It has been a very long holiday but I am finally back in Cyprus and in the swing of things. What is great about spending a few weeks with your adolescent kids, back in the UK, is that the world is a very different place. Priorities change. The only things that matter suddenly are shopping, relationships, Facebook status updates and possibly trying to persuade them to do a bit of exam preparation. But hey, who cares about exams when child number one’s Facebook status changes from ‘in a monogamous relationship with Ronald McDonald’ to ‘in a relationship with a boy who bought me McDonald’s, even though he’s not officially my boyfriend (BF) yet!’ Apparently anyone over the age of 12 no longer talks about having a GF or a BF, it is really uncool!
I had a lovely few weeks meeting up with friends and talking about our children’s love lives and lack of job prospects. We will now be supporting all our children until the age of 30, barring a sensible marriage proposition coming along first. It seems that in order to get a job in the UK, graduates need to have a first class degree from a top 20 university and then months, if not years, of work experience, gained by doing unpaid internships. The obvious alternative is to marry them off to someone who has a job and preferably wealthy parents who buy them a house.
Apparently, despite the impressive parental drive to get kids to pass all their exams at top grades in Cyprus, everyone worked this problem out a long time ago. So what is the point of passing all those exams and getting a fabulous degree if you can’t get a decent job? I mean a challenging job that you might actually enjoy. What if you can’t get any job? Well at least you know how to make a sensible choice about who to marry. I was told that a bank manager in Cyprus recently told a friend’s husband that he’s going to be working for a long time to pay off his exorbitant mortgage. The bank guy’s weary comment was ‘that’s what you get if you marry a foreigner!’ Maybe foreign women should come with a health warning, ‘no house, just here for the sunshine and the good life.’
As one of those long-standing foreign brides, I know all about sitting around enjoying the good life. It currently includes hours of live Australian Open tennis on Europsport. And now I have my new Internet radio to wile away the hours between FB updates and plans to marry off the kids. I would highly recommend it. I can listen to BBC Radio 4 all day long, the shipping forecast, the Archers, the afternoon play. Pure heaven. And for a bit of light relief, endless Radio 5 Live phone ins about overweight children in the UK and traffic updates for the M25. Some of us foreign wives may come cheap but we do know how to enjoy ourselves…..
