The 'before' time: 2004 / 2005

Once upon a time I was a resident in the UK. Having spent all of my life in my original homeland, never for one minute did I think, nor yet want, to move anywhere except within the UK borders. I am not a travelled person, just a few foreign holidays to the usual places. Lester is more travelled, being born in South Africa, but he, too, does not have a thirst to travel. It was all I could to get him to go on camping holidays two or three times a year, even then he was keen to get back home, back to his computer, back to his own bed, back to his home comforts. 

And then, in 2004, a bubble of an idea began floating into my mind, and that was to have a trip to France in our campervan. It was a surprise, this idea, and bothered me mostly because I was worried about venturing forth from a country which I knew well into a country I didn’t. Driving, for instance, wasn’t that on the wrong side of the road. And what about the language. I did have schoolgirl French but it was minimal, not exam standard, just some basic words, some verbs, nothing else, and certainly no conversational skills. 

So I pushed the idea away, considering it too complicated and potentially terrifying a holiday to have. 

It wouldn’t let me go. For a while the idea remained dormant, and then it would bounce back into my head again, surprising me because it was so unexpected and making me increasingly interested in undertaking such a venture such that I started thinking that perhaps a little drive along the north coast of France might not be such a terrifying ordeal to go through. But I didn’t do anything about it. I didn’t look at maps or make specific plans. I did, however, get Boolie, our Springer Spaniel, passported so he could travel abroad with us. Nothing else did I do in regards to France. Nope. It was not to be. Too much effort required just to go on holiday.

So we continued holidaying in the UK, travelling to North Wales, Derbyshire,  and Somerset, while I, determinedly, kept trying to put the France idea into deep freeze. 
Now it was 2005, and I finally stopped fighting with the France idea and booked a holiday there, but not to the original plan of the north coast, no, for some reason, and I know not why, I booked us in at a camp site further down, in the Tours area of France, travelling via the Southampton to Le Havre ferry which was a longer Channel crossing but it meant less driving in France. 

We started the holiday as two people who were not looking for change, did not have dreams about moving even in England, did not have any thoughts about doing anything else other than continuing along the same tracks when the holiday was done. But France hit us straight in the face. It was so different to the UK. Of endless empty roads, of a country so big that it took hours to get even half way down to our holiday destination, of dilapidated old houses, of no road side pubs,  and lots of other things as well. But it was not any of this. It was the fact that France hit us in the heart as well. I cannot explain this to you. It was not that we thought we would like to live in France. As I say, it was that France pushed itself into our hearts, not that we had the thought that we might move there. Oh no, not that. Just that France wiggled her way into our future. Of course we didn’t know this. And if you had said that we would eventually come to live here I would have laughed my head off at such a suggestion. 

........ in the middle of the night during the holiday, ..... needed the loo urgently, ..... had to get to the camp site loos across the field, ..... it was dark, no stars out, ...... busy shining the torch to see where the numerous pot holes were, ...... didn’t want to trip over, ...... thought drifted into my head, ..... ‘I wonder where we might live here’, ....... arriving straight back came, .... ‘Aquitaine’...... oh so where the hell was that, I thought, as I did the necessaries and headed back to the campervan, and anyway, what nonsense, there couldn’t be any town or region of that name in France because it was an old and ancient name, wasn’t it? Ah, but it wasn’t. A map search the next day showed Aquitaine to be a region down in the South West of France, and a long way down it was too, being almost on the borders of Spain. Far too far to even go on a holiday, let alone live there. Anyway, we weren’t going to move anywhere, let alone to France, let alone down to the lower regions of that country.

And so the holiday became finished. The idea of visiting France had been accomplished. Back to the known reality of our UK lifestyle we headed. Getting on to the ferry to head homeward, looking forward to living in a house again rather than the cramped environments of the tent and campervan, and so why did I feel homesick as soon we drove on to the ramp of the ferry. Why did I feel a wrench in my heart.  How could this be, when I was travelling to my home, and yet it was feeling as I was leaving my home. 
Strange that. Still don’t know why this was. Perhaps it was the future beckoning us, perhaps that was it. Lester, in his way, felt the same. 

I had followed through with that idea about coming to France, which wouldn’t let me push it away no matter how I tried, and our perspectives on life had been changed forever. Now it was only a matter of time before France saw us again.