A CLEAN SWEEP

From coffee-loving globetrotter to enterprising chimney sweep in Vienne, Kristian Jennings has already been on quite a journey and he’s still only 22. Vicky Leigh finds out more about his new venture and why his parents couldn’t be happier to have a boomerang child

- Vicky Leigh

How many things did you dismiss as a child that you’ve now come to appreciate as an adult? Plenty, I’ll bet. When his parents bought a second home in L’Isle-Jourdain in Vienne when he was a teenager, Kristian Jennings was less than enthusiastic about spending his holidays there. In fact, in his mum Bev’s words, “he absolutely hated it and we had to drag him across the Channel to get him there!”

Kristian has traveled considerably further since then. He left home in Ipswich at the age of 19 and spent the next three years moving around Australia, New Zealand, and Asia, his exciting adventures funded by jobs in coffee shops and bars along the way. As a coffee lover, working as a barista at the Sydney Opera House wasn’t exactly a hardship.

And yet France is where he’s now speaking to me from as a 22-year-old, sitting in the garden enjoying the sunshine and referring to it as ‘home’ throughout our conversation. His parents Bev and Paul had made a permanent move in 2017 and Kristian arrived a couple of days before Christmas in 2018 for a surprise visit – and he’s still there. So what has made him want to put down roots, and here of all places?

TAKING STOCK

“Having traveled for so long I sort of fell out of love with it,” says Kristian. “I woke up one morning and realized I wasn’t enjoying it anymore, and the next day I started traveling home.” And of course, by the home, he doesn’t mean Ipswich.

His original plan was to spend some time with his parents and help them with the renovation project they’d recently taken on, having bought the old property opposite theirs, but somewhere along the way, he developed a new appreciation for life in France.