It's probably worth telling you a little bit of the background to this big adventure.
I was born in Glasgow, and grew up in Manchester within a rather 'chaotic' family. I was never really taught many of the life-skills I needed so it took some time in adulthood for me to understand who I was, and coming up with my own definition of what a life well lived looked like.
Having lived in Birmingham and Belfast for a number of years, whilst attending university, and then working as an engineer at the BBC, I married my wonderful partner Nina and then moved out to the Shropshire countryside for a number of years where I pursued a career in web development.
To say life was a rollercoaster over that time would be an understatement! My eldest brother Duncan suddenly passed away three months before my son Evan was born, I ended the attempt at flogging the dead horse that was the relationship with my parents, our daughter Aurora arrived, and COVID hit! Amongst all this were the trials of learning how to be a parent without any backup, trying to balance a working life where invariably I was a square peg trying to be pushed into a round hole, and really just trying to get through the days. Mental health was a daily struggle and something needed to change.
So phase one was our big move up to Scotland. I had long imagined that moving back north would be a good thing to do in the future, but had imagined somewhere like the Borders or Edinburgh. My wife said to me that she'd be happy to move, but if we were doing it she wanted to live in 'real Scotland', and after some research we decided on the Moray Coast. We did a number of scouting trips, from as far west as Inverness and as far east as… Banff! The more we looked the further east we drifted until we found this little jewel of the coast. COVID slowed down the process (and made the later viewings rather tricky) but in March 2021 the stars aligned and we headed north to stay.
The house took a lot of renovation, and thankfully by that point I had co-founded a small but mighty company making compliance software for the healthcare sector, so I could be flexible with my working hours around the work on the house. This was probably the closest I ever got to a healthy work-life balance. Fast forward a couple of years and we were settled, in a finished home, with two new dogs and a fantastic group of friends.
Then we sold the company. I was a minor shareholder so got a nice, but not enormous payout. This part was great, but then finding myself working for a company a thousand times bigger, who put profit ahead of people, and would rather add a dozen layers of bureaucracy than actually get anything done. After a year of watching them asset-strip and run the company I'd spent years building into the ground I needed to leave for my own sanity. I moved on again only to find the owners there had drunk the AI Kool Aid and soon decided (against all advice from anyone with a vaguely technical brain) that they didn't need a whole development team, they just needed four people and ChatGPT! That ain't going to work out well for them.
At this point, to give a little further background on our family circumstance, we have long since homeschooled the children, because we're all neurospicy in our own ways, and the schools have very little interest or ability in accounting for any children that aren't cookie-cutter versions of the very specific neurotypical child they expect to see. Not due to any religious or pseudoscientific beliefs, but purely because it's the best thing for the children and we've been fortunate enough that I was able to cover the bills whilst my wife took point on the homeschooling. Combine this with the lack of family influence from either my side or my wife's, our extremely liberal leaning, and now living up in a place with a huge artistic community, you can tell we're pretty big hippies.
We had bought a wee derelict carpenter's workshop in town when the company sold, which we've been using ever since as a base for a not-for-profit community arts hub - https://www.theforgebanff.co.uk. With that up and running we had assets, we had options, and we had a good jumping-off point for the next phase.
So from this position I had to sit down and ask myself, and my family, what we really want our lives to look like up here. My wife and I did our sums and agreed that the money remaining from the sale of the company was enough to buy an additional premises, and keep the bills paid for a year. We will tighten our belts, and I will work on the renovations myself (with assistance from my wonderful apprentice Evan), whilst working on a variety of freelance web development, and other ideas, to see if we can get ourselves sustainable before the year is up.
And this is where we find ourselves! Big journey, big changes, but even if it doesn't entirely work out, and I have to go back to a day job, it'll still (hopefully) be the best year of my life