From Manchester to Mexico: How a Childhood Dream Became My Reality

I still remember the colour.

That is the strange thing about memory. You would think the big, dramatic moments would be what stays with you, but for me, it has always been the colour. The reds and greens of flags hanging from balconies. The dust and heat rising off a street market. The noise of a country that felt, to an eight-year-old boy from Manchester, like it was simply more alive than anywhere I had ever been.

That was 1988. I was eight years old, and through a stroke of luck I still feel grateful for, I got to spend a year of my childhood living in Mexico. I did not know it then, but that year would quietly shape the rest of my life.

A World Cup, a Country, and a Boy Who Never Forgot

Two years before we moved, in 1986, Mexico hosted the World Cup. I was six, glued to the television the way only a six-year-old obsessed with football can be, and even at that age, something about it stuck. The colour again. The energy. A country that seemed to glow on screen.

So, when my family actually moved there two years later, it was not a country I was seeing for the first time. It was a country I already loved, arriving to meet it in person. That combination, the World Cup memory layered underneath a real year of actually living there, cemented something in me that never really went away. From that point on, in the back of my mind, always: I want to live here again one day.

Always a football fan, with my father and grandfather.

I also had another dream as a kid, one that had nothing to do with Mexico at all. Like most children, my head was full of the dreams kids have: a footballer, a musician, an F1 driver, anything but a standard, boring job. But underneath all of that, there was one dream that actually felt real to me: I wanted to be a teacher. It is a strange thing to know at seven or eight years old, but it was the only proper profession I ever seriously considered for myself. Everything else felt like a fantasy. Teaching felt like something I could actually become.

Life Had Other Plans, for a While

Here is the part of the story that does not usually make it into the highlight reel: for the next fifteen years, I did none of that.

Croupier life, dressed up on shift.

I became a croupier. It was not the plan. It was just the opportunity that showed up, and I took it, the way you do at that age when a door opens and you have not quite decided who you are going to be yet. And it turned into a genuinely full life. I worked in casinos and the wider gaming industry, travelled on cruise ships, saw parts of the world I never would have otherwise, and eventually settled for a stretch in Spain. It was not a bad fifteen years by any measure. But underneath all of it, quietly, the two dreams from childhood never fully went away. I just was not chasing them. I was living a different, adjacent life instead.

Sochi, Russia, one stop among many during those years.

Mud baths and other adventures along the way.

I think a lot of people know this feeling: not misery, not regret exactly, just a low hum in the background that says this is not quite the thing. You can live with that hum for a long time. I did, for fifteen years.

On the slopes with friends, living a full but different life.

Thirty-Six, and No More Waiting

At thirty-six, something shifted. I do not have a single dramatic moment to point to. No crisis, no ultimatum from life. Just a growing sense that if I did not do something now, I was going to keep saying someday until someday simply stopped being available to me.

So, I did the thing that from the outside probably looked reckless: I walked away from a stable fifteen-year career, the security, the routine, the version of my life I already knew how to live, and retrained as an English teacher.

Fresh off training, in front of the whiteboard for the first time.

It took eight months. Eight months to go from croupier to qualified teacher, which in hindsight feels almost absurdly fast for something that ended up changing the entire direction of my life. Within those eight months, both childhood dreams, teaching and Mexico, collapsed into a single decision: I moved to Puerto Vallarta. That was August 2016.

Nearly Ten Years On

I am writing this almost a decade later, still here, still teaching. The eight-year-old who stood in a Mexican street in 1988, soaking in the colour and the noise, would, I think, be pretty pleased with where things ended up.

If you had asked me at twenty, or even at thirty, whether I would end up teaching English in the country I fell in love with as a child, I am not sure I would have believed you. It is one thing to carry a dream quietly for decades. It is another thing entirely to actually build a life out of it.

Puerto Vallarta, at some point in my Mexican adventure.

And here is the honest part, the part I think matters most: my only real regret is not the fifteen years I spent doing something else. Those years gave me things too: the travel, the people, the version of the world I got to see from a casino floor and a cruise ship deck. My only regret is not chasing this particular dream sooner. Not because the detour was wasted, but because once I finally did chase it, I realised how possible it had been all along.

If You Are Still Waiting on Yours

I do not think everyone needs to blow up their life at thirty-six to prove a point. But if there is a version of your life quietly humming in the background, a place you have always wanted to live, a work you have always wanted to do, a version of yourself you keep putting off for someday, I would just say this: someday has a way of never quite arriving on its own.

It took me fifteen years and one honest decision to close the gap between the boy who fell in love with Mexico's colour in 1988 and the man who finally moved there in 2016. I cannot tell you it will be easy, or fast, or without risk. I can tell you it is possible.

Follow your heart. Live your dreams. Mine took thirty-six years to arrive, but arrive they did!