I’m leaving Britain – and I feel guilty

I’m torn between headlining this column ‘Why I’m moving to Portugal’ and ‘Why I’m leaving the UK’. Exhausted, shadowed by tippling towers of cardboard, once more unable to put my hands on a black marker when I bought a whole box or to locate a tape gun when we have bloody four of them, in all having perversely disassembled a working household into a shambled heap, I am hard-pressed to answer either question. Why have I done this to myself? Remind me.

On the positive side, I have knocked together a thumbnail for friends. Shifting to a new country is ‘a last big adventure’, and my husband and I are at an age that we probably have only one big daring leap left in us. The more obvious alternative, returning to our native United States, would have felt like retreat. Stretching to another European country instead is expansive. Adapting will be tough, and taking on new difficulties is what the doctors claim forestalls dementia. Yet this ‘last adventure’ paradigm is a bit abstract.

More tangibly, we have good friends in both Lisbon and Porto already. A professional jazz drummer for more than half a century, my husband has been playing with Portuguese colleagues for years and has built up a network that will make his entry into the music scene graceful. Mercifully, I also have a Portuguese publisher again. Many Spectator readers will have been to the country, so I can keep the tourist-board hard sell to a minimum. Beautiful beaches extend a 15-minute stroll from our new house, roomier than anything we could afford in Britain; from our awaiting back balconies, the sea glistens on the horizon. The fish is fab.