Getting ready to be a bloke in the UK

Well, next week we'll be leaving Kenya for the rest of the year, and establishing ourselves in the UK for nearly six months. However, still being the same person, I might carry on and post some random musings here now and then.

An interesting thing about this process is how the well-established expats and others react when we say this. The conversation goes something like this:

"We'll be going back to the UK for six months"
"Are you coming back?"
"Well, I said for six months, so that would imply that we were" (OK, I'm not quite that direct)/ "We have return tickets"

When I question people about this, they say that when people leave for good, they often say that they'll be back soon, and often intend to, but stuff happens, and people find something else to do . The fact that we're holding on to our house is taken as stronger evidence of our intent to return than the return tickets.

The longer we've stayed here, the more people have treated us as... well, 'real' people. I suppose 'real' here is opposed to 'transient'. It gets tiring investing in relationships with people who keep on leaving, so I can understand that others, for whom Kenya is home, treat newcomers -not exactly with caution - but with a little reserve.

Getting ready to be in the UK is interesting as well. Wonderful friends have been helping us to find a house to rent, which seems to be going through OK, though the credit rating agency is being rather slow - when you come from abroad you just don't tick the boxes in a standard way. Our youngest two have spent more of their lives here than in the UK - the youngest was barely one when we left. So doing things like going to school in England will be new. And getting places in schools has been interesting as well. We've abandoned trying for the schools they would have gone to if we'd stayed there, and settled for ones that seem reasonable, rather then running the risk of having them going to different schools in different directions. We've been dealing with two different councils in doing this, and one of them has outshone the other - we'll forgive them for asking to see our UK visa before granting us a school place.

So, overall, quite looking forward to reconnecting with friends, church and family, but not glad to be leaving here. But I think the stresses on the children are greater than on us.