Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Places’ Category

We’ve been having really great weather over the last week or more so it’s all the more depressing that we’re back to what we’d expect to be normal February weather here ie dull and wet.

Funnily enough we’re almost at the end of February and it’s only now that we’re getting the kind of weather that we should have been getting since late December.

It’s confusing the plants as well as us as we’ve several trees with green shoots on them already!

The weather has taken a distinct lurch for the better over the last week or so and we’re having to go back to just the t-shirts as it’s just too hot outside at the moment for anything else.

Somehow I just can’t see that heat wave holding up but we’re trying to make the most of it while it lasts (well, will be once we all get over the flu that’s felled most of us over the last week).

It is pretty peculiar to be needing the airconditioning in February though!

I’ve been trying to build up the representation of properties that I have in Spain by way of sending out an e-mail in Spainish to a number of properties. Now, the sites that I have are basically targetted at an English speaking audience so I need the entries to be in English of course.

What’s interesting is that a number of properties have responded and are all excusing their “bad English”. Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? After all, these are largely Spanish owned properties. The funny thing is that the English is often better than the English that I’ve been getting back from properties based in the UK!

Still, what I must do next time is highlight that I’ll translate the entries into English if needbe which I suspect will bump up the take-up somewhat next time I’m trying to get more Spaniards onto the listings.

Many people move to France to live their dream and why not? If your dream is to live in some idyllic spot in France, who’s to say that you can’t?

Unfortunately, for every one that succeeds in living out their dream of a life in France, there’s another who falls by the wayside and ends up returning to the UK.

For some, it’s the case that the dream was never backed up by practical activities. Most common amongst those is the lack of preparation in terms of knuckling down and learning to speak French. I don’t blame those who arrive here not speaking any French or at best just a little because you can do something about it when you get here and besides sometimes the opportunity to move comes when you’re least prepared for it and you just have to jump or lose your dream.

Some come unstuck in not getting down to the practical business of living in France. Many fall in this camp I suspect. If you’re not at retirement age then you’re likely to need a job and, no, running a gite business usually doesn’t count as the income just isn’t enough on it’s own. B&B can be made to work but generally even that needs a supplementary income.

Finally, there are those who do nearly everything right and it just doesn’t work or doesn’t work well enough. For them it is truly sad I think. They genuinely want to live in France, have what seems a viable form of work and integrate with the local society yet it just doesn’t work out and they end up having to leave as the dream slips out of their fingers. At least for the others they can point to something specific that they didn’t do and could potentially fix it and live out their dream.

If you do fall into one of those first couple of categories, why not try to fix the problem and live out your dream?

We’re in the process of thinking about where we might move after we sell this place and one place that’s come into the frame is Scotland.

Now you might think that moving house in the UK is simple enough but in fact the house buying process in Scotland is so different from that in the rest of the UK, it’s better to think of it just as you would a move to a foreign country. That mindset means that you won’t be taken by surprise by developments in the buying process as you ordinarily would be. For instance, in Scotland there is no gazumping simply because the first contract is binding.

That single difference means that if you’re moving from another country to the UK then it’s considerably easier to time your move. At the most extreme case, in Northern Ireland there’s a considerable amount of bidding that goes on which makes it virtually impossible to time a house move there at the moment.

Of course there are other considerations than the simple legal system. For one thing, if you were thinking of moving to the Hebrides then you’d probably need to learn Gaelic and, of course, throughout much of Scotland it’s Scots that’s spoken which would be hard enough to pick up if you were used to “normal” English.