The Rocky Road To Ireland, Part Two: Please Control Your Children

Days 7 to 1 (24-30 June 2025)

ITINERARY:

Tuesday 24 June 10:50: flight to Nantes, hire car, drive to a holiday park near St Nazaire for 6 days

Monday 30 June 19:10: flight to Dublin, arrival time, 19:50

Tuesday 1 July morning: drive to Leitrim, start all over again

The plane lifted into the baking Spanish air at a little before eleven in the morning on Tuesday 24 June. As soon as it was airborne, I felt a lot of the poison of the previous few months seemed to dissipate as we climbed higher and glided further away from Valencia.

Let me give you a little rundown of the (abridged) list of reasons we decided to leave Valencia:

·      For almost the entire time we lived in the apartment by the sea, we were being systematically targeted by the neighbour directly below us. He and his partner resented the fact they had only ever had someone living above them for two months of the year. For the rest of the time they had no direct neighbours. We had six punctured tyres over a period of 18 months, and a glued matchstick in the main door lock, which I luckily discovered before it had dried. He also invited his friends over for frequent gatherings that went on until 1 or 2 in the morning. He thought we were bothered by it, but once we went to our bedrooms, we could hardly hear a thing. We had periodically neighbours above us and their one child was noisier than our three combined. We barely noticed. I can only imagine the guy had issues with us other than the noise.

·       On a similar note, there is a higher and more obvious number of highly-strung people than I have ever encountered. I think this is because everyone lives on top of each other in urban zones and the vast majority of the rest of the country is empty. It’s like an overcrowded mini-Australia: everyone is conglomerated around the coastline and at the central capital, and the rest is a brown barren wasteland. Because of the claustrophobic atmosphere, I was often on the receiving end of a colossal amount of vindictiveness, despite frequently not knowing what I had done.

·       An example of this is as follows – I gave one of the Club Hemingway regulars a lesson in choice of word to use, as he had uttered something unacceptable (the most unacceptable word in the English language, several times), and he started bombarding my blog with DDoS bots. I still get them today, despite this having taken place in March. He also decided to wreak revenge on another person involved with the event by sabotaging their relationship with a mutual acquaintance of his. This caused a lot of upheaval, and the sociopathic firestarter doesn’t care.

·       You can find the rest at the end of this article. They’re quite biting, so don’t read them if you don’t think it’s constructive.

It was for these very reasons that now we were airborne, and Spain was thankfully part of our past. We chose to move to Ireland because we all said that we would prefer to smile in the rain than pout and strut in the sun. A lot of expats in Spain suffer from Shiny Object Syndrome: they put aside the fact Spain is a mess, because of the sun. Most don’t actually interact with the administration, so they have no idea just how disorganised and byzantine the system is – it’s like they’re on a perpetual holiday without a front desk.

Before we reached Ireland, though, we were due to take a short break in western France, close to Brittany. The flight to Nantes was just under two hours. The problem we have faced on several occasions has been one of infant self-expression. In Spain, this wasn’t an issue as everyone’s so loud, but it was about to become one with a hypocritical couple on the flight. She was on the left, he on the right, two rows in front. She had her hair rudely draped over the back of her seat and was preening herself in between locking lips with him. I guessed either honeymoon or (more likely) poolside Instagram private hideaway alone with only him and her uninterested online followers. Dainoris was playing with Milda from his seat behind, and Milda was squealing with laughter. It wasn’t particularly loud and it had only really just begun. The man got a little animated and headed up towards me.

“Please control your children. They are making a lot of noise,” said @InstaPoolGrrl’s current pet boyfriend and unwitting spokesman.

“You can try, but it’s like herding cats,” I replied.

“Let me speak to them,” he declared, in the heroic manner his boss lady expected. He even put his fist to his chest, as if he was remaking Spartacus. Then he addressed the three of them like an army tank driver explaining a complicated manoeuvre to a bunch of cyclists at a vegan convention. He had had absolutely no experience of talking to anyone outside his age range. The children looked bewildered, nodded out of sheer politeness, and carried on their little game as if they’d just clicked “skip” on a pointless YouTube ad.

Draped InstaHairdo

He didn’t come over again, but I could clearly see he was trying hard to explain to his social media employer-lover with the stray hair why he had failed. When we landed and she passed our row, I gave her one of my “WTF?” Death Stares. She tried hard to avoid eye contact, and walked on as if nothing had happened.

We landed at Nantes Airport and were immediately greeted with a bearable breeze and a huge pile of luggage to fit into a Toyota BZ4X electric car that I had booked for us. And rather fortunately, because any other car in a similar category would have required two journeys.

The Toyota BZ4X ConsonantGasm is a beast. It has everything I have ever expected out of a car: it not only looks sleek, it has Assisted Cruise Control to the extent that it is virtually self-driving. On top of that, it takes off from zero at a ludicrous speed. At one set of traffic lights, some jerk in a Merc tried to overtake me by choosing the bus lane next to mine with the intention of accelerating faster than me in my 22-Point Lay In Scrabble Car. Nope. The Toyota just left the other one for dust. Moral of the story: don’t mess with a German-trained driver in a Japanese battery-operated car.

I stacked our stuff in the belly of the beast and we drove the hour-and-a-half to our holiday park in the picturesque countryside of the Loire-Atlantique. The French reputation for bad driving is actually quite a myth; at least in these parts. The refreshing sight of drivers using their indicators for the most part correctly, and keeping to within the speed limits, was a revelation. I did have a few nasty encounters with local drivers, but that could have been because our car had a 75 licence plate, meaning it was registered in central Paris, the epicentre of French vitriol and resentment. We were potential unwitting pariahs on the highways of western France.

All this luggage and five people need to squeeze in there

Arriving at the holiday park, I felt another great weight lifting off my shoulders – we had made the journey this far with all our stuff. And what a place it was: nestled under some fine mature trees, the beautifully designed domain contained everything we needed to enjoy a few days decompressing from the stress of leaving Valencia and taking approximately 130 kilograms of our belongings on the first leg of our journey to Ireland. There was a superb swimming area with a heated indoor pool, an outdoor pool with an island, bridge, waterfall and kids’ paddling zone, another pool with three water slides; and the crowning glory, a sand-filled beach-style pool about three times bigger than the rest. The bar and restaurant had a pool table, darts board, video games, table football, and a good selection of drinks. Everything worked correctly, and none of it looked outdated. Don’t know about the food, I cooked every evening.

The holiday park early in the morning at its calmest

Hidden under a canopy of pine and deciduous trees, the place had a special level of acoustics: the kind that makes it feel like you’re in a large room. The central driveway passed some stone-built lodges in amongst all the mobile homes before arriving at the manor house at the end. Our own accommodation was a hundred metres from the entrance on a branch track on the left. It had everything we needed, even four bedrooms. My first job was to empty the luggage from the car, which had manifested itself as carrier of the most cumbersome pile of uselessness this side of Air Force One, then go to the supermarket and get in some provisions for the week. The receptionist told me there was one just a few minutes’ drive away, which suited me perfectly. I was spent as it was, but there was still a whole evening to get through, and the kids were both wired and tired.

