Wednesday 25 October 2023

Life In Spain: Return Of The Smiles


EARNING AND LEARNING. YEARNING...? NO!

It was the last day in August. Our holiday in Peñíscola was almost over, but first we had to go to sign the contract for our new apartment at the beach. The signing appointment took place in the offices of Mercedes’ employer, a large complex of offices located in what seemed to be a former factory, then an entertainment venue, before settling on being a huge co-working space. It looked like a drive-in dance hall at 10 in the morning after the cleaners had been. I would also consider having my offices there, but there wasn’t a window except in the ceiling, and when it’s sunny outside, the last thing I want to do is not be able to see it.

When we arrived, Kirsten took the children to the playground across the street, and I went inside in my summer shorts and short-sleeved shirt – it was still our holiday for another night, at least. Our future proprietor, a sprightly lady in her nineties, was wearing full business dress and sitting next to her carer, a classy South American woman equally as elegant. Mercedes came in in her work suit carrying her papers and a massive smile. I felt like a rancid residue of flatulence in a small metal box on wires that transports people to different floors.

Anyhow, everyone ignored the fact there was a slice of half-eaten cheese amongst all the exotic salad, and had a cosy chat to get to know each other. Our new landlady was a very interesting and experienced person, and it seemed little could faze her. Which was fortunate, as I felt so underdressed, that even I disapproved of me.

Then Mercedes said that Kirsten had to sign as well. Which would mean all three of the children would have to come in. And the owner of the apartment would see them and they might start a fight or set off the water sprinklers or go to the toilet on an upholstered armchair. In the end my ridiculous misgivings were unfounded – the owner was delighted to meet the children, and they were well-behaved. Silly Daddy!

We were due to remain in the apartment for ten months until the end of June, with the intention of selling our house in Saarburg and buying a new one with the proceeds. Time will tell if that does happen, but as of 24 September, there have been about 14 separate visitors to the house. If by early spring there is no movement, I will start making contingency plans for the summer.

Further plans have included renting a container in the next town that we will fill with our furniture and belongings when we find transport. If things go well, the idea will be that we will start preparing our new house while we still live in the apartment, so that when we move in, everything will be in place. It’s a tall order, but I have hope.


After signing, I drove us all to Mestalla to a restaurant I visited earlier in the summer called El Rinconet, a special place in one of the many courtyards containing a children’s playground and shops surrounded by apartments. Their menu shows off the most Spanish foods you can find, although it’s run by a Hungarian with his sons and a Polish maîtresse d’hôtes. However, that’s beside the point – the excellent dinner we had truly rounded off our holiday, and we headed back to Peñíscola for one last night.

The following morning, we packed up the car and headed to town for a final breakfast before taking the scenic route to our new lives. The true sign of how your children are going to cope with the new setting is in their initial reaction, and when they saw the beach, the swimming pool, the ice cream bar and café, the private playground, and then the actual apartment, all three of them were whooping for joy like Texans at a barbecue. The second way you can tell if your children are going to cope or not is if they start asking when they’re going “home” again. 62 days we’ve been there at the time of writing, still no mention of the old place.

It was a Friday, and the following Monday they had to start their new school. I was intrigued to know how Livia was going to get on, now her lessons would be in English and her siblings would be in other classrooms in the same place. But first, we needed to settle in and enjoy the final weekend of their summer holiday, which until the last two weeks had been rather miserable due to their parents spending most days packing up their belongings and throwing away everything that they hadn’t used in a while.

The weekend weather was sadly very windy and cloudy, so I took us all to the Carrefour hypermarket to buy provisions and see a little bit of the area. I made us patatas fritas en aceite (chips in olive oil) and some steak.

Then on the Monday, there was an open day where we could all meet the various teachers for each child. They were charming, efficient, friendly, caring and motivated – quite a refreshing change. The school itself is between a hairdresser and a supermarket on Avinguda Cardenal Benlloch, one of the many bustling thoroughfares slicing their way through Valencia. Its façade is unrecognisable as a school, as it looks like one of the other shop fronts that line the street, but when you walk in, it’s a child’s dream. The walls are white, the tiled floors spotlessly clean, the rooms ordered and equipped for each different year.

We were greeted by the teachers for each class at various times of the day, and given a presentation on the different activities planned throughout the school year. It seemed ambitious and exciting: learning to read, appointing one of the children as superhelper for a day, and giving the children plenty of exercise in the courtyard inside the cluster of buildings.

The next day, we had to implement our new daily routine, which was totally different from the one in Luxembourg, as you will see shortly. But now that the children were in school, we could look for an office. At the very first try, we found one at a coworking centre situated about 5 minutes’ walk from the beach in the Cabanyal district of the city.

When we walked in off the street to take a theoretical look at the place, we were greeted by Cristina, the owner and director, another of the long line of very accomplished businesswomen that we have encountered here. Human and energetic, fun and patient, she runs the place without breaking sweat. This is due to the efficient team behind her, who keep the place thriving. We made some general enquiries about the possibility of becoming members, and asked if there were any spare private offices.

Coincidentally, someone had just vacated the only free office available, and upon viewing it, we took it immediately. From only the fifth day of being in our new location, we had a beachside apartment, a school for the children, and a place to go to work. Here is our routine:

07.30 – wake up, have breakfast 

08.00 – get washed and dressed

08.35 – leave the house

08.55 – arrive, park and get out of the car

09.00 – doors open, children are welcomed in the lobby

09.05 – we go for coffee across the street at one of the cafés

09.30 – we drive to our office

09.45 – I drop Kirsten off and go to park the car before joining her

13.20 – we head out for lunch at one of the countless eateries in the area

14.30 – we return to the office for a couple more hours

16.40 – we go to the car and drive to the school

16.55 – we park, pick up the children and hear reports of their day from their teachers

17.05 – we go to a café for drinks and a treat

After this, we might go to the playground, just behind the main road in a square. It is massive, and teeming with kids from all the other local schools. There are often birthday parties in there, and all the kids, even those not invited, are welcome to take a piece of cake or have a drink of juice. The community atmosphere and feeling of safety is tangible. Children just pick up toys or scooters from other kids and play with them, parents go around and pick up their stuff once they’re ready to go home. This would be unthinkable in the previous place we lived – where was that, again…?!

We would then go to the supermarket to get what we might need – breakfast cereal, bread, cheese, juice, then head home. With the evening still ahead of us, the children might play with some Duplo or watch some cartoons on RTVE’s children’s channel, called Clan. It’s a perfectly prepared recipe of animations that cater for various age groups getting older as the evening wears on. We have a few slices of bread, some cheese, mortadella, chocolate spread, or butter, and then wind down a little. At bedtime, they get ready and head to their rooms with barely a complaint, having had a full day’s activity.

The change in lifestyle, diet, climate, culture, and things to do has been extreme. Every day is different, every weekend packed with action. I worked out we have a minimum of 2, maximum 3 and a half more hours a day to enjoy our lives. In the old place, I would need an hour, sometimes an hour and a half to get to the school and then another 30 minutes to get to the office. The same on the way home. And if there was traffic, forget that.

September wore on. We were keen to know how Livia was coping in class, and how she was adapting to her learning. In the beginning, it was evident she was still behind the rest. She was not helped by her own inhibitions: her hypermobility made it difficult to do some simple things; her lack of self-confidence partly due to that prevented her from trying out some new things right away; and she was still disrupting some of the class activities.

But as the weeks went by, we noticed some positive changes: she was doing a lot more talking, recognising numbers, expanding her vocabulary, and helping with minor chores. There were also a lot of tantrums, refusals, scratching, pushing, knocking and general mayhem, but the gradual reduction in these transgressions gives us hope that she will settle down quite soon.

On 20 September, Livia was designated Superhelper for the day. How would she cope? We were intrigued to know. At the end of the day, at the report, the teacher said she did really well, even telling one of her classmates not to mess with the equipment. We had a budding responsible citizen, and we were ready to nurture this.

