We had a really good, informative and in some ways, unexpected, trip to England in June. Our flight was uneventful, and we landed on time at Gatwick. Once we'd been through immigration control we immediately found a newsagent at the airport and bought sim cards for our phones. We settled on EE cards as they had a good deal for international calls and we wanted to be able to contact our family in SA every day. Next stop was Europ cars to pick up our hire car and then we were finally on the road to Send in Surrey, to the home of our close friends.
It was at this point that I had my first "wobbly". We have visited the UK pretty frequently in the last 20 years, so if you had asked me before this whether I understood what it would be like to live there I would have said a definite "Yes" - I mean I've stayed in the home of my friends regularly, acted like a local, visited many supermarkets, shopped up a storm, been to London regularly, even spent a week on a narrowboat. England feels like home. Right? Wrong. On that drive from Gatwick Airport to Send, I suddenly got hit by a wave of sheer panic. I kept thinking "WHAT are we thinking, planning to move here? I can't do this! I really, really can't do this! I don't even want to do this!"
I've thought about it a lot and I've come to the conclusion that, in the past when we've come to England, I've WANTED it to feel foreign, I've embraced the differences in culture, accents, money, food and scenery - when you go on an overseas holiday you WANT it to be different from home, that's the very reason that you travel. BUT when you are going to a place with the intention of living there.... you want it to feel like home, you want it to feel familiar and comfortable. At that moment all my eyes were seeing were the things that were different, unusual and unexpected. The strange accents, strange bank notes, strange customs and ... strange SIM cards... were an assault on my senses that I really didn't want or need right then. It took a couple of days before I managed to re-discover the enthusiasm I had originally felt about the big move.
After spending a few days with our friends in Send, we set off to Tring. This is where the next unexpected thing happened. Before we left home, we had pretty much settled on Tring as the place we were going to live. Our visit to Tring went very well, we found a lovely school for our granddaughter, liked the look of the place and all was good.
Then, we took a drive to High Wycombe as that is the town where our daughter, Paula, has been accepted to university to do her Masters. As we were driving to High Wycombe we past through an area on the outskirts of the town... something about it appealed to me... REALLY appealed to me.... so I mentioned that it was lovely, my daughter, Roxy, then piped up from the backseat that she thought it was amazing.... silence.... eventually I said "maybe it would be a nice place to settle?".... silence.... Roxy then said that she thought it would be a lovely place to live. My poor, long-suffering, husband Grant then said.... " you guys can't be serious?!" Rox and I shot a look at each other and then gleefully told him "we are!" Major change of plan! We found a coffee shop, hauled out our phones, found schools, parks, pubs, areas of interest.... all the things that had taken me months to investigate at home, we managed to do in about half an hour in the coffee shop! We had a good look around, visited a school, had lunch in a pub, and decided that this was our place. Even Grant had to agree :-)
