Written in Crayon

This one looks back at 2024.

The warm Caribbean night breeze blew through the open bifold doors as we sat at the kitchen island. Our muscles had started to loosen from the sunny days, and with it our moods had lifted. The kids were tucked in bed, our dinner had been eaten and cleared away, and we found ourselves with headspace and a moment’s peace to talk. I turned over the mindful colouring sheet and asked Jimmy to look at the reality of the numbers we were fighting. Our mortgage was set to rise by £1,000 per month and, on top of eye-watering renovation costs, any growth in equity was easily being wiped out. As we hashed out different options, hastily written in crayon, it became clear that we had to sell if we wanted to stop effectively working for the bank.

Things had become tense at home, and we were shell-shocked from our first seemingly radical decision. Choosing to home-educate the kids made absolute sense to us, but others struggled to understand and we were left feeling isolated. I had also just received another diagnosis from a rheumatologist who arrived late with coffee stains on his shirt, was unwilling to read my notes, directed his comments and questions to my husband rather than me, and coerced me into ticking boxes that didn’t feel like they fit. I felt like an outcast in more ways than one.

Our instinct was to run away from it all. We took that isolated feeling, bundled up the kids and a few bags in that cold January that made my joints hurt and the numbness and tingling more severe, and headed to sunnier climes. By that point we had been living in a freezing house with boarded-up windows for weeks, because of the hapless mistakes the window company had repeatedly made and refused to sort out. Christmas had gone in a blur, with a chipboard Christmas tree design in place of a front door.

We paid for an irresponsible trip to Barbados that we couldn’t afford, but we knew that sunshine, warmth and space were what we needed to get our heads straight. It was an expensive holiday, but the best money we have ever spent. Those two weeks of playing with the kids, exploring the jungle of Welchman Hall Gully in search of cacao trees like Willy Wonka, and diving under the warm Caribbean ocean to watch turtles munching on sea grass, nourished us. They helped to shape the possibilities of what life could look like, if only we were willing to make some decisions.

Travel has always helped to give me a fresh perspective. Stepping out of my life and trying on someone else’s for a short time creates an expansiveness in which I can imagine. Being away from the house made it easier to separate out the emotions and memories contained in its walls and make logical decisions. I could see that we had been living extremely comfortably in a three-bedroom apartment, with one open-plan living space and minimal stuff, for the last two weeks. It made me wonder, as I had when the Ukrainian mother and daughter stayed, whether that was all we needed. The kids seemed to like it too: our days flowed better in a small space, comforted by each other’s presence.

We returned to the UK with a new resolve and, with the memories of a sunny holiday still fresh in our minds, approached the estate agents with trepidation. As the “For Sale” sign went up, we began our quest to find a new home. The kids were game, living every moment in the possibilities of their imagination. We trawled the local housing market, viewing smaller properties with the two in tow, and they would pepper the estate agent with questions. Locating the best place for their bunk beds and trampoline, they would ask whether the fluffball cat could be included in the sale. But Jimmy and I couldn’t get past our own guilt at making them leave their home and, with no appetite for further DIY, struggled to match the kids’ enthusiasm. It was hard to look beyond the view of the tip out the back window, the black mould in the kitchen, or the dilapidated property with smashed windows sitting vacant next door.

Dorset property prices had risen in the five years since we bought our house, spiked by people leaving the city during Covid. Prices stood at 10 times income, compared to 4 times for our parents’ generation. So if we downsized to properties equivalent to what we had owned in the past, we would still be looking at paying a similar-sized mortgage to the one we were trying to escape. It felt like a financial trap.

We concluded that we did not have the energy to deal with both buying and selling properties at the same time. Extending the house-buying chain would further delay the process, which we couldn’t afford. We were so scarred from what turned out to be a bad decision on the last house that we felt we didn’t have the emotional clarity needed to choose a new one without making another mistake. We could have chosen to rent, but we wanted a total reset, and renting an overpriced property in Dorset just to have a place to put our possessions did not feel like the way to get it. We also didn’t want to sell that story to the kids.

The prospect of moving from their childhood home was upsetting for them, so we wanted to make it the start of a new adventure. The end of one chapter, and the start of a new, exciting one that was about us as a family and the time we got to spend together.

The day that we detoured past the motorhome showroom in Poole, a seed was planted. We found ourselves just having a “browse”, but the more we looked, the more it felt like the answer we had been looking for. The saleswoman clearly saw us coming a mile off and sold us the perfect van. It felt satisfying knowing that with the mortgage gone, and enough equity to buy a van outright, we had got rid of our debt.

We had spent the previous two summers touring Austria, and then France, guided by the wild swimming spots and loving the outdoor lifestyle that comes with van life. We had borrowed Jimmy’s mum’s VW T6 van, which had been perfect for a first taste but too small for our needs long-term. Despite the van not being quite right, we instantly fell in love with the freedom of travel and the ability to move our home with us.

Trading a house for a van may seem highly illogical to anyone who does not share our love of camping, but it suddenly made perfect sense to us. We had already decided to go abroad for a while. My neurologist, acknowledging the link between increased sunlight hours and a reduction in chronic inflammation, suggested it after seeing success with his other patients. But it had felt too extreme to uproot our whole family for the sake of an experiment. Having a home on wheels gave us the perfect apparatus to conduct the test. It took away the discomfort around the word “emigrating”, and the seemingly permanent nature of that word, and turned it into an opportunity to explore new places.

A climate comparison and Digital Nomad visa eligibility had us settling on southern Spain. With the house set to sell in August, we knew we were coming into the colder months and needed somewhere we could sustain an outdoor lifestyle. Southern Spain promised that, with longer daylight hours, more sunshine, mild temperatures and a lower cost of living. We had never been and did not speak the language, having spent most of our camping holidays in France, so picking one location would have been difficult. Another decision that we had no energy for. The van meant we didn’t have to choose. We didn’t have to put the energy into planning or considering whilst we were trying to leave the house; we could just explore when we got to Spain, and choose to move on whenever we felt like it.

When we sat in the kitchen of that rented apartment in Barbados, we could see what needed to be done to release the time, energy and money so we could live a life where we got to spend more time hunting for turtles with the kids. But we didn’t know how we were going to get there. As is the case with most of the big decisions we have made, we couldn’t know then where it was going to lead us, and that is part of the fun, and terror, and wild rollercoaster of it all.