The following day was slightly windy and cool, in the low twenties. We took a drive in the area, visiting some of the towns and villages, just relaxing and letting our bodies adjust to the new interim situation.

Awaiting lunch in Carnac town centre

The day after was slightly warmer but with the odd rain shower around. We decided to head into Brittany and go to Carnac, the famed location of the standing stone alignments. There are over three-thousand standing stones here, about 5,000 years old. There are also menhirs, tumuli, dolmens and row upon row of stones, probably used for important ceremonies. Mainly granite, some of the stones weighed several tons, and were transported from the wider area. The planning, transportation, arrangement, and placement of these megaliths would have required a great deal of teamwork and creativity. The children were fascinated by these formations and had a lot of questions. We have now filled in their missing history issue of what came after the dinosaurs.

   

The Three Little Monsters at Carnac

Another excursion involved a visit to St Nazaire, a large seaport and site of one of the most breathtaking stories of World War Two. Take a look at Operation Chariot, and you will understand what happened there – it’s incredible. Jeremy Clarkson did a BBC documentary on it in the mid-2000s. The town itself is nothing special now, obviously, as it was rebuilt after the War, but the cafés and shops down near the beach are lovely. We sat and had some fast food, which the French oddly seem to specialise in. I did find a decent goat’s cheese salad, though. The rest tucked in to edible yellow, orange and brown oily grub.

St Nazaire seafront

A cold wind was blowing quite viciously, which made a difference to the hair drier breeze we had back in Valencia, but there were still people sunbathing. My guess is they were from stronger stock than those in Spain: there was a lot of blue sky but plenty of fluffy clouds to cast shadows. Dainoris wanted to see the submarine, so we took a stroll to the Local History Museum; it was cheap and close by. However, it was an airless former warehouse and the submarine was in another museum. He was devastated to the extent that he started smashing up the city infrastructure and needed restraining, but the sight of a crêperie took his mind off it. We hadn’t had dessert, so we didn’t need an excuse to enter.

Livia poses in front of a huge model of an ocean liner

Reaching the car, I drove back to the holiday village. The weather was about to turn warmer, so the following day we resolved to spend some time mooching at the pool. Just doing nothing and having no plan, deciding from moment to moment what to do, no regrets, was such a pleasant change that even on the evening before we had to depart, we felt serene and rested: a stark difference to what was about to befall us.

Due to the mountain of bags we had taken, earlier on in the week, I had decided to remove a great deal of items and send them by post to lower the burden and Ryanair extra baggage costs. The car would then be just totally full, rather than ludicrously overburdened, and the rest of our journey would be easier.

The children were having a great time interacting with other kids in the huge pool area, and we were regretting only booking for a few days. I think we will have to return to that place, as it is so beautiful and there is so much to see and do in the area.

The pool area before opening time

On the morning of 30 June, 2025, we filled the car and set off for Nantes Airport. We needed to be there by 1pm to return the car, although the flight wasn’t until after 7 in the evening. I wasn’t sure how we were going to fill up the rest of the day, but I guessed we’d soon find out. We stopped at a shopping centre with an electric filling station for an hour on the way, going shopping and having a much-needed drink while we waited.

The Beast

At a quarter to one, the employee at the car hire firm took the best car I’ve ever driven and promised me the deposit would be returned within the week. Then we loaded the luggage onto three trolleys and went into the airport to await our flight. Nantes Airport is not that large, and soon we had seen everything the place had to offer. Outside was an angry 38C, but we at least had a little respite from that in the terminal building. I say a little, the building is one of the worst terminals I have ever seen: there are nearly no places to sit on the lower floors, although the aircon was working almost adequately. Upstairs, where there were sections of roof letting in the sunlight, there were plenty of places to sit but it was like being in an airless greenhouse with no plants.

We struggled around like cats looking for a place to sleep. It was lunchtime but nowhere was really doing it for us – we settled on a few snacks from some sandwich chain and looked for a place to have a drink. Around the side, away from everything, there was a café with ample seating. We had struck gold – but then, once we had put our three trolleys at a table making it harder to leave, I turned around to witness an apparition so horrifying and so sickening that I felt nauseous in the pit of my stomach: the circular green logo with the crowned siren staring at me from the walls. We had entered  a Starbucks. This was the lowest point of the year. Any self-respecting coffee drinker entering one of these establishments has either got lost or saw a thief entering one with his/her stuff.

But here we were, and there was little possibility to turn around, so I held my nose and reluctantly joined the queue. The cup sizes increased from tankard to bathtub to cement truck. Did I want the jug of marshmallow espresso, the bucket of skinny cinnamon frothy latte, the barrel of pork belly corndog monster crush with a mouthwash chaser, or the bladder-busting tanker of iced salted caramel americano, woodchip or charcoal sprinkles with an optional incontinence pad?

I asked if they had ordinary cup size, and after a knowing side-glance to each other, they found a one-use cup the size of a proper household mug and filled it with what they considered coffee. It wasn’t bad, but I’m afraid I have too much self-respect to ever go in another Starbucks again. They had some rather bland cakes and coloured ring-shaped ones which seemed to have more sugary icing than dough. I opted for none at all, as did the kids, which was telling.

I hate food and drink chain outlets with a visceral passion usually reserved for my nemeses, but I reserve a particular level of bitterness towards any establishment that can ruin coffee. It’s so demeaning to a noble and rich cultural symbol of civilisation. So what Starbucks has done to it is like watching your favourite author sign up to appear in the jungle reality show, or your most cherished auntie being arrested for housing a crack den. These propagators of junk drinks should be taken to court to wrest the good name of coffee back from their barbaric clutches. Maybe, like those other EU regulations, they can be forced to call themselves “coffee-based drink outlets” or “coffee-themed drinks dispensers with seating”.

We stayed just long enough to drink our coffee-flavoured milkshakes and get out of there before we were spotted. There’s a reason why this chain has found it rough to conquer Italy or Australia – two countries with a rich tradition in real coffee. The perfectly balanced flat white is an Australian creation, and one I relish drinking.

So we preferred to stand and wait at the airless check-in area for 45 minutes before they opened than to sit on a chair in Starbucks. A matter of protecting one’s pride, even to the detriment of our comfort. The children were getting seriously irritating by this point, as they had been in this matrix for nearly five hours. Livia was rolling on the floor and the other two were running around screaming. Everyone else there was too exhausted to care: including us.

At a minute after the allotted time, the Ryanair agent appeared and started calling us to check in our luggage. She didn’t make a fuss like those at Valencia; she just did her job and smiled. She was very good at handling a crowd. We then made our way upstairs with the rest of our belongings and did the usual modus operandi for boarding: all so functional. We settled into our seats on the plane and awaited take-off. There were six seats in our row and as we sat there staring at the evening haze rising off the scorched tarmac, the sixth spot was filled by a lovely Irish mother who had a really good rapport with Dainoris. It was a revelation to listen to their conversation. If this was the type of thing we could expect in the future, I felt very positive.

