Last night, I flew down from Barcelona to Almeria to spend a week on holiday in Bedar. Linda is in the UK at the moment, and so she is coming out with Sarah on Monday and Anna is going to meet us later in the week after her marathon hitch-hike to Morocco (...thank you all you sponsors)
I’ve just had the weirdest experience…but at the same time it was clothed in the mundane and perhaps that was what fooled me.
I first flew out on the 7th Jan and then spent the rest of the month commuting back and forth as we sorted out the house, life, everything.
Linda and I then flew together on the 7th Feb and lived for a month in a hotel and then we moved to the Gran Via on the first weekend in March. Its now the 12th April and so we've been in place and functional in Spain for ten weeks. For both of us its been pretty full-on, me with the work at GW, learning to comunicate in Spanish and navigating a whole new life situation and Linda the same (but without the problem with the Spanish - we'll talk about Catalan another time...)
So a large part of the weirdness is that the reality of what we are up to suddenly came home very powerfully when I flew down here last night. (…in part induced by the fact that it took only an hour in the air in a tiny jet - a lot less than Nottingham to London)
The title of this blog refers of course to that glorious commentary on life – Once in a Lifetime, by Talking Heads. But the conversation that Linda and I have had many times over the last few weeks as we look out over Barcelona, or cycle round the city on our Bromptons is “¿How did we get here…?”. Being such an obsessive planner (…what´s the plan lads?) Rob will particularly understand how odd it appears to be doing something that feels right, but which we didn’t really plan at all. Back in September I simply sat down for a cup of tea with Mark our CEO who asked whether I would consider moving to Spain for a couple of years to help out the business…and here we are. Everything…and I mean everything else simply fell into place. Linda’s work, the apartment (we only looked at one, how sloppy is that…but it is perfect!) the location, the girls being both at Uni, the list goes on and on but we planned none of it, it just all clicked into place. And maybe that’s what´s weird…I have known all this…for weeks now…but have never quite felt it. Life, the work, living in the city all seems a bit strangely strange, but oddly normal, Flying down here from Barcelona, last night felt weird and now that I am here it is weird, but with a wonderful, exciting, glorious edge. So how did I get here? “…and you may find yourself in another part of the word…watching the days go by, let the water hold me down…same as it ever was…same as was…same as it ever was…
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