Moving to Mexico 3 — Ships, Llamas, Exams and Departure

and so we finally leave the UK…

This is the third and final part in my story of how and why I moved from the UK to live in Mexico. If you would like to read the previous two parts to provide a bit of context, you will find them here.

So to continue. We had decided to take early retirement in Mexico and bought the house in Valle de Bravo, so it only remained to decide when to take the final step and make the move. It was 2008 and I was 53 and that was too early, even for early retirement. I needed to keep earning and saving for a bit longer to ensure that it would be a comfortable early retirement. But I didn’t want to keep working until 65 when my pension would become payable. That seemed impossibly far away. So, somewhere in between, but when?

And how would we know when? When is the right time to move half-way across the world to start afresh in, for me at least, a new country? We didn’t know, so we settled down to wait and see, believing that, somehow, we would know when the time came.

Moving or migration is a response to push and pull factors. Things about the current place ‘push’ people away and things about the new place ‘pull’ them towards it. The pull side was already fixed — we knew where we were going — so now it was simply a question of how much longer it would be better for us to live in the UK than retiring to Mexico. It boiled down to a question of quality of life. So, what was our life like in the UK?

Since 2001, my Mexican wife Catalina and I had been living in Chatham, Kent. Now Chatham has a bit of a rough reputation compared, perhaps, with the more up-market and gentile Kentish towns. But it is an interesting place with a distinguished Royal Navy history. Since the early 1500’s, it was home to the Royal Navy dockyard. More than 500 ships were built there, including the famous ‘Victory’, launched in 1765, which served as Nelson’s flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar (1805) and can still be seen and visited today in dry-dock in Portsmouth. But the Chatham dockyard was closed in 1984, ripping the economic heart from the town and leading to large-scale unemployment and many related social and economic difficulties. Hence, Chatham is not your typical “pretty” English town and, sadly, the urban redevelopers of the 1960s and 70s did nothing to improve it. But it is a friendly, workaday sort of place and we enjoyed living there. It is well known for its parks and gardens, beautiful flowers and for hosting interesting cultural festivals and events. The surroundings are beautiful and there is a bit of everything for us nature lovers — coast, marshland, river and the hills of the North Downs — places we loved to go walking and relaxing whenever time and the weather permitted.

Moreover, Chatham was convenient for our jobs. I was working in London and, like hundreds of others, commuted by the 07:25 train every day to London Victoria. This took about an hour, was expensive, overcrowded and uncomfortable. But it was a fairly typical London commute and I soon got used to it, although, when standing for the entire journey, my five minute walk from home to the office in Paris seemed like a memory of paradise.

Catalina too was commuting, but she took the 08:20 train in the opposite direction to Canterbury. It is worth remembering that it had not been easy for Catalina (as a Mexican) to find a job in the UK but by 2009 she was happily employed as a supervisor in the Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB). She had found her niche helping people in a job that she loved, she was good at and where she was appreciated. Canterbury is a beautiful, cathedral city and a lovely place to work. So, from Catalina’s side, there was not much of a ‘push’ to accelerate our move from the UK — except, of course, the British weather which, being a warm-blooded Mexican, she never quite got used to.

Although we both commuted by different trains in different directions, we liked to keep in touch by phone message. I used to love getting Catalina’s morning train update, describing the different animals she had seen on the way to Canterbury; sheep and cows, lambs in springtime, sometimes a couple of llamas, dogs and occasionally a kestrel sitting atop a fence post watching the train go by. That made me smile as I looked out over the rather less inspiring grey London suburbs on my way to the office.

During 2008 I changed jobs and had to commute to Canary Wharf rather than to central London. I was pleased to discover that there was a daily commuter coach from near our house in Chatham direct to Canary Wharf and so swapped the train for the coach. This was less expensive, more comfortable, never overcrowded and with a guaranteed seat. The only problem was it took longer, so it left Chatham at 06:30 and, traffic permitting, returned around 19:30. Convenient in one sense but it meant more time out of the house and less time together with Catalina.

And so, like many others, our lives assumed a weekly routine built around work. Monday to Friday we said ‘goodbye’ at 06:10 and ‘hello’ again around 19:45. Dinner together, sharing the day’s experiences, then tiredly to bed for a bit of rest before the next morning alarm clock. On Friday evenings, we did our weekly supermarket shopping then treated ourselves to dinner out somewhere to celebrate the end of the week. We had our favourite local restaurants and an informal weekly rota of Indian, Fish & Chips, Pub Food and Thai. Saturdays and Sundays were for housework, the garden, walks and visits to local attractions and places of interest. Favourites included Whitstable, a fishing town famous for oysters, Rye, a medieval smuggling town and any one of the nearby National Trust properties, famous for their gardens and cream teas. Once in a while we would get up extra early, drive to Dover and catch the ferry to Calais or Boulogne for a day trip to France, returning with some delicious wine, cheese and patisserie to enliven the week ahead. Occasionally we went back to Paris for a short break to relive our time there and catch up with friends. We took our main holidays in Mexico, staying in our Valle house and gradually getting it the way we wanted. All in all, life was good and we were happy.

