Four weeks to go...
As I write this, it’s just under four weeks until the house sale here in the UK completes, making us homeless for eight days until things (hopefully) complete in Spain. It’s a strange time, a nervous time. And in a way the adventure has already begun, since our lives have already changed, even before we’ve really started to pack. I wanted to write this to have a record of the experience. Maybe it will be interesting, maybe it won’t but since I threatened you all with some sort of a blog, I feel justified in sending it out!
One observation to kick things off. Spring is a terrible time to make a move like this. The weather these last few weeks has been lovely, the trees are exploding into beautiful new green life. The sea is warming up, yet the beach is quiet. The air is scented from the gardens and clifftops filled with spring flowers. Every time I leave the house I have a reminder of what a beautiful area we live in, and by extension, what a strange idea it was (taken in the depths of winter) to pack up and leave. I *know* that the place we are moving to is also beautiful, and is presumably also bursting into spring. But I last time I saw it was in winter, and it’s hard not to compare there-then to here-now.
Worse, we have suddenly become – now that we’re leaving – very much in demand with friends and family. Perhaps it’s a Covid thing. Perhaps everyone is coming out of the woodwork, now that the restrictions of the pandemic are retreating into the rear-view mirror. But it feels like we’ve magically become much more interesting that we were before. Our social lives have sky-rocketed. Suddenly everyone wants to meet up, for drinks, meals, games afternoons, walks in the New Forest. They want to quiz us on where we’re going, why we’re going, how we think the kids will cope in Spanish school. It’s lovely. Actually it’s lovely enough that it makes me not want to go. It’s a real paradox. We’re suddenly so popular, because of leaving, that being here has been so fun I wouldn’t ever want to leave. But if we cancel the move, then we’ll presumably drop back to being not-terribly interesting again!
That’s not to say any of us actually wants to cancel the move. At least, no one is telling me that. I think it’s more to do with the nerves we feel about what’s to come – the packing up of our house (a daunting thought), the concerns over money (see below), the concerns about the children losing their friends, the concerns over us losing our friends. But there’s also this nagging question that keeps coming into my head, of whether this is the last time. The last time we’ll ever go for a walk here, the last time we’ll visit that shop, or drive down that street. Our last spring in Bournemouth. It has an air of finality to it that’s difficult not to equate with a kind of death. And it’s only going to get worse, when we start to question whether this is the last time we’ll ever see this or that person. I have to say it’s heart-breaking to witness it in the children.
Last weekend we went to Kimmeridge Bay for the last time. It’s one of my favourite places, a rocky bay in the Purbeck coast celebrated by all sorts of different people. Geologists love it for the bands of rock that offer a window into epochs long ago. Palaeontologists love it for the rich fossils that are preserved there. Divers love it for the clear, cool water, and the ledges of natural rock-pavements that extend hundreds of metres underwater. Surfers and windsurfers love it for the waves that break on those rock ledges. I love it for all those things. I love it for giving me many of the most memorable moments of my life – individual waves that are still stored 3D in my memory, decades after they broke, perfect still evenings when the crowds have gone home, the time I was paddleboarding out to sea when a whale breached nearby. I love it so much that I wrote a book set there (The Glass Tower, if you haven’t read that one, this is definitely a prompt to go get it!). We went with friends (see point above on our sudden popularity). I was worried at first, that it wasn’t the best day, and maybe they wouldn’t see the magic of the place, or that we wouldn’t remember it in quite the way it deserves. But as the day went on the wind died to nothing, and we cooked our dinner on the lush grass. Then myself and Rafa went out for a paddleboard on the flat calm waters, and it was perfect. We saw spider crabs climbing on the bottom, far below, and no one fell in. And we said another goodbye.
Onto that money issue. It’s kind of boring, and slightly embarrassing in that it shows how naive and stupid we were when planning this move, but maybe it will serve as a lesson to someone out there. Back in February when we went to Spain to look for a house, we worked out how much we could afford to spend in UK pounds, and we used the then pound-to-euro exchange rate to tell us how much that would be in euros (£1 then was 1.21 Euros). What we didn’t do was pay attention to how that rate can change, and does change. £1 now buys just 1.16 Euros. It’s just a few cents lower, but we’ve now discovered it means the amount of UK pounds we need to buy the house in Spain has gone up, by a lot. The current forecasts are for the pound to fall further, possibly enough so that we’ll need to find something like thirty thousand pounds more than we expected to pay. There’s absolutely nothing we can do about this but wait until the completion date, and see what the exchange rate is then. Only then will we know how much we’re spending on the new house, and by extension, if we can afford it. It’s not helping with the nerves.
I’ve managed to distract myself quite well in the last few weeks by concentrating on the new book. I’ve now finished the second draft, and it’s more-or-less ready to go, which forces me to confront the question of what to do with it. I wrote before that I was considering doing something different with this book – maybe a kickstarter campaign, maybe approaching literary agents to try and secure a traditional publisher. I’ve actually sent it out this week to a few beta readers chosen at random (sorry to all those who would have volunteered), and I’ll use their feedback to help me decide. I’m leaning towards sending it to a few agents, but if everyone hates it I might rethink that!
In the meantime, I’m going to be mostly packing from here on in!
Hope things are going well with you, wherever you are in the world.
Gregg
ps, the below is a pic from Kimmeridge that evening.
