Back at Bardies, permanently

Blog at Bardies is back! I decided to stop writing my blog in July 2014 because I thought people were bored with the prevalence of blog posts about life in France. Then last Sunday I woke up thinking of the numerous things that have changed for us in the last nine years; how our journey may be of interest to others in a similar situation, or to those catapulted through circumsatnce into rethinking their post-Brexit lives. [There, I've said it! I've got the 'B' word out after just three sentences.] I cannot think of another event in my life that has so changed all our hopes, dreams and plans.

Like many people, I thought that David Cameron was playing to his own gallery when he called for a referendum on our membership of the European Union. How wrong I was. In the face of heated debates about sovereignity, immigration and the accession of Turkey, facts and figures became irrelevant. It was impossible to argue with raw emotion. And the rest, as they say, is history. Having had a house in France for over twenty years, it felt as though a limb was being amputated.

At first, numb with shock, we struggled with definitions: hard/ soft Brexit, Withdrawal Agreement, Article 50, customs union, single market, Northern Ireland protocol, free trade agreement, passporting, to name a few. More significantly, we needed to understand the implications of the 'Third Country Status' 90/ 180 rule. Who knew about or understood these terms? As the possessor of a red passport with 'European Union' boldly embossed on its front cover, I never questioned my status as a European. Now, in the final week of June 2016, I decided to apply for an Irish passport, not realising until then that, because I had an Irish mother born on the island of Ireland, I was already an Irish citizen by birth. Not so, my children, for whom I needed to register their foreign births in the UK with Ireland's Department of Foreign Affairs, before being able to apply for theirs. Sadly, my husband, as a Brit, did not have the luxury of either option.

We waited, and waited, because the Irish Embassy was inundated with millions of applications. Inevitably, I failed to accrue all the necessary certificates, which caused months of additional delay. I then spent months chasing elusive birth, marriage and death certificates. Because my father died when I was seven and my mother married again, her Irish birth certificate bore no relation to my birth name, nor to the name on her death certificate. In all, I needed my mother's birth, marriage and death certificates, my father's birth, marriage and death certificates, my stepfather's marriage and death certificates, as well as my birth and marriage certificates and my children's birth certificates. All these original and certified copies had to be sent to Ireland's Department of Foreign Affairs before I could register my children as Irish by foreign birth.

Meanwhile, we continued with life in the UK, glued to rolling news and Parliament Live. We scoured the newspapers, including the Daily Telegraph, always a good source of Tory Party thinking. We went on marches. We retweeted posts from people like us, to no avail. The dastardly deal was done, destined, however flawed, to be written into law. All around us people seemed increasingly agitated. Our lovely Italian waitress in the coffee shop at the bottom of our road was verbally abused on a bus. A German acquaintance, a professor at a London university, was tiraded on Twitter for being a foreigner. At a drinks party, when I mentioned the fact that I was lucky to be an Irish citizen, I was told to 'fuck off back to Ireland then' by a man, a Brexiter, who should have known better. I was deeply shocked at the hostlity to anyone who claimed a part European heritage. I didn't recognise what was happening to the country I had lived in all my life.

The reverse was true in France. All our French friends were incredibly supportive, sad that the UK had opted to leave the European Union. Not a single one passed a negative comment. 'Move here, permanently,' they said. 'You'll be welcomed with open arms.' At the occasional lunch party with Brits, I was surprised to meet home owners, some with businesses, who eulogised about the benefits of Brexit. For the life of me, I couldn't understand how leaving the EU could be anything but negative for them, until it gradually dawned on me that they viewed themselves as untouchable. Somewhere, etched deeply below three layers of thick skin, they saw themselves as superior, part of a select tribe of 'ex-pats' whose position anywhere in the world was unassailable. The DNA of all those doughty army officers and their memsahibs carries on, despite the collapse of Empire and the nation's lost industrial preeminence.

'Get Brexit Done' provided the death knoll for us pro-Europeans. We were adrift, let down by the Liberal Democrats, lost in an anti-Bremoaner culture war. The new Tory cabinet, led by a man with the moral integrity of a tomcat, was stuffed full of braying Brexiters. If you weren't one of them, you were the target of abuse and vitriole. Dominic Grieve, Ken Clarke and nineteen fellow Tories had the whip withdrawn from the party they had served all their lives for daring to oppose the potential catastrophe of a no-deal Brexit. A truncated Labour Party was cut off at the knees. There would be no attempt to reconcile, to find a way through the complexities of over forty years of integration with Europe. You were either with them, or against them. There was no middle ground. Never, since the Cavaliers and the Roundheads, had the country been so divided.

Still, we may not have packed a pile of stuff into our old Volvo Estate and hightailed it to Bardies if it wasn't for the pandemic. We were due to go to Austria for a week in the mountains when the email telling us the country was going into lockdown arrived. That was on Thursday 12th March 2020. By lunchtime on Saturday 14th, we were through the Channel Tunnel. That night, at our stopover hotel, the proprietor informed us that the hotel was closing at midnight and that all shops, hotels, bars, restaurants and retail outlets were to be closed forthwith. France was officially in lockdown. There was some doubt as to whether we'd get breakfast, which we fortunately did, which was just as well because everything was closed en route. Fortunately, I'd packed the remnants of our fridge to take with us so we could cook ourselves dinner on arrival. We lit the woodburner and opened a bottle of Madiran.

'So what do we do now?' I asked.