All posts filed under: Beginnings

The Future is shed-shaped

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Before we left last January to travel around Europe for almost a year, there was a big question mark over our future as a family. People often asked us what would happen when we returned to the UK, what were our plans, how would we manage to get a house again having spent most of our money? They were difficult questions to answer because, genuinely, we didn’t have a clue. For a long time, probably since the days of reading about the children of Cherry Tree Farm running wild about the countryside chatting to nature -loving hermits in Enid Blyton’s books, I’ve had romantic longings for a life lived on the land. In recent years however, with eco-systems increasingly under pressure from the continued pillaging of our planet’s resources and the rampant beast of consumerism crushing everything in its path, I’ve felt necessity take the place of romanticism. I find myself unsure of what to do in the face of such global ecological chaos, but with an instinct to return to the land. Overly alarmist …

Bad Omens

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It should have been a relaxing and pleasant stroll through one of our country’s most historically interesting woodlands. I was looking forward to the few hours of idle chatter with a friend I don’t get to see very often while our children did the stuff that children are supposed to do in the woods. I imagined I might even get to take some photos of coppiced trees making wintry silhouettes and shadows in the mist and sun. But we were a family on  the brink of leaving the country for some time. The boys had been bed hopping for a few nights while saying their various goodbyes. I hadn’t allowed for them or us, understandably, not feeling quite right. So what followed was a series of unfortunate events. Emergency toilet trips, an asthma attack, disgruntled children. Eli had his head wounded by Rob bouncing a tree bough down on him and we couldn’t park at the cafe so had to park too far away for tired children. We were exhausted and out of sorts and …

Uprooting

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As I write, I’m sitting in the last proper bed I’ll sit in for a while and the boys are enjoying the last bath they’ll sit in for a while. Tonight, we sleep in the van for the first night of many and tomorrow morning we cross the channel. The past week has been a whirl of packing belongings, saying goodbyes and feeling a bit odd. Our last few days in Hebden were some of the most exhausting of my life. Pulling up roots is unsettling for all concerned, and we have felt the inevitable strains of a big life change. We bade farewell to our temporary house, our town, our good friends, grandparents, cousins, uncles, aunts… There’s been a good deal of driving already, some of which has gone smoothly and some of which has brought challenges. It didn’t help Colin (the van) that I drove several miles after leaving Hebden Bridge with the hand-brake on. I found it difficult that having instructed a child to pee in the tin bath I’d shoved in …

One week to go

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  The most common question I’m asked right now is whether I’m excited and if I’m being honest my answer is no, I’m not. I am scared, apprehensive, terribly anxious and a little bit sad. I run through a never-ending list of things to do in my head, which go from the less pressing ‘finish sewing curtains for back of van’, to the more essential ‘book van in for MOT’ and ‘get travel insurance’. From now on all our worldly belongings must fit into several cupboards and a generous boot. Effecting this shift from overly stuffed, tat-filled life to a more minimalist and simplistic existence is turning out to be tougher than we imagined. Along with the ‘to-do’ lists is a map in my head of all the various spaces generous friends and family have offered us to store our stuff. Boxes full of books, games and cuddly toys; unworn clothes and unslept in bedding; tickets from long-ago gigs; childhood photographs; faded cards and letters wishing congratulations on the birth of a child, a new …

Colin the van

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The biggest job on the list had been ticked off and with that came some relief. It was good to be able to look outside the window of our rented house and see our van parked just outside. It was good to go and sit in it and imagine all there was to come. Having got Colin home we thought it wise to undertake a couple of test runs. Being complete motorhome novices we needed to figure out almost everything about owning one: where to get LPG and how to fill up the bottles; how to fill and empty the water tank, how the fridge worked, how the boiler worked and what to do about the toilet… We found a suitable site in the peak district we guessed wouldn’t be too tricky to get to (ha!) and decided to leave after Rob finished work on Friday. It was already our usual dinner time before we managed to set off. As newly responsible owners we stopped to fill the tyres with air on the way out but the …

The practicalities – finding a home on wheels

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After the ‘I do!’ come the logistics, the planning, the acquiring and de-acquiring. I’m going to attempt to describe some of that in the hope that it might be useful or vaguely interesting to someone out there. I do this with some reservations however as I’m fairly convinced we are not the best people to be giving guidance on practical matters. We have a random, often stress inducing, scatter-gun approach to organising travelling and living in a van for a year. But we have managed to at least buy a suitable vehicle and have a vague idea of where we might go. So, with disclaimers in place, read on… A Home on Wheels I thought that finding a home on wheels would be fairly simple. A brief search through available camper vans and motor homes on Ebay for example, yields a plethora of mobile vehicles from the new, shiny and exorbitantly expensive to the ancient, cheap and probably broken. It is impossible to know where to start, so I just started. I poured over the …

‘I do!’

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In many ways, the hardest bit of any big life change, is making the decision to do something different. Saying ‘yes’ to the unknown is pretty difficult at any stage of life but I think gets harder as we get older and more set in our ways. Even the more adventurous amongst us, increasingly seek the comfort of the familiar as they approach middle age. Throwing ourselves willingly into an abyss of uncertainty then – particularly when we have children – can feel at times wildly irresponsible. It was easier for me than for Rob. I had already let go of whatever ‘career’ I may have had by choosing to leave the workplace over seven years ago. Rob on the other hand, was at a comfortable point in his career working as a Head of Development for The Science Museum Group, enjoyed his work and was continuing along a fairly reliable employment path. I was asking him to consider giving all of that up to come on an adventure. And to spend most of our …

The Big Idea

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It seemed to come out of the blue. Initially I think, some of our friends and family were confused but for me there was sudden face-smacking clarity. We needed to uproot, to pull up and away from the things we’d come to know. There was a sense of needing to cut the cord, to get some distance from the safety of familiarity. More than anything I desperately needed my family to be together, so with the money from the house sale we should take a mid-life gap year and travel. As soon as the idea had taken seed I knew it was right for us, knew in that deep-in-the-bones, these-things-are-destined sort of way. I only had to try and convince everyone else it was a good idea – including Rob. I’m not sure whether it was my impeccable  reasoning that had him unable to resist the logic of the plan or my barely concealed hysteria. I followed him about like a haunted soul; pleading look fixed on my face, almost constantly tearful and snotty, regaling …

Beginnings Part 2

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Living in that beautiful old house was never quite uncomplicated. It was very old and needed constant care, but so did our children and their need was more pressing. It was quaint and it was cosy, but if there were more than three people in any room it could feel somewhat…intimate. I was deeply attached to the woods around us but I had no garden of my own to tend. We knew even as we moved in, that in the not-too-distant future we’d have to leave. So five and a half years in, we put the house on the market and looked about us. We weighed up our needs as a home educating family, our single income status, and our dreams of land and greater self sufficiency. Potential buyers came and went. We changed our minds with the wind; we’d find places but then they wouldn’t seem quite right, we’d watch the way the sun danced on our floorboards and be unable to imagine living anywhere else. The only home we’d known as a family …

Beginnings

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Putting down roots in a place nourishes in so many ways. Each year that passes our connections with the land and people of these valleys deepens. We talked about never leaving, about having found our forever home, about buying land and keeping chickens.

But sometimes things just don’t quite work out the way you expect them to…