Unloading a few insecurities with a good rant, August 2008

The problem with wiling away a week in Budapest is that that we can't be in Montenegro checking on the progress of the house purchase.

Despite being in intermittent email contact with Dubravka, we’re still at the stage where we don’t actually have any idea whether the four owners have signed the paperwork necessary to proceed with the sale. We could call Slaviša directly and find out, but whilst our Serbo-Croat is now decently conversational, it’s still difficult for us to discuss things like this over the phone. Denied the facial nuances and hand gestures that can help you through a face to face conversation, I’m often reduced to apologising and admitting that I’m not following, especially as the better I speak, the faster an encouraged Slaviša replies…

“Zao mi je, Slaviša, ali možete li vi me kazati to još jednom, nisam razumio…”

Our default option is often to talk to Dean instead, but we’re wary of using this get-out-of-jail card too freely. The good doctor has already become a sort of de facto translator/facilitator for us without asking for anything in return.
“Samo polako!” he reminds us (take it easy). “These are simple things to fix, you must be patient.”

Denied the sort of access we might have if we were there “on site” and helping to push matters along (although our influence alone might not make a jot of difference), all we can do is cross our fingers and wait for news, which as anyone who has ever tried to buy a house knows is not for those of a nervous or impatient disposition. It’s when you’re that little bit removed from the process that the doubts start to set in, and you’re reminded that the path you’ve chosen is not supposed to be the one with smooth tarmac and plenty of room for overtaking.

When we first said that we were ditching our careers to go and try and set up a property/lodge business in the Balkans, there were a variety of responses.

a) “What? Are you crazy?”
b) “Wow! That’s brave. Still, I suppose you have done this sort of thing before. Sort of.”
c) “Seriously? That sounds like a fantastic idea!”

A minority 5% of those questioned – mostly the well-travelled - chose option c). A considerate 20% or so weighed up this news with a considered raised eyebrow and heartfelt best wishes and went for b). Which leaves option a) as the clear winner, polling approximately 75% of the vote. In democratic terms, it’s something of a landslide.

That’s what makes it so difficult discussing our choice with this elected majority. You see, despite being shown photos of the beauty of the areas we’re talking about, despite being informed that we would most likely make more annual profit from going down this route than we would ever be likely to save in a London full of crashing house prices and a nose-diving economy, despite impressing upon the doom-mongers how we might benefit by spending our lives doing something we enjoyed instead of being stuck in an office doing a soul-crushing 9-5, nearly eight out of ten cats still think we’re insane.

We can impress upon the doubters our reasonable track record to date to no avail. Flat one bought, renovated and sold at considerable profit. House two in Croatia bought and renovated for relative peanuts and already paying us excellent rentals each year. House three bought, renovated and sold at considerable profit, flat four bought, renovated and rented out for more than the cost of the mortgage - and these two just before the housing market went toes up to boot. If it sounds like I’m boasting then I apologise. I’m not, not really. What Emma and I have managed is no more or less impressive than any other number of couples addicted to Phil & Kirsty and Sarah Beeney. It just occasionally feels that a shots to goals ratio of 4/4 thus far is being somewhat unfairly overlooked.

This woman has a hell of a lot to answer for...

If it’s hard to be the ones that don’t play ball with convention, and harder to explain your motivations to those who are still in the game it must be even harder still to understand such a decision if your entire concept of success is actually built around convention. This is how it’s supposed to work: get a job, get a flat, get a better job, get a house, get a better job again, have kids, buy a nice car, get a bigger house, continue to earn more than your age…you know the sort of thing. Aged 34, most of my friends already have kids and families and estate cars and solid, impressive careers earning good money – and if they don’t yet, then most are well on the way. That’s the way our parents did it. That’s the way their parents did it. That’s the way we’ve been taught to do it and in most of the Western world, that’s what works. And there’s nothing wrong with that. If you’re happy with this system, then you need wish for nothing more. But what if you’re one of those people who just can’t imagine doing the same thing for the rest of your life? What if you’re one of the apparent minority who cringes with dread at the thought of one day becoming Branch Manager or Marketing Director and knowing that this will be your career for the rest of your working life (which for most of us if Gordon Brown keeps it up will mean toiling away as Head of Client Services well into our seventies)? What if – in one of the most materially driven cities on earth – you’ve woken up one day and realised not only that you’ll never drive an Aston Martin but that, actually, you just don’t need one? What if every year you’re asked what you want for Christmas/your birthday and you can honestly think of nothing because you’ve got everything you really need (at least within reason)? You start asking yourself if you really do need a bigger flat-screen TV. Or if you really do need to trade in the Mondeo for a BMW. After all, they’re both cars aren’t they (and the petrol-head in me weeps when I write that sentence - “Traitor! How could you?”)? What if you realise that there’s no reason to get a larger house because you already have three bedrooms, that you don’t want a faster car because the traffic’s so bad you can only go at 10mph? What’s the point of living somewhere you don’t really want to live because that’s all you can afford? And what’s the point of living this life, earning more money doing a job you’ve actually long stopped enjoying? What if you approached retirement wishing you’d been braver and done something else with your life?

