Last year at this time, I was supposed to
be planning a big celebration for the beginning of September. It was a huge
year for milestones – twentieth anniversary on 6 September, my half-century on
6 August, and Livia’s 6th birthday on 29 August, and a chance to
introduce all three of the kids to everyone we knew. The party was to take
place at a venue on top of a hill overlooking the Saar valley. We would have
organised food, drink, live music, games, and even a minibus to take people
back to the town or station so they didn’t have to drive.
That was all thrown into disarray at the
end of June, when Livia’s school board decided to refuse her for the coming
year so that we could finish off the research on her personality traits and
make a proper diagnosis, find the right help, and give her the boost she
needed. The party was cancelled, as we had a huge amount of panicking to do,
grasping at any leads we could find. The main issue was that Livia refused to
speak anything but English. Despite calling every potential international
school in Luxembourg (nine) and our region in Germany (zero), it became
apparent that we had to move.
Bonny Bee and I wrote down the countries on
separate lists that we would be prepared to move to, then compared them. Mine
was a lot longer than hers. In the end, the only two countries we had in common
were Ireland and Spain. Considering the real estate in Ireland is expensively
awful, and awfully expensive, we settled on Spain, her choice. She got to pick
the country, I got to pick the city. Looking around on the International
Schools Database for English-speaking schools, I stumbled upon quite an
interesting fact: Spain’s third city, Valencia, had more international schools
than Luxembourg and our region of Germany combined.
I hastily arranged a fact-finding mission to the city, spending a weekend there in mid-July last year. The school I had visited for the purpose of understanding the possibilities was in a well-to-do area of the city. It was more like a training facility for a top football team than a school – it had everything. Every type of technology, huge grounds, tree-lined paths between different parts of the school, glass walls throughout so you could see what was going on in other classrooms, water sports facilities, a theatre and ballroom for several hundred people (I kid you not), and a trophy cabinet that would have made the Liverpool boardroom quit. And the fees were less than what we had been paying in Luxembourg for much, much less in every respect. I came away with a sense that yes, this was where we needed to go. Maybe not that school, as it was out of the way, but as the others were roughly the same tariff, I was persuaded to move.
We put the house up for sale along with the
garden that I had spent so long developing. The plot of land had nothing on it
when I bought it. Now, it had over thirty trees and was regularly visited by
all types of living organisms, including the legendary hummingbird hawk-moth,
the most graceful creature I have ever had the privilege of being next to.
But hey, we had to stop Livia from being
sucked into the so-called “inclusive” education that they provide children with
slightly different personalities in the Germanic countries of Middle Europe,
where they basically cut you off from the rest of your peers and prepare you
for a life of unfulfillment and obscurity.
So at the end of August, after an entire
summer of packing up the belongings in the house and the most boringly long
school holiday the kids had ever had, we set off by car for Valencia, with a
couple of suitcases and some essentials. The rest was stored in the cellar and
would join us once we were settled.
We had seen potential apartments come and go, and we were getting a little worried about not having a place to stay. After a few days in the Ardèche and a night in the Pyrenees, we spent a week in Peñíscola, a seaside town close to Valencia where we could arrange things before we arrived. We signed the contract for the apartment on the evening of the thirty-first of August 2024, just the day before we moved in. We could have signed at any time for a rather dark and drab flat in a noisy suburb, but I was holding out for some recompense for the ordeal we had all gone through: a beachside apartment in El Puig, only 12 kilometres up the coast from the city and just a 15-minute drive to the kids’ shiny new school in the centre of the city.
This was the place I had been holding out
for until the very end. It was the least everyone deserved after being so badly
treated. I’ll be honest with you: I went through some very dark times in the
subsequent months. I saw a psychologist a couple of times because I was sure I
was going through some mental breakdown. There were times I would think about
going shopping in Auchan in Kirchberg or taking the family for a drive to
Sierck in France or just for a walk along the Saar. Then I would suddenly wake
up from this trance and realise I was in Valencia. Let’s face facts: where we
had come from was unexciting, dull, monotonous, unadventurous, and cold for
half the year. By contrast, we went out for Christmas dinner in Pinedo on 26
December and we sat at a beachside restaurant in brilliant sunshine. I have
worn a coat once and that’s because it was raining.