EXTRA PHOTOS:

A typical sight on the roads of Brittany

Carnac is a lovely town

Dainoris and Milda in Carnac

Some of the magnificent trees in the area

The standing stones are very impressive

You can touch some of the ones on the raised path

Livia skirts a play area on St Nazaire beach

Shady trees

The play area at the holiday park

A viewing platform at Carnac

CAUTION, STRONG LANGUAGE AHEAD:

Below is the rest of the list of reasons we left Spain. Read at your peril!

• ·       The contemptibly inept administration, both regional and national, is a labyrinthine mess not fit for purpose. It can only be rehabilitated if the country is taken over by a benevolent dictator from another country with a doctorate in state reform and a master in infrastructure planning. Whether getting a residence certificate, applying for a solar panel grant, or seeking a school for your kids, you can find yourself being refused, told that the service is not available, or being granted an appointment very far in the future.
• ·       Using the government apps is like playing one of those online games where you always end up losing but you think you’re close to cracking it, so if you go through the whole bloody process again after being kicked out, you’ll maybe get what you want. But you never do and around and around you go. Also, going physically to the administration can be time-consuming and you may get sent away with a long list of items you need to bring along next time.
• ·       Spain is a low-trust society. For example, you need to show ID everywhere, even to receive a package at your own front door. They’d nail the sea to the floor if they could.
• ·       On the whole, Spanish people are pretty indifferent to outsiders. This is not a blanket national status – some do actually attempt to make friends with you, but until you get invited to their house for dinner, you are still just an acquaintance. In our coworking space, there were mainly foreign nationals, but there was one group of Spanish lads that occupied an office at the back. They sometimes said hello, but we’d never knew if they were there except for when the toilet had been desecrated.
• ·       Furthermore, you will find that you will be blamed for not integrating, despite the fact that they don’t actually allow you to. They will complain that you are always hanging out in your expat bubble and that you don’t eat a hearty dinner at the ungodly hour of 10pm, but you will hardly ever see the inside of a Spanish friendship circle. If you do, you’re probably there to be deliberately made to feel impressed by the array of food on display and to be questioned on why you moved to sunny Spain and didn’t stay in your cloud-covered hovel in the depressed north. Expected answers will be induced, of course, and they’ll feel better about themselves. Everyone who goes to these stitch-ups usually ends up betraying their origins and the Spanish will feel nicely puffed up.
• ·       To deal with the overcrowding and housing crisis, there is a campaign to limit the scope of tourist rentals. Expats and tourists are to blame, apparently, for the high housing costs. The guiris go home movement has a large following, especially in Valencia, Málaga, the Balearics, and Barcelona. You would say this is maybe a good thing, except for one glaring hole in the plan: most of the properties are owned by Spanish people. Many Spanish have second homes, usually inherited, so lots of them make some extra money by renting their other properties out for a supreme amount of money during the season or from September to June.
• ·       Not all do, though: a large number leave their second residences empty for most of the year and just go there to get out of the city. In the apartment block where we were living, there were 42 apartments, meaning that well over 200 people could have been housed in there. But it remained empty for most of the year, and just during the more important holidays, plus mid-June to late August, the car parks filled up to the edges of the highway outside. The rest of the year the entire estate was a desolate, soulless concrete jungle where even the only shop closed.
• ·       If anything, the Spanish caused their own property bubble, but they are too caught up in their own mirror-gazing to notice. It could have been so much different, but the Valencian propensity to think only about themselves and blame everyone else for their rotten lives (which aren’t that rotten, but they are badly afflicted by victim mentality) has made sure your position in the local fabric of society is volatile, and unlikely to change any time soon.

The Rocky Road To Ireland, Part One: Leaving Valencia

Days 12 to 8 (19-23 June 2025)

ITINERARY:

Thursday 19 June: hosting the second anniversary edition of Club Hemingway at Radio City

Friday 20 June: hosting the last World Tour of Valencia at Batumi, Mestalla

Monday 23 June 17:00: return our leased car to the depot, check in to the hotel near Valencia airport

Tuesday 24 June 10:50: flight to Nantes, hire car, drive to a holiday park near St Nazaire for 6 days

Monday 30 June 19:10: flight to Dublin, arrival time, 19:50

Tuesday 1 July morning: drive to Leitrim, start all over again

Valencia from above

When people say they would like to bid a proper farewell to the place they have spent a long time in, things don’t always go according to plan in the strictest sense. There is a lot of cleaning up, strategic packing, agonisingly throwing away things that are still useful, etc. And then, of course, there’s the food. Boy, is that a hard job. With all the stress and the impending deadlines, people don’t always have the possibility to let go in the old-fashioned sense to their current lives before the dramatic change to the next one.

I was determined not to let that happen to me – I wanted a real doozie of a send-off and no regrets. This is the direct result of what happened to us in the spring of 2023, when we had precisely seven weeks to empty our entire house and move to another country. I lost a lot of precious happy times with the children because we were always so busy. They (rightly) came to demand attention from us on several occasions per day, a juxtaposition that our panicking minds found hard to match up. We gave them a decent holiday in the Ardèche and Peñíscola, but only at the end of August. This time was going to be different. Really.

And it was.

In the twenty-two months we had spent in Valencia, I had worked hard to establish myself and have as much opportunity as possible for us all to thrive. The co-working place where I came to do my writing between dropping the kids off and picking them up was a hive of activity, and Cristina the founder and owner encouraged us to socialise. I founded the World Tour of Valencia, a monthly gastronomic event where we would go to a restaurant with the cuisine of a different country, to give us all a break from the relentless paella, patatas bravas, albóndigas, and tortillas españolas.

In truth, it was a resounding success, as it was usually on a Wednesday or Thursday night, and we never went to a restaurant in the same region of the world two times in a row. Valencia’s choice of international cuisine is a new thing: the problem is the local culture is very dominant, so it makes it hard for any interlopers to get established. Even some of the top Japanese restaurants seem to apologise for their mere existence in Valencia.

World Tour of Valencia, May 2025 - Eritrea

But we went to Korea, Afghanistan, Colombia, Lebanon, Eritrea, Persia, Morocco, Poland, and several others. The first World Tour destination in January 2024 was Batumi, a Georgian restaurant in the shadow of the world-famous Mestalla Stadium. It was so utterly impressive that in December of that year we voted to return to it.

And it was the place we finished the World Tour on 20 June. More about that in a moment. The reason I began with this is because at the second World Tour event in February 2024, one of our colleagues said he was going to be late, as he was performing a literature piece at an open mic event called Club Hemingway. It takes the format a little like karaoke, in that you put your name in a pot and you come to the stage to perform your piece when your name is pulled out.

It was learning of this monthly event that set me on the path to joining it and eventually having the honour to host it three times. The World Tour and Club Hemingway were the two elements that defined my time in Valencia. My final Club Hemingway was on Thursday 19 June, and my final World Tour the day after, unusually on a Friday, but it enabled me to be at both. At the end of the final week of our stay in Valencia. I would have regretted it had I missed out on these. There is a lot of crossover between the two events – many people interested in literature also seem to have a penchant for gastronomy, it seems – so it was often better never to schedule them for the same night. I did once and I had to leave earlier from Club Hemingway to go to a Polish restaurant a three-minute walk away.

