It’s been a week since we started the move from our rental property to our new house, and what a week! Being the second time we have moved country we are used to the hard work and logistics that have to be put into place. The when you move country is you often have to move twice, once into a rental and then again into the home you buy.
RD and I were talking the other day about how we have basically been packing and unpacking in some form for seven months this time: Montaigu France – Gite in France- Rental Cottage in Ireland- New home.
But I’m not complaining because we have learned a lot from this part of the adventure, not least for me, because I have learned that whilst I think we need to do X life will show me we need to do Y, and this time I listen.
The start of decorating the bedroom
I was convinced we needed to decorate our bedroom before our bed came yesterday (that’s another story!) and bless RD he duly starting stripping the wall, but we had deliveries every day, on top of actually loading our van with stuff from the rental and driving it across the mountains to our new home, often through snowy wonderlands.
The oven in our new home looked as if it had something growing in it! Needless to say once the huge delivery of white goods arrived on Saturday that was a priority job for RD, along with fitting the washing machine and so much more: moving the fridge 4 times (women of the world will understand), putting the Hoover together, and the bed when it finally arrived, and the coffee table….
As well as decanting the boxes and boxes of stuff we have acquired and brought with us I have been busy ordering essentials, like crockery! Nearly all of our worldly goods are in France with no sign of when we can have them sent over, or collect them. But as most of them are going in the garage they’re not a priority for now, but it does mean we have to buy many essentialsall over again.
I have also been busy arranging rubbish collection (not automatic in Ireland, it’s collected by private companies) and arranging internet, and deliveries. To say we’re tired is an understatement.
The front gates and gate into the paddock had to be covered in wire to stop the Welshies getting out, that was our first job, carried out by RD on the first day we started the move in the snow and sleet. When we finally spent our first night here on Saturday, sleeping in the floor, we had been driving a total of 15 hours in round trips back to the rental. Add the final trip on Sunday when we went back to pick up our final bits and clean the cottage RD had wracked up 18 hours of driving and we still had another full van to unload. Followed by another night of sleeping on the floor!
I have limited internet, and hit and miss 4G on my phone, so pictures will be few for now, but I will do my best to keep you all in the mix. RD and I really feel that this little house is home, I think we all feel that.
Moisy
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We’re finally on the move. Our contract has been signed, the ten per cent deposit has been paid and we’re just waiting for all the dots on the I’s and crosses on the T’ until completion.In the meantime our vendor has allowed us to move into the house pending everything going through.
It’s exciting times, not least these two will finally have a garden, albeit small to start with, to run around in with no fear of other dogs.
Harley and Wiglet, our babies.
Eventually RD will open up the half acre paddock you can see on the side of the property. But that’s a little bit off for now. So far it’s been busy just getting what we need together to move in.
When we moved from France we came over with virtually nothing, all of our treasured belongings left in France in anticipation of moving them over. But sadly in this world we live in that has proved exceptionally difficult, what with tests, lockdowns, and isolation! Meaning we will move in without our stars, cherubs, and hearts, along with step ladders, and basic utensils for the kitchen which will need to be bought.
We have been busy buying: lamps, sparkly lights, rugs and sofas. Add to that all the basics you need like a fridge freezer, microwave, washing machine and it all begins to become quite scary, but also very exciting.
Our New Bedroom mmmm lots of work to do.
We have a beautiful super king size bed in France, but on Saturday we took on board ‘living in the here and now’, in that our bed is not here, and we need a bed now! We also finally accepted that our super king bed would never fit into our small bedroom, not unless we rip out the wardrobes which offer a huge amount of storage; it’s not feasible. So we bought a new king size bed, and the wardrobes are staying. Trust me when I say that the wardrobes are going to have the mother of all facelifts and the crystal doorknobs have already been ordered!
We will make room for the super king bed one day. I live in hope.
We had the conversation on Saturday about thinking realistically as to when we can retrieve our belongings, and how buying new things makes us realise we had still packed too much stuff to bring over to our new life. I think we may be letting even more things go.
The van is packed for its first three hour round trip to our house, including coal and logs so that we can light the fire when we get there. The oil has been ordered and should be delivered tomorrow, all good because the house has been unheated for at least two years, and it’s blowing a hooley with snow at the moment, so to say it’s cold is an understatement. Luckily we are not moving in until next Sunday hopefully it will be warm by then.
I wrote in 2015 that we had one more house left in us, now it looks like we have one more. #Excited.
