Saturday, February 17, 2018

Welcome to WobblingUK

There comes a time in a person's life when it is necessary to say enough is enough, it is time to move and having been an expat for the best part of 30 years that time has been drawing ever nearer over the last couple of years.

There have been times when I thought it would never happen. Who could possibly tire of a commute that takes you over the majestic Sydney Harbour twice a day? And, to paraphrase Samuel Johnson, who could ever tire of Bangkok? But I did tire and I did move on and last year, as I unpacked my luggage in what was little more than a bedsit in Cairo I decided you know what? I wanna go home.

Yes, it's been fun, a real blast. Since 1987, when I left for what I thought would be a 12 month working holiday in Australia, I have lived and worked in Germany, Thailand, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Kazakhstan and Kuwait as well as the two countries which bookended my adventures.

But increasingly I have been seeking joy in the familiar I grew up with yet all too often spurned. My parents would love their days out and when they retired would wander around the UK at will visiting places like Shrewsbury, Lincoln and Exeter; places I only knew for their football teams. 

During one 15 year period I spent a mere five weeks in England. Then, with a family of my own, I started returning more often and rather than just tick off the sights in London from an open air tour bus I determined to do the things I had never done but now desired to do in my mid life bucket list. Northumbria, walks through England's ancient sites, the Moors, the Dales, the Peak District.

Ride the steam trains, climb the hills, drink in country pubs, enjoy the gentle breeze in the early evening. 

I'm not stuck in some 1980s timewarp. I know what has been going on in this country over recent years, the divisions among a political elite and the polarisation caused by the referendum and going back even to the Iraq war. And I know by returning I am going against a flow, rhetorical for now, as people yell to their social media following about leaving if some apocalyptic disaster, like Jeremy Corbyn as PM, should happen.

I haven't returned for all that though. I have returned because the time was right for me and I hope over the next few months, nay years, to share my voyage of re-discovery through this website and its social media partners of Twitter and Instagram