The long way home

Here is the daft thing. We left because it was sensible.

The house back home had been on a mortgage break to pay for all this, and that ran out in February. Brexit had just landed, and me working remotely for a UK company from a Spanish coast was about to get complicated in ways nobody could quite explain but everybody could feel. And somewhere in the back of my head sat the quiet certainty that spring meant the office, meant normal, meant the very thing we'd run away from was going to come looking for us anyway. So we made the call. Fast, in the end. A gut call. Go home, sort the house, decide properly from there.

All perfectly reasonable. And I have spent a fair chunk of the years since wondering what on earth we were thinking.

The last morning I stood on the beach we'd made ours and watched the sun come up over the water, the little painted boats still pulled up on the sand, and thought: I have only just learned this place. The bike routes. The Friday fish. Which shop lies about being open on a bank holiday. We'd finally cracked it. And now we were loading the car.

The last morning on the coast.

We drove north. Up through a Spain gone quiet and cold, an overnight in Salamanca that felt like a full stop we weren't ready for. The old city lit up gold in the dark, the three of us shattered in a hotel room a long way from where we'd woken up.

Salamanca by night, on the drive north.

Then Santander, and the ferry. Three nights, all the way to Portsmouth. The long way home by design, because none of us fancied an airport in the middle of all that. We'd upgraded, which meant free snacks, free coffee and, crucially, free wine for the duration. Excellent value, especially when a storm rolled in and kept us tied to the dock for the first twenty-four hours. Nobody minded. The whole ship seemed to collectively shrug and settle in. A bit of vibes, then off to bed.

We woke up at sea. And the sea had opinions.

Choppy does not cover it. You held the rails for dear life just to get down a corridor. Brand new ship, all the clever self-levelling technology money can buy, and you could feel it working overtime and quietly losing. Rose thought it was the greatest fairground ride ever built. My wife did not. And it came to a head up on deck, mid free-snack, when Rose was sick.

Now. My wife has emetophobia, a genuine fear of being sick and of sick itself, so on a pitching boat this was close to a worst case. The staff were brilliant. There was no hiding it. Within about ten minutes she had located and moved into an entirely new cabin, which held right up until we went back to the old one and Rose was sick again. I stayed with her, she came round, and in the end we all decamped to the new room together. One small family riding out the Bay of Biscay in a cabin we'd acquired by emergency. I have videos of the waves coming clean over the bow. It was, and I mean this fondly, an adventure.

And then Portsmouth. Solid ground. And a long drive north to a house we hadn't properly lived in for the best part of half a year.

It was strange, coming back. But we settled fast, faster than I'd expected. There was family we hadn't seen in months. There was, gloriously, no mask the moment you stepped out the door, after a Spanish winter of them everywhere you turned. And there was Bernard.

I had missed that dog more than I'd let myself admit. He did what Bernard does, which is not a great deal, magnificently.

Home. And Bernard.

Within a week we were round a pub table with old friends and a great heap of their kids, everyone a bit older, a bit changed, and completely the same. After months of expats and video calls, it was the best noise I'd heard in ages.

I loved Spain. The food, the drink, the light, the people. But I'll be honest with you in a way I couldn't quite manage at the time: I was always a little bit on the outside of it. My Spanish never got good enough to stop leaning on fellow expats, and there's a version of those months where I was a guest in my own adventure. If I ever go back, and I think about it more than is healthy, I'd go all in. Learn the language properly. Actually belong to it.

So. Was that the end, or just a pause?

Honestly, I still don't know. We've been on the edge of going back more times than I can count. Sat here writing this, dredging it all up, I genuinely question why we left at all. The weather alone was ridiculous. Storms that cleared the second they got boring, sunshine in between, right through a winter. We had a great thing going.

But we came home. And the bloke who came home is the one who, a few years and one strange pandemic-shaped detour later, would start chasing daft, specific numbers up and down a trail in Cheshire, and build himself a robot to nag him about it.

That, though, is a different story. This one, at long last, is finished.

Gracias. And hasta luego.

Pardo