I know. 
I have lived here for twenty years and loved (and still love) it. We live in the most beautiful valley in glorious countryside. But …
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Heavy hearted choices eh? Made hard maybe because the answer looms large and becomes obvious. The path has made itself clear. Moving on can have a sadness and an excitement, and/or is simply inevitable or necessary. There’s not always a right or wrong answer, simply what we decide with an awareness of consequence.
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I think it could vary by location. My mother will be 80 this year. She doesn’t have a smartphone or a computer or access to the internet. She lives in a small town near Bath, where increasingly things are closing because people are encouraged to do stuff online.
Increasingly I’m finding my sister and I have to do things online for her. Recently I had to arrange her house insurance as Aviva were useless on the phone, and another time she had to have her electricity meter switched out (something to do with the radio Tele switch being switched off) but could only book it online. Very frustrating!
I should try telling her to move to Chichester 
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This is something that’s going to fall on me if my Father dies before my Mother, though she does have a smart phone and an IPad both good for calling people, texting, playing games and watching films.
Any thing to do with online things like banking, energy contracts, tax etc.no go.
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The thing I will miss most - the grues. To live under their flight path is such a privilege. Every autumn and spring to hear their cries overhead and to watch their formations as they cross our skies in their thousands is just such a delight.
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Dear Sue, don’t beat yourself up about your feelings to return or not.
6 months in for us and France is a wonderful memory that will always be ours.
We have no regrets and very happy with our decision, which was much the same as yours.
Spent most of yesterday shredding paperwork we brought back with us thinking imt should be saved, just in case.
I hear some saying that is a foolish thing to so but with all things tax up to date and now fully integrated back ibto the UK system it was a pleasurable experience.
Having now past our 6 months residency we have now been refunded our excess stamp duty paid on our uk home, from application to receipt took justv10 days.
Follow your dream xx
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I’m with you there. One of the wonders of my life in France too, a truly spectacular sight and sound.
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I am increasingly convinced that “they” believed that the move to online for everything would only affect old people, who didn’t really matter in comparison to how much their profits would increase, and that the effect would substantially decrease in a short period of time.
What"they" didn’t realise was that such systems - as well as computers - would continue to increase in complexity, so with every addition to the aged population - almost every time someone retired - there would be more people who would find online systems confusing, although the proportion is decreasing.
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Interfaces and are changing too, and it’s making online life far more difficult than it should be. Government websites on both sides of the channel take the seeker for services and information round in circles rather than to the pages they need. Many companies now also operate both shared and conventional messaging and file storage which makes communication confusing and locating data difficult. Despite being distinctly ‘techie’ I’m relieved to be retiring soon because corporate data management and wider IT is becoming increasingly inhibitory to effective working.
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Yes, the grues are fabulous… but you will find other wonders to marvel at.
Wishing you every happiness and successful transition to UK living 
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Mine too, but I thought Ned led a bunch of workers fearful of losing their jobs to machines, rather than being ousted by cheap labour.
But I’m also a devotee of him, I do have a smartphone now but make no calls with it (no sim card 
) and have just found out how to take photos and even zoom in on the subject to do so. This very morning while trying to decide which wooden shed to buy as a bird hide, I took my smartie up to the site after taking a pic from the PC which showed all the dimensions to see if it will fit. 
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And, once the UK honeymoon period has passed, you’ll have a heap of new organisations to annoy you–but you’ll have the satisfaction of tearing them off a strip in your native tongue.
For info Orange doesn’t like VPN’s!
Sorry if I seem dim but what is OH?
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Strangely enough that happened to me when were in the middle of organising the move back to the UK. I muddled along on the website mail (felt a bit like going back to the 90s). They had said the email would be available for six months after the move, but when I cancelled my mobile account a couple of months after the move, the email account vanished.
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Other Half, probably, not having the context I may be wrong.
Probably a subscription. All smart business are trying drive subscriptions these day. One off sales are fine but ongoing subscriptions are far better. As recurring services income declines car manufactures are trying to add subscriptions. Ford even tried to make the options in their cars subscription based but had to back off. The dash cam in my i4, which I bloody well paid for, is subscription based. They will all be trying this approach.
When I was an IT services provider I always drove our recurring business (or at least multi year contracts) hard. I used to explain every year at our kick off that going into the new year with a significant percentage of revenue in the bag was the only way to consistently grow the business. That was many years before Microsoft got the message and moved to subscription. I’d sometimes hard now to buy a software product for a once off fee.
Amazon Blink cameras are the same. The device is quite inexpensive and originally the cameras came with limited online storage. Now to view anything online it a €80 P.A. free, and you sort of rally have to pay it 