Sooner or later, everyone experiences one of those moments of terminal frustration with the corporate grind that can turn a mild man into an ill-tempered brute. Most people are sensible and mature about dealing with it. They simply go home, kick the cat, have a drink and tell themselves that things will be better tomorrow. I was not so sensible.
I left an overpaying job on Madison Avenue and went off in search of sanity and the ultimate luxuryβthe kind of independence that allows you to choose exactly where and exactly how you wish to live. And, such is the unfairness of life, I have been lucky enough to find it. The process of achieving a consistently pleasant daily existence has taken several years, because to live outside the system is in many ways more expensive than staying within it.
But making enough money to escape was only part of the problem; there was also the question of where to escape to, given that the options extended from Alaska to the South Pacific. The perfect spot was out there somewhere, but how did one set about finding it? We started with the climate. My wife and I had spent our formative years under a perpetual cloud in England, where, as is well known, there is no such thing as a climate, only weather. Regular and predictable sunshine was essential.
So, for us, were good food and drink, which immediately disqualified some sunny and promising possibilities. If the nearest decent restaurant is a plane ride away, as it can be in parts of Australia, for instance, it tends to discourage any thoughts of a spontaneous evening out. The choices began to narrow rapidly once we were honest enough to admit that we would make unsuccessful hermits.
A simple life is all very well as long as it doesn't involve sacrificing certain basic necessitiesβfriends, books, music, fine old buildings, the attentions of an accomplished barber and a local store that sells foie gras. Our house is a converted mas , or farmhouse, that began life in the eighteenth century as one room and spread haphazardly over the next years.
