Would you rather?

I've made a fun quiz. My auntie Hilary gave me a book when I was a kid called Would you Rather. It had dilemmas like "would you rather have breakfast in a hot air balloon, lunch in a castle, or tea on the river?"

So to help me decide about France vs England, I've made myself and you a more grown up quiz called, "would you take?"

1) 90% of the time the sky is blue, but you have to use a translation app every time you send a text.

2) Childcare in school holidays is only 12 euros a day, but you can never use grandparents for childcare.

3) It's warm enough to swim in the sea 6 months of the year, but you live in a wild fire zone.

4) You get almost free university, but no 12 grand tax free, and you have to pay 26% tax on everything you earn and wages are not high.

5) You go skiing in the mountains at least one day a year, but you never see your mum on her birthday.

6) Good wine is very affordable, but you have to drink UHT milk.  

If you would answer yes to most of these, you should move to France. 

I left the last blog on a bit of a cliff hanger and I'm sure some people reading this want me to just hurry up and make a decision about France or England, and stop chatting on about it. 

So tiny recap: 

We had an offer on the house accepted in mid June, but they said they don't want to sign until mid July. Then we asked for a date and they said, "before or after 24th July" which is not mid July! Then on the 23rd we said, "are we signing tomorrow then?" and they said, "how about the first week in August?' So then we decided to say our offer will expire on the 3rd August. Which was a bit of a risk because they could have just said, "stop pressurising us, we don't want to sell." I get the feeling they're not 100% sure they want to sell and we're not 100% sure we want to buy, so we're playing this weird game of chicken.

I said to Dan that buying a house without a job is like announcing you're pregnant after a one night stand. People want to celebrate with you but really were all thinking, "is this a good idea? I hope it all works out in the end." 

Anyway they got back to us and said we can sign before the 3rd of August and we can do it digitally, because we'll be in England. After we've signed there's then 10 days where you can still "abort" with no consequences. After that you have to pay 10% of the purchase price to the other side. Which is kind of a good rule, because when we once tried to buy a house in the UK the woman pulled out 3 days before we were due to move, for no good reason, which in my analogy is just like aborting a full term baby.

On a lighter note... we went camping and it was fun. After cancelling our Italy holiday we just wanted cheap fun, so we got a tent and went to a campsite that we'd already been to before. I'm not someone that normally repeats holidays, and I did once try to argue that people who go on holiday to the same place every single year are the worst kinds of people. But it was really comforting in all the chaos to just go back to the same little family run campsite where the kids can be free range. They had a pool, trampoline, table tennis, boules and one little pizza restaurant.

Eric made friends with all the kids. He was playing card games with the Dutch kids and they were communicating in English and then he was playing table tennis with the French kids and chatting in French. He is really good at making friends with anyone.

We also made friends with a Dutch guy who lives in Turkey and is a pilot. I like that about camping, it's really sad that in everyday life loads of people must be doing their washing up at the same time, all lonely in their separate houses, when you could be doing it outside in the sun while meeting other people.

We went to some gorgeous places, they colour of the water was so beautiful. I need to paint a room that colour in our new house.

 

 

We got told off taking this photo, because we didn't know but footpaths are closed in some departments, because of being on a high alert fire risk. This sort of fake policeman dressed as a boy scout said he could of fined us 135 euros. He also said we could walk on footpaths on the other side of the river because that was a different department that wasn't on such a high fire risk. Which seems a bit mad.

We got into jumping off rocks, and we saw people doing some mad jumps way higher and more risky than we did.

 

a crazy man who just ran off the highest bit.

 

 

On the way back we staying one night in Aix which was really pretty and we also stopped off at Nimes where Percy had recently been for a 3 day school trip so he was our tour guide.

I've been busy preparing art for my exhibition. Here's my newest little painting:  

If you're free on the 29th of August please come! Here's the details:

It's only on for that one night, but you can buy prints or products such as bags or phone cases or beach towels from my website at any time: My website!

Thanks for reading. x 

5 weird summers

I've been meaning to blog for ages. I was going to blog about our weird life again but then everything went on fire, literally and emotionally and the fire jumped the queue of blogs in my head. But its now time for this blog to finally get written.

I realised recently that every summer since we moved to France over 4 years ago has been weird. 