And yet… and yet…
Here I was, floundering, thrashing around
in my own thoughts, trying to make sense of it all, barely able to enjoy the
brightness, completely incapable of forcing myself to go to any of the
multitude of events that only a huge city could offer. Because of everything
that had changed in such a short time, I veered from anger to despair,
bitterness to elation, bewilderment to despondency. I barely got through the
autumn and winter of 23 and 24. But I knew I had to just let the process take
care of itself and I would come out the other side. How I would be by the end
was another matter.
By Easter time, I had overcome my dark
thoughts and vanquished any remaining demons. This was achieved by the
realisation that I had actually managed very well to integrate into my new
environment. And several important factors contributed to this.
Firstly, the coworking space that we are members of is a strong international community of intelligent, competent and sociable professionals, eager to have as much fun outside of work as their lifestyle will allow. Every day I don’t go there is a day wasted. Back in January, I set up a monthly dinner club, where the idea is we eat something from somewhere else where we wouldn’t usually go. It’s this type of activity that has helped me through the other side.
Secondly, on one of these dinners, some of
the participants had arrived late. They had been to an open mic event where one
of them read something they had written. Upon greater inquiry, I found it was
run by a charming lady from the UK and took place in quite a prestigious
location in the centre. I decided to go the month after and maybe read one of
my own works. The event itself is really well attended and along with the
regulars, there are a lot of debutants and returners. I had such a huge sense
of belonging from the first moment that I have written a new piece to deliver
every month since, and it is a non-negotiable event in my calendar. It gives me
an inspiration and a motivation to write that had been missing while I was
squandering some important years of my life in a place where nobody listens to
you.
And lastly, Valencia itself is so easy to
immerse yourself into. It has everything a capital city has without being one.
In fact, if it were a capital city, it would be the fourteenth largest in the
European Economic Area, making it bigger than Amsterdam, Athens and Oslo. And
that’s what has made me grateful to be alive again: being in a place where
anything goes. I’m not yet too old to find it all too much, and I make the most
of every moment I can.
That’s why this road trip has been so important – it has made me fully realise that Valencia is where we are supposed to be. Not just a stopgap before we move on, but well and truly the place where I want us to spend the coming years and whatever they throw at us. Although I draw the line at spending all of July and August there.
And this is the point I wish to make: back in
mid-June 2023, I would never have imagined that I would have spent my
fifty-first birthday in a Portuguese seaside town just over half way round the
Iberian peninsula on a two-month road trip before heading back to Valencia on 2
September.
We drove from our house in Penacova, 50 kilometres inland, to Figueira da Foz, halfway between Lisbon and Oporto, where I enjoyed the company of my lovely children. We had lunch on the ramparts of a citadel that had been converted into a restaurant, then we went to the beach for a while. The water was colder than a meeting between a divorcee and his former in-laws, so I persuaded everyone to have a drink then go to the funfair next door where Portugal’s largest Ferris wheel had been erected for the summer.
We sped home before sunset and had some bread with cheese or chocolate spread together. It was the antidote to the year before where I spent my fiftieth birthday packing ornaments and throwing out unwanted objects we had accumulated over fifteen years in that house onto a container for landfill. We were ruthless in what we got rid of – it was impossible to save everything so we had to relinquish a lot of things that contained treasured memories. This was the most distressing aspect of having to leave our home in Germany.
But here in the warm climes of the Iberian
Peninsula, a new life is gradually taking shape and with it three children are
having so much more fun and experiencing far more than they ever would have had
we remained where we were. So for that, I would like to take the opportunity to
thank the board of governors of Livia’s school in Luxembourg for their
obstinacy, their absence of vision, their fixation on the finances, and their
ruthless aversion to sliding down the league tables. For without them being
utter cretins, I would right now be sitting at home in the silence of a
provincial German town, thumbing through TikTok videos or stacking my
dishwasher for want of something else to do. Instead, I’m watching the sun set
over a lush Portuguese river valley while planning our next adventure. In the
past year, I have written more words than I had done in the previous
half-century, and I’ve had the opportunity to meet some truly inspirational
people that helped me get over the line.
Providence has a habit of claiming victims
and then building them up again.
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