A Nouveau Scouser's View

June is busting out all over, wrote Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein. This year in Liverpool, that means lots of sunshine and warm temperatures, very little rain, and the pandemic lockdown. So no one is humming this happy tune. 

I've been in this Merseyside city for close to a year now, arriving on a Ryanair flight from Dublin in July 2019. In many ways, it seems like something that happened either last week or a century ago. 

Since I can’t visit museums, cathedrals, or bistros to blog about them (my original intent), I’ll do a basic comparison of all the places I've been since the Mulberry Street fire two years ago, and why I failed to settle in them. The comparison is built on the criteria I was considering: cost, climate, culture, cuisine, walkability, stock photo subjects, healthcare, and legal residency. On most of these points, I’ve had to be flexible, but with costs, healthcare, and a residency visa, there’s not much wiggle room.


San Miguel de Allende is a charming, small city in the Bajio mountain area of Mexico that was least expensive. It rated high on climate, culture, cuisine, walkability, stock subjects, and healthcare too. Unfortunately, I could not smooth out all the bumps that keep me from becoming a legal resident in Mexico.  On the Internet, they make it look easy. It's not. At least for me, it's not.

San Miguel is a small place with less than 140,000 inhabitants. I wouldn't need to live there very long before I captured most of the important stock subjects. 

If you're wondering about those crazy, murderous drug cartels, so far they do not operate in that part of Mexico. So far.

For a locale that has lower costs than Mexico, I would have to move to Southeast Asia or to one of the politically and financially shaky places in South America. No thanks.

Except for the brutal winters, I love Montreal. My exstepson and his charming Québécoise wife live there. The healthcare system in Canada is the best in the world, and Canadians, in general, are nicer people than their neighbors to the south. Sorry, fellow Yanks, but that what's I’ve observed. Again, getting legal residency would be hard if not impossible. 

Being well into my senior years is a major disadvantage when trying to get a residency visa or healthcare in most countries. Only the UK has welcomed me on both counts. Because I'm a dual citizen, and one of my passports is Irish, I'm treated better than fairly here. And unlike my British hosts, I'm also still part of the European Union, so not hampered by Brexit. 

Next week, I’ll talk about Spain, the EU, and why I can't live in the Republic of Ireland, even though I'm an Irish citizen.