I would like to tell you a little about Valencia. It is the most energetic and exciting city I have lived in since I left London in 2001, and probably the best city I have ever visited, let alone had the joy of being a resident of. Before we decided where to move to, I was worried about being somewhere far from the places we frequent the most. The fact of the matter is Valencia has it all: there is architecture and culture here that reminds us of Copenhagen, London, Prague, Brussels, Liverpool.

There is the sea, there are mountains half an hour away, there are forests, and there are the airport and the ports. The food at lunchtime is so good and so cheap that I have cooked barely four times since we got here. The pedestrian streets are paved with marble, there are ancient trees standing majestically in every corner of the city, you can find museums that will entertain your family for weeks without going to the same one, a children’s recreation area is no longer than a five-minute walk from whichever part of the city you live in. It’s not Barcelona or Madrid, and we are all thankful for that. It still feels like a city that should host an Olympic Games or an Expo, but will probably be overlooked in favour of the other two. However, it is European Green Capital 2024, so that’s something.

And as for the people here, they are so easy to relate to: you can talk to strangers without them feeling like you’re weird. It is so safe, people of all ages walk the streets at any time of day or night, and there are little things that make you happy, like when the neighbour took the lift this morning. I heard him getting in it and going downstairs, but he obviously heard us getting ready to leave the apartment, because when we did, the empty lift was waiting for us there. He had evidently sent it back for us. These minor gestures are what make this place what it is. Since we arrived, I have also noticed how much more freely the children interact with kind strangers (always in our presence, of course).

They are no longer shy to say hello or hold a conversation with someone new. They are not frowned upon for shouting or screaming in a public place – most people just laugh or roll their eyes sympathetically, rather than come over to us when they’ve had enough and question our parenting skills. In restaurants, nobody has bat an eyelid when Milda has screamed her lungs out. When Livia threw one of her fits in a supermarket, several people became concerned and helped us calm her down, rather than ignore us or worse, complain to the manager. Because we have always believed in freedom of expression for our kids, we had always felt inhibited, or even reluctant to go out in public in the former place, but here, there’s no reason to – in fact, quite the opposite. We have done more in the two months we have been here than in the six years prior.

So you see, in the end, it was fate.

For that reason, I would like to thank the director of Livia’s previous school for not having the nerve to tell us in February that they were not going to take her, and instead waited until he could pluck up the courage at the end of June to inform us. If it wasn’t for his cowardice and procrastination, we would still be in the other place, rotting away slowly without realising why. We wanted to change places, but I think we just didn’t have the energy for it, so when he dropped his bombshell, it gave us a kick up the backside that led us to re-arrange our lives for the better.

On Friday 20 October, I took a brief trip back to our previous house to check on it, pick up some important documents, and make some arrangements for the shipping of our belongings. I flew into Luxembourg airport and hired a car to drive back to Saarburg. Upon arriving at my previous home, I felt a disconnect, a lack of attachment to the place, except for the garden. And when I viewed our belongings, I also thought “well, let’s just get rid of them, and start all over again!”

I stayed in a hotel the first night while I came to terms with the fact that I had lived in that house for 13 years until 22 August 2023, but also because the heating was off. I also remember how bored I was there. The whole time I lived there, I did a lot of irrational and unconventional things, just to keep myself distracted from the dullness all around. I look back with some horror on a few of the dark thoughts I had. Luckily, I have no more time for them, and so much more to live for.

After a weekend that included having to stay in a hotel the first night due to the heating being off, having to go for a midnight drive and walk in order to make it easier to sleep but being wired until 5 am due to being spooked out, having a massive headache due to lack of sleep, not being able to hold in my food after eating a dodgy kebab the night before, scraping the hire car against a concrete flower pot, and suffering from the miserable cold and fog, I arrived at Luxembourg airport 3 hours before I was supposed to, just to make myself psychologically aware that I was getting the hell out of the place and burying the ghosts along with it. In the end, the flight was delayed so I spent 5 hours in the airport, but I didn’t mind – it had finally stopped the sentiment of regret that we had not left on our own terms. Instead, I realised it was fate telling us to GTFO and prosper elsewhere.

I don’t mean to say everything was miserable in the old place – definitely not. There are things I miss, such as my perfect little office in Luxembourg and the many kind people I knew there. I also miss the lovely people at Café Nordbo, the Scandinavian café and the ScanShop attached to it – I felt like a friend there, not a customer. I miss the river Saar and the green trees that line it. I miss being able to pop over to France or Belgium for a short trip or for dinner. And I miss my beautiful garden and all the things I had planted in there – there are over 30 trees and some extraordinary shrubs.

But these are offset by the new life we have here. I was so happy to be back in Valencia, that I woke the kids up when I got home to give them hugs and have a little cry. The day after, Tuesday 24 October, despite a late arrival and the feeling of being wired and tired, I was so disoriented by the entire experience, and by the fact there was the sun in the sky, that by the end of the morning, I had another two car accidents to go alongside the one I had in Luxembourg. Luckily damage was minimal, and nobody was hurt.

Then, in the greatest coincidence of all time, I was involved in a fourth road accident in the evening when a car reversed into me (this time not my fault). How utterly bizarre is that? There must be an ancient pagan rule of providence somewhere that can explain why I went for four years without a single accident, to having four in the space of about 27 hours…

To conclude this, I wanted to highlight several things with these three articles:

It is important to make proper life choices and never to hesitate in changing if necessary.

Once you have kids, you don’t matter any more – it’s about assuring their future.

If something is making you miserable or doesn’t feel right, don’t put it to the back of your mind and make excuses; don't say it's too hard, or it's not the right moment, because you're just wasting time; take action.

Below are some photos of our experiences so far:

Settling in on the day we arrived

Wearing their school uniforms on the first day

Playing tag on the Plaza de la Mare de Deu

The children make a new friend at the Moors & Christians Parade

Livia gets sandy on the beach

The funfair at Pobla de Farnals

Livia goes for a drive

Milda jumps for joy

Our little supermodel

The smell of coffee is enough to put Dainoris off - thankfully

The shopping centre opposite the massive City of Arts and Culture

Livia likes heights

Sunrise viewed from our terrace



Monday 9 October 2023

From Luxembourg to Spain: Saving Private Belongings

You have 6 weeks until your kids need to go to school somewhere else in Europe. You have a house full of effects from your life. You have kids that don’t know the meaning of the phrase “tidy up”, and you need to make sure you can carry on your professional activities when you get to wherever it is you’re going. What is your first emotion? If it is sheer panic, you are probably right. But it’s the second emotion that will count, and that is focus. Focus on what you need to do, when you need to do it, and how you can get it done. Our list was daunting, the time frame virtually impossible, but it had to be done if we were to make sure our three children were to carry on their education.

It went something like this:

·       Call the real estate branch of our bank and request to put our house up for sale

·       Close down our Luxembourg office

·       Make a list of countries and cities we would be interested in moving to

·       Check out their suitability: house prices, schools and quality of life

·       Single out some schools and apartments, and start calling round (not just emailing and waiting for a reply)

·       Arrange a couple of days to go to your chosen destination in order to tap on a few doors, because estate agents don’t like to be accessible, unless they are confronted with you in person

·       Order a large container to throw out everything we don’t want to take with us: furniture, fittings, flooring, general waste, etc.

·       Gather all the other waste from the house, sort it, and throw it out: electric, paper/carton, glass, dangerous materials, etc.

·       Put all the utility services on alert that we’re going to close them off

·       Sign out of the local commune

·       Get the car serviced

·       Start gathering things we are going to need, such as different sized house-move boxes, tape, markers, bin bags, etc.

·       Begin washing all our dirty clothes and then do systematic washes of used ones, so that we can pack them easily when we need to.

