26 Degrees in the Shade . . .

Sell Everything to Live on the Costa del Sol. I want to Know Why? 1

Everybody Wants to Know the Answer to This

I would guess that I have been asked this question at least 10,000 times.

There are obviously a lot of people who would love to leave the UK and come to live in the sunshine, but they have a fear that they would need to allay before they could make such a “drastic” move.

I had studied at art school and also at university, worked in an art studio and then as a car model maker at Fords. My last job was as a head of department teaching CD&T in a comprehensive secondary school.

I enjoyed all my jobs, but my 5 years at Fords were very well paid, allowing me to buy a 3-bed semi with garage and nice gardens, a Mercedes estate and the latest top of the range BMW motorbike. In the school holidays I would travel to the former Yugoslavia and spend a few weeks camping right next to the beach, with my windsurfer permanently at hand for when the slightest wind appeared . . .

The problem I shared with the majority of Brits was that after the Inland Revenue had had their go at my pay packet, it didn’t matter how hard I had worked, I never seemed to have any money left over at the end of each month. Hence the camping holidays.

The expensive car and bike I was able to buy in the mid 70′s when I was earning big money in the car industry. But by the beginning of the 80′s those opportunities had disappeared, never to return again for most people.

The part of my life when I was most happy, was when I was on a golden beach with a windsurfer, so I asked myself this simple question.

You don’t like the cold wet winters and in summer you can count the really hot sunny days on your hands, you are taxed beyond belief, so why don’t you move to a warmer country and really enjoy your life?

There were 4 main, easily identified problems “preventing” me from leaving the UK and going abroad:

1. Great family and really great friends in the UK
2. I had a promising teaching career, backed up with top flight industrial experience in design.
3. I was buying a nice 3 bed house on mortgage in a lovely Essex riverside village.
4. I had a lot of kit: the Mercedes Estate, BMW motorbike, racing motorcycles and thousands of pounds worth of tools.

But none of these reasons were really responsible for keeping me in the UK.

I had to eventually be honest with myself. The main thing keeping me on the treadmill was FEAR! Fear of trying something completely different from the boring but safe life I had been leading for 35 years.

The photos by the way, are of my local pub where I used to live in Essex, and the river nearby.

So what did I do and how did I manage it? Tomorrow I will tell you the answer . . .

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 17th, 2008 at 5:07 pm and is filed under Business. Find similar posts by selecting and of the following tags: leaving the uk, reasons to leave the uk, why i left the uk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.