When my husband and I woke up in our corporate-rate hotel room on 24th June 2016 before starting our respective days as mobile IT consultants, we could not have known that this moment in history would set us on an incredible journey. A journey which would mean that a year on, reflecting on our decision to move to France would show us that we have changed our lives to a completely unrecognisable degree.

How I came to love France

I have always been a francophile. I’ve loved France ever since childhood. I visited Brittany with my secondary school when I was about eleven years old, and I just knew that I was supposed to be in this place where the people valued bread as much as I did. My husband, not so much. He did visit France as a child but only fell in love with it (and the bread) on a holiday to Paris early in our relationship. We talked about moving to France one day when the timing was “right”.

The referendum result was a shock. I remember being stood in my pyjamas in that hotel room, watching the result on TV open-mouthed. I was dumbfounded. So was G. I felt a deep sense of sorrow at the result for much wider reasons simply than the knowledge that British people would lose freedom of movement within the EU, but given our hopes to live in France one day, I eventually became acutely aware of the limits this would put on our dream. Still, life carried on for a while. I quit my career of more than a decade in IT with no love lost and transitioned into working self-employed as a talking therapist which I’d been training to do for years.

I can’t remember when it was exactly, but I think it must have been early 2017 when we started to have doubts that Theresa May was going to secure a deal with the EU leaders. We became worried that if we didn’t get to France soon, we wouldn’t be able to go at all.

I should say now – I am a very impulsive person, and this is somewhat dangerously supported by an innate belief that I can do anything (within reason) if I just try hard enough (thanks Mum and Dad!).

G and I decided that we would move to France. We had been taking numerous short breaks to the Cote d’Azur for a few years, and naively thought it was an option. Of course, dear reader, it was not. One only has to have an ounce of sense to realise that somewhere so adored by thousands of tourists each year would also fetch a hefty price-tag if one were so inclined to make it their home. We worked out we could just about afford a studio with a balcony somewhere near-ish the sea. With my beloved cats and a growing interest in gardening fuelled by a modicum of success growing things in our respectably sized garden in Bristol, this was not going to cut the mustard, no matter how lovely the beaches of Nice were.

Where to live?

We decided to start researching location options – it needed to be somewhere which had decent connections to the west country in the UK so that we could still visit our family, and they, us – and crucially it needed to be cheap. My husband had tired of the corporate rubbish he’d been putting up with for decades, and so he was happy with the prospect of changing vocation for something completely different. I was faced with closing two successful businesses that after a few years of incredibly hard work, were enjoying a modicum of success. The bottom line was, whilst we knew that we would have the proceeds of our house sale in Bristol, it was heavily mortgaged. Plus we had no idea how we would make money in France. But remember that – perhaps borderline pathological – impulsivity I mentioned? It could not be quelled.

So, we decided to choose an adventure – even though the risk of failure was high. Minimising the spend on the place we would live seemed a sensible option, after all, we bargained that if we couldn’t find work, we’d have time on our hands to renovate it (I’m just taking a moment here to laugh out loud and cast an eye around this undecorated office…). Never underestimate the abilities of a unique blend of millennial and IT graduate to do some sterling internet research – so within a week, we had narrowed down the area upon which we would focus our house hunting to the Limousin.

The Limousin is quite like Devon, where I am from. There’s a lot of green. Things are often green because there’s a lot of water falling out of the sky, so I kind of knew what to expect in our new area. But I could not have known just how difficult and exhilarating this past year would be in terms of adjusting to a whole new country’s culture and language.

The task of being an immigrant

This blog is full of my writing about specific events, shopping opportunities, how to save euros with informed spending – and it also talks honestly about how hard moving to another country is. We are now immigrants, and from my previous place of privilege as a person who spoke the language of the country I lived in as my native tongue, I did not appreciate how incredibly hard it is to integrate into a country where you haven’t the faintest clue what banal things people on the street or in the post office are saying to you. If you meet someone in your home country working in a job that requires them to speak a second language, I implore you to take the time to watch in awe as that person’s brain works 50% faster than yours at any given moment, because the task of in-the-moment translation is HARD.

We started French lessons within a fortnight of moving here, and I already had an okay amount of French from Alliance Française classes in Bristol and Exeter, as well as a solid A* at GCSE (I talk less about how I dropped out of A-Level at college… ahem). If you’re moving to another country and looking for a top tip – this is the one – learn the language of the culture you are joining. It will help with EVERYTHING. Yes, it costs money and potentially your ego, but it is priceless to be able to connect with others when you are so far from the places, people and things you knew before.

We took two viewing trips to find our house. We probably only saw a dozen houses total. If you read our story in French Property News magazine earlier this year then you’ll know all about our cancelled flights and the mad dash across the country to view the places we had deemed to have potential. The fact that I’m sitting in the house we should never have viewed since we missed the appointment and the French agent decided to show us around on a Sunday (!!!) only solidifies for me that this place is the right one for us.

Final reflections

I suppose I’m writing this post as a response to those who have contacted me since the most recent election in the UK, those who are scared that they too might miss out on living their own adventure. I’m very conscious that my husband and I were lucky that his children are adults and that we don’t have any, so we didn’t have to make heart-wrenching decisions to divide families where people were still growing up, but we did move away from people that we love very much. We left behind family and friends, careers and businesses, and a property in an affluent city. We withdrew every asset we had in the UK and gambled on France. We are still gambling on France. I can’t say it has been easy, it unequivocably has not been. But I don’t regret it. And I do feel as though I am really living, not just existing. Not dreaming of “one day” when the timing is right. It never will be. I’m proud to say that I live here for many reasons, and one of them is knowing the courageous journey that we (and so many people that we meet here) went on to begin this chapter of our lives.

Plus, being this impulsive, it’s certainly never dull.