From the UK (Oxfordshire, England) to PORTUGAL: Alison

Caravans, cottages, cabins, and pigs. A city girl goes ... rough.

In 2019, Alison packed up her car and drove from the UK to Portugal. Her plan was to stay with a friend for a few months, help out on their pig farm, and try to recover from what had been an emotionally tough year.

A few months turned into a few years. And she went from from her friend’s caravan, to a small cottage in a small village, to a cabin on the other side of the mountain. And to the realization that Portugal wasn’t where she really wanted to be.

This is her story of leaving home and finding home.

Which sometimes means returning home.

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When did this idea that Oh, I'm going to go live in another country get into your mind? What sparked that?

I think I've always had an idea that I'd like to live abroad. You know when you go on holiday and you think: Oh, this place is amazing. I'll come back here and I'll work in a hotel or I'll do this or I'll do that. I've been to Ibiza as a teenager and wanted to work there. I've been to Egypt and thought: Oh, I'd love to live here.

My friend moved to Portugal in 2006. My kids and I went to stay with her in 2008, when my marriage had broken up. And we just had this lovely sort of sun drenched two weeks. Lazing around, swimming in the rivers, and reading on the terrace. And I thought, I could really see myself doing this one day. One day I'll be here.

And she then bought a bigger farmhouse that she's been restoring and I went back a few years later in March and stayed in her caravan. They had a lot of farm animals by that time and I was kind of helping them out on the farm, but it was cold and wet and miserable. But on the last day I was there, the sun came out and there was this golden glow across the land. And the mountains were there and it was all beautiful. And I kind of thought again, Yeah, I could see myself doing this.

But I didn't do anything. I just carried on with my normal life.

Then, 2018 was an awful year. Lots of things went wrong. I lost my job. I had family problems and money problems and friend problems and relationship break downs and it was just a really horrendous year. And I thought, I need to change something now. I had various options I was thinking about.

And then Andrea said: “Well, you could always come and stay with us on the farm. We've still got the caravan. Come over for a few months and think about what you want to do with the rest of your life.”

And I said: “Yeah, do you know what? I will. “

My daughter was away and she'd been through university and she was a teacher and living with someone and my son was sort of doing his own thing as well. So I just thought: “Yeah, I just need to get away.” So I booked myself and my car onto a ferry, packed up my worldly goods, and went.

So Andrea and her partner and their two sons have this small holding in central Portugal. And they kept pigs and goats and sheep and geese and chickens. And they've got about half a dozen dogs and a dozen cats.

I was there for five months on the farm and I just really enjoyed my time there. I enjoyed being out in nature, being outdoors, and working with the animals. It was great.

So when the five months were up, what did you do?

My friend still had the little tiny house that she bought when she first moved to Portugal—a tiny two-room cottage about an hour's drive from the farm. In a tiny village that was once very occupied, but like many of these villages in Portugal, most of the people have moved away.

There was one old lady, Fernanda, who lived in a house at the top of the village with her dog and her chickens. And then there was a slightly strange man, called Fernando, who would come every now and then to look after his beehives. And then there was a couple who had land and they would come every now and then to tend to their land. And that was it.

So I said to her: “I really could do with getting away on my own for a bit. Could I move into your little cottage?” And after a bit of persuading, she said yes. So I packed up my stuff, stole one of her puppies, and drove off to this little cottage. And I was there until just before Portugal went into COVID lockdown in March 2020.

Were you able to make friends in this village?

Yeah, I mean I was friends with Fernanda and Fernando. And then I still went back into town and met with Andrea for Portuguese lessons and kind of knew the people that went along there. And then I joined a couple of expat groups on Facebook and I met up with a few people at those. There were some groups that got together for lunch and things like that.

I went back to the UK at Christmas, had a lovely time. Was feeling really strong, really good in myself, mentally strong. And I thought, You know what. I've had this wonderful sort of eight months or whatever of living in isolation—I would just read and go down to the river to swim and walk the dog. And I'd got a kitten by that time as well who came on the walks with us. And sometimes I’d go and meet people and have crazy conversations with Fernando and it was wonderful. And I thought, I'm ready now. I'm ready to move back into civilization.

