Are you cut out for institutions, or otherwise? Where to otherwise?

Are you cut out for institutions, or otherwise? Where to otherwise?

I was recently given a survey to answer about one of my old schools, when asked about the experience I wrote it was “By far the least painful school I had attended”. That is nothing less than the truth. I have met plenty of people who loved school, but it was not for me. I felt stupid because I only excelled at all the skills they did not measure. I was articulate, social, a good leader, creative, confident among adults and older kids, fair mind, determined and hard working, organised and entrepreneurial, I was pretty poor at English, French, Maths, Sport, History, Geography and Science!!! I am also one of these people who goes grey and pukes if made to sit tests and exams. Friends at uni (which was an institution I loved) used to ask me “Why do you nearly faint in the line to go into an exam when you always get an “A” and are better prepared than any of us?” Well getting “A”s in design related subjects was something I could do at last, but I still felt like I was back at school!

My daughter started out ok with school but gradually turned the colour of her grey school skirt and I realized we would have to change something.

So here we go off to Spain and Portugal in a ford van. We have been half living in the van and half in my mum's house and it's worked ok. I took it to Birmingham and we had to live in it fully, it worked ok. Everyone asks: How will you live in such a small space? But hopefully we will live in big forests, open meadows, wide beaches, and sleep in the van. When we drive up to the Ashdown Forest everyone piles of of the van and disappears into the trees. I have to round up me happy, rosy, good-tired kids to get them to get in the van and sleep. If you think about it quite a lot of your house used to store your stuff. Anyway I will let you know how it works long term in practice. Wish us luck.

How will we live in that small space when it rains all day? No idea!! Wish me luck with that!! Spain has the lowest rainfall in Europe but it still rains, mostly on the mountains. My kids and I used to go crazy in a five bedroom house when it rained all day! I cannot imagine what it will be like in a van. Art, games, stories, reading, then murder daddy with the camping  potty I guess!!?

I've driven my van around all Summer, not to mention Birmingham and back and I'm getting pretty good at parking and reversing the big vehicle. It broke a couple of times, oil leak and the turbo pipe came off, but being a ford transit we could get normal parts and a normal mechanic to fix it. My time with classic vans is so over!!!

Then the electrics started playing up, headlights not working on full beam, radio going off at random, I began to fear that the headlights would go off all together when driving at night! I got the mechanic to look and apparently I had set the bar on what to worry about way to low! I should have been worrying that it might catch fire at any moment!!! I assure you that it is fixed and safe now!!

I have worked out what it is that is good for us about our change in lifestyle, it continuously stretches our compliance. Get the van and you have to learn to drive it, then you have to learn how to convert it to a campervan, then you have to learn to live in it. Even the kids, Jasmine has to learn to live in a bedroom approximately the size of the hutch we used to have guinea pigs in! My husband describes middle class life as find a rut and volunteer to get in it! Well we are out and some of it is a bit crazy but some of it is good.

My kids are growing up such individuals, who knows what they will be, but I am sure it will be something of their own, not an institution's creation.

We leave end of September, boat to Spain then around the coast of Spain and Portugal to Malaga or something, an adventure is by definition not set in stone.

Picture from the front page of the still empty travel sketchbook I made myself. Yes I will share every page of you like?

Hugs, Kirsteen

I love it when a van comes together!

What it cost and test camping!!!

So I've almost finished the van. It needs some more sockets and a few little edits inside. I've worked so hard and I have done no textile design, I should be very proud of it but it's still going to be a lot more rough to live in than a swanky big proper camper - some fan of my blog should buy me one!

What did it cost?

The van was £2,500, I got it down from £3,000. It came lined with wood and with an extra battery (for running devices and not running the van battery flat) also the man who sold it gave me two free seats with seatbelts but not bolted in.

Some costs not related to turning it into a camper were £90 to fix the window that smashed itself while I was driving! Yikes!

And £50 for a new battery because that is a good idea on older vehicles.

What the conversation cost, seats bolting in, glue, hooks, screws, wood, varnish, curtains, curtain rails, storage pockets, storage nets and fairy lights..was about £400.

We used a lot of reclaimed wood from old beds, shelves and even decking.

We slept a few nights in it then I took a few things apart and changed them. We still need more 12v sockets but it's looking good. Now we embark on a strange nomad life around Sussex sleeping different places until September when the plan is to get the ferry to Spain and Portugal.

I'm not fully sure how this life will work, cooking and getting water, also Tim is going lots of face to face tutoring so we are stuck to East Grinstead and close by, but we want to be here with family at the moment.

