Living Between Poland and the UK

I remember watching news footage from Poland when I was a younger man. People queued outside shops with almost nothing on the shelves. Solidarity had emerged from the shipyards of Gdańsk and was challenging a communist government, while the Soviet Union stood ominously in the background.

For people of my age and above, the Soviet Union was not simply something from a history book. It was something to be frightened of and the threat felt very real. Poland seemed distant, troubled and firmly on the other side of a divided Europe.

If you had told me then that, forty years later, I would be planning to retire in Poland with my Polish bride, I would have judged you to be insane. Yet here I am.

I shall soon be sixty and almost all of those years will have been spent in Britain, the country where I was born and which has shaped almost everything about me. Britain is my motherland and always will be. I am very British, proud to be so and not remotely inclined to change.

I have no intention of changing my citizenship, nor do I feel that I am abandoning my home country.

For all its faults, I love the UK and shall always regard it with affection. I have not fallen out of love with Britain. I just love Ewelina more. When written down, it appears that I love my wife more than I love my country. That sounds strangely profound, although it is also exactly as it should be.

Poland has become part of my life because it has always been part of hers. It has also occurred to me that this idea of living emotionally in two places may not be new to Ewelina at all. She has spent years building a life with me in Britain while Poland, her family and everything familiar remained elsewhere. I am only now beginning to understand what it means to be happy in one country while part of you continues to belong to another.

What began as visiting Ewelina's country gradually became something different. Going to Poland no longer feels like visiting. It feels more like returning to a place that is already part of my life.

We have a home there and, increasingly, that is where I imagine the next part of our lives taking place. Britain is the country that made me. Poland is where Ewelina and I are making our future.

One contains almost all of my past, while the other is beginning to contain more of what lies ahead.

Of course, there is a danger in making this sound more romantic and straightforward than it really is. Behind the excitement of moving are the practicalities of being a thousand miles away from other people I love. I am a friend, a brother, a father and a grandfather. All of those are titles that I value.

Moving to Poland will not be a one-way ticket. I hope to return regularly to see my family and friends. I may even spend a few days volunteering for the Poppy Appeal, and I shall certainly return for my five lodge nights. These are not loose ends to be tidied away before I leave. They are parts of my life that I intend to keep.

I do not mind admitting that I worry about becoming an absent and remote grandfather. A thousand miles is not the other side of the world, but neither is it around the corner. Modern technology will help, of course. Video calls and messages make distance easier than it would once have been, but they cannot replace being in the same room.

I shall physically divide my time between two countries, although I imagine the balance may change as I grow older and perhaps travel less often. What I had never considered before is that I shall have an emotional presence in both places at the same time. When I am in Poland, part of me will remain in Britain. When I am in Britain, part of me will be thinking about our home in Poland.

Perhaps that is the unavoidable truth of living between two countries. Wherever I am, somebody I love will be a thousand miles away.

Distance, however, is not the same as absence. I have no desire to become a grandfather who exists mainly on a screen. I want my grandchildren to look on in horror at the sweaty, wheezing mess I become after five minutes of playing football. I may even teach them the occasional salty limerick.

When my eldest grandson was only a few days old, I whispered to him that I suspected his parents would be running a tight ship. I, however, fully intended to run a pirate ship. There would be laughter, madness and mayhem. I hope to be true to that promise, even if the pirate has to set sail in the Baltic and brave the perilous North Sea.