Preface

Rattling the doors of Boots in Ventnor we were nonplussed. It’s a major High Street chain after all! Why was it closed at 2:10pm on a Tuesday! Was there an earthquake we hadn’t been told about? Or in this part of the world, a landslip?

There was a gathering of people outside waiting to enter. I looked at them and tried to work out if they looked the sort of people who needed a chemist. They didn’t manifest themselves as such; none seemed unwell, sunburnt, behaving in a way suggestive of needing hemorrhoid cream, unkempt or desperately in need of contraception, and in general there was a lack of obvious ailments about them - but you can never tell, and Boots does offer a wide range of products; they even used to develop photos!

“It opens at 2:15”, offered an elderly woman.

“2:15? You mean it’s closed for lunch?”

“Yes. All the shops around here used to be closed on Wednesdays until recently. That’s the Isle of Wight for you!”

“Is this your husband?” I asked, nodding towards a gentleman standing behind her. They were both embarrassed. “No, he died last year of a brain tumour. My husband I mean, not this gentleman, she unnecessarily clarified, gesticulating at the man I’d mistaken for her spouse. This was surely self-evident.

“I’d never heard of brain tumours until then,” she continued. “He started getting grumpier and grumpier. Eventually we went to the doctor and he had some tests. That’s when we found out. We’d been married 20 years. Moved here from Cyprus eight years ago. Before that we ran a pub in Walthamstow.”

We expressed sympathy and the hope she’d had support from family and friends.

“We’ve no real family here, but the folk ‘round here have been wonderful - just wonderful. So kind. That’s the Isle of Wight for you!”

We chatted to her some more and told her about our plans to move to the Island.

“Do you enjoy living here?”

“Enjoy? Of course! It’s wonderful! And I’ve never felt safer anywhere. I can walk around here in the dark without worrying. Never done that anywhere else!”

So this is the story of how and why my family and I decided to upend our lives and take the slightly mad decision to move from our rat-run driven lives in the Home Counties to a part of the world we’d been spending more and more time in. And more than that, it’s the story of what happened when we got there. At the time, Eve and I were working in the same school in West Kent, Ewan was embarking on a post 'A' level gap year and Freya was studying at a college in Tonbridge. 

Our cat, Demetrius Trotsky - henceforth to be referred to as ‘DT’ - spent his time in Hadlow eating, sleeping, and otherwise sashaying about the house as though he was the owner and paid the mortgage. We didn’t envisage this changing much when we moved, so he wasn’t consulted much. The first he knew about it was when he was in the cat carrier on the ferry; admittedly at that point he did register some displeasure but his pique was quickly assuaged by some Dreamies treats we’d bought for such a purpose. (I once tried managing Mrs. Griffiths’s emotions with the same tactic but she spat them out with disgust!)

Eve, Freya and I were desperate to go. Ewan wasn’t; he couldn’t put his finger on why this was the case but would mutter about a lack of diversity on the Island or the fact it was hilly. Any reason he gave tended to be spurious; it came down to the fact that he doesn’t like change. But he was to start a Politics degree at the University of Sussex the following September so we didn’t feel especially guilty about factoring his view in less. He knew we’d look after him!

The issue of change is interesting. I like change - I embrace it as though it’s a long lost glass of Malbec. Before I married and became a parent, I used to dance around the world treating it as my personal playground, using school holidays to visit various remote parts of the planet. I’d worked in Egypt, and had tended to change jobs every three or four years. I missed change, and now the children were older it seemed the time might be right to mix things up a little. Counter-intuitively, I’d been worried that living in the same house in the same village hadn’t been great for any of us. And I’d been in the same job for 20 years and wanted one more challenge before retirement.

It’s an eccentric view, but I was concerned things had been too stable for our children. A few years earlier Eve had been shortlisted for a job in Jersey. The kids were about 12 and 13 and it didn’t work out, but I remember thinking how fantastic and it would have been for them, and how at the age of 30 or so they would have been able to look back and reflect that when they were teenagers they’d lived in the Channel Islands for a couple of years. Change is enriching, I’m sure of it

Deep down, Eve and I were concerned about how things would fall into place and whether we were doing the right thing; perhaps to give ourselves confidence in the move, we’d started to talk of it as a hairbrained, madcap adventure, and to stress the exciting, positive aspects. I loved the concept of ‘running towards danger’, a phrase used by the England cricket team in their new , exciting ‘Bazball’ era. There was risk attached to the undertaking, of course - financial risk, career risk, social risk - but for three-quarters of us, motivation was high.

We had our collective and individual thoughts moving out of our comfort zone: I wanted change, Eve loved the sea, Freya wanted to get married on Ventnor beach. Ewan thought we were crazy.

We were going to become ‘Overners’ as folk from the mainland are called, about to enter a different world. A friendly world, a safe world, a laidback world. A world of 30 years ago, we were frequently informed. A 'Wonderful World', to quote Louis Armstrong. Oh to live in a Utopia where High Street chains closed their shops not just for lunch, but to 2:15pm. Did such a place really exist! And what did it say about the Island? Was it indeed old-fashioned? Or embracing the future, but maintaining the best bits of the past?

I wanted to put the Island under the microscope and to really try to discover what makes it such a beguiling place. Separated from the Mainland by only three miles, why did this little rock in the Solent seem so different to its imposing parent to the north? Self-evidently it’s a popular tourist destination, but what do you get if you peel back the layers? What do the tourists leave behind? Poverty and deprivation are on the Island and the education metrics have caused concern for years; how does all that sit alongside the tourism and beauty - the outer persona that the Island projects to the wider world? And how would we fit into all that!

The uncertainty behind the whole venture was alluring - at least to me. Eve and I had given up jobs without jobs to go to. Like Alice in Wonderland's White Queen, we were having to "Believe six impossible things before breakfast."

All this - the excitement, the doubt, the worry, provoked the thought that I should document it.

And so I am!

At the appointed time, the doors to Boots were opened by a lunched employee and we all trooped inside.

It was decongestant for Eve we were after, by the way.