Rosie
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Picking up from my last post in this series it was January 2019, and we had lived in France nearly four years. That January was hard, RD had not been paid for a job he had done and we were down to our last bones, literally, on my birthday we had five euros to our name. But we had learned that what you need will come if you just believe and on that evening my tablet pinged informing me that I had made an Etsy sale of over one hundred euro, we were solvent again until our pensions went into our account. Our belief had not failed us, it was another of the lessons we had learned ‘what you need will come.’
The next morning as we sat drinking our tea I felt a surge of anger and drive and I looked at RD and said “Fuck it’ you aren’t working via someone else anymore you’re advertising and working for yourself. Add to that your not cutting corners when you are asked to save them money, if they don’t want a good job done they can get someone else to do it. We are not going to be like other people out here, we’re having an ethos and that ethos will be ‘if a jobs worth doing it’s worth doing well.’”
I had seen so many times how people would undercut others to get the work instead, but then do a very bad job. It would have been so easy to be like them but that was the crux, that was the test: no matter how hard don’t get sucked into the same mindset as the others, rise above it, have faith that keeping your integrity and principles will get you what you need. God did we learn that lesson well!
So that very day I redesigned our Facebook page, and I advertised RD as available for work on the local sites. Within an hour he had a job to start, with a person who came to be our friend. She had been let down and ripped off before by other people in the area, but once RD had spent three days with her the trust had been built and she gave him a fabulous review which I could then use to further promote our service. Life had spurred me on to do what I had the skill to do.
In the next two day I set up a website with our ethos ‘If A Jobs Worth Doing It’s Worth Doing Well’ and I advertised us on the local sites twice a week.
Now it was common for other English in the area to then comment negatively on other people’s posts, and believe me I had my fair share of that. But I was not prepared to be bullied by others, as I was back in ‘work mode’. If they were rude I would answer them brusquely and professionally, they could never respond because more often they were lying or just being negative. On one post a lady put that ‘it would be good if you answered your emails.’ Now I was in charge of all admin, and trust me when I say I am always on top of it. I went back through any contact confirming that no email had been received, so I told her so, in firm professional and businesslike way, also advising her that she was being rude in her tone. It was clear she was lying, but at that point other people took interest and answered her, appreciating the fact that I had put a stop to the nastiness. From there RD got a job with a lovely couple, who were respected in the area. We stood by our principles and they gave him another fabulous review, and work took off from there.
But France is tough, for every euro you earn you have to pay a minimum of 25% in social security, irrespective of any costs that are not taken into account, and before any tax is deducted. This meant that very often RD was working for less than a euro an hour. We survived that year, stuck to our principles and even refused work when people wanted us to cut corners. RD did some fabulous work and we built a client base and even had work in the winter (so hard in France).
But still it was difficult and still the discussion around whether to stay went on. One sunny day in March we walked down our road, looking out across the valleys and agreed that ‘Life would show us the way.’
It was in the Spring that year that I bought ‘The Book Of Awakening’ by Mark Nepo, and RD would read a passage most mornings as we drank our early morning tea. We found that each passage seemed to resonate with our thoughts at that time, and more and more we questioned what we were doing. But still we stayed.
As work came in we took it that the message from Life was to stay in France. But I think Life is more subtle than that at times, so over time we realised how we were still struggling, it wasn’t as hard, but it was still a struggle. We loved our French neighbours, and French friends, we loved our home and it’s location, and there were times we were confused as to the message life was sending. Now I know that Life was showing us, as it so often does, that even with fairly regular work in France it was still an existence. More than anything it was challenging us to still be honest with ourselves and ask ourselves did we want to ‘just exist?’
Over the course of the year we met people who would say how difficult it was to live in the old stone houses, and how they had sold up because of the problems. They look lovely but they are hard work. Then I cleaned a lady’s house who was returning to the UK, after living in France for ten years. When I asked her why she was leaving she explained that she felt life went in ten year cycles, and that we should always consider change as the cycle grows old. It resonated with me and I knew that Life meeting her was one of Life’s messages.
In the summer we read March the 7th passage from ‘The Book Of Awakening’ entitled ‘Let Go Of The Rice’. It is one of the things that changed the way I look at life, or should I say ‘us’. It said it all, how monkeys are caught in traps because they do not believe that what they need will come, because they live in fear, and consequently lose their lives when all they had to do was ‘let go of the rice.’ And that was it, we understood and we started to look at houses in Ireland.