At Club Hemingway, you are invited to write your own literature and present it in your slot for three to five minutes. At the risk of sounding conceited, I would dare to say that I had built up a formidable reputation for comedy poetry, and over the course of the year-and-a-half I had attended, also managed to become one of the performers that some came to see.

A typical Club Hemingway evening

Over the weeks and months, Cate Baum, the bestselling author and founder of Hemingway, had become a firm friend of mine, and she entrusted the hosting of the event to me while she was away for two months at the end of 2024. I was thrilled and honoured to have been given such a prominent role as the first other host. On top of this, Cate and I had spent the first half of 2025 helping each other out of various tricky situations and had become particularly close friends to the extent that we were texting each other at preposterous times of the day and night.

Some bloke with a sheet

And so she invited me to host Hemingway on the occasion of my last appearance as a resident of Spain. On Thursday 19 June 2025, I took to the stage at Radio City in the centre of Valencia to address the gathered audience and performers. Cate had made two incredible cakes for the interval, one of which had an Irish-themed green pistachio ganache and an outrageous crunchy bite to it; the other was a naughty chocolate-coated chocolate cake with extra chocolate and a side of chocolate that would have graced the menu of Café Louvre, Franz Kafka’s art deco go-to hostelry in Prague.

I would go so far as to affirm that the evening itself was one of the top five highlights of my life. I will never forget the pin-dropping silence when I began reciting my poem, the spontaneous laughter throughout, and the raucous reaction of the audience at the end, whooping like Canadians at the Stanley Cup final. I felt like a prince, and I will also never forget the love and appreciation that many regular Hemingway attendees kindly afforded me while I was there.

I love remarkably non-catchy titles to my poems, and I chose to repeat one of my previous offerings. The choices were either The Administrative Processes of Spain and Luxembourg, or The Ballad Of The Offensive National Stereotype, and the former was chosen. It rang a few bells the first time, but that night it set the place alight. Club Hemingway provides me with the motivation to write, and I never repeat my works, but this was an exception. I still had an ace up my sleeve for the end: to close out the evening a little later, I had written a short, meaningful yet amusing poem about the event which rounded off one of the most remarkable evenings that Club Hemingway has ever conjured up. I believe the event had come of age in 2025, and that was confirmed by the engagement of the participants and audience.

The second anniversary edition, 19 June 2025

After the event, I joined Cate and some others at Sueño Andaluz, a terrific tapas bar in a square round the corner. They serve some of the best tasting food in Valencia, including a plate of thinly-sliced pork in herbs. We were on a high and it showed – I felt like a threshold had been crossed in my writing career. My book is to be published soon, so I hope there will be more nights like this to come.

Then came the cold shower.

The following day, I had to get up early to take a huge amount of our belongings to our rented storage facility in a marathon run, visit various places to close down operations, and somehow be at the Georgian restaurant at 20:30 with a smile on my face. In plus-thirty temperatures.

Normally, none of the family join me for the World Tour, but this was a different sort of evening, and I felt they needed an outing to say goodbye to some of the people they had met at other events over the duration of our stay. This included a Finnish lady called Una who back in her youth had been photographed countless times – she had also been a regular at our literary nights, and had introduced us to a plethora of interesting people. Joining her was a sprightly lady from Northern England called Jane, and a man called Marco, who was quite a strong debater.

There was also Henry, a young Australian man, a deep thinker with a peripatetic conversational thread; Adrien, a French remote worker who loves his food and had built up a rapport with Dainoris. Cate of course made it too, and as always kept Livia and Milda amused.

Georgian food, if you are not familiar with it, is in my opinion one of the best in the world. When I see these silly figures that some desktop statistician has collated concerning “best [insert very subjective thing here] in the world”, it amazes me what nonsense appears. When it comes to food, if by “best”, they mean “most popular” or rather “most recognisable”, then yes, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, American and Mexican might make it pretty high, but this is because the people who get asked this type of question usually stick to fairly mainstream fare, and for the most part have probably not tried Georgian food. Or Lebanese, Polish, Vietnamese or Peruvian for that matter. Because let’s face it, very often it’s a question of marketing and the chosen professional activities of the respective diasporas.

Khachapuri Adjaruli, the second best thing I've ever put in my mouth

Una, Jane and Marco had never eaten Georgian food but they certainly polished off everything put in front of them. The food kept coming – on the World Tour, we usually get a selection of dishes and share them amongst us. Georgian food is perfect for this. Along with the food, the conversation was also quite profound and not lacking in energy at all. It was a most sublime evening; our last Friday in Valencia.

A blurred photo caused by laughter

We said a tearful and cheerful goodbye to everyone as I put The Irish Rover by the Dubliners and the Pogues on my phone and we danced down the street to our respective means of transport home. We took the car, and before the end of the street, two of the children were already sound asleep.

The weekend was hard but fruitful. Bonny Bee managed to empty the rooms one by one and I filled up the car with their contents to take to the storage facility. I made several trips from the fifth-floor apartment to the car and back, and once at the storage facility, I had to find places for everything. We also made sure we took the children to the beach for a few hours during their last weekend, and Sunday we ate at Catamarán, the restaurant across the road from our apartment building which we had frequented on many occasions. All these valedictory gestures would help us, and in particular me, to accept the fact we were moving on.

On the Monday afternoon at 5, I had to return our car to the rental place. After Shirley the Toyota Prius Plus, our first family car that we drove from Germany died a smoky death in May 2024, we had been leasing a Kia Niro. A far inferior model, it was also quite cramped and I often had trouble with the simple things like packing all the luggage we needed for our Great Iberian Road Trip last summer. We couldn’t buy too many souvenirs simply because the thing was so tightly packed, when I opened the boot a torrent of crap would fall out.

Before then, a lot of events needed to fall into place:

I had to finish taking the last stuff to the storage facility; I needed to send a parcel with the main essentials to our new home in Ireland so that it would be there when we arrived; because of the dinky size of the car, I had to drive most of our luggage to the hotel we were going to stay in for our last night next to the airport; and I had to do all this before 3pm. Because that was when Mercedes, the agent for the apartment, was coming to collect the keys and give the place the usual look-over. We would then officially be nomads.

Entering a DPD parcel shop to send my first package, I was made aware that there was an error in the code. Apparently, the shop was only for pickups, not for sending. First totally stupid error of mine, and one I shall not forget in a hurry. Still, the guy said to fill it all out and he would deal with it, which was extremely nice of him. On Thursday 26 June, I got the confirmation that the package was picked up. I’ll send him a little gift from Ireland.

