Have you ever seen a house of cards collapse? It is coming up to Thursday (tomorrow) and I can tell you this time last week we had it all but this week? Naught. Last Thursday we where set to retire to France on September the 5th (two days from now), we had sold the house, sold most of the furniture, arranged distance courses for Matthew, bought airline tickets, paid a deposit on the property in France and rented transport at that end. It was all arranged, when we arrived in France, we would have enough savings left to carry us should something go horribly wrong. What we didn’t figure on was that the airline might go bust before we left, taking all our careful planning with it. This week we have no airline tickets, a several thousand dollar hole in our savings, a lost deposit on the France rental property and no immediate travel opportunities since airfares seem to have suddenly gone skyways. Acquiring new tickets to France (or any other destination involving airline tickets) would eat up so much of our savings that we could not recover should something go wrong, which it is now evident that it can. So we have naught. The only good news so far was that the France car rental company has returned the $65 deposit on the car rental. The only advice we have received regarding our Zoom Airline tickets is that we probably will never see that money again so don’t bother chasing it. Ditto for the deposit on the rental property. As for the sale of the house, there is no easy way to back out of it (we were not particularly attached to it having decided to give it up for France *but* we do need a place to live) as the sellers have few rights in this case having signed the agreement of sale. So we are scrambling for a place to rent before the closing and trying to pick up the pieces as well as can be. It is amazing however how totally knackered life has become because of the failure of Zoom Airlines, a factor out of our control and so utterly unexpected. A meteor strike in the middle of London would have been less devastating! Watch this space, I’ll let you know what’s happening when the cards cease falling down around us.