In the August of that year I was ill, I have written how we had no health insurance and how it frightened me. It was life asking me to consider what we would do, whether France was really the right place for us. It’s bad enough being ill, add the complications of language and it is multiplied a thousand times. To reinforce its message Life sent us work with people whose husbands had suffered strokes, or sadly deteriorated from Dementia, and all of them were having horrendous problems in the French system. I found myself questioning how we would survive (there’s that word again!) as we got older. When chopping our own wood no-longer became an option, when RD could no-longer work. I couldn’t find work in France, no matter how I tried, not enough to support us. I questioned whether I wanted to grow old in France, and after I was ill in the August those doubts began to build, but still we persevered, until in the end, as she so often does Life started to hit us round the head to make us listen……
More to come…
Rosie
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RD and I are getting restless. Ever the home-makers after twelve weeks of living in our rental we want to move on into our own house and start to build our lives.
Now don’t get me wrong, I am grateful for this lovely little cottage we are renting. The landlord is so lovely, and the crofters around us have been so welcoming and friendly. But it’s not our home, and with our things still in France I have tried to make it as homely as possible buying some things we will need for our new house and using them here. I love our pretty crystal lights, currently on our bedside tables, but probably destined for our new living room.
Having always been a homebody there is of course nothing like a cushion or throw. The animals love them too…
Kittens on our day ed in Montaigu Wiglet in her old French Antique Cot, it didn’t make the move to Ireland.
Sadly most of my cushions are in France, and some didn’t make the move, so I brought some throws and cushions with us, as many as I could shove under the dogs without their heads touching the roof of the van! Knowing we will need some more I bought some from trusty Ikea, and I have made the living room as much our own as I could.
But it’s not home, no cherubs, no pretty curtains, no bed with crystals or little stars, no vintage French mirrors.
Home
As those that read my blog know the views here have been nothing but breathtaking, and we count our blessings for the opportunity to live here.
But before we moved here we used the lessons we had learnt: in not letting our hearts run away with us, and we drew up a list of our ‘idyll’ for where we wanted to live. With one of the biggest things being that we didn’t want to be in the middle of nowhere. We need to work, we want to work, we have realised that we don’t want to retire, yet, so we need to be nearer to where work is available. We also wanted to be near amenities, but still in the peace of the countryside; where we are now is literally at the tip of a little peninsula, surrounded by sea with a fifteen minute drive just to get out onto the main road, stunningly beautiful, but also remote. There is always a compromise.
All of that has served to re-enforce that we want to be near to a community, including shops, pubs (of course!) and a hub.
Carrickfin Beach and Donegal Airport.
Look at the picture above and you will see a small road on the right hugging the coastline, follow that road up into the outcrop and we currently live at the very end of that little outcrop on the left, literally right by the sea. You cannot even see the house we are so far out. It really is a spectacular place to be, and for a short stay or holiday I personally don’t think it could be beaten. But to get to any main town to work you have to drive almost an hour and a half up through the mountains, so it is impacting on finding work because once our current address is seen we would probably be excluded due to the journey. (Although I think that may be life trying to tell us something.)
Add to all of this that we are surrounded by houses on all sides, as is normal with crofts, it also means that there are other dogs all around us and Wiglet is constantly on a state of high alert. She had a bad start in life, put in a pound with other dogs who beat the crap out of her, so being able to see other dogs in our garden from all angles is her idea of a nightmare. We are stressed because she is stressed and we need to de-stress her.
Wiglet and her Wonky Smile
Poor Harley has constantly been on a lead when we take him out for nearly four months and we can see that he is depressed, which is hardly surprising given that he had the run of an acre of land in Montaigu
Harley, Waiting Patiently
So it’s time to move and things are on their way, more to come……
Rosie
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This is a blog I love, he has the courage to say what he thinks. Such a rare thing in this day and age. So here is a quote from it…
‘It is difficult to be optimistic when intelligent friends say that they lack ‘permission’ to travel more than 5 miles for a walk, or that the most destructive British public policies of the past century that also trample on inalienable human rights are somehow worth getting behind. And when the Labour Party that I once voted for bends over and gives the Tories a free pass.’
Pretty much sums it up for me. All I have ever asked is that people ‘think’. Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, or so I thought, when did that change?
What do I take from this pandemic? I will be stepping away from some, for my own sanity.