·       Look for a person to keep an eye on our house until we can return to get more stuff: feed the cat, water the plants, put out the remaining rubbish on the right days

·       Start looking for a storage place or garage to get our stuff delivered to once the house is sold

·       Plan our route to our destination including booking stopovers – that would mean setting a deadline to get it all done

And start doing all this as soon as we can – no thinking “I’ll take a few more days off and then get down to it”, because we risk being assaulted by all manner of extra tasks we never thought of. Take this road, and you will find yourself wallowing in a massive pile-up of uncompleted items. Also, don’t do one and then another – juggle five or six of them all at the same time, prioritising one above the other.

We had to do all this while in the relatively close background, three screaming, self-obsessed kids on their summer holidays kept picking fights with each other, sabotaging our sorting piles, and asking us for juice, food, a push on the swing, or to fix something they'd messed up.

Anyway, first task: deciding where to go and taking steps to organise our successful installation there. As well as plenty of housing and affordable living, the number one priority above all else was finding a place with more affordable international schools than where we were currently living. I looked at various countries on the International Schools Database: Denmark had very few options, although it was cheap. France was OK, but we were a little wary of all the current social and economic problems there, plus their inclusive schooling was also not very developed. Czechia was high on the list, but its international schools were almost as expensive as Eton or Harrow – why cater to a lot of ordinary folk, when you can put the prices up and have smaller classes with just sons and daughters of bandits and oil magnates? Italy was out of the question – we went there in April to check it out and I think the hype is really exaggerated. Sweden would be tricky to carry on working as entrepreneurs. In Ireland, we could just put them in state schools and the system would take care of it, but when I saw the house prices (and the weather forecast), I got cold feet. Which is, incidentally, also what I would get if I went paddling in the Irish Sea at any time of year.

It seemed that Spain was turning out to be a serious contender. Or rather, the only contender. I checked out some cities and found many had more than enough facilities, and the house prices in many areas were quite acceptable. There were plenty of cities with international schools and many had the right facilities.

But where?

Barcelona would be great, but it has a serious crime problem and it’s full of tourists. Madrid is a lovely city but it’s a cauldron in summer. Malaga would be a wonderful place, but the driving habits there are frightening – I think it’s where even Grand Theft Auto refused to go. Bilbao, San Sebastian, Zaragoza, Granada, Cordoba, all utterly marvellous places, but possibly a little too small for what we need.

Hold on… what about Valencia?

You know sometimes when you’re looking for something and you look everywhere else except *right there* because that’s where it’s much too visible? It’s right under your nose, and that’s why you can’t see it. Like when you’re in the kitchen and you’re looking for the knife you were just using. You look around it, over it, even through it, even though it's so visible and so evidently close that you would probably put your hand straight on it if you were blindfold. Well that was Valencia: I don’t quite know how we kept on missing it on the map, quite frankly.

Qualities:

1.       A host of international schools all vying for your business, keeping the prices reasonable and the competition hot.

2.       Located at the very top of the Forbes Magazine Best City To Live In Index, ranked first in quality of life and third in ease of settling in by Internations, it has everything Barcelona has but without being Barcelona: it’s between the sea and the mountains, it has excellent food, splendid architecture, a superb social life, an impressive number of cultural events, and such glorious weather almost all year round.

3.       What it has that Barcelona doesn’t is also worth mentioning: low crime, friendly people, competent governance, and a likeable football team come to mind, but I’m sure there are others.

I had that instinctive feeling that I didn’t need to search any more. This was our next project, and hopefully the last one: we were going south – quite a long way south.

It was vital, therefore, that I went there to check it out, visit a few important schools and estate agents, and see which areas of the city would be good to live in. I booked a flight from Luxembourg via Zurich, and found a cheap room in a student residence for a few days. We had a Zoom call with one school, and they invited me to visit them when I arrived, although I felt they weren’t so keen on us. I resolved to go there anyhow, just to see the potential.

The impressive grounds were located quite far outside the city centre, in a plush neighbourhood surrounded by villas and parks. When I arrived, there was a summer English camp going on and the place was full of Spanish kids enjoying the utterly amazing facilities. But it was more like a sports academy than a school – there were copious sports facilities catering to basketball, football, tennis, golf, track & field. Inside there were classrooms with every piece of technology you could ever need – every room looked like as if the Starship Enterprise had been a children’s space ship. The immaculate marble-and-glass corridors led to different other facilities, such as a fully equipped air-conditioned theatre with seating for well over a hundred, a canteen the size of Gatwick Airport’s arrivals area, tree-festooned walkways, and a rather large trophy room displaying the school’s impressive sporting and academic achievements over the years.

The mouth-watering services and programme on offer, plus the facilities, location and fee structure made me realise that maybe back in Luxembourg we were being swindled. No, hold on, not swindled, robbed. Pickpocketed. Mugged. Cheated. Fleeced. Ripped off. Defrauded. Conned. Hustled. Deceived. Hoodwinked. Shafted. Taken for idiots. Imagine paying a vast amount of money to a school to turn your child into a fully-functioning citizen, only for them to tell you they’re not prepared to let her repeat the year and grant you the time to put in place the appropriate professional help. What kind of crapulous business model are you running when you ask thousands of euro for your rather limited and unexciting services, and you act like you are the client? What school – remember that, school – wants all of the children in its care to conform to the system rather than to adapt the school to the individual? The visit in Valencia had raised a whole new level of questions that my brain was finding hard to answer. All I could think about was that we had not yet wasted our children’s education, and it was vital that we put everything in place by September. It was the second week of July.

At the end of the rather hasty visit, the head teacher said something that made me feel we needed to look elsewhere: “we can take Livia for a week and see how she gets on.” That was never going to work for me, but one of the advantages of Valencia is that it has more international schools than the entire Grande Région, which covers 5 regions in 4 countries. So I aimed my intentions towards a lovely British school in another suburb that had similar facilities and a powerful reputation. I called them up, they immediately arranged a Zoom call for a few days later, we told the head about our situation, and she sent us the enrolment forms.

To say that this woman is a mere head teacher is doing her a disservice. She is a ninja businesswoman and astute service provider. Every email answered, even if only a few words, all procedures explained, and all steps towards onboarding in September laid out in front of us. We were in.

Next, we needed a place to live.

Another thing I did while I was in Valencia was go to some estate agents. I had the impression there were going to be some heavier obstacles in this area, especially as Valencia is quite a popular place to move to. I visited a few of them, dropped my details and what I was looking for, and never heard anything again. Except from one; and yes, another ninja businesswoman. See the previous article for details on how we procured our beachfront apartment.

I also got reacquainted with the Spanish character and way of life. I should elaborate at this point – back in the twentieth century, my family had a strong connection to Spain. We had relatives living in three parts of the country, and my grandparents had a holiday home in the mountains near Malaga. They were special times – I loved the Spanish work ethic, the positive attitude, wicked sense of humour, strong sense of community, laid-back outlook, and ability to distinguish between fun and duty. And I had a proper revisit to these feelings as soon as I landed.

It was a bizarre, disorienting feeling, though, because I had been out of this environment for well over a couple of decades. But it all felt so very familiar, so very comforting, and so indispensable at that point. If I was going to leave behind my house that I had poured 15 years of toil into, I wasn’t going to take a backwards step. And here, in this blisteringly hot climate, with the nightly wind set to hair dryer status and the daytime temperatures reaching a point where even the devils of hell had gone back downstairs to cool off, I had my epiphany. I was, weirdly, going back to my original second home.

But there was a daunting task awaiting us before we got there: there was a house full of our junk that needed emptying, we needed to throw out a lot of stuff that we hadn’t used or seen for years, deal with some crap left over from the previous owners, and find a solution for a grumpy, deaf, twenty-year-old cat called Baldrick. Oh yes, and I needed to plan our route to Spain, dates and places to stay on the way.

