One Step Forward and Two Steps Sideways

This has been an interesting year in terms of work, personal development and family life. We have also managed to have some very enjoyable holidays both at home and away.

In terms of work this has been a year of some significant flux and unpredictability. Those of you who read my last post will recall that I had secured a part-time teaching job at a local state secondary school near our house in Harrow. I started a few days into January and it was an eye-opening experience from the outset. In December, before I officially started at the school, I had gone in to observe some lessons and left wondering a little bit at some of the interactions between students and teachers. Very quickly, once I started at the school, I realised that the whole culture of the school and the expectations of teachers and students was quite different to my own. By my second week there, Helen and the boys had gone to South Africa for a few weeks of sunshine, and I was left feeling quite isolated in a very alien school and work environment. I could write at length about how stressful it was as a place to work, or the things I learned about organisational cultures and leadership. There were several situations where students seemed totally lacking in respect for adults and simply didn’t care about the impacts of their actions on others in their class. I also really struggled with the fact that government secondary school starts at age 11, with students whose intellectual and social maturity levels were nowhere near what I work best with. But the short version is that within weeks I realised that the school and I were not a good fit for each other, and that it seemed almost inevitable that either I would do or say something that did not reflect the school’s values (the behaviour of some children was so deliberately disruptive and hampered the learning of other good students so much that some days I really struggled not to physically throw someone out of a classroom), or I would find myself impossibly compromised in my own personal ethics and backed into a corner (my instinct was to protect good students from trouble-makers, not to walk on eggshells around those who caused problems, as the school seemed determined to do). In less than two months we amicably agreed to part ways. This whole episode gave my confidence a bit of a knock and made me question my capabilities and even my personality.

 

At the same time, I kept several other irons in the fire (deliberately taking only a part-time teaching role in order to develop other possibilities) and I had begun to work with several different education organisations, exploring the possibility of taking on more of an education consultancy role. This involved me attending and observing a series of training sessions for teachers run by a small education organisation focused on developing critical thinking and critical thinking strategies and pedagogies for schools and students. I also ended up doing some bespoke consultancy work for the organisation, advising them on their international expansion strategy. However it became clear after a while that they lacked the organisational capacity and funding to be able to scale up much, let alone afford to take me on in any more long-term capacity. I also worked on my connections with a London-based educational think-tank for much of the year, hoping to get a foot into their door. Over time however, it emerged that their approach and philsophy was less specialised and conscientious than it first seemed, indeed they seemed to be chasing funding where it could be found, even when this risked potentially obvious conflicts of interest; such as producing a report on the benefits of tests for student learning and teacher feedback, sponsored by one of the largest global providers of external examinations and testing! Proving once again my maxim that what gets lots of money in education and what is good for teachers and students are unfortunately often very poorly aligned.

 

As these various prospects unfortunately seemed to dim, I worked on a few different pieces of writing or research. One idea I had was for a non-fiction book on education, which was a great concept (if I do say so myself) but required a network of influential contacts in education across the globe to be available for interviews, and unfortunately my research planning showed me that this would not be feasible. Another project was a blog on education ideas – including policies, objectives, and philosophies of education. You can look at it here: www.eduthink.co.uk or on the Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/Eduthink2/ . While I very much enjoyed writing about these ideas, my audience reach was pitifully small and I realised that in online publishing one has to devote a tremendous amount of time to marketing and media exposure, probably even more than to the actual thinking and content – or it helps to be famous when you start, then people want to hear what you have to say. 

The other project I embarked on from sometime in March, was to begin writing a play that included many of my thoughts on how to challenge or completely change how countries are currently set up – including economics, politics, education, crime and punishment, the legal system, banking and finance, etc. It’s called “A New Country” and it looks at some changes that could be made if a group of people set out to form a brand new country now, in today’s world, and some of the likely challenges those leaders would face. I realised after completing it that it didn’t work particularly well as a play, and I have now converted it into a screenplay. Unfortunately a screenplay for a typical movie should be about 100-120 pages long (a minute per page – although mine might be slightly faster as the dialogue is rapid-fire) but I had more than 180 pages, even with some substantial paring down and cutting (but it is only forty thousand words – screenplay formatting is weird!) So maybe it would be a mini-series. I know that film and television are largely dominated by who you know (and kiss up to) so I am not seriously pursuing getting it made into anything at this stage. It still needs some edits (and probably will forever need more edits) but having largely finished it by June, I am hoping in the next week or two to make a few significant edits and then to have it in a form that can be shared with others. If you’re interested (and have the stamina for it) then let me know.