Parts of the BBC have been pumping out streams of dung for years. One of the worst elements is the virtue-signalling and persuasion inserted slyly …
As I started to write this post the realisation came to me that I will actually see all the seasons in Ireland for the first time this year. It just seemed like a revelation, because we only visited in the summer when I was a child, therefore I never saw Ireland in any other guise.
I learned to really respect the seasons during my time in France. I wrote often of them, especially Spring and Autumn, with both seasons representing change: one welcomes life, one tries to teach us to understand death, and letting go. Life’s ever evolving pattern.
I am looking forward to what the seasons in Ireland will bring, having already experienced the Winter with it’s hooleys and snowy mountains! So many Irish people said how we needed to wrap up warm because of the cold winds, but we were used to them from living on our little house on the hill in Northern France for six years, the winter did not phase us, but the scenery blew us away…
Earrach …It is the first day of Spring today
Earrach means Spring in Gaelic, and there are three days considered to be the first day of Spring in Ireland, but in Ireland the one most consider the first day of Spring is the 1st of February. It’s known as Imbolc ( which means ‘in the belly’ referring to the pregnant ewes) in line with Gaelic tradition, and was a day to celebrate the end of a harsh winter and the coming of warmer weather, being the midway point between the Winter and Spring equinox, it was also the opportunity to rebuild stocks, and for milk to be available. It’s also known as St Brigid’s Day.
A Picture Depicting Brigid The Pagan Goddess
Now there are two schools of thought on this: Brigid was a pagan goddess whose pagan ceremony was held on the 1st of February, as she was also considered the patroness of early Spring. Then suddenly in medieval times, and quite fortuitously, a nun by the same name came along with all the same attributes of the goddess Brigid, how weird! And guess what? She was made a Saint, whose celebratory day was also the 1st of February. I don’t know, it seems to happen so often, how these Christian holidays and Saints day tie in with pagan ones. Must just be coincidence! Poor old pagan Goddess Brigid was elbowed out of the way and her day was given to a prioress who supposedly helped the poor. That’s not to diss St Brigid, she is now considered a patron saint of Ireland, and probably liked to have a good old knees up and a drink with St Patrick!
But that’s not the end of it, all is not lost the Irish still have a soft spot for Brigid the pagan goddess, and still make the pagan crosses to hang on their doors to welcome The goddess who would visit them on the first day of Spring.
The Pagan Cross of Brigid
Now, believing what you will, Spring in Ireland traditionally starts on the 1st of February for logical reasons: the days get longer, the weather starts to warm up (although when hail was sheeting down on us last week you wouldn’t have thought so!) and the flowers start to break through. In fact last week we watched in wonder, with tears in our eyes from laughter as the crofter tried to put two lambs in the field behind his house, he picked one up and carried it to the field, then he went back for the second as the first followed him back bleating it’s head off, bless him he must have done it at least five times until he got someone else to help him. If I can I am going to ask if I can see them, taking the chance that I may never eat lamb again if I do.
Over the last two weeks we have had hail, snow, rain (of course it’s Ireland!) and beautiful warm sunshine. They do say that March comes in like a lion and out like a lamb! With all this weather we have had some fabulous cloud phenomena over the mountains, it’s like seeing an ever changing painting, and we are loving it.
Mount Errigal with Levanter clouds around the bottom
There is nothing like warm Spring sunshine to give you hope, and despite all the madness in the world today nature goes on her way, doing what she needs to do, no lockdowns for her!
In Donegal where we are putting down roots the Gaelic language is still the main language, although all those we have met have kindly spoken English to us. Most signs in our area are in Gaelic, and I plan to learn some as the years go on.
I believe it’s important to embrace the culture of where you live, even more so when it’s your heritage. It should help that I learned quite a bit of French because I notice how a lot of Gaelic words are very close to some French words. Although the French are mainly considered Gauls, many people in Brittany consider themselves Celts, and so the link continues.
I am lost on the pronunciation however, although I am getting my head around some of it involving dropping the syllables, for example Donegal … Dún na nGall, when you say it quickly it sounds the same but has a gutteral intonation.
My actual name is Moira, I use Rosie as a pseudonym because of my book, but at times it pisses me off that I lose my own identity due to that. Given that Moira is an Irish Gaelic name, derived from Celtic, I think it’s important now I live in Ireland to own it and embrace the Gaelic language.