I arranged for a container to be delivered to the driveway, and we started to divide all the junk that couldn't go in there into categories to take to the dump, a 35-minute drive away at the other end of Trier. I never realised how much utter rubbish the average household could accumulate over time. It is amazing. I did several runs to the dump, one of them just with electric bits and pieces: old blenders, a few outdated printers, a ton of battery-operated gadgets, obsolete chargers, lamps, broken plugs, sections of the Internet, old modems, clocks, and even a battery-operated oil painting. Don’t ask me what that’s all about, I have no idea, but it was a thing left in the bowels of the house by a previous occupier. Kirsten said she supposed it played a tune. Nobody buys that kind of trash, unless it’s a gift from someone who hates you!

The days went by, July finished and August kicked in. We had boxes and boxes full of our stuff, packed high and stashed in the flat below. I went up and down the steps carrying so much of it, I lost 4 kilos in just 3 weeks. Our gardener, Benek, had also helped to get the place in order, and without him I don’t know what we would have done.

The children were on summer holiday, and they were constantly asking us when we were going on holiday. I felt bad because we had so much to do and so little time, but yes, we all deserved a holiday. We were supposed to start our rental period on 1 September, so I decided that we should finish up on 21 August and the next day make our way southwards. I would find us a good seaside holiday home near Valencia for the week before we needed to move in, and arrange a couple of places to stay on the way that would count as a holiday.

One of the best ways to experience Spain is to go to a place where the Spanish go on holiday. The picturesque town of Peñíscola, about an hour and a half’s drive north of Valencia, is one of those places. It’s a quiet, unassuming resort, but it’s a beauty. Two enormous rocky promontories, one with the old city on it, a small harbour, and some beaches in-between that are protected from the main sea.

I found a delightful house in a typical urbanisation up some very windy roads with its own garage and terrace overlooking the sea – we would stay there for our final week from 25 August to 1 September. Now I could fill in the gaps to get there. I love planning holiday itineraries, and my first and most important tip is planning backwards is so much easier. Book your final destination first, it’s really then just a matter of filling in the gaps.

I used Google Maps to search for a good place in France to stay for a couple of nights, quite a long way south. I decided we should leave early on 22 August, a Tuesday, and get as far as possible towards our end point. Ambitious, but doable. I landed on Camping et Chambres d'hôtes du Moulin d'Onclaire, near the delightful town of Privas in the Ardèche. It had a swimming pool, and we could stay in a pavilion tent under some trees next to a river. I thought the second leg should be less ambitious so we could enjoy the Ardèche more and have a shorter drive. I found a delightful little bed and breakfast in the foothills of the Pyrenees about an hour from the Spanish border called Maury Cat Studio 66, where we would stay one night before our week in Peñíscola.

It was all set, but time was pressing. I would tell you what the months of July and August were like: imagine someone gets a fire hose and sprays you for days on end. Not with water, but with an endless number of tasks. You need to do some more packing, but you also need to collect rubbish, but you need to sweep the toys up that the kids spread all over the house, but you need to go shopping for food, but you need to put some washing on, but you need to clear up the terrace, but you need to go to the council to sign out of the community, but you need to arrange some meetings with a few people to say goodbye, but you need to buy more boxes, but you need to occupy the children before they turn the place into a set from Lord Of The Flies, but you need to cook dinner, but you need to call the agent in Spain for an update, but you need to put all these things in some kind of order of urgency so that you don’t have to choose one of two impossible options later.

You get the idea.

Anyhow, by way of a miracle, we managed to fit everyone in the car on the morning of the 22nd of August. I think it was just getting to the point where we said “we’ve done enough, we can’t look at it any longer, let’s just go.” So we did, with the aim of returning the following month for a few days to put the rest in order. Good intentions, good intentions…

We unceremoniously sped off towards our new life without looking back. From what I remember, we stopped at a few places as we moved southwards, and each time, we noticed an increase in the intensity of the heat. It was really telling that by the time we reached Lyon, we were starting to flinch each time we stepped out into the sun.

Arriving at the first destination at about 7, we immediately went to the local town, Privas. Having parked the car, we headed into the blazing evening light to enjoy what was left of the day, sweat a little, and allow the children to stretch their legs. There would be no set bedtime that night, not now we were finally able to let go of many of the obligations. Saying that, I think it still took six weeks for us to fully expunge the stress and tension of the summer: for a long time, we were still quite edgy and tense, always responding to every noise or movement, and finding certain simple tasks too heavy to complete, or even start.

The day after, we spent the day at the pool just generally trying to detoxify. However, another rather silly annoyance crept up on us: the brakes of the car were worn and scraping metal on metal. I was in no mood to drive all the way to Valencia with dodgy brakes, not now we were south of Lyon, the kind of dividing line between northern and southern driving habits (with a few southern exclaves, such as Paris and Brussels – and for those who know, Esch-Sur-Alzette too…).

So I drove to a number of garages in the hope someone would be able to change them as quickly as possible. In the French countryside. In August. In a heatwave. A woman at the only garage that said it could fix the situation told me they would order the part and it would be there the following day, when we had to head south. It was the only possibility, so I took it. It was a garage about 10 kilometres from our campsite, so the assistant, a boy of about 19, was given the task of driving me back. The car was a tiny Renault Clio from about the late nineties and I had to heave my legs in to be able to close the door.

That evening, we ate at the camp site’s restaurant, a lovely courtyard terrace next to the swimming pool. There was to be a concert afterwards, and we were encouraged to stay.

There is something about the French and their stomachs that I will never understand. When the French go on holiday, so do their taste buds... and their principles. Between September and June, the French will look down upon the Americans and the British, the Dutch and the Germans, even the Danes, and pour scorn upon their eating habits, always dwelling on how superior their food is (despite there being a lot of cross-over), and yet when you go to any French holiday resort, the only thing they’ll serve is brown or orange-coloured fried food, often straight out of the freezer. There’ll be nuggets, breaded chicken, croquettes, fish sticks, meat balls, these thin, quick-cook fries that crisp up if you leave them in for a minute longer, and they’ll put them all in the deep fat fryer. There will always be loads of ketchup, an almost blasphemous ritual that the French seem keen on keeping alive as soon as July and August roll round. I remember my mother refused ketchup in the house, but in France, this is the summer staple. And they’ll charge you as much for this fattening brown pile of factory-made offal and plant-based leftovers as your local restaurant back home would for a decent salad, followed by an entrecôte, vegetables and potatoes roasted in garlic and rosemary, plus dessert and a glass of decent red wine. Not to forget a proper coffee, not the powdered crap they lazily make themselves as soon as the calendar reaches July. The French will forever bang on about their “marvellous cuisine”, even trying to bully UNESCO into giving it World Heritage status, yet they themselves are close to the top of the world rankings for fast food consumption. Go figure.

Anyway… rant over, back to the point. The evening passed well enough, and we had a lot of fun with everyone else at the concert/party. The performers, a man with an electric guitar and a digital mixer, and a woman vocalist, both local, would regale us with some proper rock songs, many in English. This, despite them not speaking a word of the language. They played really well and their hilarious pronunciation of the English lyrics was just the tonic I needed to cheer me up. I loved Suite Homme à la Bama by Aerosmith, Wok Ziss Ouais by Aerosmith, Ail Oué Tou'elle by AC/DC, Aneuze Houane Bail Tzeu Deust by Queen, Aille L’oeuf Roquenrol by Joan Jett, and Chize Gotze Louque by Roxette. Despite that, they were a lovely pair, and they really knew how to get us all dancing. I’d have hired them if I lived locally.

In the morning, I called the garage to see when I should come and get the car. They said the part would be in but they weren’t sure when. The prodigiously long, unnecessary rural French lunchtime came and went, no car. By 3pm, I was crawling up the walls. We should have been gone by then – our hosts for that evening were preparing dinner for us, and it was 360 kilometres away. Another intolerable hour ticked on, no call. The children were having a thoroughly great time all day at the pool, so the fact that Daddy was having an internal meltdown was immaterial.

