


It just didn’t feel how I thought it would. It’s now a 24-hour society, but it wasn’t like that when we left. And, in the 20 years we’d been in France, Britain has changed massively. “When we saw the pictures online, we thought: ‘Fine, let’s do it,’ but when we arrived, I realised how much we’d changed. “We pulled up outside and my first words were: ‘What the hell have we done?’ We’d had 20-odd years of being in the middle of nowhere and suddenly we were at the bottom of a small cul-de-sac,” says Jez, who is keen to stress there was nothing wrong with the street he lived on and that his neighbours were “very friendly and welcoming”. ‘It was naive on my part’ … the Scunthorpe home Jez bought online from rural France.
