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.

Interviews and Moving House

Last time I moved house I packed up an entire 4 bed house with a loft full of stuff, got rid of everything including furniture, painted it all white, got a new kitchen put in and moved countries with a 4 and 7 year old. So when I was thinking about this up coming move, just 5 minutes down the road, it felt like it would be a piece of cake. It was not a piece of cake, it was the opposite of that. It was a piece of broccoli, raw hard impossible to chew broccoli. 

We had done some prep for the move. This is just a house for the next 3 months and its an airbnb so it's furnished (but we'll bring a few things) and has things like plates and towels, which meant we had to pack up a lot of our stuff into storage. So we had made quite a few boxes of things we don't need for 3 months and we had slowly been selling stuff. I'm most proud that we managed to sell our fake grass. 

I tried hard to sell a fridge that made an annoying noise too, I tried to target people who had space for a spare fridge in their garage, bad landlords and the deaf. But sadly I couldn't even give it away and we had to take it to the tip. 

So the weeks plan was like an interview moving house sandwich:

Monday - Dan had a interview for a job that could keep us here, 

Tuesday - Start moving a few things into the new house, our desks and chest-of-draws-es (what is the plural of chest-of-draws?)

Wednesday - host my English club in my house 9-11am then move everything.

Thursday - Clean the old house.

Friday - Old house inspection at 11am

Saturday - Interview for Dan at Decathlon for a summer job.

I realise I haven't yet publicly said, after a lot of applying and waiting Dan has two interviews this week. One of them would mean we would try and stay, the other probably wouldn't but would still be great for now. It turns out interviews are like buses, there's always a drunk guy at the back of them. And that other thing people say about buses. (Apologies if you're a French person reading this and I'm not making any sense by messing up English expressions.)

So yeah the plan was fine, and we were only moving down the road no biggy. But every day we seemed to get more and more behind. On Sunday night I asked Dan if he had any suitable interview shoes and he hadn't, he now owns a pair of shoes for all future weddings, funerals and interviews. So Monday morning was filled with the shoe shop and the food shop, the afternoon Dan went to the interview which went well, they said so, and they said they would be in touch next week about the next stage. My friend Flick is currently here on holiday from where she lives in Paris and she told me she was going to the hot springs on Tuesday. I love the hot springs, and luckily my Tuesday work had been cancelled for that morning so I thought I'd go along. Dan was happy for me to go and him to stay and work on the move, I'll work hard in the afternoon I thought. 

The hot springs we went to was not the one I was thinking it was, which is like a swimming pool, this was a natural springs which was incredible but also really far away and a long hike from where you can park to the actual springs. They were on holiday so very chilled about timings and at no point did I say I should get back now. I was chilled, Dan can get things done I'll help when I was done. I even put up a smug little Facebook status about the hot springs. 5AM Friday me wants to punch 5PM Tuesday me in the face. I did not have time to go to the hot springs!

I began Wednesday with my English club. We did an Easter egg hunt, and sang head shoulders knees and toes, you can't be stressed about moving while singing head shoulders knees and toes. We then got down to business, taking furniture apart and moving stuff for the new house into the car and stuff for storage into the oldest van in the world, kindly lent to us by of of my English students. The trip to storage took so long, the journey was long on the slow roads in the rickety van, the paperwork took ages, the storage was on the second floor so everything had to go up in a lift. 

By the time we were back it was nearly time to collect the kids and we felt so far behind, and they were only going to slow us down further. There's nothing like playing 3 games of connect 4 with your kid while wondering how late you will be up working in the house. We worked until nearly midnight and the house was still nowhere near empty.

Thursday morning we were so behind I couldn't even look at all the stuff in the downstairs because it was stressing me out. Dan was in charge of getting our possessions out of the house while I focused on cleaning the upstairs which was at least free from all our rubbish. 

In the afternoon our lovely friend Marie came to help and I realised I'd never in my life cleaned an oven. Do I speak for all millennials when I say we don't clean ovens? We just move house or get new kitchens put in. I don't notice that ovens are dirty, I thought they were meant to be brown. Marie is only in her 20s but she'd cleaned ovens before, she even had the special magic oven cleaning products. What a legend.

We met our new neighbour she is the neighbour on BOTH SIDES! Like she owns both houses and apparently she is very angry that she missed out on the chance to buy this house. Its like a real life game of Monopoly where you own Regent Street and Bond Street and then someone else buys Oxford Street. The first thing she said to me was (obvs this conversation was all in French), "you can't park here in front of my garage." I said, "I know, I'm not." Then I said, "I'm moving in here" and what I meant by that was I'm not just a passer by, hello I'm your new neighbour. But she replied, "not my problem."

View from our balcony

Mad floors throughout the house 

On Thursday night after a long day cleaning we went for tea with Flick which was a lot of fun and a nice break from the cleaning, but then we had to get back to the cleaning, so much cleaning. I stayed till 10:30pm and Dan stayed until midnight but it still wasn't done! The inspection was at 11am so we thought we would both do a little more after dropping the kids at school but then I was awake at 4am and thought what is the point of just lying here awake, I'll go and clean more. And I actually had quite a nice time cleaning with music on and finished it just as the sun was rising at 7AM and got back for the boys waking up. The inspection went ok, the estate agent was happy, she said it wasn't perfect because the walls were not pristine white but it was up to the owner whether she would give the deposit back or not we'll hear on Monday. The rest of the day I was teaching and Dan was trying to take more of our stuff to storage that we didn't have time to take before. It was only at the end of the day he said I've got an interview tomorrow which was totally not in my brain at all I was exhausted! 

Next week I'm running a holiday club in a school and the head teacher phoned me to finalise some details. I wanted to ask if I could do an Easter egg hunt but I asked "puis-je casser les oeufs?" instead of "puis-je cacher les oeufs?" I asked if I could break eggs not hide eggs. I could blame that on being tired but to be honest I'm just bad at French.

Today was the first day all week with moments that I thought, I could just sit and chill for a bit. And I made up a new challenge, trying to get a photo of us in our house with a the maximum timer an iPhone, which is 10 seconds. I almost made it. Dan managed but knocked the camera so it’s a bit wonky. If anyone visits you should try the 10 second photo challenge too.

Nearly made it

Dan made it but knocked the camera