A MOVING EXPERIENCE from www.newskys.co.uk
Over the past few years Sarah Drane has heard a wide variety of stories of how people have ended up making a permanent life for themselves on the Costa del Sol.
"I came for two weeks on holiday and never went back," or "I bought an Audi TT with my severance pay and drove until I found somewhere I liked," and so on. Mine was a relatively boring. "I was fed up with life in London, applied for some jobs in Spain, got one and moved over." However, the story I heard last week from Darran, the Director of T5 Estates, (one of my clients), was riveting enough to be made into a movie. At times the story sounded so incredulous that I made him swear on various things precious to him that it was true, and indeed it is.
Darran, now 37 years old, hails from Swanley in Kent and was European sales and marketing manager for a large communications company in London earning many, many shiny pennies and then suddenly it all went wrong. He was unexpectedly made redundant from his seemingly safe job, then equally unexpectedly dumped by his girlfriend and before he had a chance to pick himself up, his house was burgled bare, leaving literally only a mattress. His life went from riches to ruin virtually overnight and Darran understandably felt distraught.
One particularly lonely night he jumped in his car and just drove. On autopilot he took a ferry from Kent to France, passed through a snowy Paris by the morning, reached the Pyrenees by the afternoon and ended up near Benalmadena in Málaga early the following morning. Recognising the road signs of Mijas, Elviria, Marbella and Puerto Banús, he recalled that he had a pal who owned a bar in Estepona just a few kilometres further south, so he headed there.
Feeling a little apprehensive with just a few notes in his back pocket and the clothes that he was stood up in (he never packed when he left the UK as he didn’t actually know he was travelling somewhere!), Darran predicted a difficult time ahead but decided that everything happened for a reason and he should make a go of it. For his first few months on the Costa del Sol, Darran did any job that he could get his hands on. He even got up at the crack of dawn to wash down golf buggies at Estepona Golf Club, although he couldn’t face the embarrassment of telling anyone, not quite the dream career move for a 30-year old PGA Golf Professional.
However, luck was obviously on his side and he was offered the more salubrious job of teaching professional at Estepona Golf Club. Then, along came real estate as it does for so many expats on the Costa del Sol, firstly as sales manager for a large Costa del Sol real estate agency and now as director of his own company, T5 Estates, specialising in golf-related properties. Eight years later, Darran now claims to be the happiest man in the world, with his own company, a beautiful wife (who is, incidentally, the girlfriend that dumped him eight years before!) and a beautiful daughter.
This is most definitely the best ’how I ended up living in Spain’ story I’ve heard so far. Let’s see if anyone can beat it...
Sarah Drane is a writer and creative director living on the Costa del Sol. Her PR and marketing company, Purple Cake Factory, is based in Puerto Banús.
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