  

In March I attended a jobs fair at my old school, the American school in Hillingdon. It was fun to be back in a familiar environment, with small classes of mostly well-behaved teenagers. And it turned out that they needed an Economics teacher quite urgently. So I had some quick interviews within a few days, and was offered a position as an International Baccalaureate Economics teacher to start in early August. On the one hand I was gratified to be considered by such a good school, on the other I had a nagging sense that something wasn’t right, particularly because I didn’t feel overly enthused when I learned that I had been offered the job. To try to assuage that doubt I went in to the school and shadowed some lessons, including an IB Economics lesson in which I understood very little of what was being taught – hardly surprising given that it was a particularly mathematical topic, and I last studied Economics in 2001 and dropped the subject at university because I wasn’t very good at the maths! I realised that I am not an economics teacher and more importantly, I realised that my Masters and everything since then has been working toward moving on from teaching in high school classrooms. I regret first accepting the job and then deciding a few weeks later not to take it, but I am glad that it helped me to draw a line in the sand and to say that it is time for me to move on from teaching, at least at high school level, and into something new. So, I guess that means I will be looking in some ways at my third career trajectory – having already been in accountancy and business consulting as I worked my way into the development world, only to realise that it wasn’t what I had envisioned; and now having re-trained as a school teacher and enjoyed it, but realised that it isn’t a long-term career path for me.

The question of what to do next career-wise has also intersected with some important processes of personal development and self-reflection. I finally agreed (Helen and my mother had both gently suggested it for years) earlier this year to try some therapy sessions to work through a number of different personal issues. Until now I have been very reluctant to do so, not because of any potential stigma but just because I wasn’t that comfortable with (and still find it a bit odd) talking about my life, my feelings, my attitude and outlook, with someone who is otherwise a complete stranger. But I also realised that I wasn’t particularly happy with the kind of father and husband that I find myself being, and the lack of patience and even tremendous anger that I felt bubbling up at times. I don’t think I’ll ever be some mellow and totally chill dude, and I do think anger can be healthy, but at the same time therapy has been a valuable process that has helped me. I think I’d already started some of the work before I started the sessions, having read a bit of “Don’t sweat the small stuff” and found the advice very helpful, even if I don’t always manage to personify it. Some of the realisations were, for many people, probably rather obvious, but for me they have been important to consider. For example, taking the time and head-space to acknowledge how I feel rather than only trying to apply logic or rational expectations or telling myself what I “should” feel or do. A big part of this was and continues to be dealing with and working towards resolution of a tremendous sense of sadness and loss in having decided to leave South Africa permanently. Intellectually the decision has been, for me and my family at least, the right one. But it comes with an emotional toll of acknowledging that wherever I live from here on, I will always be a bit of an outsider, and that my children will grow up different from me and my wife; and that we have chosen to leave behind many of the wonderful people and things we love about South Africa (as well as the chaotic, dangerous, and just plain annoying aspects too!)

Another avenue that I have begun to work through is the realisation that I grew up in a family culture of quite strong and dominant personalities, and contrary to the world view that I adopted, perhaps in part as a result of this, there isn’t necessarily a right and a wrong answer to quite a lot of what happens in the world, or how things can or should be done (by me or anyone else). Some of this links very much to sweating the small stuff – I still have a lot of work to do in terms of loosening my own grip on attempting to or wanting to be in control of what happens or how it happens around me. As Helen would say (sometimes through gritted teeth no doubt), I still have much to improve on in terms of learning to pick my battles, and recognising that there may not necessarily be a “right way” to do things either for myself or my family (although don’t let anyone start trying to tell me there isn’t a definite right way to make and eat a slice of peanut butter and honey on toast – that’s just blasphemy! 😊 Within this is a recognition also that sometimes I need to be a bit kinder to myself and less unforgiving of my own failings and flaws – because my criticism of imperfections in the world around me, and in others, are often an overflow of the criticism and negative feelings that I may have about myself. I’m never going to be a perfect parent, husband or friend, and will probably still end up shouting at my boys sometimes when they drive me completely crazy, or be unnecessarily pedantic about certain things in my home, but I can keep trying to be better and more thoughtful, and to be present and a source of warmth in the lives of those I love.

