So why "Notes from A Broad"?
Back in 2020, the dreaded Time of Covid, life was pretty good before March. I was all loved up, one year into a new relationship, after losing my husband to mesothelioma in early 2018, and we had just come back from a long weekend in Rome, exploring that wonderful city and loving "la dolce vita". Even then, covid was looming... there was chatter about it in northern Italy, our temperatures were scanned as we arrived in Fiumicino Airport (yeah, Heathrow, you definitely dropped the ball back then!) but none of us knew how it was going to affect and dominate our lives for the next couple of years to come.
Things started seroiusly perculating in March, and at work the senior managers were meeting almost every day, assessing the potential impact, preparing for the moment we were going to be working from home "for a few weeks". Ha! How naive we were, eh? One minute we were being sent to the safety of our homes, loaded to the gills with laptops and monitors; we were Zooming or meeting remotely on Teams, trying to do all the stuff we'd usually done in the office, and the next minute, we were being furloughed. Oh, I forgot to mention one important detail here... I was living in the UK at the time, and well, let's just say, the government back then were about as useful as a bucket in a sinking boat. One minute we were being told to sing 'Happy Birthday' while we washed our hands, and the next, we were watching some bullshit story about Barnard Castle being told to us by some idiot from the Rose Garden in Downing Street!
Anyway, a few months after being furloughed, I received a letter telling me that the company were unfortunately going to have to reduce their staffing numbers, to minimise the costs while the company was effectively unable to operate, and my job was one of those at risk. F*ck! Life was challenging enough at that point living on 80% of one salary, never mind being made redundant, and sadly, it came to be. And not even a "sorry" or "thank you for your contribution" from the CEO - tut. I was quite angry at this point, because despite covid being a challenging time for everyone, I felt the company I'd worked for could have done better. Hey ho!
Looking for a new job when half the world was shut done was not the most fun I've ever had with my clothes on, and discovering just how unhelpful the UK government could be was a literal eye-opener. My partner, Ed, was a professional chef at the time, and his career came to a screaming halt in March 2020, when the hotel he worked in, as well as other hotels across the country, had to close for business. He'd also been semi self-employed, working in the events and catering industry, and those events were all duly cancelled while the world was in lockdown. This was when things got depressingly interesting (!) for him, as he had only just signed a new contract with the hotel, but his start date fell foul of the government's requirements for furlough, so he was getting a big fat zero in financial assistance from the hotel. Add to that his self-employed status not qualifying for any government assistance, and suddenly, we were not looking great financially. Have you ever tried to apply for Universal Credit in the UK? It's not as easy as the UK's rightwing media would have you believe it is, and if you have savings, like I did, you're screwed. So there we were, one of us redundant, and the other earning diddly-squat, all while the bills kept needing to be paid, living off dwindling savings.
During the course of our new relationship, I'd mentioned to Ed that I had no intentions of getting old in the UK, and that I had plans to move, most likely to Germany, once I hit retirement. Why Germany, you might ask. Well, I had family there, and I'd always loved the country when I had visited it, quite regularly, to see said family. And the UK, post-Brexit, was a hot mess. I had cried when the Leave vote won in 2016, because it opened a Pandora's Box of xenophobia, the likes of which hadn't been actively present in the country for years. That's not to say that people hadn't been overtly racist, it was just that those feelings had been shared behind closed doors, mostly, and now suddenly, people felt confident enough to tell complete strangers to go back to where they came from without a care for the impact those words had. I had visited Germany with Ed in 2019, and he had loved it. I had imagined there might be push-back from him, when I suggested moving sooner, especially as the poor bugger had just installed a brand new bathroom in my house!
So, I guess you know what happened next, right? Yup, you guessed right - we moved to Germany! Now, I will say this... never, ever, if you want to hold onto your sanity, move countries in a pandemic. Just don't. And no, it wasn't the actual moving from one country to another that was complicated - it was all the stuff that usually precedes a move that really tested our limits, haha! Packing boxes? Easy! Arranging a removal company? No problems. Getting rid of all of the unwanted stuff you're not planning to take with you? Hahahahahahaha! Lockdown meant lockdown, right? Yeah... that included going to the local tip, any charity shops who would take unwanted books, clothing, furniture, etc. That proved to be the worst of what we needed to get done, so we did what any normal (??) person would do, and we hired a lock-up and shoved it all in there. What absolute desperate idiots we were, lol!
The Big Move was scheduled for early December 2020, for a variety of reasons, the predominant one was I had a cat, Marmite or Miss Claws to some, and pet passports for UK pets were going to end come January 2021, thanks to Brexit. The other was a huge collection of gin that we had (more on that later), and we didn't want to fall foul of any customs regulations coming into effect in January 2021. So, we shoved the gin collection and the first of our belongings into a small truck driven by Alex, a great Polish guy, in December 2020, and with Marmite and more stuff in the car, we drove to Germany via the Eurotunnel.
Thanks to my German family, we'd been able to find a flat in early September, and the landlady had kindly let us only begin our tenancy in December, so we weren't having to worry about finding somewhere to stay. Ed and I are both fortunate enough to have passports that allow us Freedom of Movement, so visas weren't an issue for us either. We arrived, tired and slightly cold, on December 8th 2020, and straight into a ten-day quarantine! Thanks to my fabulous family, we had food delivered to our door when stocks ran low, and as soon as our quarantine ended, we were down to the local Meldebehörde to register our arrival in Germany, a legal requirement for all residents living in the country.
And that's when "Notes from A Broad" was born. Our family and friends from the UK (and beyond) wanted us to stay in touch, hear our news and learn more about the country we'd chosen to be our new home. I've always loved the English language - of all the languages I speak, it's the one that I've used the longest. I love its quirks, the double meanings and entendres one can play with, and so I started labelling my updates "Notes from A Broad" and continue to do so, to this day.