Out of the black...
It is, of course, absurd. We have worked and striven to get here, and ‘here’ is the kind of place where people relax, settle down and grow older gracefully. We have a comfortable life; or if not completely comfortable, then at least we are in a place where we could get comfortable, trundling in and out to our comfortable jobs every day and watching the boys grow up in an environment which relaxes us as parents – even if I suspect they will be somewhat resentful of living in a tiny village when they are teenaged and tired of their parents.
Nothing on earth could persuade us to leave all this, and head halfway round the world to a place where it is cold most of the year, and we would be “500 miles from everywhere”. Nothing.
Could it?
We were walking across Kensington Gardens in a light summer shower when it first dawned on me that this might not just be a passing fancy. We had spent a pleasant few hours in the company of our Canadian friends, and despite not having seen them for more than ten years, quickly fell into the kind of conversation which passes between old friends; the kind of conversation which leads to wild surmises. We asked about their life there in Canada, we gasped enviously at their hot tub and their space – all that space! And we began to wonder about things.
When you have lived in the south east of England for any length of time, you become inured to house prices, and you find it quite normal to casually drop them into your conversations, safe in the knowledge that everyone else has paid extraordinary amounts of money for their little corner of the Home Counties. We are pretty much unshockable when it comes to housing, and we kind of expect everyone we meet to be the same. Which can come as a bit of a surprise to people from other parts of the world. We tend to moan excessively about the price of our own homes, and then bluntly ask people what they paid for theirs. Often, they are so surprised, they just tell us, whereupon it’s our turn to fall into a jealous faint.
From all of which, it may be surmised that there is something of a price differential between the leafier parts of Buckinghamshire and the more remote areas of British Columbia. Enough of a price differential to actually make me feel faint. Enough of a price differential to actually make me think seriously about things.
For several years now, I have been wondering about the future. This, I know, is not particularly unusual in people of my age – I turned 40 two years ago, and am by any standards in a pretty comfortable rut. I could, if I chose, trundle happily along doing what I do now until I felt the need to retire. My family would be provided for, and I would be neither stretched nor unsatisfied. My job is one which I have more or less created for myself; it fits me very well, but it’s not exactly a fast track to anywhere – not that I necessarily want it to be, but it would be nice to think that I had some kind of prospect, or at least the possibility of progress by something other than ‘Buggins’ Turn’. Which, in any case, really wouldn’t apply. My employer is Italian, and the reality is that in order to progress beyond a certain point, you really need to be – not Italian as such, but sufficiently inculcated in the culture to want to spend evenings and weekends working, and I have passed that point in my life. I have other priorities in life, and I’m beginning to realise that work is not the driving force in my life it was a few years ago. In short, I’m in a rut; I can’t see a way out of it I would be in any way happy with, and I do not want to spend the next 20 years driving the 25 or so miles to and from work at an increasingly slow pace – already it takes anywhere between 45 minutes and an hour each way, and that time has been gradually increasing. I can easily imagine the journey stretching out to around 75 minutes each way, and I just don’t want to live like that. I mean, I like my car, but not that much.
So, the future has been occupying my thoughts. How to reconcile the financial burden of a growing family with the desire to spend somewhere between a little and a huge amount less time at (and travelling to) work; and how to actually find the time to do the things I’d much rather do. So far, it had seemed an unsquareable circle, but a conversation in a London park changed all that.
Nothing on earth could persuade us to leave all this, and head halfway round the world to a place where it is cold most of the year, and we would be “500 miles from everywhere”. Nothing.
Could it?
We were walking across Kensington Gardens in a light summer shower when it first dawned on me that this might not just be a passing fancy. We had spent a pleasant few hours in the company of our Canadian friends, and despite not having seen them for more than ten years, quickly fell into the kind of conversation which passes between old friends; the kind of conversation which leads to wild surmises. We asked about their life there in Canada, we gasped enviously at their hot tub and their space – all that space! And we began to wonder about things.
When you have lived in the south east of England for any length of time, you become inured to house prices, and you find it quite normal to casually drop them into your conversations, safe in the knowledge that everyone else has paid extraordinary amounts of money for their little corner of the Home Counties. We are pretty much unshockable when it comes to housing, and we kind of expect everyone we meet to be the same. Which can come as a bit of a surprise to people from other parts of the world. We tend to moan excessively about the price of our own homes, and then bluntly ask people what they paid for theirs. Often, they are so surprised, they just tell us, whereupon it’s our turn to fall into a jealous faint.
From all of which, it may be surmised that there is something of a price differential between the leafier parts of Buckinghamshire and the more remote areas of British Columbia. Enough of a price differential to actually make me feel faint. Enough of a price differential to actually make me think seriously about things.
For several years now, I have been wondering about the future. This, I know, is not particularly unusual in people of my age – I turned 40 two years ago, and am by any standards in a pretty comfortable rut. I could, if I chose, trundle happily along doing what I do now until I felt the need to retire. My family would be provided for, and I would be neither stretched nor unsatisfied. My job is one which I have more or less created for myself; it fits me very well, but it’s not exactly a fast track to anywhere – not that I necessarily want it to be, but it would be nice to think that I had some kind of prospect, or at least the possibility of progress by something other than ‘Buggins’ Turn’. Which, in any case, really wouldn’t apply. My employer is Italian, and the reality is that in order to progress beyond a certain point, you really need to be – not Italian as such, but sufficiently inculcated in the culture to want to spend evenings and weekends working, and I have passed that point in my life. I have other priorities in life, and I’m beginning to realise that work is not the driving force in my life it was a few years ago. In short, I’m in a rut; I can’t see a way out of it I would be in any way happy with, and I do not want to spend the next 20 years driving the 25 or so miles to and from work at an increasingly slow pace – already it takes anywhere between 45 minutes and an hour each way, and that time has been gradually increasing. I can easily imagine the journey stretching out to around 75 minutes each way, and I just don’t want to live like that. I mean, I like my car, but not that much.
So, the future has been occupying my thoughts. How to reconcile the financial burden of a growing family with the desire to spend somewhere between a little and a huge amount less time at (and travelling to) work; and how to actually find the time to do the things I’d much rather do. So far, it had seemed an unsquareable circle, but a conversation in a London park changed all that.
posted by Richard at 9:57 pm
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