Finally, at about half past four, the garage called to say the car was ready, and the boy would pick me up in twenty minutes. I told Kirsten to have all our belongings waiting outside the tent and went there expecting to pay, pick up my car keys and get the hell out of there. Nope. The client before me had a list of demands and gave an explanation each time: “The front left tyre might need some air – I was driving back from Carrefour on Tuesday – or was it Monday? Oh no, it wasn’t Carrefour, it was Leclerc, and there was one of those potholes that you can’t avoid. The local council should be ashamed. Anyway, I didn’t see it until too late so I was going too fast. Must have been about 40. Could have been faster though. Anyway, it hit the pothole and my coffee went all over the dashboard, I dropped my cigarette on the floor, and the suspension took quite a hit.”

Oh please STFU, I have a bunch of kids thinking Daddy’s hidden the car somewhere and I have to be in the Pyrenees by 8. I interrupted the conversation after a while and the chatty guy said “oh, I didn’t see you there!” I wanted to say, “yeah, no surprise there… you’re so self-absorbed, no wonder you hit a massive pothole. Why don’t you move your gaze away from the end of your own nose, you boring old troll, and take a wider look around you!” But instead I said “sorry for interrupting this pleasant little conversation, but I do have quite a pressing need for my car.” Regretfully, I held in my utter rage, because despite firstly the little devil on my left shoulder telling me to give any idiots and time wasters a good verbal slapping, and secondly the lack of an angel on my right shoulder keeping me virtuous, there is a terrifying Kirsten-shaped leviathan at home waiting to murder me for not having a placatory, well-meaning, non-confrontational attitude, even among people who really need to be told they're the main problem in their friends' and family's lives.

It’s a weird, paradoxical, almost hypocritical situation: she has a distaste to point out other people’s idiocies or despicable attitudes, so as not to cause a diplomatic incident, or worse, to offend the bastard, yet I might get a full half-hour sermon on putting too much salt in the pasta water. Believe me, the feeling of self-loathing for not telling a stranger he’s cycling in the middle of the road by hooting my horn loudly right behind him is better than the Full Kirsten Lecture awaiting me if I did do it. But sometimes temptation does win, and I will take the verbal fallout heading my way.

We hit the road at twelve minutes after five. I sent a message to the hosts with our excuses but that we were definitely on the way, and they said not to worry, they would wait. Having committed a few minor traffic infractions, we got there at two minutes after nine, and it was truly worth the stress – from the front, it looked like an unassuming row house on a very steep hill with some very dodgy surfaces, but the view on the other side was simply breathtaking. You walked through a huge room containing a proper, professional kitchen, passing tasteful but engaging décor, into the adjoining entertainment room containing an immense dining table, and a circular sofa for properly cosy moments (I’m quite sure that sofa could tell a few stories).

Our hosts were a couple in their fifties with the attitude and outlook of people half their age. They were in the midst of preparing our dinner when we arrived, so we were escorted to our room. We left through the back door, where there was a terrace overlooking the slope, and up a metallic spiral staircase to a huge wooden platform. Our room was through some hermetically-sealed sliding doors. It was so perfectly laid out in a nautical style and even had a mini cinema at the back. The children’s room was off to the side and had enough playful accessories to keep them entertained, but it was the terrace that was the star. It was dark, the moon was coming up, and we could make out the mountains in the back, the valley below, and the trees straddling the river. I was impatient to see what it looked like in the morning…

Dinner was served – a truly impressive salad to start with, which could have filled me up on its own. But then came a dish of local sausages, potatoes and summer vegetables. Believe me, about five years ago, I would have eaten the lot. But then, I was 30 kilos heavier and had a penchant for assuring an empty plate.

Dessert was equally delicious, and we were thoroughly impressed with the entire experience. We moved to the terrace, where it had got a lot cooler, for cigars and a nightcap, then we went off to sleep. Our quarters, up the metallic spiral staircase, were not to everyone’s liking… Dainoris needed his hand held and Milda was a little sceptical to start with, but in the light of the morning, I was sure the situation would be different.

And yes, it was.

I woke up with the anticipation of a child on birthday morning, and went over to open the sliding doors and the shutters. I lost the ability to breathe for a few seconds – the vertiginous rocky mountains, the fertile valley, the length of the view along the river – it was all so immense, so wild, so raucous in a silent kind of way. I could happily have just decided to move in there and then, but there were three kids to take to a holiday home in Peñíscola, and then there was the little matter of our new life in Valencia.

After a proper breakfast, we thanked our remarkable hosts and once more got back in the car. An hour passed and we crossed the border into Spain. The borders between countries in the EU are becoming more and more difficult to discern, and the difference in my lifetime of crossing into Spain in the 1980s compared to now couldn’t be more stark. Back then, we had to pull up at a huge roadside installation and show our papers to some very strict-looking geezers in odd hats and uniforms who used to make a habit of confiscating cameras, even if they had remained in your bag the whole time. How on earth they could suffer the heat while wearing a buttoned-up shirt and blazer was as baffling as the procedure they put us through. On this journey, we hurtled over the frontier without even thinking about it… it wasn’t until I saw an advert for a restaurant serving tapas that I realised we had left France. The European Union has a lot of detractors – but it has made our ability to move around so much easier. We would never have been able to do what we did back then: just pick everything up and dump it 1500 kilometres further south without even needing to show our passports.

We drove some more through the flourishing landscapes of Catalunya, deciding to pull off the motorway near Lloret de Mar, where there were surely some places to stop for lunch. We found a roadside restaurant that had ample parking and I put our long-suffering car under some trees.

After what was a perfect “Welcome to Spain” lunch, we jumped in the car and headed to Peñíscola, still quite a long drive away, passing exit signs for some of the country’s most well-known tourist destinations: Palamos, Tossa de Mar, Calella, Blanes, Sitges, Salou, not forgetting Barcelona, then crossing the Ebro valley before reaching Peñíscola itself. The children were veering between quietly interested in the scenery outside, to boisterous and annoying. So it was a particular comfort when we arrived in the town. I just had to get the keys from the tourist bureau on the other side of the town, and we’d be all set for our well-deserved holiday.

The town itself is a bright, friendly and laid-back place with a mix of restaurants and bars, tourist tat shops, and mid-range clothes boutiques. There are two main beach fronts on each side of a huge promontory containing the old town, with its castle on the top, seeming to rise out of the land like a massive organ in a theatre. So the first thing we did when we arrived at about five-thirty and got our keys was to change and head to the beach. The evening warmth kept everyone on the beach until after half past eight.

The children released a lot of energy that evening, both there and at the restaurant we went to after, a ranch house with a sprawling tree-speckled complex of tables and chairs, benches, chaises longues, sunbeds and deckchairs surrounding a small raised pool with a bridge over it. The Steakhouse El Campo is a seasonal venue open while there are enough summer tourists, and it’s run by a German man and his son. The Vater runs the restaurant in and around the ranch house while his Sohn runs the outdoor bar and grill near the pool.

Now we really felt like we were on holiday. During the week, we just did some typical tourist activities – visiting the beach, going to the park, walking in the cool night air, going to bed reasonably late, and eating local delicacies. We visited a lot of great restaurants and other places to eat, such as Hogar El Jubilado, an old-style hostelry owned by the local council and run by an elite team of workers. You queue up to make your order, they prepare it there and then, and by the time you’ve paid for it, it’s ready. There were potato salads, seafood salads, Russian salads, tortillas españolas, meatballs, cheeses, fresh fish dishes, chicken drumsticks, and a whole 1-and-a-half-metre-long fridge with whatever dessert you could desire. They opened for breakfast at the crack of dawn with croissants and pains au chocolat and closed at midnight after the last beer was poured. It was the town’s beating heart, and the people working there were happy, mischievous and highly efficient.