Of course I’m not suggesting that this happens to everyone. I did use to like my old job, sometime back in 2003 or so, and I dare say there are plenty of people who are completely fulfilled by what they’ve ended up doing five days a week (or more). If so, lucky, lucky you. Even more so if you’re actually being paid enough to live somewhere beautiful where you want to be at the same time, and if there is anyone out there among you that has all this and has no complaints about the amount of free time at their disposal, then bastard, bastard, and triple bastard. Congratulations, you officially have it all. Now go find a cure for cancer and male-pattern baldness, you lazy sods.

Is it morally irresponsible to jack in a pair of careers that some people would give their back teeth to have? After all, a civil service pension’s a highly sought-after perk, and there are many more people wanting to work in publishing than actually do. Is opting out of the rat race a sign of failure, an act to ridicule? Or is opting out still such an unusual step to take that some just can’t – through upbringing, circumstance or tradition - get their head around it? Does it challenge some people’s world-view, their sense of equilibrium to such an extent that they feel they can endorse no alternative?

Maybe the reaction would have been different if we had announced that we were planning to set up a new life in Australia – or France, or Italy, or somewhere more known, somewhere that hadn’t recently had a civil war and wasn’t still rounding up war criminals. It can’t be a coincidence that the some of the most worried doubters haven’t actually been to Croatia or Montenegro - or that some of the most enthusiastic comments have come from those that have. The unknown is always scary. That’s why Gaston never walks through the open door in Huis Clos. It’s why Kylie sang about it being better the devil you know than the one with whom you’re not so well acquainted. Far better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, right?

Robi, Emma the younger and Imola share a laugh with us on Luppa Island

In this way, it was terrific to spend time with my Hungarian cousins, Imola and Robi. They’re about our age, and also – to the alarm of their parents - took a calculated risk to start up a non-office based business by opening a restaurant in downtown Pest. They are an object lesson to me in how to go about a workable life change, juggling the restaurant, one daughter, two watering holes at the increasingly renowned Sziget Music Festival and showing us around with complete, unflustered calm. Watching the Sziget Island festival-goers drinking, pitching their tents and milling around the island, it struck me that the kind of people who I might once have regarded as cool (you know, toned abs, dreads, never travel anywhere without a bongo drum) were actually trying too hard to have actually pulled it off. In addition to handling all the above, sorting out 100 t-shirts that had been printed with the incorrect restaurant name on them and enthusing about our plans to great length, Imola was also eight months pregnant. Now that’s what I call cool. Incidentally, those of you who are reading this thinking that if I attended one of Europe’s biggest music festivals then they must have instantly lost their cool factor by association, don’t worry. I stuck out in the crowd every bit as much as you’d have thought. But at least I can pitch a proper tent – I ask you, half of these young hippies carried those cheating pitch-itself-in-three-seconds jobs. Huh. Amateurs.

So, I suppose all I can say to those who are still scratching their heads in puzzlement and/or dismay at what we’ve chosen to get up to is that the opportunity presented itself for a limited time only, so while we still have that window, we’re going to give it a damn good go. We’ll not die wondering. Things might even work out beautifully, you never know. Köleves restaurant in Pest is living proof of that – and so are our current hosts, the Ridgley family, who have been putting us up in Romania for the last few days. What they've done – and are doing (more of which I'll explain later) – is so inspiring that it actually prompted our whole life change in the first place. So there you go. Penny, Duncan – this is really all your fault.