When you leave one country for another it changes you irrevocably. Travelling from place-to-place, visiting on holidays does that in small ways, each trip gives you hints of a different life, another way of living. But moving to another country leaves a more indelible mark, it gets into your cells, infuses you with another culture, another way to be that doesn’t really ever leave.
We’ve lived in France for seven years now, and while I know I’ll always be English to my very core, I have soaked up parts of French life and made them mine. However long we stay here, maybe forever, maybe less, I think these particular bits of Frenchness will always linger.
France has undoubtably changed us, but the life we’ve chosen to live here has left its mark too. If we’d moved to a city, or different part of the countryside things might have been different, if we still worked in an office or kept more than a toe in England, they might have been more different still. Other people would be changed in different ways and anyone following in our footsteps might find their lives otherwise altered. We turned our life upside down seven years ago and I don’t think we’ll ever be the people we were back then again.
Life here is undeniably simpler. I’m not sure when I last went shopping for anything other than food. I can’t remember the last time I bought clothes or shoes, or shopped for something for the house that didn’t come from a flea market or vide grenier. We no longer spend our weekends pottering around in town, poking about the shops or spend hours online coveting things we can’t afford. In my old life I wanted what everyone else had. I would visit friend’s houses and come away dreaming of cushions or lampshades like the ones in their sitting rooms, I wanted to holiday where they holidayed, have a car of equal status, buy the right clothes or the perfect accessories. There was a constant pressure to keep up, to be part of a group, to maintain a certain lifestyle that we couldn’t always afford.
For a little while after we arrived in France that feeling remained, but looking around I realised that no one here cared.
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