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It was a million little things that made us reconsider our original, starry-eyed plan to stay in France for ever. A million little things, and a few big ones.

The little ones added up to a cloud of ennui. You can have a few years congratulating yourself on having found the good life. There are many things I adore about France, and the honeymoon was one of the best times of my life. But the reality was, Utopia did not exist and I was entirely sick of being foreign.

Furthermore, as soon as we acknowledged the existence of the major reasons for moving back, they became impossible to ignore. They did for me, anyway: I started planning our return to Britain long before James was ready to join in, despite the fact that his career was one of the larger stumbling blocks to staying where we were. As soon as I realised that I would be happier back in the UK, and so would the rest of my family, then it became impossible to imagine still being in France in ten years’ time, or even in two. Overnight, everything changed. France was no longer the promised land: unexpectedly, Britain was.

The decision was made easier by our circumstances. We had sold our house in the middle of nowhere because of practical considerations – James had done a TEFL certificate but, after a year on a British Council placement in various nearby schools, there was very little work to be had teaching English in the back of beyond. He made a strong case for us to move much closer to the coast (and the fact that this brought us far closer to the surf was, naturally, purely coincidental), so that he would be able to work in Biarritz and Bayonne. Unfortunately, this involved our trading in a proper expat-style country house for a utilitarian place on the outskirts of a village. It never, not for one instant, felt like home. A huge falling out with the people we were buying from did not help, and for the whole time we lived there (not that long, it transpired) I felt that I was living in the house of a woman who [comments removed for legal reasons] [I don’t have a lawyer but I feel that this is for the best].

On the plus side, James had set up a business, complete with the traditional wheelbarrow full of paperwork, and was teaching English in workplaces and doing pretty well at it. However, he was also working at a primary school, and enjoying this so much that he realised that he would love to become an actual primary teacher, which is not something he could possibly do in France because of the language question. And the paperwork.

Finally, and overridingly, the village school at this new place was so shockingly bad, in contrast to the wonderful school at the first village, that there was no way in the world that I was going to leave my poor firstborn there for a moment longer than necessary. It was straight from the Victorian era: single desks facing the front, nothing on the walls, dictation and everyone reading the same two pages of the set reading book, each night. He cried and clung to me regularly. It was heartbreaking. I came very close to home educating, but settled instead on refining the escape plan at the same time as allowing him to skive from time to time.

James quickly came round to my way of thinking, as he tends to do, and we were abruptly faced with the question of where to move to. I would have considered going back to Brighton, but I was alone in that. The south west was more appealing to the surfers among us (elder son having now been indoctrinated into the wave riding fraternity), and friends from Brighton had recently relocated to Falmouth in Cornwall.

We visited them for one night, just after Christmas 2007, taking a slight detour on our way to catch the ferry back to France from Plymouth. In fact it was an enormous detour, and we spent most of the journey marvelling at how very back-of-beyond our friends’ new home must be, and how we were finished with living in remote places and could never ever consider living somewhere like that.

About an hour after we got there, I changed my mind.

We have been back in England for eighteen months, and everything is so settled that I am beginning to feel weird when the ‘we used to live in France’ thing comes up. It almost feels like something random that I am inventing. Sometimes I want to say ‘we used to live in Iceland’ instead, because that seems to be about as likely.

We went to France on a whim. I look back at it and try to pick out a rational thread in our reasoning, but there really wasn’t one. It went, as I recall, something like this:

We were young and foolish, living in Brighton and expecting our second child. James had just finished an MSc, and was looking for a job. All the jobs in his field were in London, and he wasn’t keen on the commute, and neither was I, on his behalf, so we started to cast around for alternatives. At that time (2003), you couldn’t switch on a television without finding yourself following the fortunes of a British couple as they set out to start a new life abroad, but it didn’t always run smoothly, and there was rarely a deviation from the formula of naïve optimism-harsh financial and social reality-catharsis-happy ending. They would inevitably dramatically run out of money, and then dramatically be all right again in the end.

James is a surfer, and the south west of France plays host to world-class waves. I had spent time in France many years earlier and could speak the language. When I was in France in my late teens, I knew some English children growing up happily in French schools living what seemed to me to be fairly idyllic lives. In fact, I’m sure they were exactly that. It seemed very appealing. If you detect a hint of the voice of experience there, you are correct. What was idyllic for our friends was not necessarily the right thing for us and our children; as we would discover.

We turned up, insanely, in the depths of the French countryside in January, knowing no one, in the middle of a hail storm, with a confused two-year-old and a newborn baby. The house we had bought was not as habitable as it had at first appeared, and so we lived in a rented house for six months while the builders failed to turn up to make our actual house into a reasonable prospect. We ended up moving into our real house at the same time as the builders rocked up, and baby Seb learned to crawl just as they were doing the dusty parts. Then we gave them all our money, and suddenly we had a big house to live in, miles from anywhere, and no cash.

All the same, a lot of the isn’t-this-divine clichés applied. We went to the local market in our gorgeous local town of St Sever and came away with a basket filled with local seasonal vegetables and a few baguettes. The local farmer invited us to come and show the children his animals any time we wanted. Gabe went to the local nursery and then school and started to speak French. And so on.

But as the years went by, I began to wonder, quietly, what exactly we were there for. The things I liked were lovely, but there was a lot of harsh reality, too.

Things I liked:

The smug factor (“we live in the south of France”)

speaking French every day

Having French friends and occasionally dreaming in French.

Bilingual children

Peaceful countryside and huge sandy beaches.

Being far away from the teenagers who used to vomit outside our house on a Saturday night in Brighton.

Things I didn’t like:

If you drive or walk through a village, people will put down what they are doing to have a good stare, and no matter how much you smile and wave, they will not reciprocate.

Being foreign. Over the years, I came to hate the fact that I was foreign and as soon as I opened my mouth, people knew that I was. This says more about me than about where I was but the self consciousness ruled my life for a while.

Most of all, though, the realisation that moving to rural France, leaving the only country we really knew, and recasting ourselves as outsiders, was a cop out. Either you engage with the culture in which you live, or you don’t. We knew some expats who were completely part of their communitites, but we were always going to be different, even if subtly. For a couple of years, we managed to keep a smug aloof distance from Britain (us with our nice weather and long beaches and all), yet remain utterly baffled by French bureaucracy, and the fact that children went to bed late, and the way that a GP would prescribe antibiotics the moment you showed up with a sniffle, and numerous other petty differences.

In the end, after four years, it seemed to be time for a rethink.

To be continued…