Then I screeched back to the apartment and loaded as much stuff into the car as I could so that we had less to carry by hand once we dropped the car at the depot. When I returned, I saw with horror and bemusement the quantity of luggage we were going to be taking on a Ryanair flight and I recoiled in panic and distress at the very thought of trying to get this all to France then into one single hire car in Nantes Airport. In the end, it looked like a professional football team had press-ganged a bedraggled bunch of kids and their parents to cart their luggage for them.

The view from the hotel with some of the roadworks

I took it all to the hotel, and found yet another obstacle had been thrust in my way – the storms of last autumn in Valencia had taken their toll and the road outside the hotel had been badly affected. The only way to get to the hotel was to park in the petrol station below and walk up a path. Later on, the plan was to check the path to the airport so we could get all our bags there. This was hilarious: walk almost the entire perimeter of the hotel and the petrol station between parked cars and stones from the new works, go up a hill about 100 metres long and over a bridge then down into the airport taxi pickup at arrivals, and take the lift to the departures. Forget that, we’d be taking a taxi, even if it was just a matter of a few hundred metres.

I asked the receptionist of the hotel for a trolley or something to be able to manage all the stuff. I was very lucky he actually had one. I needed four trips to get all the bags upstairs, so my burning question was: how in the name of all that is reasonable were we going to get this huge pile of stuff to Nantes, let alone Leitrim?

Hurtling back to our apartment, I was not surprised to find Mercedes chatting to Bonny Bee and looking pensively at the diverse set of crap still to remove from the apartment. I had an hour until we needed to leave for the car depot, so I decided to deal with the last remnants of gear for the container while they took the final rubbish to the bins across the forecourt outside.

Then it was time for the big check-up.

After another 10 months in there, it seemed we had managed to keep things in a fairly proper state, despite the shelf falling off the wall, the main double glass door shutter belt breaking, a ship’s steering wheel dropping off its hook, and the remains of infantile behaviour on the walls and sofas. We paid a cleaning firm a generous fee and that was that.

We were also greeted by our kind-hearted neighbour, Andrés, a sprightly late-septuagenarian who still put on his Lycra gear and cycled to his field where he grew all sorts of vegetables. His warm words of farewell gave me a lump in my throat and I failed to stop the tears. He would also call a day later to check we had arrived in France. The man is an example to us all.

The clock was not just ticking towards 5pm, it was whirring and the hands were moving like a rev counter in an Italian muscle car. In fact, I calculated that even if Mercedes were to leave at that precise moment, we would be 5 minutes late at the depot. The place closed at half-past five, so we all had to get a shift on. The cosy valedictory chat with Mercedes finished at about four thirty-nine, so I strapped everyone in unceremoniously and made a beeline for the car lease place.

Two floors underground inside a hotel car park, and at least 5 kilometres from the hotel, I knew I would feel better once we got there. I called to say we’d be late and the operator said the guy would wait for us, which was nice. I may have committed a few traffic infractions on the way, but at least we got there.

A kind man, quite young, he coincidentally lived in the same town as us, 20 kilometres away. He did his job thoroughly and said everything was in order. I guess we’ll receive a bill if there is anything still to pay. We took everything out of the car, and surveyed the mess. There were a lot of loose items, a rectangular fold-up shopping basket with some shoes, a few sports bags and some other sundry junk that could have been jettisoned somewhere. Oh, and a huge child car seat.

I thought it was prudent to take a good mix of clothes to fill up our allotted suitcases, but Bonny Bee had other plans – I’m sure she would have taken the mattress if the thought had occurred to her. In the end, I had to pay a small fortune for extra luggage, and I was none too pleased about having to lug all this stuff on two planes. In fact, if truth be known, I was incensed and outraged by this. We could have done with the money for other more practical things, but I was so tired, I just let it slide.

We went upstairs into the lobby of the smart hotel above and made our way to the bar area. We were all parched after such a day. The steaming pile of garbage we were bringing with us sat by the beautifully designed mezzanine like a festering mound of abandoned trash in a palace courtyard. Not that either of us cared that much.

Outside the hotel sat two taxis that I was eager to get to before anyone else. After our drinks we hired both of them to transport us and what was to become the world’s most well-travelled heap of litter to our hotel at the airport. Upon arrival, I went and borrowed the trolley to cart it all up to our rooms. We were being given a discount on the rooms because, on the hottest day of the year so far, with temperatures well into the thirties, the air conditioning wasn’t working. Happy times.

It was approaching half-past seven and it was still ragingly hot, but we were all famished. I had eaten nothing since my bowl of muesli that morning. Manises, the suburb of Valencia which houses the airport, is a lively working-class area with a great deal of places to eat and the central market square seemed to be the place to go. I found a bar-restaurant on the corner of the square that had the type of menu that would suit us all: the children had nuggets and chips, Bonny Bee had chicken in an interesting sauce, and I had half a grilled cow.

Our last evening in Spain was spent in Manises

Having managed to lose 5 kilograms in a couple of weeks, I have taken to trying to avoid carbs and starchy food in the evenings, so I had a mere salad and a handful of chips. I deserved a treat. We all had dessert: chocolate moelleux for Livia and me, and Contessa ice creams for the others, plus coffees for the adults, then we made our way back to the hotel. It was at this point that we were looking for a couple of extra travel bags to make sure the stack of garbage made it out of the country. All the Chinese shops were closed, so I thought it would be a safe bet to go to the airport shop – it was bound to have one.

I left the others at the hotel entrance and strode off towards the airport. It was then that I spotted Lidl was still open. Bounding across the road and into the door, I had ten minutes until closing time. And on one of their numerous renowned jumble tables sat a pair of large freezer bags that we could fill with clothes and shove a few other items into the vacuums they created. I also bought five breakfast pastries; these would turn out to be the only food we would consume until we were airborne.

After my educative walk to the airport, where I noped out of dragging all the gear to the airport on foot, I spent the rest of the evening trying to fit everything into existing bags. In the end, I resorted to stuffing a load of jumble into one of those IKEA laundry bags and tying it up. Completely spent and at the end of my tether, I asked at reception to order two taxis for eight-fifteen and I set the alarm for an hour earlier.

The treacherous airport path

The next morning, we just woke up, got ready, stuffed the breakfast pastries inside us, and made our way downstairs. I borrowed the trolley once more and brought everything to the lobby. The taxis arrived and the drivers looked on with utter stupefaction at the colossal assortment of luggage we had. Squeezing it all into the two cars, a Prius Plus and a Dacia Sandero, we set off for the airport.

One of the abiding memories I will have of Spain is the scandalous amount of asphalt and concrete there is everywhere; much of it I am sure the result of backhanders. Sometimes, what could have been a straightforward motorway junction has been transformed into a cement spaghetti layout with tentacles in all directions, signposts, surprise turnings to nowhere, and often a superfluous relief road. It’s evident that someone somewhere was creaming off EU funds to make these vast intersections, so it was not a shock to discover that the taxi ride would take longer than my walk to the same spot the night before.

Due to the traffic situation, they parked at the arrivals section on the lower floor, which was no help to us, and scuttled off with our money, leaving us with three large suitcases, seven hold bags and five carry-on pieces. There was not a trolley in sight – naturally, as we were on the arrivals floor... the trolleys are sent back to the baggage carrousels in the arrivals terminal. I entered the building and went to seek three of these hand-operated devices.

