’t come, but in the end we made space for the other kid by Dan cycling and me driving all the kids plus my parents. So Dan did a 40k round bike trip that day just to make space for this other kid, what a hero.

Everyone had a great time climbing and eating Mexican food. We brought in a cake and sung happy birthday, and the kids came back to ours to play afterwards. Then in the evening we all watched an Ice Age film together. Percy had some lovely gifts, Eric got him a folder that holds Pokémon cards. He’s been planning this for ages, about 6 months ago I found him trying to work out how you would make plastic wallets into Pokémon card holders, which I dont know if there is a way but we just ordered a little folder that holds all their many Pokémon cards. Eric was possibly more excited about Percy’s birthday than Percy was. He loves to give gifts and he was really excited for the climbing too.

Percy is a big fan of saving the environment and wants to be a re-wilder.

We got him (among other things) the kids version of the game Cards Against Humanity. It’s where you make silly sentences and in the kids version it’s mainly about poo and bogies and farts and stuff. They giggle so much playing it, but what they think is hilarious is totally different sentence combinations to what adults would find funny.

Playing the game with Granny.

You might notice this is not a house. We were staying on a boat the last few days, on the Canal du Midi. I’ve done a lot of boating before but not on a river boat. I’ve done a lot of small sailing boats across the Channel, and a bit of canal boating. So this felt like a luxury in terms of space. And no one had to sleep in the bed on my dad’s old boat that we all referred to as a the coffin. 

What’s more exciting than a boat trip on the Canal du Midi? Pokémon.

See my boat tour video here

On the Canal du Midi every lock is manned or womanned by a lock keeper, and we briefly looked into how you get to be one and especially how you get a free lock keepers cottage. Every kind of employment is an option for us now. Well actually not quite every option, I got 2 offers of having a sugar daddy in the last month, really quite reasonable requests too for a lot of money, but I turned them down. They both came as private messages from guys after I had a viral video, which is currently on 5.5 million views. It turns out if 5 million people view a video about 1000 will follow you about 5 will private message you to say hello and 2 will offer to be a sugar daddy. It’s pretty flattering at my age actually.

Before the boating and Percys birthday we had a few more nice days with my parents. One was a lovely sunny day where we had a picnic on the beach, I swam in the sea and it was lovely until a jellyfish stung me. 

I also took my 67 year old Dad to my roller dance lesson. That was a good laugh. Last week I was saying that I couldn’t come because my parents were visiting and they said bring them and my Dad actually did skate in his youth and once at my 36th birthday party. 

So he came along and did pretty well. There was a cute moment when 2 young people were trying to explain to him in quite complex french how to do a roller skating move, they were super patient with him. It’s such a nice little club there. The guy who runs the dance part of the roller skating club is 61 and an amazing roller skater. See my little video of Dad here.

This week coming is another week of half term. We’ll mainly be doing boring stuff like getting the kids to do their homework. I have some private English classes to teach and Dan has some jobs to apply for and a few bits of work, nothing fun but I am trying to do more art making. 

I started a kickstarter about 10 days ago which is now 78% funded! I’m so grateful to everyone who’s donated to it. If I make it to 300 pounds I’m going to buy a printing press and each person who donated is going to be sent some Hannah original artworks in the post made, with the new press. It’s all or nothing so you only pay if enough people agree to pay. But I only one need another 3 or so people to reach my goal. I really didn’t want to do it at first because I feel like I’m always sharing stuff on social media and asking people to come to my gigs or like my pages or watch my videos, if I could have afforded to just buy the press then I would have, but there’s no way I could have justified doing that given our current job situation, and it was too much to ask for for a birthday or Christmas present. So I’m supper happy that it looks like I am going to be able to get this anyway. I hope it will make my prints look a lot more professional, and I could maybe try and start selling more work.

If you want to support my kickstarter by buying a print click here

Ups and downs.

Last blog I talked about how the jobs I thought I was going to have in September failed to materialise and I ended up with just one job on Wednesdays teaching English (plus a bit of graphic design stuff) but now I’ve lost that one job! Or more accurately I quit that job, which I know might seem insane given the lack of work me and Dan have between us, but it got to the point where it was impossible to stay. I won’t go into all the details, but let’s just say the things I was being asked to do, and asked not to do were becoming more and more unhinged, to the point where it felt more like we were in rival drug gangs, instead of just being two people in separate villages that want to teach English to children. So I’m doing it on my own now, I had a few kids come to a free trial lesson last week and then I did my first real lessons this week.