You can tell the quality of the place by the amount of insolence they are willing to hurl at you, and this place was right there at the top. Their coffee was tremendous and so was their teasing. It was here that I said to myself “I think we’re going to be all right.” I’ll be honest with you, I was still in mourning for our old life, and I often had moments when I just wanted to cry. Looking back, it was compounded by a deep fatigue from all the hard work before we left, but it didn’t take away the sting from having to uproot the entire family from everything they knew.

All I can say is the younger three were having the time of their lives, and the last thing on their minds was returning to our former house in Saarburg and going back to any schools in Luxembourg. And that was the most comforting thing. Because after this week, we were to start our new lives and they were to go to school.

But that is for another post. 


 

 

Tuesday 5 September 2023

Why we moved from Luxembourg to Spain

FOR SALE: 5 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, 1600sqm land, 100m to supermarket, 200m to bus stop direct to Luxembourg, contact me for details


IF YOUR BACK IS AGAINST THE WALL, THE ONLY WAY IS FORWARD

Thursday 29 June seemed like such an ordinary day. I drove the two younger children to their crèche, then took our five-year-old eldest, Livia, to her speech therapist. We went to the playground a little afterwards, before I drove her to school ready for lunchtime. When I arrived, the head teacher asked me to join him in his office. He weirdly called me by my first name, which I found slightly unsettling. For legal reasons, I will not mention the name of the school, or any names of those who work in there, but you can be sure that my account of events is accurate.

Back in winter, at the parent-teacher meeting, Livia’s teachers had come forward to tell us Livia was showing some behavioural issues and didn’t want to speak to them in French or German. Throughout the time, we heard reports of Livia eating leaves, stones, paper, and taking other children’s hats and throwing them over the fence onto the footpath that runs next to the school. Having said that, I also noticed that the staff tended to exaggerate the severity of typical children’s behaviour, for example at the end of the school day, all children were assembled downstairs in the canteen, and if the noise levels went above what I would call Thursday Afternoon At A Village Tearoom Level, the lights would be switched off until the kids went back to being dull and apathetic zombies again.

Livia’s German teacher in the school had suggested we send her to a “Special School” in Germany, where they would “look after her and help her find her place”. A German doctor, at a pre-school inspection in Trier spent half an hour in his room with her and then declared that she had autism. We were sure this was not the case – there are certain very large pointers to autism, and she had very few of them.

If anything, we thought she had ADHD, but these so-called professionals were pushing hard to make sure she ended up isolated from the real world in an age where most education systems are closing their separationist schools and moving towards a more integrated model. We were quite adamant that if we reached the point where we were forced to send her to her certain isolation, we would get the hell out of here.

It was at about this time we started getting letters from the local school in Saarburg. The head teacher wanted us to visit to enrol Livia there. Considering her complete aversion to German, this was a non-starter. We are not totally sure how she decided to reject German, but back in 2019, she was in the local child daycare centre here, and she absolutely hated it, which is why we moved her to Luxembourg in the first place. So enrolling her there would be a step backwards.

I remember very clearly, when she was just two years and four months old, taking her back to her daycare centre in Saarburg after Christmas. She entered her room and saw her educator, but then she noticed the head of the school, a rather unsympathetic and businesslike woman. Livia took one look at her and ran to me screaming. I resorted to get her out of there and vowed never to put her in a local school again.

Fast-forward to 2023: all of this barrage of various messages from different people in the school was leading up to something, of course: the school was trying to expunge someone who didn’t fit their Sound-Of-Music, Top-Of-The-League-Tables image, and the German authorities were trying to reclaim one of their own from the clutches of the neighbouring country.

The nurse at Livia’s school said she thought we should send her to the paediatric unit in the CHL Hospital in Luxembourg to have an assessment. We went there, and the very kind doctor spent a few sessions getting to know Livia before writing out eight (that’s EIGHT) prescriptions for various specialists and tests: child psychologist, ophthalmologist, speech therapist, ergotherapist, ENT doctor, blood test, brain scan, and one other I have forgotten. These would come in very handy if the German authorities decided to follow through with their half-hour assessment and request us to send Livia to a Special School.

For the next four months, I spent at least two days in every week driving her from place to place, getting reports and assessments done. After I told her about the German doctor’s rather rushed assessment, the psychologist said she was convinced it wasn’t autism and found the method, state-approved, to reach that conclusion extremely troubling. She also felt that the school was trying to shake off their own responsibilities towards Livia.

The speech therapist had ten sessions with Livia, and she has advanced very far since those early days where she found it hard to make conversation. We are coming to the conclusion that along with a form of concentration deficiency, she also suffers from a crushing lack of self-confidence; an almost pure form of perfectionism. I should add that all these appointments had taken their toll on my working life: I am paid per hour, so I had lost about €2000 in earnings through all these appointments, and spent about €700 on them, which I wouldn’t get back, because Livia was seeing specialists in Luxembourg. If I took her to Germany, I would lose even more time at work, even if the service were free.

We came to an agreement with the school’s head teacher that we would like to conclude her tests before we take any action, and all this could last until way after the end of term. Our idea was, as she was born at the end of August, it wouldn’t really harm her to repeat the previous year while we did all the tests necessary to put in place a proper regime. The head teacher seemed to think this was viable, but he would have to run it past the board of directors. However, he didn’t think this was a big issue. We even told him we would be prepared to pay more for any extra outside help brought in.

In early March, we had another meeting with the teachers, and one of them came to me in private to say she thought we should take precautions and apply to some other schools, just in case. This filled me with panic so I did just that. We wouldn’t hear until the end of June from the other schools, but we had to hope we would get in somewhere, or Livia would be condemned to her solitude.

In the meantime, Livia was struggling to communicate with some of her teachers. A few of the after-school carers, who spoke predominantly English, managed to have a good relationship with her, plaiting her hair, getting her to draw and paint some elaborate pictures, playing with the material, but the morning teachers in the learning hours really saw her differently. They would say Livia would mess up other children’s artworks, spread sand or soil across the classroom floor, or mix up all the pieces from different sets of games. On occasion, she would soil herself and have to be cleaned up. All this happened in the mornings, and was, as far as I am concerned, a cry for help. The teachers just saw this as an annoyance, and didn’t really relate it to her state of mind.

We were “summoned” to a meeting at the local school in Saarburg to discuss Livia’s options there and we informed her that under no circumstances would we be sending her to that school. She also wanted to send Livia to a “Special School” in Trier, which would mean Livia’s school holidays would be different to mine and to her siblings’. We might never have a week free where we would be able to be a family again.

When we arrived at her office, with all three children because I was going to take them to school directly after, Milda walked in first. She is nearly three years younger than Livia, but this alleged “pedagogical professional” astoundingly said “ah, this must be Livia.” I replied “no, she’s 3 years old, and she’s called Milda.” First mistake. Throughout the meeting, she didn’t once address Livia or even acknowledge her.

After 45 minutes in there, the three were understandably getting a little boisterous. It was at this moment she at long last spoke to them, rebuking them with the following remark: “this is a school, we don’t play games here.” Second mistake. I spoke to the children myself, saying “you heard her, there’s no fun allowed here!” She tried to backtrack, but I wasn’t going to let her get away with such an outburst.

She then decided to go for the ultimate in nonsensical power-play: “yes, well having seen her, I can definitely say she would be better off in Trier at one of the special schools.” Third mistake. To which Kirsten and I politely told her to take a long walk off a short pier.

We really hoped one of the other schools, where English was the main teaching language, would come through, but otherwise, another year in the same school repeating the year might help her grow in confidence while we finished having her assessed. It was the lesser of the two evils, the other being sent to a German school where she would most likely flounder and lose any confidence she had picked up.

