The first day, and the night before…

The day finally arrived. On Wednesday 4^th November, my wife and I pulled up outside Gatwick airport, no longer in possession of a house, car or anything tying us to England. It marked the start of a very surreal period in our lives which is currently ongoing….

I loaded all of the cases and bags onto a trolley and my wife left me there to take the hire car back. I struggled across Gatwick with everything and checked into our hotel.

For the next couple of hours I explored the facilities Gatwick airport has to offer (surprisingly few to entertain you after an hour or so, as it happens, and I was almost glad of the frantic thirty minutes I wasted retrieving my mobile phone which I managed to drop in the amusement arcade!) By now, my other half should have arrived back and I made plans to go for a celebratory drink and take my wife shopping for beach attire at the few shops in the airport.

Unfortunately my wife, despite having lived in London for around ten years, is not a seasoned rail traveller – she usually drives, and the chaos of Clapham Junction had served to give her one last London story to tell. Whether she got on the wrong half of the train or fell asleep and missed Gatwick is still being debated, but she ended up zooming down to the South Coast to a place called Barnham, about 5 miles from Bognor Regis. She had to get off, wait for another train and then begin an hours journey back to Gatwick airport, during which she stood up to ensure she stayed awake. Sadly the shops were by now shut, so no beach-wear shopping. There was just time to have one last bit of junk food from Burger King before getting a few hours sleep ready for our early flight.

The morning came and it was time to start our new life. As a treat we had booked “speedy boarding” with Easyjet, which entitled us to a separate check-in desk and allowed us to board the plane first. I have to say that unless I run out of money, I will always do this in the future. The £16 it cost allowed us to feel like we were travelling with a civilised airline rather than a budget one and it avoided the whole “Boarding Group A or B” scrum that always ensues and highlights the very worst parts of human nature. We secured seats on the exit row with good legroom and had an uneventful flight into Faro.

It was an incredibly strange feeling, flying into Portugal on one-way tickets and I almost wish I could have been more aware of what was going on. It was surreal and overwhelming and all my wife and I managed to keep saying to each other was “this is so WIERD!”

We arrived in Faro and, after an interesting experience with the automated gates I can now use with my high tech biometric passport (I got trapped inside the gates alongside two other passengers – hurray for technology,) we retrieved our cases.

We were met by the car hire man, who we recognised from past trips and told him we were here to stay. He offered two pieces of advice to us; firstly he said that we would really struggle to slow to the pace of Portugese life and secondly that we would, in the coming months, keep doubting ourselves and our decision. Just ten days on, I have already come to see the huge wisdom in these pieces of advice, but more on that in future posts!

We drove into Tavira, and once again I wished I could take more in. We were almost silent, overwhelmed by the enormity of what we had done and at the same time, more excited and alive than I had felt in years. After some fun and games getting our head around Tavira’s one way system we got to the estate agents, and within an hour, we had the keys to our new home.

It is funny how things change in your memory, as the living room and kitchen were smaller than we remembered, and the roof and ground floor terraces were bigger – still, given our plans to spend a lot more time outside this was the right way around!

We went on a small expedition out to the town and came back with our first takeaway meal – piri-piri chicken, duck rice (arroz de pato,) chips, salad, 4 Sagres beers and 2 desserts – all for the bargain price of 11 euros. The general consensus was “yep, we are going to like it here.” The eating was good, and full of excitement and anticipation for the future.

The rest of the day was lost to excitedly exploring our new house, and we also visited our local bar. We introduced ourselves as having just moved in and were welcomed warmly by the owner of the bar who insisted on giving us our second drink on the house. We then had a rather stilted conversation, due to the fact that no one could understand each other, but this gave us the determination to learn something new to say to him each time we visited.

By the time the time came to turn in for the night, the fact we lived here had still far from sunk in, but we were here. A most exciting day.

X Factor? Get me out of here…..

It’s been a while since I moaned about London life and seeing as we leave in 9 days (typing that just pushed my heart rate up!) I imagine this will be my last little political rant….

As a TV show, I can’t say I actually have any issue with the concept of “The X Factor,” but the reason it is right up at the top of the list of “things I hate” right now is how it highlights the vacuous way of life everyone seems to be being encouraged to adopt.

Several times per day I am becoming tempted to deactivate my Facebook account as yet another of my friends posts some inane comment about “The  X-Factor.” Visiting the offices of my clients all I am hearing is chatter about “Miss Frank” or “The Twatty Twins.”  As if this wasn’t enough, the tabloid front-pages scream out more “X-Factor” exclusives everywhere you go.

All of this is producing within me emotions from mild depression to actual FURY! As well as religiously watching this drivel, people are voting on it, talking about it, twittering about it, reading about it and texting about it. Some of these people are my friends, and are, at least in some cases, quite level headed, interesting people. Are the government in some way complicit in allowing this nonsense to slowly rot away our collective intelligence?!

Some really significant stuff goes on in the world. The country is at war in a couple of places, the politicians and the bankers are all stealing our money, and the British National Party are on “Question Time,” yet nobody talks about any of that. People prefer to be anaesthetised for weeks at a time by the antics of wannabe fast-track celebrities, while Cheryl Cole and some others decide which one of the contenders gets to record a shit ballad for Christmas number one, thus financing Simon Cowell’s next party, and next teeth.

