Moving on thoughts

I remember my friend, Annie, standing at her cottage window in dreamy Oxfordshire, saying she never wanted to move again; that she had settled and would stay there forever – and thinking she was quite mad. Heavens, she was only about 30! How could she know? It was an alien concept to me and I feel I have spent most of my life moving on. I have always been a bit ‘snail-like’ and I’m quite content in my own shell. I take what I need with me in internal compartments and put out my feelers to find the external comforts I require.

I haven’t been a great adventurer but my imagination has coloured the travelling I have done - at my own pace – into a series of exciting adventures. Readers of Julia Donaldson’s story will know why I love the tale of the tiny snail who climbed on the tail of a humpback whale. ... though I will stop the snail analogy here as its conjuring up some slightly unpleasant images in my head and making me look for the slimy trail I might have left behind me...

I have just always thought of myself as a mover-oner. But maybe I’m not. The first time I stopped moving on, was when I started working for Kirklees Council. I was just 30 years old and had had many jobs beforehand – but the longest I’d stayed at any of them was 14 months. It was a different era, and luckily, gadding about didn’t work against me at interview. (Though I have always had mixed feelings about why I got the job on the day...I suspect it was mainly to do with my having studied Old English. That and being a young, fairly feisty female who was the most appealing of the candidates on the day to the lecherous interviewer ...I think I was the right person for the job but I wasn’t interviewed in a way that could have demonstrated it.) Anyway, that was then. And I’m very glad I got the job. I stayed for 21 years. But outside work, I was still ‘moving on’ and the end of one long term relationship eventually made way for meeting FR and our moving on together.

FR and I have lived together in eight different places – four in England and four in Spain. It might not sound that much but we’ve had three children during this time and Mateo has moved seven times, Ruy, six and Romy, five. That doesn’t include the six months they spent in Spain with FR whilst I was still working in England. This is a lot of upheavals for young children. Mine have had quite a snail-like attitude to it too, thank goodness.

In England, the first house FR and I bought was a beautiful, bijoux, converted chapel – not child-friendly, as I said before, as I was convinced I was too old to have children. But –within one month of us moving in, I was pregnant with Mateo. And in just over a year, we decided to move on.

We sold the chapel very quickly and bought a house in a dreadful state at a bargain price with the intention of doing it up and selling it on. The bath was in the garden; there was no heating, the walls were damp with paper hanging off – it was awful but had a large, high-ceilinged lounge which I fell in love with. We made it really lovely and it was there I fell pregnant with Ruy. Two and half years later, we had no trouble selling it and could have sold it three times over – indeed, we even had a note pushed under the door offering to pay more than the offer we’d already accepted. Our third house was an accident really. So was my third pregnancy.  I had seen and put in an offer on a different property but the survey was so bad that there was no way we could have taken it on. Our buyers were pushing us to move out and we had to find somewhere fast. And it was a seller’s market at the time and our choices were limited. We ended up with a house that I instinctively disliked but which my head told me was a practical choice. It was close enough to work for me to walk in and, being on an estate of similar properties (nay, identical – it took me weeks to remember which one was ours!) was full of people with children. It had a lovely garden and in the end, I grew to love it very much. (But I always hated its mock tudor beams and smug residential attitude.)  A week after moving in, I discovered Romy was on the way. 

Talking to a friend recently, we thought perhaps it was my nesting instinct that made me want to ‘lay an egg’ in my new nests. Something like that... probably. But the two nights before we moved in here, I had vivid dreams of being pregnant – one of them, with triplets – so perhaps he’s right. No laying eggs for me now though. I’ll stick to making chocolate ones!

All our previous houses were bought with a mortgage. I can tell you now, when you are looking for a house to buy that requires a mortgage, it feels very different from looking for a house that you are going to pay for in ‘cash’. The latter is significantly more scary. There is a heavier burden of responsibility to get it right. It might be psychological and it might be just me but it has been one of the things that has made it so much more difficult to find the right house here in Spain. Whilst there have been several that I have liked; ones that we have discussed late into the night - the idea of putting all our money into any one of them has just paralysed us. We couldn’t do it.

So, what made a difference in the end? Because here we are - we bought a house. Did all our months (and years!) of searching make us wise, prudent purchasers in the end? Well, of course not!! I had seen this house on the market for almost as long as we’d lived in Alcala la Real and had, over the course of this time, driven out to Villalobos about three times, just to see if I could cope with the idea of living in a village. The house originally had a higher price and wasn’t within our reach but it was subconsciously registered. With retrospect, I can almost say that I knew we would end up here. The intervening time was needed for house prices to fall – which they have done – and for me to feel settled enough in Alcala la Real to know that if we moved just 7kms away, our lives would not have to change too much. After more than two years, we have established good friendships and contacts; we have our work and the children their schools. We had become tired of the noise, the traffic and the dust that living in a town creates. I had looked at around 50 houses in the centre and none of them would have worked for us but we kept on looking. And, then this house came within my budget just after Christmas. FR and I came on a Friday afternoon with Derryl, the estate agent, to this and another property. We did our usual non-committal wander around but I felt I’d walked into a home for the first time in ages, not just a house that was for sale. I hardly remember seeing the second one.

FR has hopeless recall skills – he could remember only the vaguest details of the house by the time we got home, whereas I knew where I wanted the furniture to go and who would have which bedroom. However, he thought it was OK. This was the only green light I needed. Over the weekend, we went to see it again from the outside with the children and, on discovering from the neighbour that the property included a big piece of land, we were all convinced we had at last ‘found it’. And by Monday, our offer was accepted. We’d only been in it once and for all of ten minutes. We didn’t even discuss it. But we knew.

And it was time to move to the countryside.

It was time to move on. It was time to arrive.
And I have been put in mind of my friend and the feeling she had in her lovely home. I don't want to think of moving on again.

Painting by the previous owner of the house that is now ours - Casa Rosales

And now, I want a new blog name. And I need some help in finding the right one. Any ideas?