Queuing at Ryanair's baggage check-in was not a lot of fun

I quickly noticed the sea of humanity in the Ryanair queues and felt a pang of foreboding, but I was more concerned to know if I had paid the right amount for the extra bags. If not, we would be hit with a huge supplementary bill. The queues were moving fairly rapidly, although I was focusing on trying to shift everything along and round the snaking channels to the front. Dainoris was pushing a trolley and was doing rather well, I have to say, although he needed a helping hand from the woman behind to get round the bends.

Reaching the front, the administrator weighed our bags and counted the tickets several times, which was the right thing to do, as every time there was a different result. One of our bags, the IKEA one, had to go through a special procedure that required me to follow another administrator to a holding zone at the end of the baggage area and load it into a lift to take to the plane. No idea why, but there we go.

By the way, that child seat I took out of the taxi the day before and whoops! I left it on the pavement outside the hotel. Silly, silly me… how thoughtless was I to have done such a thing?! *cough*

We watched our luggage make its way along the travellator, and I took in a deep, contemplative breath of fresh air as I brought the family along to the security barriers. I opened my phone to the PDF, sent Bonny Bee in first, followed by the children, and I, along with the rest of the carry-on bags, went last. Nothing of great note, except that our stuff filled up the entire conveyor belt. When we reached the departure terminal, boarding was already taking place.

The extraordinarily officious but remarkably efficient boarding staff informed us we had two bags too many. Their advice was to stuff the smaller ones inside the larger ones and take no notice. It consisted of Bonny Bee’s handbag and my satchel with all the documentation and money. For the rest of my days, I will never understand why we couldn’t just carry them on – we had got that far without any issues.

And all that stress, anxiety, tension and worry that we went through was the reason I made sure we had a good sendoff and said proper farewells beforehand. That was the therapeutic catalyst that would allow us to leave with as few regrets as possible. And then, at just before 11 o’clock in the morning, the plane taxied a short distance down the runway and sped into lift-off, taking us away from our two-year exile in Spain and northwards towards Nantes for six days, before we reached our new home in Ireland.

Livia, excited before take-off, as we all were

What We Did Next: Our Time In Valencia Has Come To An End

    SOLD! More photos at the end.

After twenty months here in Spain, we have made the decision to move to a farmhouse in rural Ireland. When we departed from Germany/Luxembourg, it was done in haste and we had barely any time to accept what had befallen us.

Late last year, we found a buyer for our house in Saarburg, and decided to use the money to invest in a property here in the Valencian Community. But following the ravaging storms of November and a litany of unfortunate events, it became evident that this was not the place for us. This was confirmed by Livia’s struggles to adapt to the classes; the main reason for our need to move in the first place.

So we decided to review the list of countries that we had drawn up that we would both be willing to move to (my list was longer than Bonny Bee’s!), and of course there was only one that we shared: Ireland.

In early December, I made some appointments to view houses in parts of the country that seemed attractive, and we took a trip by plane to Dublin a week before Christmas. We figured that if we liked the place in midwinter, we would certainly like it in summer.

It was an enchantment: so much so, that even five months later, the children keep asking when we’re going to Ireland. We drove across to the west coast and back again looking at various properties. One of them was a lovely little house nestled in a valley surrounded by lush, green forest in a village called Cloone. The neighbour, a farmer called Frank, came by and explained about the history of the place. It was a grey Sunday afternoon with scattered rainclouds, but that didn’t deter us.

Frank almost convinced me to buy the place, especially as it was so cheap. The agent had said that everyone who had come to see the property had taken one look at it and driven on, which I thought was harsh, but we kind of liked it. So I said goodbye to Farmer Frank and more or less told him that we would see him in a few months.

That would turn out to be a lie.

I checked on my phone for somewhere to go and eat lunch and one of the places was a lovely pub in Dromod, a small town about 15 minutes’ drive away. When we walked in, the atmosphere was very Christmassy and the menu short but very appealing. The lady of the house came over to us and asked us what we wanted to eat. She also asked what brought us to Dromod. I told her we were looking for a house to buy.

“Oh really?” she replied, “My husband’s a property auctioneer and he’s just over there. Let me get him; just a moment.” Bonny Bee and I both had a feeling that we were supposed to be here, in this place, at this moment, and about two minutes later, a jolly man who had obviously had a long, happy and peaceful life surrounded by his friends and family, came over and introduced himself.

“Hello there, Adrian speaking,” he said, with a smile that contained a hundred kindnesses and an eye twinkling in a manner that I have never seen before, “I hear you’re looking for a house in the area. If you tell me your criteria, I’ll see what I can do.”

So I told him we were looking for a house to buy within our budget that wasn’t too badly neglected. We were hoping to buy a house in cash with the proceeds of our previous one, and we were willing to make concessions regarding the state, as long as there was the potential. He shot me a penetrating glance that radiated reassurance, and promised to return in a few minutes.

When he came back, he handed me a brochure of a house not far from Cloone and just a handful of kilometres from a well-equipped town called Ballinamore.

“Four bedrooms, an acre of land, top of a hill surrounded by forests, lakes and grazing pastures.”

I looked at it and realised I had actually made enquiries about this very place. So I asked him: “Did you get a call from someone in Valencia a few weeks ago?”

“Yes, yes I did. We spoke about the big storm you were having,” he replied.

And it was at that moment I knew we had to go and take a look at that place. I told him we had seen a house in Cloone that would be our preferred choice, but we were happy to take a look.

“Stay there, I’ll call the owner now. There are still a couple of hours of daylight left.” We had a huge drive ahead of us to a place called Bohola in Mayo, but we felt we had to do this. “Yes, he’s there, you can go over any time after you’ve finished your lunch. We’re having a charity event this evening, so I have to go and get prepared now, but let me know in the morning what you thought.”

We thanked him. I asked his wife what the charity event was – it was to raise money for a local care home. I slipped a twenty in the bucket and we left to take a look at this place.

It was down a narrow lane past some rather grand houses and through a forested area. When we came out the other side, it was like we had passed through some Tolkien-esque portal and found ourselves on the top of the world, closer to the heavens and a mere raised hand to reach the clouds.

The current owner, Emmet, a man from the East of England, was there to greet us. A softly-spoken fellow with a German wife called Bettina, he shook our hands and invited us in. They lived in the caravan parked out the back while they were renovating the interior, not because it was uninhabitable, but because under Irish law, if you don’t occupy the house, you can apply for up to 70,000 euro of subsidies.

They were selling up after only two years not because they wanted to, but because Bettina’s health was deteriorating and they needed to live nearer to a specialised clinic that could help her. It was truly out of the way, but it had a charm that drew us in. Emmet showed us around and told us a lot about what was wrong as well as the good stuff, which was refreshingly honest.