So I started looking around to see where I could move to. And a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend said: “Oh, this guy, Tim, has a cabin and I think he's looking for someone to move in and sort of dog-sit and live in the cabin.” And I said: “Oh, that sounds great.” So I got in touch with Tim and I went over and met him and saw the cabin and met the dog. And we agreed that I would move into this cabin, rent free, which was very nice. I just paid the electric bills and I would look after the dog and I could stay there as long as I wanted in this cabin.

I packed up, drove about an hour and a half over the mountains to the other side of the mountain ridge and up to a little village called Vila Mea where this cabin was. And I stayed there for two and a half years until I came back to the UK.

I arrived there on Saturday. And the next Thursday was when Portugal went into lockdown. So all my plans of socialising, of being in a village with real people, of going out and talking to my neighbours? Didn't quite work out how I intended.

Were you able to make friends there?

Once the lockdown lifted, somebody set up a local book club and I met a really lovely bunch of people there. It was an English speaking book club. I think one person was Dutch, but the rest of us were British, I think. All kind of around the same sort of middle age. They were much more my kind of people, I guess because they were bookish people and that was really lovely.

A lovely woman and her kid moved into the renovated house on the same property as my cabin and we became really good friends.

And then the other thing was I also set up a kind of online Zoom chat group thing. And a few people came along to that and we just clicked. So I think I'd gone from having friends just because they spoke English to having friends because I liked them. And that was really good.

Was the language a big deal or did you not really have a problem living your life and getting around and doing what you wanted to do?

It was a bit of both. I could speak enough Portuguese that I could go into a shop and ask for what I wanted. Or if I needed to go sort out my driving license or anything like that, I could kind of work out how to say it and sometimes I understood the response, not always.

And there were some lovely old ladies in that village who I just had the best conversations with. Just, “How are you? What's the weather like? What have you been doing?”

So, on the one hand, I could get by. On the other hand, I actually found it really isolating.

I think the moment when I suddenly thought, you know, I don't feel I'm ever going to settle here, I was standing in the supermarket on a Saturday morning. It was really busy and I was in the queue at the tills and everyone was having conversations around me. And because they were talking so fast, I couldn't pick up on any of it. And it just felt so isolating. There was me and there was all this chat going on around me and I couldn't access it at all, even to earwig.

And I just thought this language is a really big issue. I think it's such a binding factor. And I really tried—I was having private lessons by that stage and I had enough to get by. But I think there's a big difference between having enough to get by and having enough to actually fully engage in a community.

So you're standing in the supermarket and you start to think, I'm probably not going to be able to settle here. Was it just the language or were you sort of missing being back at home?

The big way COVID hit me was not being able to travel back to the UK. So the first year, I think I came back four times across the year. And my mum came out to stay and my daughter came to stay as well. So I had quite a lot of contact with my family. And then the second year, I went home at Christmas and then that was it until September when my daughter got married and there was that brief window when you could travel. But that was nine months that I went without seeing any of them. And Zoom is great, video calls are great, but it's not quite the same, is it?

And I think I'd started to realise that actually, for all the problems that some family members have thrown at me, my family is everything to me. And I think it's like a little seed had settled and was just growing very slowly. I can remember that there was a gig in the park during the summer and it was a Portuguese covers band. And they were awful, but it was live music. And I realized I was missing British culture.

I was missing being able to go to museums and galleries and read the labels. I was missing going to gigs of bands that I knew and singing along. I was missing just these little things. And I think this little seed took root and it grew and it grew and by October 2021, I thought, I don't know if this is for me. But I didn’t want to rush into a decision, you know. I thought, I'll give it another year.

I spent the next seven months in a bit of a headspin, because I really didn't know what to do. I didn't know that I wanted to go back to the UK, but I didn't know that I wanted to stay in Portugal.

I didn't know where I would live in the UK because I didn't have a house to move back to. And renting with pets is really difficult. And I loved the cabin.

I was going back with no job, no income, really. I'd made really good friends.