This links to a broader realisation that I am free to make my own choices, and that I need to figure out what I really want, and what is important to me, rather than doing what some voice in my head, or set of expectations I have foisted upon myself, tells me I “ought” to do. Yes, 38 years might be a rather long time for this thought to arrive, but better late than never. Perhaps in dealing with parts of the straitjacket I have sometimes made for myself, I will also hopefully resolve some of what might be euphemistically be called my authority issues and tendency to chafe against limits set or imposed by external forces. In reality, we are all constrained in different ways, no matter what our blessings in life. Nothing worthwhile can be achieved without at least some compromises and less-than-perfect interactions and even relationships between people. While studying and being in an academic setting as I have been in several different periods of my life, has in many ways suited me: allowing me to drive my own high standards, relying only in limited ways on the inputs of others, and allowing me to set the pace and timing to suit my own needs; the remoteness of theory from the real world, and the loneliness and isolation of much of the work have always been significant drawbacks, given that I do have at least some part of my personality that enjoys social interaction and peppering other people with questions and answers (sometimes at the same time!) At times I recall a quote (which I heard from a character played by Samuel L Jackson in a random movie called 187, but apparently it’s actually from Thomas Wolfe) that “loneliness is the central and inevitable fact of human existence” – and I think back to high school, a time when I was incredibly driven, and hard-working, and often quite single-minded, even arrogant in my disdain for those who didn’t seem wiling to put in the effort. And yet the high marks that I got in the end did not feel, even at the moment when I got them, like the achievement that I had aimed for. I have been fortunate that those marks allowed me to be able to study in some amazing places and to have met good people through those things, and no doubt those academic accolades have opened some doors for me, but I’m no longer sure they ever opened the doors that I really wanted: to have firm friends whom I could see regularly (rather than scattered to the four corners of the globe), to feel involved and wanted rather than completely replaceable, and to feel happy about myself and living in the present rather than always discounting the past and the present and looking restlessly to the future for something better. I’m not quite ready to wear orange sheets and live in a monastery somewhere in Tibet, and I do think that a hunger for improvement is still important, but I’m realising that nothing external can make up for any sense that I might have of not liking myself. So there’s a balance to be had between being kind to myself and kinder to others, while still striving for better in every aspect of my life.

 

All of this being said, I do need to find a new driving force or central motivator for my day-to-day life, and I’m actively considering several possible avenues (entrepreneurial, non-profit, creative, there certainly are lots of choices out there). Although writing was cathartic and often very enjoyable (with a definite silver lining that I’ve been able to enjoy having my hearing aids out and being my own boss), this has been a rather lonely year in many ways. I remain eternally grateful to Helen and our boys for the fact that there is always a cheerful face and a warm hug in the morning and at night. Although after several weeks of summer holiday with no school for the boys, having an entire day to myself would also be very welcome! Hopefully by the time I post my next blog update I’ll be neck-deep in a new challenging and satisfying project. 

Physically, although I have experienced the odd niggle from refereeing over the past year, since spring I’ve had a good run of time using a gym I’ve built up down in our basement to become as strong if not stronger than I’ve ever been (though I will always have skinny wrists and legs at the end of the day) – setting PB’s in deadlift and bench press, and I’m in good cardio shape again, having done pretty respectably in the referee fitness test earlier this summer (18.8 on the yo-yo beep). I think this physical health has helped to keep me mentally healthy as well. I have now joined the London Referees Society not just for mid-week games as I was doing during the last season, but for all of my games, and hopefully this will allow me to make new friends and meet lots of people in the local rugby community. The area covered by the London society is pretty wide so I’m not sure I’ll be travelling much less than when I was refereeing over in Oxfordshire, but hopefully I will also get some games closer to home.

Because rugby refereeing here is quite solitary (especially with most games taking place at exactly the same time on a Saturday afternoon and with no assistant referees until quite a bit further up the greasy pole) I’ve also looked to create other social avenues. This included a bit of squash, but socially I didn’t find the right group of people (and wound up needing all sorts of physiotherapy after all that dramatic lunging), and unfortunately my tennis has been rather dormant since Calvin was born and at about the same time my two regular tennis partners both left Johannesburg. I also attended a local writer’s group where unfortunately I lowered the average age by a few decades and it seems that the group has subsequently disbanded over the summer. One thing that has worked is a small group of us have formed a Dinner Discussion group where several guys around the same age get together for a meal and conversation once a month (partly in response to a Guardian article highlighting that men, especially those with families and a hectic career, often find themselves lacking meaningful interpersonal social interaction outside their family even though it is important for their health). This has been thoroughly enjoyable and we’ve deliberately avoided Britain’s political shambles in favour of conversations about all manner of real and theoretical topics that also allow us to get to know each other a little bit better, all while courting at least a little bit of controversy in our opinions, and some animated and amusing discussions have ensued.