We had visitors last weekend, my lovely friend Helen and her husband Graham. Me and Helen have been friends since 2005, and have done many bizarre things together, like attend a medieval dance class at a Polish arts festival, went to a basket ball match in Palestine, got told off by the police for doing fire circus tricks in the park, and when I had only just passed my driving test I drove her while she held a fish tank full of water and fish, which sloshed around a lot. But these are the kinds of things that make a friendship. Helen moved out of Liverpool to the south in maybe 2009ish so we don’t get to drive fish tanks around much anymore. But whenever we do get together it’s always a good time. 

On an outdoor ice rink in Norway 2008

Força Réal 2024

That friendship group we were in was the absolute best. I’d already been in maybe 3 good friendship groups before that at school and sixth form and unfortunately I’m not friends with any of those people anymore. A lot of them are all friends with each other still, and I wonder what I should have done to still be in their crews. But anyway when I met this bunch I thought, “I have to stay with these people forever even when we’re not all living round the corner from each other, these guys are the best.” And I have, kind of. Everyone is more spread out now, internationally as well as nationally, and a lot of people have kids and partners and you just can’t hang out in the same way. If I had a time machine, I wouldn’t stop Hitler I’d just go back to a Saturday in 2007 where we just hung out in each other houses, playing board games going to the park, playing ready steady cook where we all buy the most obscure item we can find and then cook a terrible meal. 

So it was super nice to have one of the original crew in our little corner of the world showing her the sights. Our kids didn’t remember them at all but they quickly became friends, and got some great banter going with Graham. It was nice to have a break from everyday stresses and just be reminded of what a beautiful place we live in. 

Eric looks like he’s in love with Graham

The beautiful town of Eus

And I’ll probably look back on this time the same as 2007 like, “remember that time we lived in France and the kids were at a fun age and we went to beautiful places” and I won’t remember all the stress and the times when the kids are grumpy. While Helen was here, we still had to do annoying things like fail to get my new ‘I’m still allowed in the country card’. I am still allowed in the country but I have to wait another month for my card, which is in turn delaying any benefits I’m entitled to.

But it was fun to then forget about that and hang out with my mate. We phoned some of the old crew including Will in Australia and Joy in L.A. And Josh in the Lake District. We haven’t spoken to them for years! And it’s mad that you can call someone for free and video chat but we rarely do. If you want a video chat let me know, I know some people find them weird but I’m always up for them. On the last day we were seeing Helen and Graham we were having lunch together and there was a knock at the door. It was a signed for letter from our landlord telling us what we roughly knew anyway. We have to leave this house by 11th April. Cheers for ruining our lunch landlord. It was kind of a sad goodbye after that. I don’t know when I’ll see them again because although we do come back to England its tricky when there’s lots of people to see and you dont have a car to make it down to the middle of nowhere south. 

It is an odd feeling not knowing where we’ll live or even which country we’ll be living in, in a years time. But that’s enough sad stuff now, let me cheer you up with the happy news that we won a weekend away in a holiday park! Maybe we should go there on 11th April and then just squat. 

In the summer we had Dan’s parents visiting us and they very kindly paid for us all to stay in a local holiday park in Canet. And while we were enjoying our free holiday I saw a sign for winning a holiday by sharing a photo on social media so I shared this photo:

And we won second place! Which is a weekend in any of their parks. We could go to a local one with a nice pool or we could go anywhere in France or the Netherlands. I’m tempted by Paris because we wanted to go there anyway, and although it doesn’t have any nice pools it is a free weekend’s accommodation just outside of Paris.

This week I’m in an art exhibition which has been nice, and a definite bonus of living here, there are a lot more inspiring things to paint. These are my painting from the exhibition it’s on until Sunday if you’re in the area.

The other bizarre kind of fun thing that happened this week was, for the second time ever, I had a video go viral. Really viral like at its peak it was getting 2000 views per minute.  It’s slowed down now but it’s on 2 million views. Unfortunately I dont make any money out of it, but I have got what money can’t buy….a lot of data about what people call a “Chinese Burn” in other countries. Wow it’s a minefield. Very interesting. I’m not sure what to do with this knowledge now. I might actually be the current world expert on this very niche subject having read the majority of the 10k comments.  Here’s some of that data on a map…. 

And last bit of happy news for this blog is Dan has an interview next week for a remote job. Thanks for reading.