I kept making all these lists of pros and cons and I just did not know what to do. So I just thought, You know what, just stop thinking about it and just get on with living life.

So I carried on. I carried on doing art that looked like a six year old made it. And going down to the river beaches and meeting up with friends and reading. And I wrote a couple of books—I wrote a novel about a middle-aged woman who runs away from Britain to Portugal (which is not in the least autobiographical). I also wrote a book about writing books, because that's what I do in my business. I wrote an erotic novella (which is under a pen name that nobody has ever seen and nobody ever will see).

For the next few months, I just got on with doing some writing and messing around with paint and meeting up with friends and walking the dogs and visiting various places in Portugal. And every now and then thought: What am I going to do? August is only a few months off, what are we going to do? I don't know. I don't know, I don't know.

And then. My dad had been quite ill for a while. On June 16, I got a phone call from my brother to say my dad had died that evening. My dad and I weren't really very close, but it hit me really hard. My dad was a keen ornithologist. He was a bird watcher and always had been. The next morning, I took the dogs out for their normal walk and as we came back up the path to the cabin, they started barking. And I looked up and there was a red kite hovering over the cabin. I know you get red kites in Portugal, but I'd never seen one. I'd seen black kites over the valleys but I'd never seen a red kite. And literally, this kite was just hovering over the cabin for about 30 seconds and then it flew away. I'm not particularly spiritual or anything like that, but it just felt like a bit of a sign.

That day and the next day, it hit me that I needed to be back in the UK with my family. My dad had now gone. My mom is in really good health, but she was 79 when I came back. I was starting to travel back to see them again after COVID, but I just wanted to be closer to my family. And all of a sudden, this little root suddenly blossomed into this tree and I thought, I want to be back there. I really, I really want to be back.

By that time, I had my lovely book club friends. I had lots of other lovely friends as well. And it was really tough saying goodbye to people, but it just felt right. I just knew that I was never going to settle. It was never going to be home. I think that's what it came down to.

What advice do you have for something considering moving abroad (in general) or to Portugal (in particular)?

I would say, if you’re going to a country that speaks a language that is not your language, start learning the language as soon as possible. There are so many ways to access language learning now. Start learning at least some basic language, because it is really hard. That would be my number one tip: try and try and start learning as soon as you make a decision to go somewhere. Just do 10 minutes a day on Duolingo or Memrise or one of those apps and just start putting the foundations of language in place.

Find your people as well when you get there. Look for people that you click with, rather than just the people that speak your language.

Other than that, I think: go. Go for it, you know. A lot of people have said to me: oh, you were so brave to go there on your own. I don't feel anything brave about it really. You know, whatever you're handed in life you get on with, don't you? I don't know that that makes you brave. You just get on with it. Just go and be open to whatever life throws at you.

Good news!

If you want to connect with Alison (or if you’re a writer and want to learn more about her editing and proofreading services), check out her website.

And grab her book, “What’s Your Story: Take Your Non-Fiction Book From Possibility to Plan to Publication...and Beyond!

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WHAT ELSE DID WE TALK ABOUT?

Alison and I talked about a lot of other things, including:

• What life on the pig farm was really like. Spoiler: it was…rustic.

• How she was able to communicate with her neighbors and make friends in a small village with her limited ability to speak and understand Portuguese.

• What the neighbors really thought about her. And why one neighbor sent his cousins to her cottage.

• Why she booked a ferry back to the UK a whole year before she decided to leave.

• How she arranged to bring her dogs from Portugal back to the UK with her.

• What she missed about the UK when she was in Portugal.

• And what she misses about Portugal now that she’s in the UK.

And whether she’s glad she moved to Portugal or if she has any regrets.

Paid subscribers can access the entire conversation.

• Just click play on the video below.

• Or listen to the podcast on Substack or on Spotify.

If you want to listen on Spotify, you’ll need to do this first: ❶ go into your Substack profile (click on your picture up on the top right of the screen), ❷ click “Manage Subscriptions,” ❸ click the “Set Up Podcast” button, ❹ then click the “Listen on Spotify” button and ❺ link your profile as a paid subscriber to the podcast on Spotify. You should only have to do this once.