31st January 2020
Well, here we are. 31st January 2020 and the date when the United Kingdom officially leaves the European Union. Having just come back from the dentist in Granada, and lying on the sofa waiting for that grim numbness to subside, I have been looking through the messages on social media expressing either sadness or jubilation.
We spent months feeling anxious and angry and uncertain leading up to the General Election in December, following which I, for one, have felt strangely divorced from emotion surrounding the UK’s inevitable departure.
I don’t feel sad, or angry any more. I feel a huge sense of relief that we live in an EU state. For us, the uncertainty is diminished as we now know that our rights as residents of Spain are secure, certainly for the time being. Speaking for us both, I think it is fair to say that we feel far more affinity with our adoptive country now than we do with our former home. We feel completely welcomed, valued, loved and at home. Over the course of the past 3+ years, we have been able to do what we set out to do - pursue our creative interests and create work for ourselves because we love doing what we do, rather than being driven by the ceaseless need to generate income. The values of life here in Spain are completely different to the values of life expected of us in London. I would like to clarify that London is our point of reference as that is where we spent the last 5 years of our time in the UK. That said, I also lived and worked in the country and found that the challenges of life were much the same - the need to generate income was of prime importance, and greed seemed to absorb everything else.
We need to work here to generate income, of course, or we couldn’t survive, but the emphasis here is on balance. We have had space and room to breathe while we discover ways to earn a living. Our neighbours and friends demonstrate, every day, that life is so much more than working from dawn until dusk just to pay a mortgage. We look back at the time we spent in London, climbing aboard sweaty, heaving buses for unpleasant commutes to an anonymous office where we would sit glued to a computer for hours on end trying to convince ourselves that what were doing was in some way worthwhile. We’d watch the clock, waiting for the end of the day, conscious of the fact that there were colleagues who’d work on into the evening as if this gave them additional validation. We would board the return bus as evening fell, too tired to think about preparing something delicious to eat, instead falling back on some packaged nonsense that can be slapped into the oven while we wash away the stress of the day with gin. There was little enough to stimulate us into animated conversation about our respective days, so habit dictated that we zoned out in front of the TV until it was time to go to bed.
That is the bleakest and perhaps most cynical of images, but it is strange that it is that image that stands out so vibrantly as we wake here to blue skies and sunshine on this last day of January.
Weekends have little significance for us. We work when we want to and when we need to. Although we still set the alarm in the morning, we tend to wake with daylight, and watch the sun rise over the magnificent Sierra de Huetor. We have time to have a healthy breakfast before we start whatever work the day has for us. We stop for lunch, and eat it on a terrace looking at the distant horizon, warmed by the sun. We cook every day, and chat over dinner. Of course we always have our evening gin, but this is as part of our time together as opposed to a necessity to drown out the noise of another grey, monotonous day.
We don’t miss our life in the UK at all. We see the friends who are most important to us, so we don’t feel that we ‘miss’ them either. Our children love it here and the time we spend together is magical because we have time, and room to breathe, chat, be quiet, enjoy nature, relax, eat good food and drink good wine without competing against the blare of background noise.
Life here puts family and friends first; it is about spending time with each other over food. It is about appreciating what a glorious place this is with so much to offer. I don’t care about bureaucracy; paperwork is everywhere, a necessary evil. I have never found the paperwork here in Spain to be any more confusing or onerous than some of the forms we were expected to fill in when we lived in the UK. Yes, for many it can be complex when Spanish is not the first language, but gradually we have come to terms with that. Through our relationships with our Spanish friends, we can communicate effectively, share our own love for life and feel more at home here every day.
A sense of belonging, for us, is essential to a contented way of life. I don’t think either of us have ever felt such a strong sense of belonging as we do now, in our new home in this beautiful country. So that is probably why we don’t feel much today, as we approach 11.00pm. We love belonging to this country that welcomed us so warmly, and we love belonging to the European Union. We neither of us want to be part of a country that has turned its back on that feeling of belonging and believes that by going it alone will somehow conjure up some new golden future. I don’t believe that golden future exists without the support, love and union of the friends and family we need to survive.
