As I write this, Longrider Towers is awash with boxes, full of possessions gathered over the past two decades. Slowly, the house is becoming depersonalised in preparation for the new occupant. On Thursday evening we will drive to Portsmouth to catch the evening ferry and make our home across the channel.
This is the culmination of an idea that germinated when travelling through the Larzac in the summer of 1990. An idea that grew into buying a house and spending every available holiday for the past five years working to make it a home. There was a point a couple of years back, one starlit night in the quiet moments as one year died and a new one started, when I made the mental adjustment and there was more home than here. Now, looking at the home we’ve known for twenty-one years, I am ready to go.
When we first thought about living in France, our motivation was the countryside, the climate, the pace of life and the French way of doing things. A love/hate relationship with France became more love than hate. In the meantime, my love for my homeland has descended into contempt. Contempt for a population that is so passive that it fails to hold its political class to account. The French will bring the country to a grinding halt if their politicians upset them. They are not always right, but their willingness to say “non!” has my admiration just as the willingness of the British to accept the erosion of our civil liberties with a shrug earns my utmost derision. I have watched in despair as the righteous have eaten away like a cancer at the things that made this nation so great, that made Britain a wonderful place to live. No longer are we free to speak our minds for fear of the industry so willing and ready to take offence, of the righteous who decide what is “acceptable” or not. Thought crime is becoming a reality in 21st Century Britain.
We live in a country that has reversed the presumption of innocence, that undermines the very principle of justice, where mere suspicion is sufficient justification for the state to seize assets, where law is made on the basis of prejudice and puritan morality rather than reason, evidence or justice, where the citizen is being criminalised and treated as a suspect, where the police are becoming politicised and no longer adopt the Peelian principles, where politicians believe they, not the electorate, are the masters; politicians who treat the electorate with open contempt.
This is a land where youngsters leaving education have A* exam grades yet are barely able to string a sentence together, and mathematical illiterates such as I have to explain to them how to work out percentages. Where our history is being lost or rewritten, a nation that is being taught to be ashamed of its past rather than proud of its heritage.
France is not a common law country, but the French are not followed wherever they go by surveillance cameras, they are not subject to constant demands by the state to poke about in their business. If the state did, they would call a general strike and mean it. The French, when faced with law they do not like, will either get it changed or ignore it. Their national belligerence is something we have forgotten to our cost. I can travel almost all the way to Montpellier and come across only one set of traffic lights and they are switched off. The only speed camera is well signposted and if I take the back road I won’t see one at all. The standard of driving is better, more disciplined and courteous. Oh, and I can sit in my back garden in the summer, in the shade beneath my walnut tree and the loudest thing I will hear is next door’s chickens.
Yes, I’m going for the quality of life. I always was. It’s just a shame, though, that my own country has changed such that I want to leave it behind.
All that said, I’ll be back in December to work…
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