Just noticed that it’s exactly three years since I started writing this blog (or it was when I started writing this post). When you consider that I have trouble sticking to anything, I reckon that’s something else. When I began this blog I was living in Nailsworth in Gloucestershire and had recently made the decision (along with my missus, natch) to emigrate to Australia. That decision was much easier for us, because I’ve held Australian citizenship since birth on account of having an aussie dad. So the spouse visa was just a case of form filling and an agonising five day wait!

That was then ...

That was then ...

My first blog post was made after a day at the Bristol Ice Rink with my wife and son and the sister in law and her daughter. Yes, it’s a pretty bitter post, but I genuinely have a lot of affection for Bristol and the Southwest of England in general. I was brought up in commuterville, 30 miles north of London, but found Bath, Bristol, Cornwall and the Cotswolds far more to my liking and made them my home for all of my adult life post-college. My all-time favourite band – Massive Attack are Bristolians and I love pretty much everything the ‘Bristol Massive’ produced, from Roni Size to Portishead and all stops in between. If our family return to the UK (you never know what’s down the line), we’ll almost certainly head for exactly the same spot we left from.

So I’m sitting here wondering if my feelings for England have changed since I began this blog and I have to say, in all honesty, probably not. I still hate grey skies and drizzle, I couldn’t give a rats-arse if there are 10 different supermarket chains, I feel no great desire to drive a car on roads constantly saturated with traffic, I do not miss the endlessly downbeat furrowed-brow UK media, I still think the education system has its priorities seriously out of whack with its focus on testing and test results, I don’t miss waiting eight months for a summer that ends up being cold and wet, I feel no great yearning to visit an out-of-town carpet warehouse, I do not miss endless piles of dogshit adorning every pavement and kerb, I particularly don’t miss the colourful baggies of dogshit which dog owners inexplicably tie to trees and fences along country walks, I don’t miss Little Chefs or Golden Eggs, I don’t miss Dixons, I don’t miss realising that 30% of the shops on a town’s high street are charity shops, I don’t miss the meager run-down sports facilities, I don’t miss knowing with all certainty that I will spend 20 minutes just looking for a car parking space when I arrive anywhere, I don’t miss walking up to an ATM and discovering (at best) gob and (at worst) vomit all over the screen and keys, I don’t miss public toilets so rank you have to hover your arse above the bog while crapping, I don’t miss Heathrow, I don’t miss the M4 and its motorway service stations, I don’t miss that feeling of malevolence when you walk past a group of teenagers, I don’t miss the British abroad and most of all, I don’t miss my wife’s parents.

Hmmm – pretty long list that. So here in no particular order is what I do miss. That rare warm day of the summer when you get to sit in the beer garden of the boozer, snow, M&S Sticky Chilli Chicken and, of course, good friends. Regular readers of this blog will know that I don’t much like Australian TV or radio, but I can get everything I need online, so that’s no biggie.

Three years ago, we were in the process of planning our move to Oz. In hindsight we were very lucky to move when we did, because the house we bought four years previously for £87k eventually sold for £225k. Without the insane British property market we would not have been able to emigrate – it paid of some fairly sizeable UK debts, it funded the move, it bought all the furnishings in our house, it bought an almost new 4WD car and a 25% deposit on our house. I wonder what that house is worth now, in the current financial climate. Like most of us, I suspect, I’m very hypocritical – I strongly believe that houses are overpriced (both in the UK and in Oz) but I’m more than happy to walk away with a £138k profit just for living somewhere for a couple of years.

When you’re in the process of emigrating, it’s far too easy to become obsessed with the whole process. I have no doubt whatsoever that I bored friends and family shitless with talk of Australia and it’s a testament to their goodwill that none of them (well, none except the wife’s parents) said anything. I remember pouring over the real estate supplements my mother sent over and scouring the Internet for information on the towns we were interested in living in. I recall watching anything related to Australia on the TV, including terribly out-of-date Australian property shows on the Real Estate channel. I listened to ABC radio on the Internet and adorned my computer desktop with the image of Sydney harbour which is now the backdrop to this blog. I joined the British Expats forum and posted endlessly, arguing the toss about what life would be like in Australia with people who’d lived there for a decade.

So was it what I expected? Pretty much, yes. I’ve reinvented myself since I moved here and have tried to get involved in stuff that interests me. I joined the local surf life saving club almost by accident – Jack was in nippers and they were short-handed one day and I asked if I could get in the water to help only to be told that if I didn’t have my Bronze Medallion – no. So I did my bronze medallion and became a surf lifesaver. Then I joined the committee and now I’m the club’s registrar. We couldn’t afford to live right on the coast in the UK, but I’d have loved to have joined the RNLI and get involved in that. I’m pleased that Jack’s growing up in a beach town – on rainy days here the kids look not to their Playstation, but the surf, because they know that when it’s raining the waves tend to be that little bit glassier.

I have no idea really of how the move has affected Jack. We can only make guesses about how he’d be maturing if he was still attending Amberley Parochial School in Gloucestershire. But I’ve made my views on the subject of the British school system clear and I hope that he’s becoming a well-rounded young man here. The missus says she hasn’t been homesick at all, though I’m sure she’s had the odd moment here and there.

... this is now.

... this is now.

So much has happened since I started writing this blog that it takes moments of sober realisation like this to reflect on it all. When you start out on this emigration lark it seems like a pipedream that won’t ever happen. Then it happens and you’re on a roller coaster. You wash up in Australia and spend some time finding your feet, making friends, working out the system(s), how things tick. And before you know it, it’s routine again. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it of course, just that if you do, you’d be very foolish not to take advantage of all the things Australia has to offer and instead just plop back into your old life, 12,000 miles from where it was before.

Who knows where the next three years will take us.