Moira comes from the name Máire which means bitter, beloved, drop of the sea. How apt then that I have chosen to live in a place surrounded by the sea. It’s good to see that my name is right up there with Boudicca, it explains my strength, being able to fight my own corner and my hate of injustice since as long as I can remember.
I have always felt closer to my Irish roots than my English. I am proud of England for many things, mainly their stoic approach to the second world war; for whilst I am not someone who condones war I understand that from all wars that war was probably the one most necessary. Britain was up against it where that war was concerned, and they stood their ground, eventually convincing others of its need; but I think it’s important to also remember that WWI was a pre-cursor to it’s cause.
I don’t buy into the crap of ‘let’s make Britain great again’, or watching the 1966 World Cup Final over and over again. It was 55 years ago, lets move on FFS!
I have never felt a sense of English pride, not when I look back through our history and listened to my dad’s experience where Ireland was concerned. Sadly, including my time in France, there have been many times when I have been ashamed of my English heritage, including that sense of entitlement and grabbiness that I have found on my travels, perhaps that comes from all those times in our history that we have just ‘taken’ other’s countries! Then there is football hooliganism: Jack Charlton was so ashamed he gave up the Irish Football Managers job because of it. Or when I holidayed in Turkey and the other English guests ran down to put their Union Jack towels on their sun-beds, there was no other person from any other country (mostly from Germany) who did. Where did that myth about the germans putting their towels on the sunbeds come from? I know some people will read this and say ‘well other nations do that too!’ But I am half English, I’m not speaking for ‘other nations’.
Let us not forget all the times my relatives would call my dad the ‘thick Paddy’, when he was the cleverest of them all. So clever he never felt the need to put them straight, he knew he had the last laugh when he left them to drown in their own ignorance and ego.
Perhaps my Irish ancestry is coming through. I know that’s why I have been thinking about my dad more than ever and finally understanding him, more than ever. We learn and evolve, if we want to.
Where Gaelic is concerned some of the words are familiar to me and I understand them, it may be that my Irish DNA is coming through and my ancestors memories are finally starting to show themselves.
I do feel as if I am finally home.
Deireadh seachtaine maith a bheith agat
Moira
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Our first St Patrick’s Day and Ireland is in lockdown! No pubs open, no parades, only virtual ones that RD is going to watch for the marching bands. That’s something I have never shared that RD was in a marching band until he was 27, he even travelled to the USA to compete, so that part of Ireland is really going to resonate with him. Me, it’s not my thing, but I will love the atmosphere when the parades take place next year (we’re going down the positive route now!)
But sadly this St Patricks Day is a subdued affair (or perhaps a celebration that is being held behind closed doors away from prying eyes for some.) It is a bank holiday here in Ireland, but as we heard the assistant in our local Cope yesterday they will be open because ‘sure what else is there for people to do?’ A classic Irish way to look at things! Who ever thought that supermarket shopping could be so exciting!
We’re just having a quiet day, we won’t be eating boiled ham and cabbage, the traditional Irish meal for Paddy’s day,, although I was brought up with it and have converted RD. But we will toast St Paddy, and wait until next year to fully celebrate then.
St Patrick’s Day is celebrated all over the world, including Japan, Turkey, Argentina, and many more, Montserrat even has a bank holiday to celebrate (who knew!) I think it’s the infectious enthusiasm of the Irish just spreads across the world. Or as I put it when RD asked me if there were Irish in Japan: ‘Of course there are, the Irish get everywhere!’ I realised then that I have followed that tradition, being Irish by descent, and have so far been in England, France and now back to the homeland. I understand that pull to return.
St Patrick was it appears a saint that liked to have a drink or two, he sounds like my kind of man. Folkelore says that when he went into the pub and ordered a drink the landlord served his drink in short measure and St Patrick was having none of it. He was the man who introduced Christianity to Ireland, but I think the Irish respect him because he came back to Ireland after being a child slave here, to bring ‘The Faith’ to the Irish. Although I’m not into religion I respect the man for that.
Happy St Patrick’s Day folks
Rosie
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I’ve had this post in my mind ever since we moved because it’s about how we look at life and ultimately how we came to go on another adventure. It’s not a post for those who want to ‘stay safe’ and thereby close their minds and talk themselves out of opportunity; it’s a post for those who are feeling restless, feel a strong urge to make change, or to just change the way they view things.
There are so many things that happened that got us to where we are today I will break them down into a series of posts. I hope they get some of you thinking. So here goes..
