I love Wizzing

Last weekend we tried to escape all our problems by running away to a mountain.

It’s a difficult balance not earning much money and yet also living in an incredibly beautiful place that you might not live in much longer. In general I’ve always been quite careful with money even as a little kid, and when I was a student I was incredibly tight, mainly because once I left home I never wanted to have to go back, and as long as you have some money you can live where you like.

There’s not many times I regret spending money, except for buying my first house for too much and selling it for way less. But there’s loads of times that I do regret not spending a bit more, and a lot of them happened on our big 2013 bike trip. I’m super glad we did it and we had to save up for a long time and budget a lot, but there were a lot of things we didn’t see and days we didn’t do much, because of money. I think it was 62 days long but for example, we were 5 days in Istanbul just wandering around not doing a lot, we should have done 2 days and gone inside places and paid for stuff. 

And then our first year in France Dan had a good job and we could have done a lot of stuff, but I was still being cautious because we had spent a lot of our savings on the move and compared to the previous year where he had that job and I was working I didn’t feel rich. So now its a weird balance of “lets make the most of our time here because this might be the last few months” and “we should be careful because if we have to move back all of that is expensive.” So last weekend we went skiing and we tried to forget all the other stuff that was going on, like not having a house to go to after April and not having proper jobs and not agreeing on what country we want to live in.

I made a playlist of music from the 00s that I had sort of forgotten about, stuff like the Artic Monkeys and Mumford and Sons and and the Kaiser Chiefs. We listened to it in the car driving up to the mountains on the Friday night and I enjoyed it a lot. But one song became the anthem of the weekend, it was The Wombats’ “lets dance to joy division” mainly the line, “everything is going wrong but we’re so happy”. It also starts with the line “I’m back in Liverpool” which is nice (for me who on balance probably wants to return.) 

We had a rule that no one was allowed to speak about going back to England or just anything negative about the future or they would get snowballed (which happened to Dan). We tried not to think about it either. It’s fully consumed all our conversations lately, especially the house moving stuff because that was the most pressing concern. This is just finding somewhere to live from April to July so the boys can finish the school year and Percy can finish primary school here. The options at the time were:

1) live in my friend’s empty house, but it’s not free all of that time. And its 20 minutes drive from the kids school and I can’t continue teaching local kids there because its too far for them.

2) pay over 2000 Euros a month for an Airbnb in the village, that not even amazing it’s just an ok house.

3) move in with my parents and either us or them go off on a canal boat so we’re not in each other space too much. But then either we would be sending our kids to a random school for 3 months or homeschooling them.

It was a bit of a head wreck and that’s only our most immediate problem that needed sorting. But luckily it is hard to worry about this stuff when travelling down a mountain at speed, and we had a lot of fun just enjoying the views, and trying to remember from last year what to do. I really love skiing. I used to think, “what’s the big deal it’s just standing up sledging for posh people,” and maybe I still do think that but it’s so fun. I don't really care to be good at it, I’d like to not be a danger to myself and others like I was the first time. But I just want to whizz around all the time.

 It’s sort of the same with my roller skating classes, just let me whizz around, don’t teach me how to do it on one leg backwards. And when I learnt trampolining as a teenager, just let me bounce lady! It’s basically a bouncy castle and I’ve no interest in doing a pike.

I do love that there’s no gatekeepers when you ski. Unlike driving a car, if you have the money to buy the ski pass you’re allowed to do what you like. It’s not like that at the Manchester snow dome with their fake little mountain and their extortionate beginners course where no fun is allowed. Dan is very different to me in this regard, he loves being told what to do and not having fun. He would love a ski instructor to give him some tips and techniques, he watched some youtube videos and keeps saying skiing jargon to me. When I think it’s just whoever can have the most fun is the winner. The boys did well in general, although Eric had a grumpy first morning, but after some food he was a lot better. I love that they’ve had the chance to do something neither of us did as children.

It was a good head break away from the stress, we weren’t sure if the stress would immediately come back the minute we were home, but Dan said he did feel more positive going into this week. 

I did an online comedy course this week, I’ve never done a course before. Lots of people do a course before they start, I guess just like I threw myself down a mountain with no experience, I did a 5 minute comedy set back in 2012 and then I did more and more and now, after years of virtually never doing it, I thought, “this might be fun or interesting and might help me decide if I want to get back into it again if we do return.” I definitely do want to write a show about the move to France and all the mad stuff that’s gone on here, and all the stupid stuff I’ve said wrong. Here’s this weeks french mistake: I’ve been saying arobase the word for the at sign (@) when I mean ardoise the word for a little white board. “Oh that’s not so bad Hannah, you surely don’t need to say little white board much.” Yes I do actually, I say it every single English lesson because all the kids have personal whiteboards.

I’m going to end this blog with some happy news, as a reward for you reading this far. We found a house we can live in from April to July that’s in our village! It’s an airbnb but it’s not the one that’s over 2k a month. We met the landlord and managed to persuade him that we are trustworthy and we won’t trash his house. It was actually quite miraculous, he shared his whole life story with us, he knows a few people we know and he is a Christian and was baptised in our church. Last night he brought us a massive box of food that was like stuff that would have gone to waste, that they give to charities. Dan isn’t even here to eat it. He’s doing a half marathon, in Africa (just kidding he’s in Marrakesh it’s not really Africa) that’s like when people from Liverpool say they’re going to another country and they go to Rhyl. Technically true but don’t be a loser.