When people seem to be putting more thought into who to vote for in The X Factor than who to vote for to run the country, something has surely gone horribly wrong? I am really struggling with the fact that this isn’t glaringly obvious to more people around me.  The UK seem to have adopted apathy as the key lifestyle choice and “not my problem” as the collective mantra. Unless people begin to wake up and take more interest in the society around them than the sad little lives of Jordan and Kerry Katona, I really to fear for the future of our culture.

Moving back to the key topic of moving to Portugal, I am sad to say that, yes, they do have X Factor in Portugal (in fact across most of Europe and even “XSeer Al Najah” throughout the Arab world, according to Wikipedia.) The silver-lining in that particular cloud though, is that I won’t understand a word when people are talking about it. The same will go for politics – I am going to go out of my way to not know about it – that way I may not feel so cross all the time!

Lost in translation?

In order to take my mind off the intense pain of my dental abscess while the antibiotics do their thing, I have spent a lot of time on the web over the past couple of days.

As a keen cook, exploring all of the the different food Portugal has to offer is one of the things I am most looking forward to – and the fact that I am currently only able to eat foods which require little or no chewing has found me looking lustfully at food-related websites. This web-surfing landed me at www.continente.pt – the website of a Portugese supermarket chain. I have spent a fair bit of time browsing this site to get an idea of how much things are going to cost when we arrive in Portugal.

I thought I might make more sense of the foodstuffs if I translated the whole site into English with Google Translate – it is not perfect but it generally gives you a good chance of working out what something means. That said, it has left me with a few unanswered questions this time:

1. If I fancy a stew, does “diced biological calf” taste as nice as stewing steak?

"Cool hunting" anyone?

2. Will eating “a piece of cool hunting” improve my street-cred?

3. Does “dogfish, whole, clean” imply that unless specified other fish is “dirty”?

4. Can I really buy a “small horse” for 40cents?

Discoveries like this are when I remember what enormous fun this journey is going to be, and with the stress of moving, we don’t often get a chance to remember that at the moment. I can’t believe it is less than three weeks until we go!

I’m off to find out what kind of fish a “cool hunting” is….

Broken Britain?

Welcome to Britain

I got “started on” today! I don’t think I have even used that expression since school some 17 years ago. It was all very unexciting really – I was cycling into the park to meet my wife in what would generally be classed as a “pretty posh” area of London and a group of 3 “youths” blocked my path in order to cause some sweary low-level trouble. It passed without event and in the grand scheme of things it was nothing major at all, but it was still enough to make me not particularly want to stay in the park, or even go there again really.

I am so pleased I am moving to Portugal in under four months. I have always been pretty patriotic, but it’s time to speak from the heart. This place sucks nowadays. The Friday before last, I had to snatch my wifes bag back from a bag-snatcher outside our very friendly London local – and living in London has made me so desensitized to this kind of low-level crap that I only just remembered about it and hadn’t thought to mention it to my family.

So as not to risk turning this post into an unfocussed political rant. Here are five things that are shit about London and the UK.

1. If you break a traffic or parking regulation in London you will be pounced on and fined immediately, be it by a well-paid, target-driven council worker or an expensive, tax-payer funded CCTV computer system. If however, you prefer higher level crime, you can go for shop-lifiting or burglary with complete impunity because there isn’t enough money to get cops to investigate that.

2. If you don’t fancy working and you prefer to drink or smoke weed all day and have fun by causing trouble in public parks – don’t worry YOU CAN. We have a welfare system that needs completely overhauling so that people cannot make a career out of laziness and stupidity. The Kaiser Chiefs should never have been allowed to release that song that says “It’s cool to know nothing.” For many I fear the irony was lost and it was adopted as a mantra!

3. Still on the subject of public parks. If you get some rare English sunshine and you fancy buying one of those disposable BBQs and having a couple of burgers in the park – YOU CAN’T. There is nowhere within the M25 where it is allowed. “Feral Youths – roam all you want! – Eco-friendly middle classes who fancy a quiet organic burger before clearing away and recycling all your litter – you are not welcome here!” Bloody ridiculous. Did everyone start out stupid or are they reacting to being treated AS IF they are stupid?

4. APATHY. Hold on, weren’t the majority of our politicians caught COMPLETELY RIPPING US ALL OFF a little while ago? Why did no-one DO anything? Well a few people texted a few jokes about it to each other, maybe a spot of light whinging around the watercooler. But then the Champions League final came along….now there’s some common ground we can ALL talk about! Pathetic. Everyone seems to have been so numbed by sport and celebrity culture that they don’t care what is important. Every person in this country who starts reading the paper from the back should be ashamed of themselves.

5. VANITY. A culture where physical beauty and/or sporting prowess are more revered and rewarded than genuine good is rotten to the core. Perhaps this culture is affecting the whole western world, but Britain is doing it’s best to lead the charge of the superficial. I thought all the Susan Boyle business may have been a turning point but it appears to have just been a temporary blip in the collective conscience, and the tabloids soon manged to put a stop to that. “SuBo” anyone? It makes me want to break stuff.

Sod it, it was a political rant, but I feel a lot better now. I just think it’s a damn shame that somewhere I have tried so much to love has been so spoiled. I am also pretty sure that it is going to get a lot worse and that we won’t be the last skilled, hard-working couple to get away and prevent our children having to grow up amongst the scumbags.