The leaving of Pudding Island

Featured in

  • Published 20090831
  • ISBN: 9781921520761
  • Extent: 264 pp
  • Paperback (234 x 153mm)

I SPENT MUCH of 2008 in France, Spain and Greece, living among British expats, some of them relatives or friends and some complete strangers, all of whom had decided over the previous two decades that they no longer wanted to live in the country of their birth. What started out as a pleasant journey of exploration and reminiscence ended in a jolting confrontation not only with the collapse of capitalism as we know it, but with a more urgent imperative to survive.

The decisions made by the people I knew were mostly based on romantic dreams they had harboured in their twenties but could only realise in middle age. The accelerant was the decade-long power of the British pound, whose strength against the euro gave owners of modest homes from all over the United Kingdom the opportunity to sell up, buy a little bit of continental Europe and live there on quite low incomes or pensions. Sterling peaked in 2000, when a euro could be bought for 58 pence, but in January 2009 the two were at parity, with the pound falling. It was a disaster the English had never imagined.

Already a subscriber? Sign in here

If you are an educator or student wishing to access content for study purposes please contact us at griffithreview@griffith.edu.au

Share article

More from author

Something for the weekend

MemoirWHEN FORMULA ONE ‘supremo' Max Mosley successfully sued Britain's News of the World (NoW) for its invasion of his ‘privacy' in 2008 (he was secretly filmed...

More from this edition

An outsider’s perspective

EssayI RECENTLY PARACHUTED into the crucible of the American policymaking debate when I was invited to present alongside Robert Shiller of Yale at a...

The other side of silence

FictionIT'S TRUE I wanted him dead and would gladly have done it myself. I wonder about the days before fingerprinting, before CCTV, forensic analysis...

A short prehistory of the future

EssayAh, the old questions, the old answers, there's nothing like them!– Samuel Beckett, Endgame Above all, the bourgeoisie produces its own gravediggers.– Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto FOR...

Stay up to date with the latest, news, articles and special offers from Griffith Review.