In mid-June, we received news from one of the English-language schools we had applied to: they were sorry to inform us that Livia had not made the cut. This was a disappointment to us, but having filled out the enrolment questionnaire, which was clearly designed to spot a child likely to reduce its ranking in the national table of scholarly excellence, we were hardly surprised.

The other English-language school wrote to us soon after, to say that she was on a waiting list and we would be informed when a place came free. That might not be for months or even next year, meaning that our hopes were firmly pinned on her current school. I asked the head teacher, and he said all the paperwork would be done and he would inform me when the board of directors had given the green light. I presumed this meant we were going to be all right.

I had already planned the summer holiday to Denmark from 20 July to 8 August down to the second, including stopovers in northern Germany, ferries, three different rentals, and a birthday lunch for my 50th with my good friend Gustav, who had a house 200m from our rented apartment on our final week. I had started telling the children about our impending trip, and showing them pictures of where we were going.

I had also planned to return to Denmark a few weeks later at the end of August for Gustav’s wedding. On that note, our other mutual friends had arranged his bachelor party which would take place the same weekend as my 50th birthday, and it would be a pretty special time – fishing, hanging around on the beach, camping, and smoking a succulent piece of meat for 24 hours. I had even got the perfect ruse for his surprise: I would meet him, take him out for lunch, go for a walk, while other friends would set up a gorgeous party scene in his backyard overlooking the Baltic Sea before taking him off to Copenhagen for a night of camping and merriment around the fire.

But all that was about to be pulled from under our feet.

On Thursday 29 June, I stepped into the head teacher’s office. He took a deep breath, invited me to take a seat, and began:

“It is with the deepest regret and frustration that I am charged with informing you that the board of directors will not agree to let Livia remain in the school next year. They don’t think it’s something this school can handle. We don’t have the space to cater for a Special Educational Needs child here – as you see, we are already struggling with the space we have. I am truly sorry, as I thought they were going to agree to it.”

His eyes were moist and he was holding back some emotion, but I could tell he regretted ever leading me to believe it would get the go-ahead. I called Kirsten while I was in his office so that he could deliver the news twice – it was the least he owed me. Kirsten gave him a diatribe I don’t think I’ve ever heard her deliver. She went absolutely berserk, and rightly so. She felt betrayed and let down. He advised us to write a letter of appeal to the board of directors.

I left the school, went to my car and let out the most anguished sounds I have ever let forth from deep inside my soul. I knew the road had reached its end. This was the point where Livia was sentenced to a life of unfulfillment and ordinariness. She would never find herself – her anxiousness would manifest itself and she would forever be stigmatised by her so-called “condition”.

It was just before that horrendous meeting that the leader from the local school in Saarburg sent a menacing email telling us “time is pressing.” Later on, I found it rather suspicious to get it at that moment, and my suspicions were confirmed when our neighbour, who works at the same school, said in a passing conversation that she had heard our application had been rejected.

In the days that followed, we decided to fall back on other contingency plans that we had considered were unlikely to be required, but we should have some anyway, and that included a list of countries that would be acceptable to us both. My list was a lot longer than Kirsten’s but we had two countries in common: Ireland and Spain.

I looked on the International Schools Database at various cities in Spain, and did some research on the Irish education system. Both seemed viable, but it was the cost of living and especially property prices that swayed us towards Spain. Also, it was going to be a city, not a glorified village in the middle of nowhere that we would move to – we are city people at heart, and after 15 years here, it was time to move back to our roots.

I stumbled on a very revealing fact: Spain’s third city, Valencia, has three times more international schools than the entire country of Luxembourg, and ten times more than our entire state in Germany. This alone is an appalling indictment of the lack of educational infrastructure and the unimaginative scarcity of choice in this area. When we consider Luxembourg is home to almost three-quarters non-native people, it starts to really exasperate me that the pitifully low number of educational facilities is woefully oversubscribed.

It is also an element of shame that one of the pillars of European integration, the freedom of movement of people, is at the national level, just a sham. The shining light on the hill of European identity, that we can live and work in, fall in love in, be educated in any other European country, is not real. It is kind of a cross between Potemkin and Schrödinger – it’s there but it isn’t, it’s enshrined in law but it’s not carried out. You see, in Luxembourg, if you want to work in many sectors, you are required to have a certain level of Luxembourgish language skills, even though French and German are also official languages, and English and Portuguese are pretty prevalent too.

Also, many jobs require certain qualifications to fill these posts, with some countries (let’s be honest, everything to the west of the former Iron Curtain) making it mandatory to have locally recognised certificates. This has caused a crisis of recruitment in many sectors of employment. But this isn’t unique to Luxembourg: this is being replicated all over Europe. That’s how EU member states keep immigration down, and one of the reasons the UK was so popular: because before Brexit, it didn’t apply such rules. Two of the sectors affected by this are education and medicine. There are so few psychiatrists catering to youth in Luxembourg, that they are sent to Belgium or Germany for treatment. Also, there are difficulties recruiting native speakers to teach foreign languages. Imagine a country like Denmark, where a qualified Spanish teacher from Spain needs to speak Danish to teach their own language in a state school.

A week after the atrocity at Livia’s school, I came to pick her up for the final time, just before their end-of-term party. I really didn’t feel like standing there watching the kids give the parents a performance when I knew Livia would be a bystander. I was sure they were quietly relieved, too, in a macabre way.

And a few days later, I flew to Valencia on a reconnaissance mission: I went to view a potential school for all three children and to sign in at various rental agencies. The school itself was ultra-modern, had bigger and better facilities including sports facilities, a theatre, and a lot of technology. I was dumbfounded at the difference from Livia’s school, where they weren’t even in possession of a blade of real grass in the grounds. And it wasn’t as expensive.

Rents in the city weren’t cheap, but less than Luxembourg for much bigger places. We would probably start off with a short-term rent and in the meantime find a more permanent place where we could ship our possessions to.

I resolved to get the ball rolling.

Upon my return, I started my research. We put the house up for sale, and started sorting out our stuff into two categories: what we would take by car in August, and what we would leave here packed up for when we moved in to a longer-term place. I cancelled my office contract with the coworking place, and looked for another one in Valencia. Another point here: there are three times as many coworking places in Valencia as in Luxembourg.

This is the right place to go, as I can find another place to work much more easily if we need to shift the centre of activity to another area of the city. Furthermore, if the school doesn’t work out, we have so much more choice.

I had also planned a party on 27 August to celebrate my 50th birthday earlier in the month, as well as our 20th wedding anniversary on 6 September, and Livia’s 6th birthday on 29 August. It was to take place at a hillside venue with beautiful views of the Saar valley. I had already sounded out a band to play, and we had written out the invitations. This was also a victim of circumstance.

The realisation that we needed to leave was traumatising – we had finally got things sorted in our lives: the garden was now almost perfectly how I had planned and conceived it over the last 13 years; I had a wonderful little office to work in, where my ideas were flowing; I had started to regain some of my pre-children and pre-Covid social life, meeting up with old acquaintances again; and I had established a burnishing reputation in Luxembourg for my professional services, being called on by some of the country’s most influential citizens. I was also continuing in my active support of Ukrainians in the country, and had some big ideas.

All of this was swept out of the door by a dismissive wave of a hand in a school board room. The period between receiving this news and arriving at a new destination is an oxymoronic and multi-layered sensation:

First, there is a mix of utter fury and resentment that everything you know and have built up has been taken away from you. You think about all the people, places and events that you will no longer be part of.

Then there is the sheer panic about the amount of work you need to do in such a short timeframe – find a new place to live, arrange schools, hire a container to throw out all the stuff you can’t take with you, pack up your belongings, call various people to arrange a house sale, plot a way of getting to your new destination, cancel all your subscriptions, arrange passports for your children, sign out of social and municipal organisations, arrange for someone to feed your cat for a few weeks until you can come back and get him, close bank accounts, and the list goes on.

