Introduction

In the previous chapter I focused on how my research participants felt dislocated from and in the UK and how their sense of belonging was fractured. Women experienced disengagement from the UK as a place, or space, and also as temporal disjuncture since they also rejected the UK in the present. Age and ethnic positionalities, too, shaped feelings of disruption regarding being on the margins through retirement and the presence of ‘others’ through immigration to the UK. I unravelled the multiple motivations for women's migration, taking account of structural forces, their unique biographies and agency and positionalities through structurally analysing their narratives, illuminating their lives in context. In order to fully understand women's migration experiences, however, we need to look beyond the circumstances and processes involved in decision making but also at their post-migration lives. Pursuing an individualistic lifestyle is for a privileged few (Skeggs, 2004), and although the women featured are not particularly affluent in the main, it needs to be acknowledged that they were privileged in terms of being citizens of powerful nation states (Benson and O’Reilly, 2009). However, some people have more freedom to make choices than others (Bourdieu, 1984) and women's choices were both enabled and constrained by their previous experiences of mass tourism. Like Benson's (2011a; 2011b) respondents in the Lot in France, women's migration reflects their class position, although this is differently experienced.

In this chapter the focus on place continues. Although global movement is seen by some to have irrevocably changed the meaning and experience of community for older people, it also provides the opportunity to reconsider and examine what it means, particularly in relation to place (Phillipson, 2007). I offer further exploration of how women experience and construct belonging and non-belonging and the complex relationships they have with place, highlighting that it can be imagined, pragmatic and contingent on experiences and intentions. Translocated across space, women construct their Mediterranean idyll imbuing it with nostalgia through pre- and post-migration imaginings of moving to the seaside and eulogise ‘good Spain’ (O’Reilly, 2000a, 90).