September 10, 2005

Wherever they hang their hats

Spending each season on a different continent was once only possible for the rich and retired. Now, says Eric Ellis, people with jobs, kids and mortgages are becoming citizens of the world.

I'M A MEMBER of a club, one so exclusive that there are only three members. One of our number, an Australian, "lives" in Singapore. Another, an Irishman, "lives" in Rangoon while the third, a Kiwi, "lives" in London.

The Sociedad de Hombres del Mundo, HdM for short, was conceived years ago in a flood of self-irony and Cruzcampos under the stars of a perfect summer night in Andalusia. True, HdM by definition is slightly sexist and the abbreviation sounds like a tacky Italian underwear brand. But as old friends together again, totting up all the places where we'd lived, worked and visited, we thought the designation appropriate.

Since then, we HdMs have tripled our collection of locations, passport stamps and visas, and we now move effortlessly between 10 properties in eight countries (owned or rented because it's cheaper than hotels). I've seen recent-year references to "road warriors" and "bourgeois bohemians" but I can proudly say that HdMs pre-dated them both. Like all good clubs, it has a culture, almost a lifestyle, one that insufferable trendies such as Tyler Brule might vaguely understand. And it's one, in this era of cheap flights, deregulation, globalisation and mobile internet, that many more people have embraced. The fact is that HdMs live nowhere, and everywhere, and are more than comfortable, settled and domestic while doing so.

Lancastrian architect Andy Fisher, 40, isn't an HdM, but he could be. He and his businesswoman wife Clare Dally split time between properties in Sri Lanka (where they mounted a post-tsunami aid project for his stricken village neighbours), Singapore and the UK, servicing assignments and clients at many points in between. Fisher is as at home in Mumbai as he is in Muscat and Malmsbury and considers it a normal way to live.

"Having moved away from the UK in 1994, due partly to the severe recession and partly to rid ourselves of wanderlust, we never really had a plan to return," he says. "I like to think that we could live anywhere in the world and enjoy it. The (key) is not letting physical possessions dictate our choices. Possessions are not particularly important to us but our living and working environment is. People often ask us where we'll end up and I say probably just like we are now."

Likewise Andrew Grant, an Australian who spends part of the year in a rambling Balinese stone beach house, part in Sydney and part in Dubai running a business consultancy with his wife Gaia. His two kids are at an international school in Bali, and they seem deliriously happy. "With the internet, it's remarkably easy and cheap to keep on top of things," he says. "And we are really only six to eight hours from a meeting anywhere if we have to be."

German photographer Hans Hoefer, 58, is another example. He has a house in Singapore, where his teenage children attend school; a magnificent villa in Sri Lanka, which he rents out and operates as a hotel; another villa near Kathmandu; a flat in London; and a crewed yacht called Rising Tide, which he uses to move around Asia and rents for Dollars 500 a day.

Non-HdMs might snort that we - and people like us - are wannabe Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. But that's nonsense, and misses the point. You don't need to be rich or famous to be an HdM. It's a lifestyle that evolves through circumstances. And with kids, cats and mortgages, we are all as "conventionally" settled as Marooned of Milton Keynes. We just happen to spread our money across more homes than he does and transit more airports, more efficiently and with less fuss.

My friend's house in Rangoon, a palatial spread by a lake, which costs less to rent than a bedsit in Chelsea, is five minutes to an airport. The apartment my wife and I rent in Singapore is 20 minutes from one. From the 1,000-year-old village house we own in on Spain's Costa de la Luz it is 40 minutes to a flight (but only 10 to the beach); and from our bungalow on a rice paddy in Bali (we own the house and lease the land due to government restrictions on foreign holdings) it takes an hour. An HdM can rise at 8am, be on a plane at 9am, and arrive at a business lunch in a big city by noon.

I know people who have sold their cramped London flats for ridiculous sums, bought an expansive Andalusian pile in the sun at half the price, and commute every few days to flexi-time jobs in the City. Negotiating Jerez airport is much easier than Heathrow - you can even park out the front.

What about services? True, in some places they can be tricky, but it is easy, and inexpensive, to create a self-contained paradise. With wi-fi and a modem in your laptop, communications are rarely a problem.

When it comes to managing our finances, I'd venture that HdMs are one of the few groups of people who believe HSBC's advertising hype that it's the world's local bank. Bills in five countries are paid online. My wife and I frequently order groceries so they arrive the day we go somewhere. True, our phone bills can sometimes be killers, but we offset the cost of a year's worth of groceries bought in Uxbridge with two to three months worth bought in Ubud, where the food is not only cheaper but better. In Sri Lanka, you'll get change from a fiver for a family-sized feed of ocean-fresh lobster.

The money HdMs save with basic life costs for half the year (our monthly electricity bill in Bali is Dollars 15 and it just went up) allows us to splurge a little when we are in, well, Milton Keynes. Or somewhere more interesting.

Richness isn't just about money. I'd venture that time spent with relatives is better as one tends to have more to talk about. Much as I'm fond of my family, I find conversation a lot more fulfilling when I've got a return ticket to somewhere in my pocket. I've even speculated that's why we HdMs tend to be happily married. We find understanding and similarly peripatetic partners - mujeres del mundo perhaps? - and share our experiences.

As Andy Fisher says: "We don't have a plan or desire to return to Blighty and the post-expat life retirement home in Devon. When we come to the UK now, if not for business, it is to catch up with family and friends. (But) we try to avoid rushing around the country and prefer to rent a cottage and let people come to us. We're (now) looking at buying a small cottage in Sicily for this purpose."

His aim, he says, is to "carry on travelling and hanging our hat wherever we wish."

HdMs understand perfectly. His membership application is before the committee.