For me, being an expat has always been about finding a place to call home, that elusive thing I lost when my mother died. This was exacerbated when my father - who remarried a few months later - sold the house I grew up in and moved abroad.
With its howling rainy skies, gourmet pubs and endless Benny Hill reruns on TV, Britain wasn't 'it'. The Netherlands - as much as I loved it - was not that country full of windmills with its salty sweets, pancake plain polders and straightforward (sometimes to the point of rude) inhabitants where my Dutch mother grew up.
A few years after my mother died, I fell in love with a Frenchman while on holiday in Crete and moved to Versailles. In the 90s, the famous castle town was so boring that - as they say in French slang - ca puait le moisi (it smelled of mold). Looking for a new life, we moved from my partner's cozy, heated apartment in a bouji part of the city to his family's holiday home in the rural backwaters of southwestern France.
It was a centuries-old carriage house where we glided in socks over wooden floors so old they gleamed like cobblestones, huddled around a cavernous fireplace whose flames cast strange shadows on the enormous oak trusses high above our heads, and slept cozily on a straw-filled mattress. in an illuminated bateau - boat bottom - in the shape of a gigantic Dutch clog.
After quitting our jobs - his at the Palace of Versailles, mine in stand-up comedy - we had no income and lived on a diet of tomatoes served in salads, soups and pies, supplemented with buckets of fresh cinnamon milk from the local farmer. -colored Charentais cows.
It was so warm that most days we swam in icy rivers and sunbathed under cornflower blue skies. When the first snow fell in early January, kind neighbors - who had known my partner since he was in diapers - gave us coal and potatoes from frozen gardens, and we kept the house fire burning with rotten logs we dragged from the garden. surrounding woodlands and carved with a blunt-toothed handsaw.
The story continues
During the long winter months, huddled by the smoking fire, we applied for one of the grants given out to people reckless enough to set up a business in rural France. Against all odds - and after negotiating an inordinate amount of red tape - we were assigned one to create a chambres d'hotes (guest house), which allowed us to obtain a loan to build a vast farm with 20 to buy - and renovate - rooms next to a shallow river in the shade of weeping willows in a neighboring village.
To furnish our guesthouse, we visited auctions in the neighboring city of Angouleme. Because lino and formica were all the rage in the French countryside at the time, we could buy sturdy walnut beds, ornate mahogany cabinets-and an oak farm table big enough for twenty people-for a few cents. "What do you want with that old junk?" our neighbors cried when we returned with our latest purchases.
Their misunderstanding did not end there. In a village of 300 residents - most of whom were in their 70s - it was incomprehensible that two twenty-somethings opened a business hoping to attract tourists. "But there's nothing to do here," they would say as we tried to explain the charms of long walks in the woods, swimming in fern-lined lakes and then returning to lazy meals next to a flickering fire in the minds of the jaded. . city dwellers.
Shortly before opening, we decided to clear the jungle-like brush across the river, only to discover a pipe the size of a boa constrictor leaking raw sewage underneath.
Our attempts to resolve the problem led to a clash with the local mayor. "City dwellers come here to change things," he bellowed when we tried to raise the issue. He made it clear that, as far as he was concerned, a few glib 'foreigners' could only cause trouble - they had to leave.
A few years earlier I had read how Formula 1 driver Alain Prost had had to flee his home near Saint Etienne and move to Switzerland in the 1980s after an angry mob of Renault workers came to his house and smashed his Mercedes had set fire. to his ongoing feud with Rene Arnoux, one of France's most popular drivers. At the time I found it hard to believe the story. That changed when the harassment started - people stared and whispered as we entered local shops; an elderly farmer spitting at us in a busy street; children, egged on by parents and grandparents, throwing rocks at our dog (and, on several occasions, at us).
It wasn't all doom and gloom. Our guests, who came from as far away as Buenos Aires and Los Angeles, loved the guest house and - thanks to the clever use of plants, perfume and tape - remained completely unaware of our struggle to stem the village's fecal tide. When we weren't working, we spent hours in the forest looking for mushrooms or gathering chestnuts; we kept chickens and ducks, and there were long summers when we swam in the nearby lakes and picnicked in the darkness of abandoned churches.
There was plenty of light entertainment too, provided by a crazy Belgian pop star - famous for singing her (only) hit on live TV, dressed in a negligée while eight months pregnant - who bought and renovated the large stone house next door. After hiring and firing several architects, she decided to work on her own plans. When the house was finally finished and the shutters and doors were painted Barbie pink, she decided she wanted a wine cellar under the bedroom. A few days after the digging started, there was a bang like a bomb exploding. When we ran into the street it was full of rubble from the house that had collapsed, thankfully without her in it.
We lasted seven years in La Charente and then, still looking for a place to call home (along with a lot more sun), we sold it for a good price and moved to a mountain village near Velez Malaga in southern Spain.
We loved almost everything about Andalusia: the music, the heat, the salty seafood tapas. The only problem was noise. Because, as we soon learned, Andalusians never sleep. Whenever we returned to our charming casa along one of the narrow streets of the pueblo Blanco - whether it was dawn or midnight - there were children playing football, elderly neighbors with a good old chin wagon and mopeds with souped-up exhausts cruising over the cobblestones. farts.
We reluctantly sold it after six happy but tiring years and bought a plot of land in a remote spot higher up the mountain. By the time we laid the foundation, our peaceful plot with panoramic sea views was surrounded by illegal buildings that would soon be our only view. When we sold out this time, we took a break from our relationship and I spent several years moving between countries - working for a newspaper in Cambodia; training as a gaucho in Argentina; learning about Ayurveda in Kerala - and still searching for that elusive place I could call home.
In 2011 we decided to return to Crete together again. After traveling around the island for several months, we came across an old stone house surrounded by citrus groves and olive trees. It was the house I had always dreamed of.
After 15 years here, we speak Greek, make our own olive oil and have lovely neighbors who regularly invite us for meals consisting of vlita (wild vegetable) pies, xochloi snails and other meze snacks. From March to mid-December we swim from almost deserted beaches or dine on the roof terrace and watch the griffon vultures returning from their foraging in the surrounding mountains.
When I come back to Britain these days it's like visiting a foreign country, and I do all the touristy things: look for overpriced tat in Camden Market; paying an arm and a leg to ride The Eye. Last month, for the first time in my life, I even had to climb 334 steps to visit Big Ben.
Friends often ask if I miss anything from home. In the words of Edith Piaf I answer: "Non, je ne regrette rien", although every now and then I do fancy well-cooked bacon and a greasy bag of fish and chips.
