Journey to coldness and darkness
In all honesty, being back in the UK in November is like...
Mum tried to reassure me, saying that temperature dropped "a bit" too in the South of France too. It seems that occasionally, there is a grey cloud or two there on a bad day!
The journey back to Cambridge from Antibes took about 18 hours including lunch breaks and maximum speed of 70 mph for the Polo. So we stopped a night in Dijon then Boulogne-sur-Mer.
The hotel in Dijon, that we booked for its private parking to secure our gear overnight, turned out to be a cool idea. It had a wild 2001: A Space Oddity deco, a pool, hot tub and sauna, which were a real treat after the long hours of driving.
Things went a bit South, sadly not literally, an hour before reaching Boulogne-sur-Mer when we ran in the tail of storm Ciarán. A gentle transition to UK weather. The hotel there shared its parking with the local police station cars and was right in the centre of town, so we enjoyed a pleasant walk and a delicious meal with homebrewed beer at "La cave de Monsieur Guy" in the fortified city.
After a reasonable delay at the Eurostar and sailing through customs thanks to Didi's new French passport, we made it home safely in cold wet darkness.
Good bits about being back
It did feel good to find our house as we left it, functional and decorated to our taste, after a year adapting to odd bits and bobs in AirBnbs like sinks designed for giants, dodgy boilers or fridge doors opening the wrong way.
Didi's good mood compensated for our light spleen, she was ecstatic to be back in the rain and be able to roll in the wet grass and leaves in her local park. You can see on the vid she has a spring in her step. When we arrived, she ran back and forth in the house Scoobidoo-style slipping all over the place like a puppy, so much so that she leaped on the stairs, forgot they are steeper and narrower than French ones, and flipped over, slamming on her back quite hard... so we mounted a stair gate the next day. In her excitement, she also managed to somehow fall into the Cam river during her walk and went into shock because of the temperature compared to her Mediterranean morning baths this year. A blast of hairdryer heat eventually revived her.
There are more positives. The weather picked up and provided you get up early to see it, the grass is thicker and greener here than any of the places we've been to in a year. Autumn has given giant tree leaves beautiful copper hues. The sun turned up, and though it doesn't heat much, temperatures are above the usual at that time of the year. We were also pleased to find again our usual takeaways, sort out our health checks without hassle, and to generally slip back into our old ways. Truthfully, we can say that Cambridge has been good to us over the year and has many good points, it is probably one of the best places to be in the UK and one of the safest in the world.
Back to the routine, or big decision for the future ?
All nice things said about Cambridge, especially friends including the best neighbours we could wish for, a layer of lustre has gone. Sinking back in our old routine has a bit of a grating edge. The seed of change has been planted and is slowly but surely growing. . This means we have truly shifted from what if we... to when do we... and are planning a final move. This could take anytime between 3 to 15 months. As much as Didi will protest, when we move will mostly depend on Cuong's options. He has just come back to work while continuing his Master, and is exploring possibilities of future semi-remote work with his current company, as well as opportunities in Antibes. On my side, I've done my admin research and already mapped out what is needed to shift my work to France while keeping REM registered in the UK.
In the meantime, we keep doing what's needed to go on. That includes redoing our bathroom tiling, which, as we did, took too much humidity here over the years and finally threw the towel. We were just about managing to keep on top of the damp and mould, our tenant did a fantastic job keeping it at bay, but the inventory lady from our Estate Agent 'pushed the tiles to see if there was damage', .... and at that point, the tiles fell off. Next week will thus be spent with a builder. We are quite confident he will finish the job before Christmas because when he came over for the quote and we offered him a cup of coffee, he replied: "Oh no, I've got another job to go to, coffee lowers my energy, I have ADHD you see..."! Cuong's sister will be visiting for a week after that from Aberdeen where she studies, which are making us very happy, since we have used up our legal quota of days abroad for the next three months.
We have gone back to our small local pool and gym, but struggle to keep the 5 times a week gym/swim ratio that we maintained the whole of last year, we're now down to 3. I figure that's because in France and Spain, we would go between 5-6pm. Since it is dark and cold here at 4pm here, getting out of the door just required too much willpower. So we shifted our swim/gym time to 7:30am, which unsurprisingly, also requires a huge amount of will.
Topically, Exit light / Enter night...
What's easier here to do is to sink on the sofa under a blanket and in between two episodes of Orange is the new Black to remind myself how lucky I have not to be in jail which would be a lot worse than hanging around in Cambridge. There, I practice playing my guitar. A couple of years in my youth learning the flute, piano and music theory have not helped much, since the usual notes are all over the place on guitars, going by CDEFGAB instead of DoRéMiFaSolLaSiDo. Why O Why. It reminded me of learning Vietnamese: even if you learn tons of vocabulary, the grammar is so different your best bet is to play boggle to get it right, meaning throw all the words up in the air, read them in the random order that they land in, and that way you can approximate a Vietnamese structure. So it goes for guitar chords.. Translating notes and finding them on the frets drove me nuts until I decided to forget all I'd learnt before, and instead to greet the chaos with an open mind, starting afresh.
My neighbours, Cuong and Didi are counting their blessings that I mostly use headphones to practice, but after just one month, I'm super proud to be able to approximate the beginning of a classic from Metallica. It does require a bit of mental gymnastic to imagine the right rhythm and notes, but here is my go at Enter Sandman, which makes me happy! 😊😊😊Dire Straights will have to wait a tad longer 😒
On these wobbly but hopeful notes, it is time to say goodbye my friends, so long and thanks for all the fish. I may come back to this space sometime in the future, hopefully to share what it's like to transition back to France after many years abroad, and perhaps inspiring some of you to follow us to the sun. I will then have the necessary distance to reflect back fondly about all the things I miss from England!
For now, I'm heading for a walk in the night and cold with Didi, my little ray of sunshine, before Cuong returns from work and brings in the warmth!
Lots of love, Val.
-- To be continued...
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