Following this, there is the feeling of the unknown: how will the children adapt? Can we find a place to live? Are we able to cope with the stress of it all? Will we have enough time to clear out thirteen years of life in a house and move it all to Spain?

And finally, there is the long goodbye. You spend more time in places you like to be: a kind of drawn-out attack of nostalgia. We spent every evening in our garden playing with the children, or sitting in one of the numerous seating places dotted around the garden, looking out at the view and noticing things we never did before, such as finally seeing our hibiscus blooming, which it hadn’t done for the past 8 years. I went to the Danish café in Neudorf more frequently, I took a few detours in the car to see some of the old places I used to visit, I looked more intently at everything to try to remember it. I took a lot more photos, although it will be a while before I will be able to bring myself to look at them.

Moving house will bring about some difficult decisions that you have to take in cold blood. There are certain pieces of memorabilia you collect during your lifetime that were nice to keep at the time as a souvenir, but you maybe shouldn’t hang on to them anymore. A bottle of very strong alcohol that I received on a hilarious trip around Slovakia; some notes from my raucous A-Level Law class in 1991; some trinkets I bought on various excursions.

Then there was a box of old papers and cards from years past that linked to an occasion, such as a remarkable Georgian restaurant in Moscow, a pub in a small Scottish village where we had a wild night, a youth hostel in a haunted castle in the Black Forest, the bus timetable of a route I took in the mountains of Andalusia, a page from a Polish phone book with the number of someone I regarded as very special, a rather flirtatious note tucked into a menu from an admirer in Prague.

These are things I couldn’t part with, as they are etched on my soul, but there were other things that I had to let go of. The memories will grow fainter or even die, but you can’t keep hold of every morsel of your existence.

All this has made me understand the plight of refugees. I am lucky in that I don’t have to head off in a hurry and leave everything behind; but the feelings that they evoke and the impressions that I have are similar: I am not leaving on my own terms, I am abandoning the comfort and familiarity of my home, my professional and leisure activities and telling myself it’s better where I’m going. I am trying hard to convince myself that it’s the right thing to do. I am jumping off a cliff and hoping for a soft landing.

Which brings me to the saga of how we found our new home: upon hearing the news, I knew I needed to get something sorted straight away, but I refused to compromise. I had always promised myself that if we were going to leave our lovely house, it would have to be something very special indeed. I would go as far as to say that the only reason we remained here is because of our house – the garden has been my life’s labour over the last 13 years, and has seen so many changes.

From being just a plain parcel of grass with a couple of walnut trees at the top, my garden now has 30 trees, including a majestic hanging cedar, two cherry trees, four apple trees, a tulip tree, and the queen of the garden, a magnificent two-coloured maple that provides dappled shade on our terrace. There are blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, sloes, redcurrants, roses, cypresses, and even a magnolia so rare, you can count the number of species in the country on one hand. There is a pond with a bridge surrounded by pampa grasses and syringa, and just below it a seating area made up of slate stones in a semicircle where roses and catkin grow side-by-side.

So as you can imagine, I’m not going to give this place up so easily. If we were going to move, I would do everything I could to assure we found something special. Since my youth, where I made some awful life choices, I resolved to reverse every negative or regretful occurrence that affected me or those around me by taking affirmative action. This was one of those times.

I went to the main real estate website in Spain, Idealista, and began to search for places to rent within budget. Many of them were really good for the rate, especially if you compare them with what is on offer in Luxembourg for the same amount. I wrote to a few of the agents, but I heard nothing back. Which is why I decided to go to Valencia for a couple of days myself. Firstly, I wanted to make sure it was the right choice, but secondly, I wanted to personally visit some of the agents myself, just to make sure they knew I was serious.

One of the places I had found on Idealista was a truly splendid four-bedroom apartment in a gated community about 15 minutes north of the centre, right next to the beach, with a communal swimming pool, children’s playground, tennis court, ice cream cafés, tapas bars, French bakery, and its own parking spot. I would have had to be completely nuts to not even try to apply, even though the queue for the place, if all applicants were brought together, would probably resemble a Japanese metro station in rush hour. I sent an enthusiastic message over the website and hoped for the best.

It was a rent from September to end of June only, as the owners rent it out in the summer to tourists for a higher weekly tariff than the off-season monthly rent. Living there would be beyond our wildest dreams: it would give the children such a fantastic kickstart to their new lives in Spain. I imagined bringing them home from school, then heading to the beach for a swim and having dinner in a chiringuito before we went home to bed. Or the rush they would get hurtling down the five floors to the swimming pool. I was picturing our ability to sit on the enormous terrace and have dinner in short-sleeved clothes and sandals while watching the sea. In November.

A place worth moving to: beach access, swimming pool, parking space, entertainment facilities, children's playground

But I was sure I needed to jump through an enormous number of hoops to get there. Being in Valencia and actually going along to speak to the agent herself would surely help – I don’t think there are many who would go so far just for an apartment, but this was different. After my visit to a potential new school, I called a taxi driver I had befriended called Toni to drive me to the agency near the outstanding Palace of Sciences in the south of the city. In 38 degrees heat, I walked the final 500 metres to the agency, located at the back of an enormous converted warehouse, only to discover that the woman responsible was not there. Crestfallen, I left my details and went back to my room on foot in the stifling heat for a siesta while I figured out what to do for the afternoon.

But to her credit, she did call me back explaining the situation and what we would have to do. As I would discover over the coming three or four weeks, she was a really kind, patient and happy woman called Mercedes, but when talking business, she also did her job properly. “Are you aware it’s available only until June next year? Why would this suit you?” I replied that this would give us the opportunity to look for a more permanent place to live, and if we found one in the spring, it would allow us time to send for our stuff and set it up properly. In our conversations, she had a warm and human approach which made me feel we were actually in with a chance.

I wasn’t dreaming yet, but I had made contingency plans. There were a handful of more expensive and smaller apartments on an Airbnb-style short-term rental website and one of the places was rather humdrum but fairly adequate for our purposes. It had no access to a balcony, but it was big enough for us all. I would rent it for a couple of months until we had bothered enough agents to give us a place. It was near the beach though, which meant we could at least do something in our free time. It was the only one perpetually vacant on that website, and it was an instant book, which is why I considered it our place of last resort. I wasn’t even sure it was actually real.

As the weeks went on, Mercedes and I spoke on a number of occasions, and each time she would prepare me for the next stage of our application, guiding me through the process. There were times I became quite despondent as I was getting jittery, and I nearly pressed the button to apply for our last resort when I saw the advertisement had been removed from Idealista. But I held on against all hope, even with the start of the school year only five weeks away.

Three days before my fiftieth birthday, I received a call from Mercedes, telling me that if I agreed to certain conditions of residence set in a new Spanish law from May 2023, she would be able to grant us a rental contract. Did we have a job to go to? I explained that we were both freelance company owners and were going to set up an office in Valencia once we were there. Which is true. To Mercedes, I could only say the truth – she was that type of person.

I misunderstood the mood slightly, as our conversations take place in Spanish and I was in a supermarket with a rather verbose Livia constantly seeking my attention, so following the phone call, I messaged Mercedes to say if it was a big obstacle, it might be better for me to find a short-term rental and once I’m there look for something else. Within an hour, she called back and explained that all we had to do was write a reply to an email she was sending asking us about how we were going to finance our stay through work.

24 hours later, two days before my Big Day, and a month after my visit to her office, I received email confirmation that, indeed, we had been granted a rental contract for the highly-cherished apartment by the sea. Upon reading it, I let out a scream so full of elation that I got a massive headache within an hour. I think it was also my body releasing all the toxins of stress it had accumulated since the start of this ordeal.

To read about how things went, you’ll have to wait a while – I need to write it first! But write it I will.