We continue to live in my parents’ old house in Harrow, which has been funny to consider at times: that I am back in the house I lived in when I finished high school, now 20 years ago. Helen has made great efforts to get to know other families at the local nursery school that our boys have attended and as a result we’ve started to make a few friendships in the local area. That being said, the demographics of the area have changed a lot since my parents first moved here, and we’ve found that we’re drawn to a relatively small pool of local middle-class people, with much of the surrounding areas being much more socio-economically diverse, with a substantial minority of non-English speakers. So we’ve found ourselves drawn into both a surprisingly large diaspora of middle-class South Asians (many of whose families migrated from East Africa in the 1960s and 70s) as well as the population of schoolmasters and teacher’s families at Harrow school – many of whom seem to work like absolute donkeys during term-time, to the point where they are almost never available, and then disappear elsewhere for much of the holidays. We’re very lucky that we’re within walking distance of both the nursery school and the independent prep school that Calvin is starting at next week. But we’re not sure if we want to be this close to the middle of London and the noise, traffic, and pollution that seems to come with it. Night-life doesn’t have quite the same appeal for us these days, as by 10:30pm we’re ready for bed, and a recent evening out at a cousin’s wedding cost us more than a hundred pounds for babysitting (cheap babysitters can’t cope with getting two tyro’s fed, bathed and into bed, and people who can handle it don’t come cheap). So we have started once again considering our options for moving somewhere further out of London, to a greener, leafier area with a thriving community life where hopefully we can meet even more people with whom Helen and I can both identify, and over time build friendships. Not knowing what sort of work I’ll end up doing isn’t entirely helpful in this process, as it will certainly entail more of a commute if I need to be based in London, but on the other hand I’m keen to give my children a sense of a place that is a hometown for them, where they can return to even once they begin to venture out into the wider world.

For much of this year our boys only attended nursery school for four days per week. Helen found a wide variety of activities and excursions to keep the boys entertained and stimulated on Fridays. This included trips to a local farm / petting zoo with animals and a playground, kiddie gymnastics sessions which both boys seemed to thoroughly enjoy, swimming lessons at home in our pool (we are very lucky to have an indoor pool, so I often have a dip with the boys at the end of the day and then take them for a shower rather than the usual bathtime saga) and also various trips into London to kiddie theatre, to Buckingham Palace to see the changing of the guards (a favourite for the boys, who usually spend several days thereafter re-enacting soldiers marching), and also along the South Bank of the river to visit various attractions and sample different cuisines.

 

 

We have had some family fun over the past year as well. In December we were lucky enough to be able to create our own family festive season. We had several different parts of Helen’s family come to stay with us, including having two of Helen’s cousins, Robyn and Peter and their spouses and children, all together for a few days that included opening presents on Christmas morning and a big Christmas lunch; as well as just before New Year having Helen’s sister Kylie and her husband and kids to stay with us. Helen’s family are very close to her heart and she misses them very much at times (as do I), so it was nice to be able to host several of them. Helen had hoped to join the others on a big family skiing trip but unfortunately she had to cancel that as it was the same week as Calvin’s interviews for prep school entry (yes, four-year olds are asked to come to the school and they are observed and sorted into yea and nay – the school don’t call it an interview, but nobody is fooled).