I took a few photos to remember it and discuss it with Bonny Bee later on in Bohola when the kids were asleep. I told Emmet we had seen a house in Cloone that we were going to pursue, but if that doesn’t work out, we would be in touch. He thanked me for my honesty. I also called Adrian and told him – he thanked me too, and we left for the west and that was that.

Or was it?

That night, after a dram of the finest whiskey I had ever drunk in a splendid ancient inn, I had an epiphany. That house near Ballinamore just wouldn’t leave my mind. It was more expensive than the one in Cloone next to Farmer Frank, but it just seemed to have slightly more potential. There was no kitchen, no bathroom, and the windows were very drafty, but all the things we could do with it were so tantalising.

So we drove over a hundred kilometres back to Ballinamore to take another look. We just hoped Emmet was at home when we arrived because we didn’t have his number. The skies were clearer and the wind was more clement, and the whole wacky operation seemed like the best thing to do at the time.

He was pretty surprised to see us, to say the least. We got out and told him that we were unable to stop thinking about the place. He was definitely excited about that. Bettina was there and she had a broad smile on her face despite the obvious pain.

We asked more in-depth questions and went through everything from the electrics to the water supply, from the septic tank to the rafters below the roof. We understood the house needed some TLC, but we were prepared to give it what it required. Outside, Emmet told us, there are hares, deer, pine martens, hedgehogs, brown squirrels and sheep. There is so much space on the land that we can more or less do with it anything we want.

After a good hour and a half, possibly two hours with a great deal of wandering round getting a feel for the place, and having consulted the children who gave it a massive thumbs-up, we resolved to buy the place. Emmet and Bettina were delirious. In my mind's eye, I pictured the pond, the tree house, the huge boulder, the grove, the herb garden, the roses, the lupins, hollyhocks and syringa that I'm going to pepper the place with.

Then they told us a story: a few months earlier, they had the house virtually sold to an American lady from New York. One of those with spurious Irish ancestry, you get the gist. She had paid the deposit and was about to leave, when she realised she didn’t have a driving licence and the nearest bus stop was two kilometres away. So she pulled out, and that turned their lives sour. They were feeling despondent. Well they could now look forward to providing Bettina with the help she needed and move to a more convenient location.

I called Adrian.

“Hi, guess where I am right now…”

“Oh I don’t know, Bohola, wasn’t it?” he replied.

“Nope, I’m standing next to Emmet and we have decided to buy the house in Ballinamore.”

You could visualise the level of relief on the phone as I told him that. He was also pretty surprised. We went back to the inn for lunch again and the children got ice cream on the house. There was a celebratory air after the gala evening the night before and the confirmation of the sale of the house. Adrian took all my details and resolved to get cracking on the sale.

He took me by the hand and announced in a merry yet meaningful manner: “Raymond, congratulations on buying a picture-perfect parcel of land in the green and lovely county of Leitrim. Welcome to the community!”

We were home.

Driving back to Dublin, things just felt right: we had planned to move on our own terms this time. This was going to be the point where we could put our lives back on track.

The next thing was to seek a school with amenities for Livia. Just four kilometres away, there’s a school so I called and spoke firstly to the deputy head and then the head. The head told me that the school had several members of staff and a dedicated class for children with Special Educational Needs. The application was so straightforward: a two-page questionnaire and a few other details, then finished. This is in blatant contrast to the administrative psycho-drama I had getting the kids in our preferred school here in Valencia.

So now, the next thing is getting us there…

At some point near the end of June, we will leave our apartment of 20 months and head to France for a week to decompress. After that, we will arrive in Dublin to begin the next chapter.

 

Why we decided to abandon private education

It was just a year and a half ago that we were compelled to leave Germany and Luxembourg because of Livia’s education. The idea was that we needed to make sure she received a solid education in English, as she refused to speak French or German. With the UK off-limits, it came as a no-brainer to us when we discovered the province of Valencia in Spain had three times as many international schools with English as the working language compared to Luxembourg and our region of Germany combined.

We always saw our time in Valencia as an experiment where we would take stock of the situation on a regular basis. The first year passed quite quickly, but Livia was once again rejected from the private school she had been welcomed into only nine months earlier. Fortunately, they had the decency to tell us in early January of their decision not to renew our contract with them, which gave us time to look around for a better match.

Livia had been accompanied in class by a professional from a psychology centre most mornings for several months, paid for on top of the fees for three children. Despite this, the complaints about her behaviour started rolling in a couple of months later. We knew about her inability to stay focused and her propensity to misunderstand people’s intentions, but the idea was that the professional assistant in the class would help her settle and focus. It was working. So it came as a shock when the head of the school and her teacher called us into the office for what one might call The Little Chat.

The initial line was “it isn’t working”, then it dialled up to “she needs to be in a school with a far smaller group”, and finally it reached “we will help you relocate her as soon as possible” (but they won’t). You know how these “escalation” conversations go – a similar trick is applied to employees being told they’re about to be made redundant, or to unsuspecting partners in one-sided relationships. If you want to get rid of unwanted baggage without upsetting them, you need to start small and gradually build up to the main point. They were insistent that she needed to go to another school with smaller groups as soon as we could find another place for her.

And so the manager promised to make some calls, but in fact the burden really fell on us. We looked around for other schools as after this, we were pretty upset that they hadn’t really given Livia the choice to stay until the end of the school year. There was the Waldorf School in El Puig near our apartment, but they didn’t get back to us after our visit. So we thought about putting all three children in the semi-private (concertado) school near our office in the Cabanyal area of the city. I called for an appointment and a very kind lady invited us for a visit. We just hoped all three children would like the place. The day came quite quickly and we went all five to see the school.

Livia in all honesty hated it. But we felt this was nerves about having to make yet another change rather than an actual dislike. Dainoris walked round with us and found it a pleasant experience. As for Milda, we lost her on the way round, but we later found her sitting in another classroom taking questions from an audience gathered round her. She had only recently turned four at the time, and here she was, holding court amongst about ten other children and their teacher. She was going to fit in fine.

So in the first few weeks of 2024 I made the appropriate moves to try to enrol them all in that school and withdraw them from the private school at the behest of the latter school’s manager and Livia’s teacher. This is when the hilarity began… I first had to request the papers from Valencia city council. Arriving there, the employee at reception said my journey was unnecessary. All I needed to do was to download the city’s app and go to the education section. Oh, that sounded much easier, didn’t it? Nope. It took longer than it would have done to just queue up at the council and speak to a human being. It required you to set up a digital signature with a disproportionate set of hurdles to clear, and then upload a list of documents longer than those required to get a mortgage. And this was just to establish your profile.

To actually effectuate the enrolment, I had to undertake such a daunting and prohibitive procedure that I can honestly say was the most futile waste of my time I have ever been forced to experience. And I have taken a speeding awareness course. In German. Which took place on four consecutive Saturday mornings. And it cost me hundreds of euro.

In Luxembourg, for example, you sign in once and you gain access to everything from social security to housing, from health to education facilities, from unemployment benefit to reporting defective street lighting, noise pollution or stray cats. In Germany, we showed up to the council buildings, took a ticket and someone did everything necessary to be able to live and work there in about ten minutes. Here, though, I was confronted with a barrage of dubious and intrusive questions, many of which had nothing to do with education, all just to prove we were who we said we were and that we wanted what we said we wanted.

