I wrote this blog at East Midlands airport back in October while en route to France. I didn't publish it at the time, as I thought I might be over-reacting. Another couple of months hasn't changed things however...in fact it's just solidified how I feel about things...
"I’m writing this waiting for my flight to Dinard-Pleurtuit-Saint-Malo. Over the last 10 years
I’ve frequently travelled out to our house in Brittany at this time of year,
sometimes for bike riding, more recently to mow the lawn one last time and
generally prepare the place for the ravages of winter. Even if I’m just going
out to do the domestics I normally feel a frisson of excitement once I’m at the
airport. This year, not so much.
There’s a whole variety of reasons for that. Some are to do with the house itself - the burden of maintaining a large garden increasingly outweighs its pleasures. Covid, inevitably, plays a part too; aside from the temporary inconvenience of having to wear a mask for an extended period for the first time (though I’m partly getting round that by making this bottle of Coke last an unfeasibly long time), I’ll actually be spending quite a lot of the next week doing the day job - management consulting from anywhere is now possible in a way it just wasn’t this time last year - so it won’t feel like I’m on holiday. It will, in fact, feel like a normal week, but just one where I’m working at an inferior desk with inferior WiFi.
But the point of this isn’t too moan about the first world problem of being well-rewarded for doing an interesting job from my second best house. It’s more to do with the changes Brexit will, finally, bring at the end of this year. As I write, Boris has advised M. Barnier that there’s only any point him going to London next week if he has something new to offer. That looks unlikely, given that the point of the EU’s negotiating strategy has always been to try to punish the U.K., pour encourager les autres. So a No Deal Brexit is looking likely, unless I’m being very naive and the whole thing is being stage-managed so that a last minute agreement can be presented as a triumph for both sides, depending on which side of the Channel you reside. [Update 21/12 - can't believe the last sentence remains valid at this point....]
So the realities of a Britain outside the EU will bite, and the 4 1/2 years of wondering will end. It’ll mean quite a lot of change for us, all of it unwelcome. Getting our cat and dog into and out of France will become, without going into all the detail of what it means to be an ‘Unlisted’ country for pet travel purposes, hasslesome and expensive (to the tune of several hundred pounds a year in additional vet’s bills). [Actually the UK has been awarded "Part 2 status", not as bad as Unlisted, but not as good as Part 1, for which there is no good reason for it not to apply; another 'punishment']. We’ll be limited to spending 90 days out of any 180 in France, unless we apply for a visa - more hassle, knowing French bureaucracy, and probably another 90€ or so for my wife, who typically spends April to September across there. We’ve always taken out travel/health insurance rather than rely on the EHIC, but were we to ever need treatment, no doubt that dreaded bureaucracy would rear its ugly head again.
All this comes, of course, on top of what you knowingly sign up to when you buy a property abroad - the local taxes and utility bills, the usual travel costs and maintenance jobs. Those things have felt manageable for the last 10 years, and while the new costs probably don’t add a huge percentage to the current bills, for me they contribute to a crossing of the rubicon.
I’ll come back to the role of Brexit in that, and how I feel about it, as a Leave voter and staunch supporter over the last 5 years. But France as a country plays a role too. When we bought out there in 2010, it felt like something of a nirvana; close, but with a whiff of the exotic, a lower cost of living, and in the rural parts at least relatively free of crime and social problems. The glorious countryside is unchanged of course, but the other things on my list aren’t, unfortunately. Part of that may be down to my greater familiarity with the place, but other parts are demonstrably different, as anyone who’s paid for a week’s grocery shopping can attest. Living there, whether it’s the relatively new 80km/h A road speed limit, or the more visible rural poverty, just feels a little bit worse.
So France has changed, and not for the better. Add my reduced enthusiasm for gardening, the continuing uncertainties of Covid, and Brexit-created difficulties, and I’m not ashamed to say I want out. The place is for sale. I feel slightly guilty about that; unlike my wife, who’s learned to speak good French and has a number of friends out there, I’ve never really integrated. Sure I smile a lot and ‘bonjour’ all the locals, but that only goes so far. So I have no ties other than to the results of all the work we’ve done to make it a nice place to be, but those feel like they're loosening quite quickly.
Back to Brexit. As I’ve described, its effects probably aren’t a dealbreaker in their own right, but they're the final nail in the coffin of my love for our Breton chez nous. I can feel the schadenfreude of some readers from here - “you voted for Brexit, you’ve defended it, you’ve even been selected as a candidate for Brexit Party, so own it”. Fair point. But je ne regrette rien.
To start with, there’s more to it than the pedantic observation that had
I voted differently in 2016 it wouldn’t have made any difference to the result. But then, the approach of the EU to the UK since 2016 has confirmed
my suspicions; what
matters most to the EU, beyond everything else including the wealth and
wellbeing of its citizens (as million of Greeks would agree), is the EU; the
project itself. Nothing must get in its way, and any deviations from the
plotted course must be punished mercilessly.
I'm not interested in re-running Brexit arguments however; those about trade and whether we’ll be better or worse off particularly bore me, partly because they assume a set of conditions that almost certainly won’t apply forever or even for very long - we and our trading partners will adapt. Some doors will close, others will open. The arguments over the balance are academic; I don’t care about them. And Covid's effects will dwarf them in any event.
I guess the acid test is whether I’d have voted
differently in 2016 if I’d known that we were going to end up with what looks
likely now. It’s hard to assess honestly and rationally of course. On balance,
I think not. I might have paused to consider for longer, and I’d certainly
prefer to avoid No Deal from a personal point of view, but the underlying
fundamentals aren’t any different. And at the end of it all, if I was still in
love with France and our little part of it, the post-Brexit hassles would be
barely registering."
21/12 update: I feel the same. It may take us some time to sell our houses of course, and part of me hopes that in any case it won't be until after the Tour de France passes our door at the end of June, assuming of course we're allowed into the country by then. But my clear ambition is to have cut our ties with the place by the end of 2021. I feel sad, but philosophical about that. We've had some lovely times and a number of superb summers out there, so I certainly don't regret our buying decisions. But if this year has shown anything, it's that life can change quickly and unpredictably, and what matters in terms of our health and contentment is how we choose to react to it. Easier for some than others of course, but that's for another day...
All that remains to say is.....Happy Christmas, wherever you'll be and whatever you're doing.
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