'You've all created some kind of utopia here, haven't you?' said one particularly memorable friend who passed through Les Seilhols that summer. I remember feeling torn in how to answer. She lived in London and was experiencing many thing I desperately missed: theatre, a social...
Some time in July, we returned to the UK. Jon went to stay with his parents and I stayed with my mum who had since moved back to the UK with my brother, not far from Manchester. Before giving up everything and moving to France...
After a week in Barcelona where we saw more of my old school friends, drank far too much absinthe and bought a pair of ill-fitting trainers from Decathlon that would leave my ankles in shreds, we left the city in a hungover daze, joined a...
We arrived in Tarbes, Haute-Pyrénées on the 8th of March 2011. Jon had left behind the video production company he ran with his ex, and I had left behind my ambitions to carry on acting, a job teaching drama to kids, a job in a...
I started life as a drama school student at the age of 24. It was a late start for this specific type of career, but I felt so very ready to throw myself into a creative endeavour that I was willing to take the risk....
I caught a plane to Manchester with nothing but a blue samsonite suitcase. I had no money, no job, no purpose. Luckily, I did have a roof over my head with Jim. All I knew was that I needed to be somewhere other than Barcelona...
As with most creative homes, money generally came in fits and bursts. One day we were figuring out all the different ways to eat a potato, other days we were carrying a long list of essentials/desirables into the luxurious darkness of the Casa Gispert by...
Our life in Barcelona was very sociable, it was impossible to walk anywhere without bumping into a friend on the street, shopping at the food market was an entire morning’s activity and on most days friends would join us for lunch, knelt around the long...
September 1992. The day after Carmel’s concert on the steps of the Cathedral, mum and I travelled back to Madrid on the tour bus with the band, packed up the Alfa Romeo Spider and waved goodbye to Tudor, who I think had fallen slightly in...
The very day my mum decided we should move to Spain, she picked up a magazine advertising a 350 year old farmhouse for rent, originally built for the town mayor and now with an art studio, high up in the mountains of Ronda. The landlords...