Sorry, I don't think I've made this post very funny but here are some pictures of lovely places we have camper recently. XX

Adventures: Change of idea: I love driving my van and it works perfectly!

Adventures: Change of idea: I love driving my van and it works perfectly! It's easy and fun to drive and nothing is wrong with it...

I had a bit of an annoying two days. I feel a bit like Huck Finn after he touched a snake skin, although I don't really believe in bad luck. And I should add I have not found any dead blokes or silver dollars.

Yesterday someone scratched a word on my van and all down the sides too, but the lovely man next door got it off with some tcut. Then today I was driving Jasmine to her friends house when there was a massive bang and my driver side window smashed itself to tiny bits and showered glass all over me. I admit, I literally screamed! Like a stupid blond in a B Horror film. Then I pulled over, talked calmly to my daughter, brushed off the glass and drove my daughter to her destination, drove home and cried from delayed shock! So I guess I messed up when I told my friends, "can I stop driving now?" Please wish me lots of safe successful driving to fun places I intended to be! Thank you!

The window is all fixed now and it's looking better inside. I've been working.

In five days it's my birthday, I will be 41, and I'm ether "sleeping on my stepdad's floor at 41 with all my family and a total wash out in life" or  "shedding all the complexity and going after the truly worthwhile" depending on how you spin it and if I've had my coffee or not! You can make up your own mind. 😂🚐

Adventures: I made it to the supermarket, can I stop driving now please?

I have my new van. I love it. But it's proper terrifying to drive!! It's bigger than the last one and you can't see out the back at all! It beeps when you reverse, like a delivery van. It is 14 years old, half the age of my last two vans but it has some old van eccentricities. It rolls back on hills!!! All you drivers who drive a manual are going "so?" But it's an auto and they don't! You just sit there till you go. It's so unusual there is a warning sticker about it on the sun visor. It looks like a funny airplane safety card drawing, and when you slam the hand break on your two ton van in shock to prevent rendering two-dimensional any car that may, or may not be behind (who knows), you mentally go "0h! That's what that is supposed to mean!"

I drove it to the supermarket on Saturday morning then panicked! The car park was filling up by the minute, and I had left my 10 year old babysitting my 2 year old, what if they box me in and I NEVER get back to them? How can I possibly drive around the cost of Portugal if I panic in a supermarket car park? I only got half my list and left in disorder.

The van also leaks. I'm sure I can fix it but in the meantime it drips when it rains, exactly into a little cup holder on the dashboard! So you drive around with a tiny dash board pond! I'm thinking of adopting a tadpole. And it's developing a lake inside the left hand headlight unit, perhaps a little carp and some water lilies too. My brother says; drill a small hole and it will pee in the street!

It's also a huge project on a tiny budget. If we had lots of money for this (My husband is paying debs so we have lots of money for debt repayment, and not too much for anything else.) I still would not want to spend a lot converting a van worth about £3,500. So it's got to be done for a few £100 which means, I do it myself. I'm still a bit overwhelmed by the amount of work for me. Easy if I was not also full time mum, homeschool teacher, and freelance textile designer. I always have my kids in tow, and I'm always behind on design. More of a textile non-designer to be honest at the moment. 

I'm so loving seeing my friends and family. It's so so good to be back where I get help, listened to, understood, hugs. We have had to be a unit of four and count on each other, good for us in some ways but exhausting. Everyone is seeing as much of our family as we can. I am a full time social secretary to my daughter! Although I don't want to drive her anywhere. Also the van still only has two seats. Right now only me and one other person can travel in it. Give me till September and I'll be ok, but for now I've lost my nerve. I just want to get someone else to drive for me. It probably doesn't help that the last time I drove anywhere was breaking down in a multi lane roundabout in France!

On the other hand I have not lost my nerve about worldschool. Why did I do worldschool? For my kids, but it's paying off and paying off for me. I have only made one trip so far but I've got the idea I can. I no longer own tons of stuff I don't use, I don't have a wardrobe full of clothes I never wear, I don't have a wardrobe! Or an iron, or scales, I don't know how heavy I am, I don't care, I own luggage scales instead! Much more exciting priorities!

I used to look at the worldschool community and think "Oh! My! I hope I could get organised enough, and brave to do that one day! Wow! Those people are in Bali learning local crafts, gosh! They are in India with elephants!" Now I find I look at it more like a menu! "We will have a double helping of Bali please with a plate of India on the side!" I would go lots of places with my kids. Why not? Lots of people do.

Goodbye Spain, hello squalor!