But, bit by bit, we began to realise that this lifestyle was taking its toll. As time passed, we would both arrive back from work increasingly tired. I suppose this was partly to do with age. With each passing year, I felt I had less energy and patience for the long commute and the long working days. But something was also changing in my work. It seemed to require more of my constant attention, effort and energy than before. Days were busier, there were more meetings, more emails, more initiatives, more procedures, more things to be done…yet no more time in which to do them. While I loved my job and was rather good at it, there came a point when I started to ask myself whether there might not be more to life than working quite so hard for quite so many hours then arriving back home too tired for any meaningful interaction with Catalina. I was giving the best of myself to work and Catalina had only what was left over, which wasn’t much and certainly wasn’t what either of us wanted.

However, this by itself was insufficient to precipitate meaningful change in how we organised our lives. We were stuck in a lifestyle dominated by work and it would take more than a bit of tiredness and vague feelings of dissatisfaction to jolt us back to reality.

As is often the case, the impetus for change came strongly and without warning. In 2011 it was announced that the government organisation I worked for would be split into two and that my part would move back to central London. That was OK, but it was also announced that all staff would need to take exams to “prove their competence” before being allowed to join the new organisation.

Well, for me at least, that was a step too far. Although I am by nature cooperative and non-confrontational, at the age of 57 I was not going to take examinations in order to “prove my competence”. I knew that I was competent and so did the organisation, not least because my competence had been regularly assessed in the annual appraisal process and I had achieved consistently good results. As far as I was concerned, the organisation could either invite me to continue or I would leave but I would not take any examinations.

So, in the end, this was the “push” that I needed to put my life back on a more healthy and sensible course. Catalina and I agreed that this was the moment to put our Mexican early retirement plan into action. I handed in my notice and said I would work until 31 August 2012. At that point the organisation decided that they wanted to keep me and suggested that the requirement to take exams might, in my case, be subject to a more flexible interpretation but by then it was too late. Our decision had been made and our move to live in Mexico would now happen.

We put the house on the market and started to work out what to take with us and what to leave behind. The biggest logistical problem was our big, ginger cat, Ludo. He had arrived in the garden one day from who knows where and been with us ever since. We thought about taking him with us to Mexico but it didn’t feel right that he would spend days alone in a travel cage in animal transit facilities and during the 11-hour flight so we looked for alternatives. Fortunately, we found Mike living nearby who loved cats. He had retired from the army and was looking after his disabled wife and several cats and was happy to take Ludo. It was hard to say goodbye to Ludo and there were tears but we knew it was the best option for him.

We wanted to travel light, taking only personal items of sentimental value. It was therefore time to find new homes for the furniture, electrical appliances and the many other things that we had accumulated during our ten years living in Chatham. Quite a bit went to charity, the neighbours had some, my daughters accepted other things and, bit by bit, we reduced our worldly possessions to what would fit into the half-container we had booked for the sea journey from Europe to Veracruz, Mexico.

Mexico imposes some high import taxes but personal effects are exempt. To qualify for the exemption, each item being imported must be listed and the final list reviewed, agreed and endorsed by the Mexican consulate in London. So, one day in September 2012, Catalina and I found ourselves at the consulate explaining what we wanted to import and trying to get our list agreed. All went well until we got to Catalina’s substantial reserves of components for her hobby of jewellery making. We had some difficulty persuading the Mexican official that the bags of various semi-precious stones and silver components were not part of some elaborate international jewellery smuggling operation but finally it was all agreed and our now “official” belongings could be packed into boxes and made ready for the journey.

In many ways, it was sad to say “goodbye” to our Chatham house, home for the previous 10 years and full of happy memories. I also had mixed feelings about leaving the UK for foreign shores. Although I had previously lived in Brussels and Paris, these had been time-limited secondments with known end-dates for return to the UK. Now, I was about to sell up and leave on a one-way ticket, returning (if at all) only as a visitor. But I am not one to dwell in the past and I like a challenge. I also knew that I liked where I was going and loved the person I was going with so it was with smiles and a good, fresh start sort of feeling that we finally handed over the keys to our house and our car and took the taxi to London Heathrow for our British Airways flight to Mexico, where we arrived on Saturday October 6, 2012 to start our new lives together.

Thank you for reading our story and I hope you enjoyed it. If so, please be kind and give it a few claps and, even better, send me a comment or reply. Writing on Medium is always more fun when I engage actively with a few responsive readers.

My future posts will continue our story and tell you something of our lives here in Mexico. Stay tuned!