Mama Malone

Malone ponders living on the Isle of Wight

Now I’m weighing up the options of a move to the Isle of Wight. I know I know… People of a certain age say things like: “Ooh, lovely!” and people my age say: “What are you thinking? Are things that bad?” Yes, they are. Do you think I would consider it if they weren’t? You think I want to move from the most alternative town in the UK to an island that charges you £60 to get the car on it, has only one Argos store but 132,000 inhabitants and 2.6 million visitors a year! (How can they afford to get there? Are they counting the 30,000 people that attend Bestival?)

Bestival is where I met my child’s father. If you take one bit of advice from my situation, it’s don’t have a festival romance – they’re like holiday romances. They’re fuelled on atmosphere and not built on solid ground but a trodden tent-pegged one.

Hmm, what I mean to say is: don’t have a romance with anyone where a ferry is involved! What if it doesn’t work out and you become pregnant? (OK, if you’re a man reading this and you did become pregnant this is excellent, because small islands always have a thriving circus scene!)

“Festival romances are not built on solid ground but a trodden tent-pegged one”

My daughter has to get a ferry just to see her family for the rest of her life. Sounds fun for a holiday, doesn’t it? But every weekend is just a pain. It’s three hours, door to door – that’s six hours deducted from a 48-hour weekend just for traveling.

I wonder if my daughter will one day begin to resent it. I am wondering how the visits will work when she starts school. Her father is going abroad for two years and promises to return irregularly. Her school says even if he gets permission to take her away during term time (when he returns) it would be disruptive.

Say, for instance, she was learning the school play, she would miss a week and then not know what was going on. They suggested she goes to her dad’s in the school holidays, but I am wondering if that would be just as disruptive.

She’d make friends in class and then everyone would make plans for half term, and she’d be left out while everyone bonded in the holidays. I don’t want her to be the child who never builds friendships because she’s always away! She already misses her friends’ birthday parties as they often fall on weekends when she is at her dad’s.

My thinking is that if we move to the Isle of Wight for a while, at least she will have consistency. When her father returns from abroad I can just leave them to it for a week. And, in the meantime, I get a cottage hideaway where I can finally write my book! Or go mental in an isolated village…