2022

We moved in April 2022, and Dan took almost all his annual leave for moving house. By the long summer holidays we'd not been in France long enough to go back to England for a holiday, and I'd been in England for all of June due to a visa admin error. Both sets of parents came to visit, but mainly I remember it just being long and hot and we didn't have enough friends, and Dan was working, so it was a bit lonely.  It was exciting being in a new place but I had no one to share it with. 

We were meant to have a visit from our good friends Zac and Jude and their kids, but at the absolute worst time they got chicken pox and couldn't come, that was pretty gutting and really sad for them.

I got really into outdoor painting with the kids, we'd just sit out on side roads and paint trees and mountains.

We had some good times. We bought a massive paddling pool and invented many games to play in it, such as 'nose ball' (it's like football with a balloon and your nose.)

I really struggled with re-learning to drive with a new big car on roads I didn't know on the wrong side of the road, so we went on the train to lake Vinca a lot. It wasn't a bad summer just a weird one. But I thought, "the first one is bound to be weird, it will be less weird next year."

2023

This summer came just after Dan had lost his best ever job, I remember going back to England and trying to see as many people as possible. The job thing was playing on my mind. We hadn't been in the country long enough to get any kind of help, so we were just living off savings, but that summer was before I really realised how bad the French job market was in our area of France. I still felt okay about stuff. November that year was peek panic about your life time. The thought of moving back to England then seemed mad, we had committed to a house for 3 years and I had mentally committed for 3 years, the kids had only just become fluent in French. We were all in on trying to make things work. We had quite a few visitors and we had made a few friends and I was a lot more confident with French and driving.

Back in England wearing coats in August

2024

The end of 2023 and beginning of 2024 was a tough old time with Dan still not finding work. He had done a few projects and a brief period when he worked for local magazine P.O life who ended up screwing him over. But then in spring of 2024 he found a new good job working mainly remotely for a company in Toulouse, and we thought, "we're sorted now." I had some work too teaching English. We were happy to stay, but then after 3 months of work Dan was told his trial period was over and he just wasn't exactly the right fit for the job. They said, "it would be better if you lived in Toulouse." He said, "I'll move to Toulouse." They said, "nah, don't worry about it." So that was the beginning of weird summer number 3. 

That summer we realised staying in France might not last much longer. We knew our rental contract was coming to an end in spring 2025 so we thought, "lets just try and make the most of being in France." We did a trip to Biarritz and San Sebastien for a long weekend in May, but in the summer we did a big road trip to Lake Geneva and back. 

 

 

It was out first time camping, and we went to some absolutely beautiful places, but our car was dying the whole time and because we were not in one place for long we had to go to a garage and get car parts sent to another garage that we would be in a few days. We couldn't drive fast, a 5 hour journey took over 8 hours and it was very stressful.

2025

After another year of not having enough work and surviving through the French benefit system (which we had finally been there long enough to benefit from) our 3 year contract came to an end in April, and my tolerance for France also came to an end. We said we'd do 3 years, it didn't work out, it's a shame but lets go back to the land of tea and banter and clouds, it's not all bad. But we might as well stay until July so that Percy can finish his last year at French primary school. So we found an airbnb to live in just from April to July. We put most of our stuff in storage and started to prepare to move. But then Dan got a job! 

He was on the toilet when he got the phone call that would change the course of our lives, after 3 interviews he was offered a job in marketing. I was happy that he finally had something, and in the short term it was great. We couldn't stay in our airbnb over the summer, because the landlord wanted to make money from holiday people, so me and the boys went to England all summer and Dan stayed in random peoples houses for work. He didn't have the best time, but I had a great summer, seeing 97 people in England. It was possibly my best summer since moving to France, which does really say something about our lives in France.

Why would you live near the Med when you can live near the mud?

2026

After a summer away in England, we moved back to our weird Airbnb more permanently, and I was feeling more positive about France. I started French lessons again, I made some new friends, and we were talking about buying a house. Now that Dan had a proper French contract and a secure job we could get a French mortgage, and although that scared me a bit, it was also exciting. We weren't loving our Airbnb, we hadn't had any visitors, even just local people round to hang out like we used to.

And then after a year of work for Dan, they got a new boss to come in and shake things up. She upset everyone who worked there, changed everyone's roles and got rid of Dan. We were just about to offer on a house and then suddenly the new house or any of the houses was not an option and going back to Liverpool was a real possibility again, but being half way through a remortgage of our UK house that cost a lot of money, made things really complicated. Especially as the terms of the mortgage state that as it's a buy to let we can't live in it if we were to continue with the process of the remortgage. 

