Not quite the idyllic notion I had in mind...

This column first appeared in The Guardian on Friday April 28, 2006. You can read it in its original form here

Anybody British with a reasonable education always has a financial fallback when they travel abroad. When the money runs out, they can teach English. The demand for native speakers seems to remain insatiable. It was certainly a possibility that my wife, Barbara, had considered before we headed off for a life in Ibiza.

She was far better qualified than most ex-pats, having been a primary school teacher in Scotland before ill health forced her to quit. It was a job she loved and she'd long felt her skills and experience were being wasted.

Before we arrived on the island two years ago we had an idyllic notion of using those talents to help our Spanish-speaking neighbours with their English. We thought there would either be schoolchildren requiring additional tutoring or adults who wanted to add to their qualifications. In fact, she has found a call for her skills, but not from the sort of people we expected.

The demand has come from friends who are native English speakers and want some extra help for their primary school-age children. Barbara offers a partial solution to a dilemma that faces many adults who move abroad. It's alright for them to decide to change countries as often as they want, but is it fair for them to impose their nomadic lifestyle on their kids?

One way round their problem is to send their children to an international school where they will be taught in English. However, not only is this expensive, but it carries a built-in assumption that the family will return to the UK. That's fine for parents who have been posted overseas by an organisation, which will probably also pay the fees. It's not much use if you want to become part of the local community in a foreign country.

There are, after all, few better places to get to know your neighbours than at the school gates. Sending your kids elsewhere suggests you don't really want to be a full part of the community.

Houses and businesses can be sold. And, if the worst comes to the worst, family and friends in Britain are just a budget flight away. It may be difficult financially for adults to return to their roots, but it's surely much harder for their children to slot into an education system that uses what to them is basically a foreign language.

Their difficulty probably won't be speech. I've heard young children at play switching effortlessly between Spanish, German and English. But that doesn't mean they can write it down. Even when they study English at school the emphasis is conversational.

An added challenge in Ibiza is that a few years ago the local government decided Catalan would be the main teaching language across the curriculum. Catalan was banned under the Franco regime, so it's fairly easy for me to understand and even support this piece of cultural protectionism. But, I don't have kids.

If I did, I'd probably want them to at least have the option of British further education. It may not be superior to the Spanish system, but at least I have some understanding of how it works.

For those who do want their kids to keep up with the twists and turns of the curriculum in England or Scotland, every government document is posted on the web. Ploughing through them and making sense of the jargon is, however, another matter.

More useful are the lesson plans and teaching materials that are also available online, often for free. In fact, as so often with web-based information, the problem that Barbara has found is that there's just too much available. She's spent far more time online than actually with our friends' kids.

So for ex-pat parents with a web-literate former primary schoolteacher on tap, there is a way of avoiding the complete imposition of their lifestyle choices on their children. The rest, I suppose, will have to wait until Esperanto is universally adopted.

My new website

Please check out my new website A Desk In The Sun. It's an attempt to develop an online resource for people who live in one country while working via the internet in another, in the same way as I do.

At the moment there's no book, magazine or website aimed specifically at people like us. That's despite it becoming an increasingly popular choice for anybody who can telecommute.

It would be great to turn the website into a real resource, but I cannot afford the time at the moment. I have to earn a living. If, hower, anybody reading this is interested in providing financial support I'd love to hear from them. A financial services company could, for example, find an audience with a group that has considerable spending power and use for money transfers, savings products and more.

Staying here, but still out there

This is my latest column for The Guardian newspaper. You can read it on the newspaper's site here.


When I moved from Edinburgh to Ibiza two years ago I really thought it would be a case of "out of sight, out of mind". In fact, far from being forgotten, I've not only kept in touch with many of my old friends, clients and contacts, I've managed to broaden the UK circle. And, they've continued to offer me work.

I wish I could pretend this was part of some carefully planned scheme, but I'd be lying. What's happened is, almost by accident, I've found myself following a variation on the highly publicised strategy that's supposed to be shaking the music industry to its foundations.

Earlier this year the Arctic Monkeys caused a fuss by selling truckloads of their debut album, mostly through an online community called MySpace, bypassing the usual marketing channels and selling straight to their fans.

Actually, what they did wasn't all that new. Six years ago the distinctly unfashionable Marillion emailed their fans asking them to pay upfront for luxury copies of their next CD and raised enough to avoid the need for a record-company advance.

Before the internet, most of a band's contact with fans came from touring. In business, networking performs a similar function. When I first arrived in Ibiza, almost everybody who was paying for my services was somebody I'd swapped business cards with back in Scotland. Not any longer. A growing number of my clients I've never seen in my life.

Instead of conference centres and bars, I now meet most of my contacts online through various discussion forums. Some of these are sophisticated membership organisations based around a website. Others use simple mailing lists. The mechanics of how they function doesn't really matter. It's who belongs and participates that counts.

And if you can find the right networks they're a great way of finding work and, from my point of view, they have the unbeatable advantage that geography is no barrier.

I can be sitting at my desk in Spain keeping in touch with all the gossip and professional developments while subtly touting for work just as easily as in Scotland. Of course I can't press the flesh as often, but anybody returning from abroad has a little bit of celebrity, which is useful when you do make it to a meeting.

Whether networking online or face-to-face, the more you put in, the more you are likely to get out. If your only contribution is the mercenary pursuit of work you may not get much response. If, however, you join in the discussions it's far more likely to be fruitful.

As with any group, though, debate tends to be dominated by a small number of participants. So when you first join you can feel ignored. But it is worth persevering, remembering that the vast majority of forum members don't join in most of the time, but just lurk and read the postings. They are often the ones that will offer you work.

It is definitely worthwhile setting up your own website or blog. It doesn't have to be complex. But do make sure that it's mentioned in your email signature so when you post to a forum it's easy for people to find out more about your skills and can get in contact easily. The alternative is to display your email address, which may attract the unwelcome attention of spammers.

Finding the most useful forums is a real challenge. There are the large generalist networks such as Ecademy and myriad others, generally focused on a specific industry or geographical area. Ask around, as even the most active groups don't necessarily show up on Google and it does help if there are a few members you know already.

In the spirit of online networking I'd be interested to share advice and experiences with readers who are attempting to follow the same lifestyle as me, self-employed telecommuters working in one country while living in another. These responses may form the basis for future columns and articles.

Nick Clayton is a freelance writer and web content consultant. Email: deskinthesun@nickclayton.com