A Life in the Sun

5 minute read

I’m lying on a sunbed, one of those good ones, from a five-star resort, that’s as comfortable as a real bed and makes any activity other than dozing difficult. I’m on this bed in a garden, under the dappled shade of an olive tree heavy with fruit. There’s a book lying flat beside me and a drink on the ground. I’m not asleep but I’m not fully awake either. In the distance, the children are playing and their laughter fills the air, my husband is making lunch and I can hear him humming in the kitchen, doors flung wide to the view of the sea as he cooks.

None of this is true, of course, I’m still in my house, at my kitchen table, trying to bargain an hour to work out of my children with snacks and Daniel Tiger on the TV but every time I have a minute to myself, I float back to this fantasy. It has been my pandemic meditation.

Perhaps it has been the lack of a trip abroad, the feeling of heat on my bones that has made me crave such scenes? Maybe it’s this new way of working that is making me think about the possibility of living somewhere warm and bougainvillea-scented, or maybe it’s just that I have filled my Instagram feed with people who have made the leap and now I can’t think of anything else.

Whatever it is, the idea of working remotely from Italy has become my new obsession and it’s driving my husband absolutely nuts.

Each morning I check in with the accounts I love and drive myself scatty with jealousy that I am not living their lives. I feverishly check the @cheapitalianhouses page and bookmark the ones I really love.

Cork travel blogger @stephmylife left London about four years ago to travel the world. She and her then-boyfriend, now-husband, Tim, set up as freelance web devs and software engineers and worked remotely in southeast Asia. When the pandemic hit they found themselves back in London thinking, for the first time about setting up a home somewhere. They hadn’t had a base to travel from in years and it finally felt like the right time. They settled on Italy and on a hilltop town in Abruzzo which was close to the airport, the sea, and the mountains. At first, considering the €1 home offers that you often see, they decided against that and instead found a stunning property, already refurbished for a fraction of what you would pay in the UK or Ireland. Last week, as restrictions eased, they went on a road trip to Naples and the Amalfi coast. This is what tipped me over the edge.

The town of Amalfi is one of my favourite places in the world and as she and Tim drove the windy roads I know so well I kept muting the tv to make my husband watch her stories. He’s been rolling his eyes and telling me to stop torturing myself, but every so often he’ll stop to look at one of the houses I show him and will casually say “wow, you really could sell up and have a great life there”, before swiftly remembering who he is and laughing at me again.

For months I’ve been telling myself that I’ve two small children, work, responsibilities, and all those things that make us afraid to pack it all in and head off.

But if the pandemic has shown us anything, it’s that work can be done from anywhere and children are adaptable. Mine aren’t even in school yet so are actually at the perfect age to do it.

My husband works in tv news which isn’t really something that can be done from a remote Mediterranean town but there are lots of other jobs he could do that would make my fantasy a reality for us.

My other favourite account is @designmom. Gabrielle Blair is a Mormon mum of six from Utah who lives with four of her children and her husband Ben in a picturesque French town. Both Gaby and Ben work remotely with businesses they founded themselves and bought two properties that they are doing up in France. I came to them for the renovations and stayed for her family and idyllic Gallic life. Her two oldest kids are at university in the US which has been difficult over the last year when Covid made visits impossible but seeing the family live their dream and rebuild a beautiful French townhouse has made me crave that way of living.

I know it’s a romantic dream, one that would take a giant leap of faith, but I have to wonder what’s stopping us all from living the life we really want.

I could work pretty easily in Italy and we could own a home outright with money left over. We could eat delicious tomatoes and swim in warm seas at dusk. There would of course be challenges there, as there are here and if another pandemic happened we’d be far from loved ones. But this year, I was a 28-minute drive from my parents and still didn’t see them for months on end, would living in a small town on the Amalfi coast really make that worse?

We build lives around accepted rules that make selling up and heading off something that only the brave or crazy do.

It’s fine to do it if you’re heading to the UAE to make loads of tax-free money but not okay if you just want to live well and more cheaply in the sun in France or Spain or Italy and work just enough to have a nice life.

Isn’t that just bonkers? Why would killing yourself and uprooting your family for tax-free money be ok while a lovely life be the mad thing to do. Hopefully, we’ll all revaluate what we do and how we do it now as we realise what has been truly important to us over the last year and a half. In the meantime, I’ll keep sending beautiful remote Italian villas to my husband hoping to slowly wear him down. After all, badgering your partner until they do what you want is the basis on which all great relationships are built.

Jennifer Stevens, June 2021