3 year Franceaversary

Today marks exactly 3 years since we got a one way ticket to the south of France, to a house we’d never been in before, on the outskirts of a city we’d been to for one day. 

It was a risk, especially because life was pretty good when we left. We had survived the baby years, cancer and then Covid, we both had good jobs and lots of friends. Things were almost too good, like we needed just a little bit more risk and adventure and sunshine. We decided to move for a minimum of 3 years, it’s enough time to become bilingual if you’re a kid surrounded by French kids, and it’s the length of a standard French rental contract for an unfurnished house.

Moving to France 2022

Our new village 2022

When you get a new sofa and it comes with a lot of cardboard.

What’s the worst that could happen? We don’t like it and we choose to move back to our lovely life with our lovely friends with a fresh sense of gratitude for the things we took for granted. Or best case scenario we love it, we make friends, we buy a house with a pool and live a happy life in the south of France forever. 

Ok there’s a few things we didn’t anticipate. We spent a while talking about if one of our parents was seriously ill would we move back. Thankfully they’re all fine, but we didn’t give enough thought to if Dan loses his job and we can’t find work, and then we can’t rent another house and then actually as a family we all disagree on where we want to live. We didn’t predict that our siblings between them would have 3 (soon to be 4) babies while we were here, and we would miss them all, and we didn’t predict that French square pillow cases would not fit our English rectangular pillows.

I don’t mean to be dramatic but the whole of our future seems to be resting on one interview tomorrow. Will our grandchildren be more likely French or English? I’ll tell you next week. Obviously they could be any nationality or we might not have any, but it’s mad to think that something that’s happening tomorrow might affect that. And I don’t even know which way I want this interview to go, in the short term I really want it to be a yes. Then we can chill out a bit about money and when the kids break up from school in early July and we have to move out of our house, me and the boys will begin my UK road trip of everyone I miss, and Dan will mainly stay and work and find people he can stay with here. And then he will find us a house for September. In this scenario hopefully I will get all my extroverting out over the summer and be happy to return for a beautifully warm September. I’m not sure about how I’ll feel after that but I’ll try and make it work, I’ll definitely give French learning another go.

If it’s a no at the interview then July will be the end of our time in France. Dan will concentrate his job search in the north of the UK but not necessarily Liverpool. And then we will either rent a house in the UK or move back to our old house. But I’m still doing my UK road trip! Either way that will be happening.

There’s so many smaller decisions to make once the big “which country?” decision is made, especially for Percy’s school. His first choice is to stay here in this village forever and go to the local secondary school, when we talked about moving to a different village 10 minutes away he wasn’t happy. I would prefer a bigger more walkable village with better public transport links, but for him our current village is his first choice with all his friends, then Liverpool, then anywhere else in the world. Whereas Dan’s top choices are 1st, French countryside 2nd, English countryside 3rd, Liverpool. 

Anyway I’ll let you know what happens, but in the middle of all this I’ve been running a holiday club in a school. If you don’t know yet I’m an artist masquerading as an English teacher. And when I get the chance I like to make my lessons as fun as possible. Really I would love people to sign up to the Hannah Jones School of Creativity, Risk and Fun. It would be like a mixture of Taskmaster, Gladiators and Art Attack, but parents would rather sign up to English lessons. 

Sometimes the fun ideas pay off. I made a cool stop frame animation of the surprisingly gruesome story of the 3 little pigs. And the kids did voiceover narrations so it was very good for their English pronunciation. 

Then I tried a game that normally works well with the group I teach at my house, putting a load of flash cards on the floor and playing a sort of musical statues. When the music stops I say a word and they have to go to that flash card. There were 3 girls and 3 boys in the group and I don’t want to stereotype, but the girls were great and easy and had fun, but also had the ability to sit in a chair and listen, while the boys were like animals. They could not cope with just going to the nearest flash card they had to run there and then do a pile on.

I also tried a very unsuccessful Easter egg hunt. I was trying to teach the prepositions “on, in, under, those things.” Well really I was looking for ways to justify an egg hunt. So the idea was the boys hid the eggs and then wrote clues for the girls such as “under the desk” etc and vice versa. But what actually happened was the boys hid the eggs in the most obscure places and then they had to write a really long sentence like, “the egg is in the small Tupperware box with the orange lid in the top draw of the biggest cupboard hidden behind a cardboard box of paper.” And then they got angry writing such long sentences. And then the girls came in and couldn’t find the eggs, even with the help of the clues and boys, so then I had to give out more eggs to everyone to stop a fight breaking out and there must be still hidden eggs in that classroom. Next time I will be writing all the clues!

I hope you all had a lovely Easter if you were celebrating. We went to our church the English splinter of the French church we go to and got some home made hot cross buns, because you can’t get them here. We also attempted making a roast in our not a proper oven and it was pretty good in the end. I would definitely try it again.