The original plan for this summer was to go to Italy. My sister Sarah is going to the Italian lakes and I thought a road trip there would be fun. We planned it all out with a few nights in Nice and a night in Genoa, driving on the way and then getting a ferry from Genoa to Barcelona on the way back to reduce the driving. We had booked a few bits of it, including the ferry, when Dan lost his job and we decided it was all a bit stressful and expensive. 

I had also booked a short trip to England, just me and the kids. Originally Dan didn't have enough time off work to do Italy and England, so I got a flight based on the cheapest ones where he could take us to the airport. We were flying from Perpignan to Leeds and then back from Manchester to Girona late at night so he could get us after work. Then when we cancelled the Italy holiday it made sense for Dan to come to England with us, but those flights weren't cheap any more, and the times made no sense. If we drive to the airport in Perpignan and leave our car there, then how do we get back from Girona late at night when there's not public transport? After looking at many mad options such as Dan dropping us off in Perpignan for our flight and then driving down to Girona to get a different flight to Leeds so our car would be in the right place, we asked our friend Sam for a lift from the airport.

Then as summer was approaching I felt more and more uneasy about only spending a short time in England when the kids are off for 2 months and I'm in a boiling hot house with no outdoor space. We only have air con downstairs so we're all fighting over who gets to sleep on the sofa bed.

I thought I'll just have a little look at other flight options, and then I found some for 25 euros. So we 3 are now staying in England for over 3 weeks, but Dan will stay for the original stupid flight, because he can't be away too long if he wants to get the job seeker benefits, and if we're in the process of buying a house (which is not certain) and to do a bit of work for Guy. 

Shout out to entrepreneur Guy Wilmot for continuing to pay both of us at different times to work on various projects he has going on, without him we really wouldn't have financially survived.

It's our anniversary today, we've been married 15 years. I don't think any of the years have been easy, before these last years that I just explained, we had Covid, and then before that a bit of cancer, then it was the baby stage. Summer 2017 was harder than any other summer, a new born baby and a toddler all day every day for weeks is hardcore. Then before that we were living in someone else's weird house which was mixed, there were some nice times and weird times, and before that our tiny house which was also mixed. We had a few good parties and fun memories there, but it was a pretty crimey. Starting with our first night there after we arrived back from our honeymoon in the 2011 riots and ending with a murder on the doorstep several years later. I grew up in a village where we once got a newsletter saying "everyone please be vigilant, someone's had their wellies stolen from there shed" and that was too little crime. It's really the dream to live somewhere with moderate levels of crime.  

People often say marriage is hard, and I'm not saying it's easy, but in my experience life has been hard and messy and I can't imagine doing those hard things without Dan. Last week I was feeling very unsure about everything, especially about buying a house, because we really would be committing to being here long term. And I had a day where I was more up for the huge hassle of returning to the homeland than ever before and I asked him, "what happens if I really can't do France any more?" And he didn't try and persuade me that it would all be okay, he just hugged me and said, "we'll go back." Even though he doesn't want to, even though it would be a logistical nightmare, I know he would do it, if I needed to.

Thanks for reading this far!

 

Next blog... our camping trip, and do we or don't we sign for a house, which is meant to happen tomorrow. 

France is on fire

This weekend we went camping. It wasn't a weekend though, it was Sunday to Tuesday. What do you call that? Dan has wanted to see the Tour de France ever since we moved to France because he loves looking at men in lycra, but he's not middle class enough for ballet. We nearly saw it 2 years ago, we managed to see all of the promotional vehicles that throw out free hats and stuff and a load of cars in the shape of funny things like cheese triangles, but for some reason, and I don't remember why, we didn't see the actual bike racing. So this year the tour came to Les Angles, which is the mountain area an hour and 15 minutes from us, where we have skied in winter. I've never seen it in summer before and people say it's a cool place to go in the summer time too. So we decided to go camping there to experience summer in the mountains and to see the Tour de France go past.

We spent all morning packing and left just after lunch. We were aware of some fires on the way and Dan said we might have to take the small road that goes through all the villages rather that the big 110kph dual carriage way. Fine no probs, wild fires happen every year here, so we've become a bit blase about them, like they were just annoying roadworks. So we set off on the big road and after 10 minutes of driving were forced to join the smaller parallel road. We could see a lot of smoke but at this point it was kind of interesting rather than terrifying.