So nearly six months ago we set off in a classic Chevy to road trip around France, Spain and Portugal. It didn't go anything like the plan but it did go brilliantly! We set off too late in the year and were worried that ice and snow would make the driving dangerous and the living miserable, but two days in we broke down and were told the can was scrap. After expecting to go home a friend of mine offered me her flat in Spain for winter and we flew to Javea, via the train to Paris. Shipping the broken can home, three nights in hotels and flights to Spain were all covered by my Europe wide breakdown cover for £90 a year! It totally saved us and is my top road trip tip. Also my only road trip tip, as we didn't actually go on a road trip!

In the end the Chevy was not scrap. It needed an expensive repair and we sold it for £1,800 to a lady in rural France who is very happy with it.
So it was off to Javea. We had never seen the place, I hadn't been in Spain since I was 16. We promised to stay all winter and hoped we would get on ok! I think I knew I'd love it within 10 minutes of landing. Javea felt like we had walked off the edge of the world and got Spain to ourselves. It's filling up now. In the next three months its population goes up 10x! It's shops are all open and it's getting the feel of a busy holliday town. It has a different buzz like this.

We have learned a lot, we have relied on each-other, with no one else we know around. We have played on the beach till my kids are fed up with it! Who knew that was possible?? Now we are for home. First week in May.

We have bought a van to convert into a basic camper. As we are going to live in it while we do this we will be starting out with mattresses on the van floor - living in squalor! Hopefully we can start to turn it into a cosy home quite quickly.

We could of course sell the van, use it as the deposit on a flat and resume being responsible, normal grown ups. But I don't want to. I've got my heart set on coming back here next winter. I want to learn more Spanish, see more cities, see Portugal too. But I've learned from my late-in-the-year dash across France in an unusual van. We will leave in September, we will bypass France and take the ferry straight to Spain, we will make no promises to be anywhere specific but potter south at our own pace.

I'm looking forward to seeing everyone. I'm also going to be able to solve all the problems of living in a van bit by bit in a familiar country, hopefully get a little tour of Scotland and see my dad, then by September we will be old hands at living in a van and I will be used to driving it. Then we can face the new country problems having solved the first set. It will be a more manageable adventure.

Though Javea is warming up for the season we are all willing and happy to wish her goodbye as we want to see our families and friends.

Here are what will hopefully be before pictures on a wonderful before and after project! Our new home!

Living in Spain: homeless by choice.

Living in Spain: homeless by choice.

So we are in our last five weeks in Spain and I'm thinking about what is next. Home early May. The plan is get a van and stay in Sussex, letting my daughter binge on her friends while we see family, Tim does local tutoring as well as the usual Skype tutoring (which he is still working hard to build up to acceptable survivable levels) and in September we take the van to Santander (the city in Northern Spain, not the bank). It's a bit odd having nowhere you come beck to in terms of “our house.” I'm torn between, “Yay! I shed all my stuck middle class ideas on being sensible and struck out into the world” and “Why am I homeless?” It's a bit off, to say that we are less stable now, as we rented a house and had an epic quantity of second hand furniture and toys to store. Now if we rented again we could get a smaller place comfortably, having shed our Ikea/ toysRus load. Technically that makes us more stable. It just feels different. I've always returned “Home” before. But I don't want to go back to more of the same, I'm just riding the adjustment wave on the transition to one of those oh-so-cool worldschoolers who casually chat about taking the kids to volunteer looking after elephants after they finish in KL (Kuala Lumpa, not my initials)! I guess they must go “home” too, and sleep on their relatives floor a few nights, and have coffee with all their old friends, and think “Gosh I'm a weirdo!” Even Facebook thinks I have become a weirdo, perhaps through searches or groups I have joined all the advertising I now get shown is for hideous, shapeless, green woolly hippy clothes! I despise green and shapeless knitwear, I like sleek lines and classic styles! I would love to look after elephants but I AM NOT WEARING GREEN HARIM PANTS!!!! I will go back to doing PR in an office 9 to 5 first!

The plan is that home is a van of course, but I'm starting to realise that is a bit complicated, like so many things it would not be too complicated if the budget for it was £22,000 but it's not. I started a bitch fight on Facebook when I asked if I could drive a converted minibus on my licence (in the self build campers group) that ran to over 30 comments, “Yes” “No” and everything in between, some quite horrid to me and others, scattered links to unclear government guidelines and ended with some wit commenting “Well that cleared that question up then!” I've seen less controversy in a post about vaccines or US politics!

I called the DVLA the answer is “no” unless I've fully converted it and re-classified it as a motor caravan with the few remaining seats. So no driving it around while I get stuff done, and no recourse but sit a new test if they judge the conversion not fully a camper!

