Why doesn't everyone just move abroad? Part 1


Just in case you have not already caught me out, I am now going to put up my hand, confess and acknowledge that I am a guilty plagiarist. Claire Rushton’s splendid blog Auntie Bulgaria is just too good and so of course it has to be imitated, paralleled and, yes, copied. One of her recent posts, Why doesn’t everyone just move abroad?, summed up my thoughts about the UK and Bulgaria so well that I simply must repeat some of the points Claire makes.

First of all, I did go to university when it was free and it wasn’t just any old Uni. Oxford still has a certain cachet, a cut above yer average redbrick. Looking back on it now, I was amazingly lucky. And then I got my PGCE and that was free too. When I graduated, I did not have thousands of pounds’ worth of student debt hanging over me, unlike many students in the UK in more recent years.

As for that perennial topic of English conversation, namely house prices, I think that Claire was absolutely spot on when she wrote about the problems of “… finding £250,000 (or more) for just a regular fucking house in the South of England. Not a mansion. Just a little house or flat, with a postage stamp garden if you’re lucky, and neighbours practically up your nostrils.”

Peter and his little house in the UK

Oh yes and then we come to the heated topic of energy bills. Is it really true that keeping warm your average family home will soon cost over £3,000 per year? And what will the prices be when price caps are removed in 2023? Will average heating bills in the UK go as high as £5,000 or even higher?

Tina is mesmerized by the plink-plink sound of the wood pellets in our stove

With surging mortgage payments in the UK, the reality is that you can still buy a “fixer upper” for under £10,000 in Bulgaria, although you might well have to pay the same again in renovation costs. 

The VT Walkers, yet again
As Claire points out, you will also have the charms and delights of the EU (and Bulgarian) bureaucracy to cope with. (Regular readers of my blog will recall our encounters with various Microwave Women.) While many young Bulgarians do speak at least some English, the reality is that moving to Bulgaria is going to mean a head-on crash with the Bulgarian language. Bulgarski ezek mnogo truden.*

I have the feeling that most expats in Bulgaria rarely watch the BBC news and, even when they do, there is that feeling of detachment, that sense that it is not terribly relevant, rather like a weather report in another country on the other side of the world. (By the way, Claire Ruston is not a big fan of Boris Johnson, although I suspect that recently she has not been too impressed by Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak.)

Not such a small house in the UK, where Constable painted The Haywain

Claire concludes her lively and amusing piece by writing, “It’s not all doom and gloom, of course. Life in the UK is free from war and persecution. It’s still a beautiful country. The sausages are good… I just feel increasingly disconnected and disheartened by my homeland. Which is pretty sad, really.” 

I do not think that Claire is completely one-sided or inaccurate. She argues the case for leaving the UK and relocating in Bulgaria. It is a strong case and one that appears to be getting stronger by the day. BREXIT and the recent cost of living crisis in the UK only serve to underline the points she makes. Yes, I do believe that expats often try to make a virtue of a necessity and so they pretend that everything in the UK is so much worse and that everything in Bulgaria is so much better. Yes, that is a big generalization, but, like most generalizations, there is quite a lot of truth in it. Which is pretty sad, really.


*”The Bulgarian language is very hard.” I thought that it was about time we had another asterisk.    

    

  

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