The End… For now

I left things as we’d made an emergency dash from Spain back to England on the advice of our tax and immigration lawyer. We did so back in early part of summer 2022, back when all the talk was about the weather…

I love hot weather, but this year it felt different. It wasn’t just how warm it actually was, but the narrative about what this meant. How the heatwave hitting Europe was the first real-world evidence of what global warming is going to mean for us, and not just for polar bears and glaciers. Where the media might once have shown happy images of parks filled with sunbathers, they instead fed us wildfires destroying homes. I don’t know if there was an intention to leave people unsettled, or if it’s simply that our future is unsettling, and this is the beginnings of some sort of responsibility in facing up to it. But I noticed how it affected me.

And as we queued for the Santander to Plymouth ferry in our old van the thermometer read above forty degrees. We didn’t have air conditioning, and worse, it seemed everyone else did, so that they sat comfortably inside their cars, engines idling, adding to the heat on the exposed dockside. It felt almost threatening, as if we might actually be in danger, and we carefully sipped our way through the water supplies and hoped there would be no delays. But once onboard, we were able to jump in the pool (yes, the ferry has a swimming pool) and cruise back to the UK with the breeze over a calm Atlantic.

But on arrival we were homeless. We’d hastily arranged to stay a few days with friends back in Bournemouth, and though this was really nice, it is quite the imposition to turn up with two kids and a dog, when both parties know we had nowhere to live for a month. We agreed it would only be a few days, and then we’d go camp out at my Dad’s place, perhaps literally in the garden, given the incoming heatmageddon that was so preoccupying the media.  

It’s almost hard to remember how much attention was given to the heat. As I write this it’s all about the Queen, or sudden lack of, and the squabbles over exactly what counts as the correct etiquette in such nation-defining moments. But back then the obsession was heat. The UK, according to the forecasters, was closing in on a dangerous new record. Nowhere in the UK had ever recorded a temperature of 40 degrees before (for US readers, that’s 104 degrees Fahrenheit), but the forecasters were predicting that Tuesday would be the day. But this was no cause for celebration, oh no. Put away that bikini, cancel the BBQ. People were going to die. Britain, we were told, was simply not built for such heat, and it seemed quite possible that society itself might simply spontaneously combust, killing us all…   

At the same time, life goes on, and it so happened that Maria’s sister was moving house that same day. We had nothing to do – quite literally nothing – but we had the van. So we emptied it into the aforementioned friends’ hallway, ready to fill with moving boxes, and headed over to help.

But we were mindful of the hottest day ever narrative. We brought along our reflective windshield cover, and in the absence of aircon, stopped at the supermarket and bought two giant bags of ice cubes. And that’s when it happened. We were driving on a dual carriageway, when – BANG – the engine suddenly seized, taking the steering with it. But we were lucky, I was able to coast the van off the road and come to a halt in a layby well away from danger of trucks thundering by. And – lucky again – we were just within the limit of where we could still get reception on our phones to call the rescue company. As we waited to be connected, we remembered how the same company had been on the news that morning urging drivers not to use their cars, and that anyone who did so would be waiting at least seven hours should they be foolish enough to break down.

We explained the situation. Stuck in a broken-down van with two young children. In the middle of the day, the hottest day in history. Scared and thirsty, with only five litres of water (each) to sustain us. The danger was insane, and they clearly agreed. They promised to be there within the hour.

We celebrated this unexpected result by brewing up a cup of fresh coffee on the van’s stove, and then I had the genius idea of adding in a couple of handfuls of the ice, to make a highly refreshing cup of iced-coffee, which I hadn’t even finished by the time the tow truck arrived.

So even though this was the death of the van I’ve had for nearly fifteen years (broken cam belt, cost to fix significantly higher than the value of the old rustbucket) I feel it gave us a good send off, and vice-versa. We pushed it into a ditch and got a ride back to Bournemouth, this time both homeless and without the means to move on from the home where we were currently squatting…

This caused an interesting problem. Since Brexit, it’s illegal to use a UK-registered vehicle in Spain for more than thirty days (actually it’s hard to tell if the rule is 21 days, 30 days or 50 days, which illustrates how the rules post-Brexit are still being worked out). You can ‘import’ a UK car, but this costs a minimum of 5000 euros, and takes many months. So there was little point buying a new car in the UK, only to be stuck when we did get back to Spain. We couldn’t rent a car, since all the rental companies have apparently sold their fleets to survive the pandemic. Yet without a car we were totally stuck imposing on our friends, moaning incessantly at how inadequate their coffee machine was (that’s an in-joke, they have the best coffee machine money can buy). But then we found a little company in central London that had a few Spanish-registered, right-hand-drive vehicles for sale. One of them was a cheap-ish Korean people carrier. That’s catnip to me. And so, a week after I’d been happily building a kitchen in our house in rural Spain, I found myself on the London Underground heading to Kings Cross to pick up our new car. I‘d wanted an adventure, with all the twists and turns that implies. It seemed I’d got it.

I don’t have that much to say about the rest of the summer. We were able to stay, very comfortably, at both my dad and my mum’s house, and though I planned to do some work, I actually just enjoyed the enforced rest (we taught the kids to sail at my dad’s dinghy sailing club). And after enough time had passed to solve our immigration drama, we braved the Dover Brexit queues to be let back into France, and then bypassed the wildfires to wind our way back to Spain.

And that, dear reader, is where this story ends. We fixed the kitchen (it’s not blue, that’s just the protective film that we hadn’t peeled off), enjoyed what was left of the summer, and here we still are, starting our new lives in Spain

If you’ve read this far, thank you so much following this story, and I hope you’ve enjoyed it. Do keep an eye on your emails, as I tend to send these emails at a rather random pace (but if you really want to read more, this missive on the joys of Carnival is a favourite).  

 Thank you for reading!