Foreign Perspectives

How did I come to be writing Foreign Perspectives?

Well, once upon a time (all good stories start like that, don’t they?) I thought that it would be nice to move to France as I figured that if I were living there it would feel like I was always on holiday. Unfortunately, I also figured that no way could I see myself living in France without actually speaking French so a number of years passed by whilst I did something about my ability to speak French.

Then in 2003, we realised that my French was more than good enough and ’twas time to think about making the move so we started looking really seriously into the options. We’d a “looking for general areas” trip in July that year, went to the French Property Exhibition in September and took what turned out to be our buying trip that October.

As things got moving along, we kicked off a little newsletter to keep the folks back home up to date with our activities (the initial entries here). That sort-of fizzled out in 2005 as you can see from the number of posts mainly because we’d done the majority of new things that people do when they arrive in a new country so hadn’t much left to say on those topics.

However, by the Summer of 2006 we’d such a buildup of things to talk about that we kicked off Foreign Perspectives to give us a forum for our “words of wisdom”. Of course, things aren’t static and this has evolved since then to become something of an expat cum travel blog for the most part but still with the snippets of news from the earlier incarnations.

Whilst it continued to feel like I was on holiday in France (despite working really hard), we found that a number of things were pushing us towards moving back to the UK in early 2009 and that’s what we did. Consequently, the content of the blog has taken another lurch in the topics covered. Thus you’ll find that I’ve had a lot to say about the business of reintegrating ourselves into UK society and quite a lot about the  degree that I’ve been doing.

Anyway, this little post is here as a marker to let you get in touch with me and to make comments that fall outside the remit of the various posts.

If you’d like to contact me by email, click here.