THEIR ESTEEMED smugnesses have it all worked out. Handsome in tans and tennis whites, and based on a few summer holidays in Marbella, they have taken the decision to throw all their eggs into the expat basket and retire to the Costa del Sol.
A pensions industry survey this week found that a third of Britons want to move abroad when they stop working and, among those, the largest single group yearns to join the 200,000 of their compatriots already living in Spain.
They are evangelical about the tiled-floor villa that the sale of their little Luton terrace house will buy them; about the low cost of fuel and food; about the zillions of ready-made British friends in the bars and clubs and local amateur dramatics; about not even needing to trouble themselves to learn Spanish — after all Pedro will always bring a fresh G&T if you bellow loud enough; and, best of all in this epidemic of aspiration, about the glorious, endless sunshine!
The deluded fools.
Or so says my friend, who married into a Spanish family and lives on the Costas, watching in growing horror this influx of the short-sighted. Of course, he accepts, it is an affordable nirvana when they are 60. Indeed, thanks to the anti-arthritic climate, perhaps even at 70. But at 80? Or 85?
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Reality can be a bruiser when infirmity sets in. When tennis is out of the window and the expat club too far up the slopes of the sierras. When one of the couple dies, and dramatic isolation is added to the list. And when the widowed partner becomes, in turn, incapable of unassisted living — then what?
A return to Blighty is not much of an option: apart from the shock of the wet and cold, there is the severe alienation that results from having severed all neighbourly ties 25 years before — not to mention the discovery that the pretty Spanish villa cannot now be swapped for much more than a garden shed back in the British housing market.
And so, says my friend, many end up staying — in a country where, by and large, families look after their own elderly and care by public authority is consequently grim. An unedifying end for the bewildered old émigré, jabbered at in the language he did not bother to learn and wondering, perhaps, in his last, lucid moments why he had ever been so bloody silly in the first place.