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Lockdown prompted Hannah and Dan Jones to fulfil a long-held ambition to live abroad, and now they’ve found the perfect spot in France, there’s no stopping them…
Hannah, why did you come here?” my French teacher asked me, in French. I’m sat in a mandatory lesson with about 12 other adults, we’re all attending in order to get our visas approved. The world is well represented in the room: Colombia, Sudan, Turkey, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Ukraine. Answering the same question, the people before me have said, “escaping conflict, and to find safety”. This is awkward. What do I say? “For fun? For the cheese? Because England is too rainy.”
People in my village have asked this too. Why did you move to St-Féliu-d’Amont? A tiny village near Perpignan with just one shop and a primary school, a thousand miles from everyone you know? It was a slow process of narrowing down all the places in the world we could move to, until we settled on this obscure village which is actually perfect for us.
I’ve always wanted to travel and before I had children I had an epic adventure, cycling through Europe and the Middle East with my husband Dan. We’ve considered living in loads of countries. I had a gap year in Palestine and was interested in moving to an Arabic-speaking country. We considered Australia or New Zealand; integration would be much easier in an English- speaking nation, but it’s just too far away for family to visit us.
When we had our children – Percy in 2014 and Eric in 2017 – our plans were put on the backburner. We just wanted sleep and for our lives to be as simple as possible.
TIME TO REFLECT
Fast-forward to the beginning of the lockdown, we now had two boys out of the baby stage and a lot of time for reflection. Brexit had happened and, while neither of us would have chosen that, we knew we were lucky to still have the freedoms of other Europeans due to the fact that Dan’s mum is French. Like many people during lockdown, Dan’s job became remote. Even when things opened up again he was told there was no need for him to physically be there, which started the thought process of, “if I’m not needed in Liverpool, I could be anywhere, right?” He asked his boss and was told: “It’s not that simple I’m afraid – you know, tax and stuff.”
So he started looking for remote jobs based in Europe. Whenever we’d discussed moving to France, the biggest hurdle was getting a job. Dan speaks good French, but surely they would always pick a 100% French person over him? However, with a remote job, he could start it in England, and move over when we were ready, and we always had the option to come back if it wasn’t working. And