Thereafter, Helen and the boys went to South Africa to catch up on some sun for several weeks but I was working at the local high school and stayed behind (although I was very tempted once or twice to catch a taxi to Heathrow and just not pitch up for work the next day!) By early April we felt a bit cooped up so we took ourselves off for a mini staycation, a few nights away ‘glamping’ in semi-permanent furnished canvas tents in the Wiltshire countryside. It was nice to be out in the fresh air, although the weather was still rather chilly and our tent was only heated by a wood-burning cooking stove, so by the middle of the night it was quite cold, and poor Helen did not particularly enjoy waiting half an hour in the morning for me to get the fire hot enough to boil water for her tea! In fact, Helen unfortunately took on more than her fair share of the childcare during the holiday as I spent quite a lot of time reading and being even more useless than usual. The boys seemed to enjoy the whole adventure very much however, particularly the fact that they had their own little mini wooden house with a bunk-bed inside it, contained within our larger tent structure. At one point we had been considering asking my parents to join us, but my mother’s health has suffered several challenges this year and unfortunately she’d recently had surgery on her foot and was out of action still; in the end it was probably a good thing they hadn’t joined us anyway, as the boys’ mini house had an open roof and they complained if we made too much noise after they had gone to bed, relegating their parents to reading by candle-light by 8pm, something I’m not sure my father would have taken with much humour!

 

In late April we were very pleased to have Helen’s parents come to stay with us in Harrow. I think it also gave them some comfort to be able to relate a little bit more to our lives here now. We discussed with them the possibility of their moving to the UK and living with us, particularly given the way that costs of life for middle class people in South Africa, especially medical insurance costs, have risen enormously and incomes have generally not kept pace with this. At times we do worry quite a bit about their current and future well-being in a country that has very little social safety net and is not particularly kind to people as they age. Although they gave the matter some serious consideration, in the end Helen’s parents realised that for them it made better sense to remain in South Africa where they both have an established life of their own, with work, friends, two other children and several grandchildren. During their visit we also celebrated Helen’s 40^th Birthday and to mark the occasion we had a number of Helen’s relatives over for a lovely gathering. The other half of the celebrations will be in December in South Africa where we’ve made plans to get together with both of Helen’s siblings and their families as well as her parents, in two different places along the coast.

Apart from our staycation I had not really been anywhere this year, so I was quite pleased that we (after agonising over the bewildering range of options available) booked ourselves a week-long holiday in Montenegro at a fully catered resort focused on holidays for families with small children. There was nothing fancy about the place, but the sun shone for the most part, the boys loved the various swimming pools, and we enjoyed being able to drop them off at the kids club for an hour each day and to tag team looking after them so that we could read books and have some long chats. While the buffet meals became a little bit repetitive after a while, it was still great to be able to offer the boys various foods and not to have a struggle on our hands when someone turned their nose up at something different. Helen also managed to get out on one full-day tour of some of the sights of Montenegro, and on another night, we visited a local vineyard, although unfortunately neither the scenery nor the wine was much to write home about.  

School summer holidays are long (amazing how much more parents appreciate teachers by the end of them), and while Helen has done her best to keep all three boys (me included) from driving her crazy, it certainly hasn’t been easy.

More recently we all went to Sweden for just over two weeks, the first part of which we spent 2 nights in the home of a Swedish friend Vania, who I met in South Africa, then two nights with another much older friend Pontus, whom I met in junior school while living in Sweden. We then drove up to Stockholm and stayed in a rented holiday cottage on the Baltic archipelago about 40 minutes from the city. While we were in the area we were able to catch up with old friends Jon and Lynn who moved from London to Sweden several years ago, and also to see another childhood friend of mine Johan, whose two boys are within months of our boys in age and all four seemed to get on very well, playing with a plethora of toys and dancing to Michael Jackson music. We then drove down to the West Coast and spent several nights staying in the holiday home of Johan’s parents, along with my parents and Andrew and Romain and our nephew Ilya. We were all together to celebrate my mother’s birthday, which was nice to be able to do for the first time in a while. Our trip to Sweden included eating lots of local food, and swimming in many lakes and seas (when the weather wasn’t too bad, which unfortunately it was for some of the trip). Helen had both the highs of a day’s sightseeing in Stockholm (while I looked after the boys and did our laundry over several hours in Johan’s rather slow washing machine), and the lows of me shopping for weird Swedish foods that she didn’t like very much, and a miscommunication meaning that on our way to the west coast we had to make an unplanned stop for one night, which we spent in a hostel in the village where I grew up in Sweden. Unfortunately, the bathrooms were shared, which is not ideal when pregnant and wandering the halls in pyjamas in the middle of the night, and our neighbours in the next room were apparently quite noisy (luckily I didn’t notice at all). I think Helen was very relieved to join Andrew and Romain who like to prepare a variety of foods and are much better cooks than I, and our boys love playing with Ilya and had a great time with all the children’s toys in the house.