Meet the low-trust society head-on.

It was the most Kafkaesque, Byzantine, tortuous, and flawed procedure ever dreamed up by the depraved mind of a civil servant this side of the grave of George Orwell. Even the French couldn’t muster up such a pile of utter blethering gobbledegook if they forced all their hundreds of thousands of employees to eat a tinful of shrooms and tasked them with inventing a new procedure for the registering and licensing of electric scooters for dung beetles.

And at the end of the online application process, having spent a good hour answering the plethora of questions and uploading everything necessary to satisfy the city education ministry’s great and good, which I had to do three times for each child, I pressed “SEND”. And the longest error message ever written appeared on the screen, which in the type of stuffy, haughty and circuitous language that had been banned in most northern countries in the eighties, explained I had missed one pathetic little piece of information a few pages earlier, and I had to do the whole thing again. No recourse to correct the mistake, no red highlight of the erroneous data, just the obligation to go through the entire demoralising process once more, making sure I didn’t forget how I did it last time. Instead, though, I went for an angry walk on the beach where I kicked a lot of sand and shouted incoherent profanities at the sea. My mental health had already started to come apart at the seams due to the previous traumas, but this set off a load of alarm bells that screamed to everyone around me “he’s clearly potty, keep your distance!”

So Bonny Bee took it off my hands and did it all a few days later, having learned from my mistakes. It went through. Apparently. Not that we’d know, apart from the little message on the screen saying the process was complete.

Several days later, we received a very short, terse message from the city council, all in capital letters, that essentially said that nobody was going to allow Livia to change schools in the middle of the academic year. All that effort for nothing. I was getting really tired of doing the bidding of people who clearly had no sense of proportion when it came to handling citizens’ needs. But then I realised that actually, they had a point. Why should Livia have to change schools half way through the school year? It made no sense.

So I told the head of Livia’s school what the city council had said – it would mean they would have to keep her there for the remainder of the year, which would be the most ethical outcome. For despite all the moaning and carping from her educators, Livia had made a lot of progress.

The head and Livia’s teacher were disappointed, but they had never done this before, so they had learned something – that it took a furious faceless bureaucrat sitting in an office to act as a moral compass in all this. Imagine that.

The thing which had disappointed me most was that I was under the illusion Livia’s teacher had been showing a lot of eagerness in her efforts to help her, as she had initially said it would be her special mission. But the reality in the end was, like the staff at her last school in Luxembourg, she just wanted the quiet life. She didn’t want the hassle of an eccentric and confused little girl disturbing the class.

This was confirmed when, a week or two later, she complained about Livia’s behaviour again as Livia had been giving one boy a particularly hard time. To give her and the others in the class I suggested they swap Dainoris and Livia around, as they were in the same year but in different classes. The teacher did her very best to look shocked before making the most self-condemning statement of the year: “we could never do that to a child – if we moved her to another place, she would think she was being punished!”

Well, Ms Poppins, if this is how you felt about moving classes, then I wonder what you thought forcing her to change schools was going to do to her… if you read this, I would love an answer. I’ll print your reply anonymously, of course – I wouldn’t want you to start getting quality control inspectors, or worse, hate mail.

Despite all the condescending, Teachers-Know-Best sermons and the We-Only-Have-Her-Best-Interests-At-Heart homilies, we don’t hold any grudges. We just want to know whether the founder and owner was worried about her beloved school’s position on the education league tables, rather than being the outstanding pillar of education that all the advertising material alluded to. That included a whole spiel on their website about a special needs department, which was obviously another fallacy, as the only allusion to special needs was a visit once a week from an external child psychologist who would do the rounds and have a few chats with sad-looking munchkins.

I mean, I don’t mind the fact that a huge private school with exorbitant fees doesn’t have the facilities to cope with one solitary difficult child, and I’m glad in the end the head teacher admitted it, but I truly felt that everyone in there gave up far too early. Along with Livia’s classroom assistant we were paying extra for, we felt we were making progress. Livia came home happy four days out of five and had been making a huge amount of progress. But her teachers didn’t even wait for a diagnosis before pulling out.

This was the second year in a row that a private school had given up on Livia, riding a coach and horses through their own shiny charters that proudly show off their Duty of Care To Every Child. What’s the point in promising to do your best if in the end you hide behind your school’s deficient infrastructure (despite those huge fees) in order to justify running up the white flag of capitulation? I can only imagine how badly they must have felt in having realised they had failed a child. Again.

All this has led me to conclude one major thing: the private schools in every place we have been to all have one thing in common – they really aren’t as competent or as qualified as the public sector to take care of your child. If they can’t cope with one child with a restless spirit, causing havoc with their mythical multitasking skills, then you may as well save your money.

Now you may get the idea that I’m bitter about this. No, not really.

However, I feel it’s my duty to warn everyone thinking that sending their child to a private school is going to give them a massive head start in life.

But for some, nothing could be further from the truth. Their facilities may be cleaner, their gadgets more modern, their playing fields bigger, but that’s just cosmetic. What matters is the people running it: from the head of the facility to the caretaker, a school is there to give every child the means to cope with the essentials of life, and to send them home feeling happy and fulfilled.

I was sent to a private school, and I really don’t recommend it. There are several reasons why you should not send your child to a private school, in my opinion. And this is only based on my opinion, not a broad assumption. I am sure there are many fine institutions out there. I myself went to one outstanding preparatory school which sadly closed down in the 1990s. The other private school I went to had the same toothless leadership as those at Livia’s schools. This is because ultimate accountability is not to parents, but to the board of governors, aka the shareholders, many of whom have absolutely no interest in the wellbeing of the pupils or the desire to invest in better facilities if it means losing out in the short term.

But this is not the only reason I would warn parents off private schools. Let me take you through them one by one:

The first reason is what it does to the child’s psyche. Because of all the money being spent on me, I felt under the greatest pressure to perform. But every test that came up, I flopped, because I could not handle the pressure. I would have much preferred to have been a slightly higher than average pupil in a state school than a less-than-mediocre performer in a paying school.

The second reason is that private schools are under no obligation to hire teachers competent in their field. In fact, in a few of the private schools whose interiors I have seen, the teachers have been completely out of their depth. Qualifications are becoming an issue now, especially when it comes to education authority inspections, but a lot of them are failed state school educators.

And the third reason is that no matter how much money you plough into the school, it still doesn’t have the same amount of access to important resources as state schools do.

In the end, we managed to fill in the application for the three to go to the semi-private school near our office this year, and so far they seem to be coping well, but they need some assistance. In fact, although Livia is still visiting therapists and is still quite a handful, she is far more settled than her previous two schools. Furthermore, she comes home and surprises us with the number of Spanish words she can speak. Considering the principal reason for our move was her refusal to speak anything except English, the dial has most definitely moved on this front.

But this is not all we have decided to abandon. I will elaborate in another article coming very shortly.