On the big road

Obviously I wish the fires weren't happening and climate change is scary, but it is quite interesting to drive past fire, and see the helicopters flying and the planes that scoop up water from the reservoir to drop on the fire.

We continued on the little road and then it was blocked off too. We weren't sure if there was any way through, but then we followed some other drivers onto an even smaller road which is more of a bike route, that you would normally only use as an access road. So we managed to make it past Ille-sur-tet to Bouleternere.

Then we came to a roundabout where we could see actual fire on the hills as well as smoke, and we saw about 10 fire engines coming out of a field that had been down to the river to fill up with water. We continued our journey thinking we were past the worst, but about 10 minutes later we saw more fire just near Vinca. 

Vinca is our favourite lake hang out spot, it's the nearest place we can go to swim for free. At this point the fire was on the opposite side of the road and river from the town and lake of Vinca, but the small village of Rodes was at risk and being evacuated. We continued on and after another 10 minutes of driving past fire, things were fine and normal.

little stop to admire the views

Our friends Sam and Emma were joining us for the camping trip but leaving a little bit later. We were giving them advice on the best way to go, they left around a hour after us, but by this point the way we drove had all been blocked off and they had to drive round the super long way which is an hour longer. 

We arrived at the campsite and set up the tent and went for a swim while waiting for our friends, and then when they arrived we helped them set up their tent and had a BBQ. It was a lovely time hanging out but the concerns about the fire were playing on our minds. We were glad to be safe and far from the fires, but the fires were progressing fast and it had managed to cross the river to the much more populated other side. We could see updates on our phones about different villages being evacuated. We also found out they had told everyone not to travel to see the Tour de France and they had cancelled the promotional bit at the beginning where they have the mad vehicles that throw things out. But since we were literally right on the road it was going past there was no danger to us walking up with our little folding chairs and watching the cyclists go past. 

 

Me and Dan were discussing what were the most important things to take from our house. We decided the laptop and passports would be administratively the most annoying things too loose, but we also talked about a big box of photos I have and all my paintings. I don't think if I had 20 minutes to pack a car to leave I would save all my paintings, mainly because it feels a bit arrogant. I think I'd save this one: 

and Dan said he would save my newest one I just finished last week:

both are available to buy as prints even if the original burns.

While villages were burning I was ironically really cold. The warmest outfit I took was a very thin pair of cotton trousers a t-shirt and a very thin cardigan.  It was around 36 degrees as we were leaving and I just couldn't imagine ever being cold again. But up in the mountains it does get cold at night. Emma kindly lent me a base layer and me and Dan zipped our sleeping bags together so we could snuggle ourselves warm. But it was a night of very little sleep, worrying that our house might be burning. At one point Dan offered to drive back and collect the important stuff, he'd have to go the long way making it a 5 hour round trip, which seemed crazy, but if our house did burn I would be glad he had done it. You can't wait until you need to evacuate to do that kind of thing though, you have to do it while you still can. In our area the villages are all in a row. Lets say we're village 1, village 4 was being evacuated and village 2 and 3 were asking the question, "do we need to leave?" So there was some sense to making the trip while it was still safe to do so.

In the morning we tried to have a nice normal day, just chilling in the campsite playing some games and swimming and in the afternoon we went to watch the race. Everyone being told not to travel there did mean we had a better view and we had a good position on a hill 25k from the end, so we could see them going up. Dan or Sam could write a better bit about this, but I will just say we waited a while the 2 cyclists in front came past then the big blob of cyclists and then a few more cyclists. 

 

Then we went to the campsite sort of common room space to watch the rest. I thought we could be on TV and I could watch the bit where we were on iplayer or something, but it turns out in the UK its only highlights on channel 5, and me waving was probably not a highlight. I would have had to caused a crash to make it onto a highlights program. 

I slept much better the second night, I think it was not quite as cold. The road back was still closed and I think will stay closed for a while, so we went back the long way round. On the way we saw Les Angles where we ski in the winter, and we stopped at Axat for a picnic and then saw an outdoor pool and thought, "why not?" Eric absolutely loves swimming at the moment, he could spend all day in a pool.

We returned to find things fairly normal, we can't see the smoke from our house. It's all fine apart from the existential dread of a climate crisis and the personal doubt about being weeks away from buying a house in a region that's burning.

Happy Wednesday.