However all this research suggests we can add seats to a van, something the camper shop told me was not OK – come to think of it they may not have been fully unbiased. The government web site is clear this time but the insurance companies have a say... It's a minefield. I plan to entertain you with every tiny regulation regarding converting a vehicle to live and travel in – oh what? You don't want to know? But I thought everyone loved insurance company stories?!!

If we can't find an automatic van for £2400 that is big enough to stand up in, and reliable, we have plan B (the plan not the movie studio).

Plan B is actually very cool. Possibly quite cold and definitely wet. However it would be fun. I buy an estate car, just a big car, and we take my mum's tent (she has the sort of tent that people who have really camped a lot buy, it's not that big but you can stand up, the ground sheet is part of the upper...) and go to Scotland. Living in a tent in a posh camp site in Sussex, in high season, is literally as expensive as living in a flat there! So Scotland it is, you can wild camp, camp away from camp sites in the forest, moors or next to the beach...my big brother has done it, and it sounds cool. Then you rock up at a much cheaper camp site and wash all your stuff and dry out. Also one of us speacks the language.

My kids will get to see their roots and I will get to continue the mountain-fix that Spain has been supplying, but Jasmine will miss her friends and so will I. I'd rather do the home a while, away a while thing, we will have been gone six months by then and it seems that middle class, retirement community, nothing happened since the doomsday book, East Grinstead is “Home” for me??! How did that happen?

Living in Spain: Travelling

Living in Spain

I'm really starting to come across more and more people who travel but not the package holiday once a year. Some of them travel in vans, some house-sit, some rent a place and stay a while.

My friend who runs the soft-play place here (she rocked up here from South Africa, via the UK) met a family passing through who had come from the UK on bicycles with two teenagers and an eight year old! I even heard of a family who travel with no budget, they work for food and a nights stay wherever they go, with two small kids!!!

There are lots of options. Scotland recently legalised wild camping, you can rock up with a tent and camp anywhere! I'm thinking about going up there in the summer and having a wonder around. Really you just have to get out of school and you can go anywhere!

I've always been into seeing places, I remember in school they used to teach this idea “People are the same all over the world.” I know what they meant, they meant people have the same rights, and basic needs, all over the world, and deep down are the same eternal stardust or whatever. I remember my utter delight when at twelve my dad took me to Holland for four days (at my insistence) we had Youth hostelled all over Scotland but this was the first time overseas, to my astonished, and lifelong enchantment, I discovered that people are different all over the world! This was HUGE!!! They have different architecture, different bone structure, different cakes, different rules, different faiths...you get the idea.

It became a thing with me, I need to see more places. When I grew up I started a series of trips to different destinations around Europe and eventually also made it to Egypt and Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand and America, I'm really keen to see India and Japan.

Poland for Christmas and New Year stands out, I had never seen such bleak concrete, recently-ex-iron-curtain harshness. Nor been treated with such warmth and hospitality. Old men stood in the snow in -20 OUTSIDE the church to give me a seat at midnight mass. You can imaging how I begged to swap places but eventually realised I was starting to dishonour my hosts and accepted.

I had also never eaten cold jellied carp that had lived in the bath for a week to make sure it was fresh at Christmas. We had to relocate six large carp into a bucket to bath or shower, (I gave them all Scottish names) then the women of the house stayed up half the night on Christmas eve (the half not taken up by mass) to jelly them whole – seldom has so much effort gone into cooking something so unpleasant as a cross section of cold carp in clear tasteless jelly!

That trip I also got stranded up the mountain skiing, total beginner, -20, fading light, ski lifts shut, no snow left on the easy slopes so I have to start down the red slope with about one hours practice under my belt. Being Scottish I knew enough about mountains to know I was in real trouble. When I cracked and burst into tears about half way the two lads I was with said “It's OK we made a plan to piggy back you down but we left you alone because you were doing so well!” Then began the wild piggy back ride down the mountain in the dark clinging to the back of my Polish friend who said blithely “If I can't stop don't worry I'll drop you in deep snow and come back.” Lucky for me I was tiny and about 8 stone, we made it with several dumpings in deep snow. For a few amazing minutes I was a pro skier without the work to learn – whipping past the black pine trees with sheets of show thrown out beside me. The moral of my story should be if three lads who can ski plan a trip to Poland and then one backs out, don't say yes to the spare bus ticket if you can't ski – but actually my moral is DO SAY YES!!!

Italy also blew me away but I think I will tell you about that another day....