Our boys have grown a lot in the past year and their personalities continue to develop. Calvin loves to talk loudly and non-stop, and he has a great love of stories and characters from those stories: he seems to have moved on from The Lion King and Peter Pan to Robin Hood (the Disney version where Robin is a fox), the Jungle book, and now his obsession is How To Train Your Dragon. I don’t think our boys always fully follow the stories in these movies, but I try to watch with them the first time and to help them to understand at least some of it (not always easy when Calvin tends to talk over the characters in the movie with his own running commentary). Calvin is very gregarious and seems to make friends readily. He has a phenomenal memory and may also have picked up some of his uncle’s and grandmother’s knack for languages. He is slender and not particularly tall (wrists like his father), but very fast and full of energy. Mackenzie, as appears to be typical of second children, seems to be doing a lot of things much earlier than Calvin – for example he can almost dress himself entirely and is currently potty training. He is still a very enthusiastic eater and can be very good at using his fork and spoon and makes very little mess at mealtimes (maybe because he doesn’t want to miss the food going into his mouth!) Mackenzie is very physical and still loves to be hugged and tickled. He also expresses himself physically, in contrast to Calvin’s tendency to talk, and unfortunately with Mackenzie this includes using violence to make his dissatisfaction or frustration clear. To some extent this may also be that Mackenzie still doesn’t seem to be entirely aware of his own strength – sometimes when he and Calvin end up in disagreement Mackenzie simply sits on Calvin even though he is almost two years younger (there is no more than a few hundred grams of weight between them and Mackenzie continues to have what the Zulus would call ‘umkhaba’ – a paunch traditionally associated with rising prosperity and more senior rank of middle age). He is naughty, but always contrite, at least until next time! We are hoping that Calvin will enjoy his new prep school which starts later this week, and we are also looking forward to meeting other parents in his new class as a way of widening our social circle. I still have significant misgivings about how early they start with serious school in England, and what kind of academic pressures Calvin might face, but he will be one of the older children in the class and he generally gets on very well with teachers and students, so hopefully that will make things a little bit easier for him.

Our considerations of houses and schools now has the added dimension that Helen is expecting our third child, a girl, in November this year. Helen’s pregnancy has been relatively straight-forward, although she is starting to suffer more regular heartburn and it seems that her bump has grown much more readily the third time around, and that has made it a bit harder for her to sleep well (never mind that catching a nap with two other boys running around has not been easy). The National Health Service approach to pregnancy has been interesting to observe, with Helen seeing a completely different person for each of the myriad of appointments, all of which are simply notified by post. As in: you have been given this day and this time, if you want to change it please be prepared to hold on the phone for at least 20 minutes and then wait a month to see anyone else. I have no idea how career-women cope with it, they must have a very sympathetic employer. I have not always been enamoured to find myself saddled with the boys for an entire morning in the middle of the week (school holidays!) even though that is hardly a big ask. It is a remarkably communist system in a way, certainly not one with much personal care, although the actual appointments have been with people who are friendly and competent. Helen continues to handle it all with (mostly) her usual aplomb and I am lucky that she generally just takes things in her stride. I have tried to have some Sundays where I take the boys and give Helen some time off to relax, or head into London and explore. Helen has also very much enjoyed taking part in fairly regular tennis sessions at the courts down at Harrow school, and has started to have the odd girls’ night out with other mums from the boys’ nursery school.

We are happy, but also a bit daunted by the prospect of an enlarged family. In my case perhaps also a twinge regretful that we are going back to square one just as our boys are reaching an age where they might possibly have been able to stay over with grandparents for a night at least! By the time the third one is out of nappies and reasonably independent it will only have been a total of about 8 years of our lives (I’m sure there are some pretty serious offences that carry shorter sentences, but at least the inmates are often highly amusing and remarkably cute!) I remember a quote from Bill Gates at a High School graduation where he told teenagers, ‘your parents weren’t always boring, it was looking after you that made them that way’. Even if what we do has changed, Helen and I both still enjoy meeting new and old friends and having people to share meals and afternoons or evenings with. We’re pretty optimistic that we’ll be able to do that wherever we end up. So there are lots of possible changes coming our way, but lots of exciting adventures too, no doubt. I love hearing from friends far and wide so please do get in touch. And if you’re thinking of a trip to London please do give me a shout as we have spare rooms and enjoy having friends over and catching up.