The biggest change to RD and I since embarking on our adventures has been the way we think. I have said for many years that ‘life will show us the way’, but our adventure in France made us see that it really did, if we listened.
When we arrived in France, in the first year we were there our Jeep broke down numerous times. No matter how many times we had it repaired something else went wrong with it. But still we persisted because we had paid over the odds for it, we liked it and we didn’t want to acknowledge that we had been ‘had’ and it was a heap of shit. Life was telling us to let it go, and each time something went wrong it was a problem that was worse than the one before. It took us two years and the wheel falling off it as RD was driving (luckily slowly at that moment in time) for us to realise that life was telling us to let it go! But that was not the end of the lessons.
Before we moved RD bought a flatbed truck, it was only six years old, but within the first eighteen months the engine blew up!
When we first moved into our house we turned the water on and it poured through the ceiling from the shower, we also discovered as winter drew in that the heating didn’t work. In the first year I wrote often of the cold, but we persevered because we had made our decision and we HAD to make it work. I did write a Post about our adventures a year in, reading it now made me smile because we had so much more to learn.
Our Old Green Door
In the March of 2016, after only seven months of living in our house, the roof blew off our kitchen. It was at that point, as RD stood at our old knackered door, where the water seeped through when the rain lashed down, that he looked out and his subconscious said out loud ‘Here we are, living the dream!’
By 2016 I had also started to read the book ‘Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life’ the book of Tao, and it helped me to keep going because I understood that where there is bad there is good, and it enabled us to keep going, because there was good, in the shape of our beautiful old house, and our surroundings; add to that our love for each other and son and our animals.
I remember now talking RD round, out of this mindset, but when looking back I can see that it was ‘life’ trying to get us to question what we had done. I even painted and tried to renovate our old door, it looked fab, but it still leaked and we still weren’t getting it!
In my old post I wrote with hope that we were just waiting for the insurance company to pay for the replacement, which of course they never did. It was one of our lessons about France don’t trust the insurance companies . Over the years we would come to add the un-regulated, at times corrupt banking system to a long list of what wasn’t right for us. No wonder French people protest!
We had tarpaulins on our roof for nearly three years. When it rained, and trust me when it rained it blew across the open countryside and hammered our lovely house on the hill, we had bowls all over the kitchen catching the water. But still we carried on.
We learned from it all, we learned patience, and that sometimes things we think are catastrophic are not, you survive.
Work was difficult, we were starting to realise that the English people that we had to interact with were pretty awful (I’m being polite) in fact that was a continuous lesson right up to the day we left France.
In the September of 2016 a tornado ripped through our garden demolishing everything in its path. But we persevered, we held on to what I thought was ‘hope’ when in fact it was the fear of letting go of what was not a dream, in fact ‘life’ was telling us it wasn’t the right path for us.
But we didn’t listen to the messages life was sending us, and so they got worse and in 2017 our well ran dry. We had no water, nada, none, and again RD’s subconscious tried to get him to listen and he went down. Our wonderful French friends came to the rescue again and we had water connected via Marc’s supply until we could find the funds to have water connected. At nearly three thousand euros that was no mean feat, and we lived like that for eighteen months. But again we survived, the adventure in France taught us a lesson about ourselves, and how resilient we are, as we showered each other using a watering can.
It was in 2018 that we started to read ‘The Book of Awakening’ by Mark Nepo, we would read it together and consider each lesson. We are still reading it today, and it taught us one of the biggest lessons: Let Go.
We had a fabulous summer of 2018, I remember laying on a lilo on our pool in the baking sun and thinking ‘I am in my garden’. I understand now that summer happened to enable us to love what we had, before things started to change and we became enlightened in that it was time to consider change. We thought at that time that things were getting better, but in fact all our plans fell through and by the December I was starting to understand that life really was trying to tell us something.
By January of 2019 we found ourselves with no work and no funds, chopping up falling logs in the garden to try and heat the house after RD wasn’t paid for a job he had done (a common thing in that area of France sadly where English clients were concerned). Our new roof had leaked, and one night just as we went to bed I asked RD if he thought staying in France was the right thing to do and he answered honestly ‘I don’t know.’ Then he promptly started to snore as I lay awake in the darkness contemplating our life and our future. I was afraid, but I also realised that what I was actually afraid of was letting go, and so we finally started to listen….
More to come
Rosie
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