So that's that then. The period 7 November 2008 - 6 April 2023 I spent overseas as an expat in Dubai and now I am home to get on with the next stage of my life with Jane and the boys. You can want for a thing for too long so that it becomes in danger of verging on the anti-climatic. Is this it ? Ultimately, the act of coming home is a plane ride with too much luggage. Your first morning home Radio 4 is still just a series of domestic problems of little relevance and then as you step outside the heavens will open. The skies will literally rain on your homecoming parade around your garden. There is no rising sound track as you turn down the lane. You have to imagine that. I did though shed a few tears through the day. Relief is the overwhelming sense of it. Relief and a sense of what's next.
During the last year of "hiatus" I have been able to travel to South Africa and New Zealand with Jane which was superb. I hung out in Vienna catching up on some military history (another hobby) and also went diving (another hobby !) in Thailand from a boat for a week with my younger son Sam who had timed his gap year perfectly. I have torn the guts out of life once I was let go from my law firm. I have been everywhere I have wanted and done anything I wanted and why not ? I am a firm believer that this is not a rehearsal. I cannot remember what legal matter I was working on even three years ago but I can remember most crops I have planted, most dives I have done, toy soldiers I have painted and places I have visited. Don't believe that even rock stars don't live for the weekend. Rod Stewart has a train set he had to take on tour.
So finally after a year of complete and utter self indulgence interspersed with a bit of boredom and frustration at not being able to come home immediately it was time to say goodbye to close friends and jump on a plane. A leaving lunch at the famous Dubai Offshore Sailing Club was arranged by some good friends who are jolly tars.
We have already passed the baton with friendships back to the UK and most people we know from Dubai have already sat on the terrace at Oaklands with Jane or both of us or lit a fire in the telly room or dug into a pie in the kitchen. One or two close friends are starting to migrate to not so far away or indeed beat us home which is just wonderful.
The relationship between an expat and "home" and "country" is a strange one. Where do you want to end up is the eternal supper party question ? Do you want to be in the UK or will you slide away to a warmer bolt hole in Portugal or Italy ? Has your blood thinned sufficiently so that you are ruined for the English climate for good - global warming not withstanding ? Have your genes regressed or mutated to those of a lizard ? Where on earth is your home ? Where do you belong by climate or inclination ?
I have had far too long to think about these questions but I am quite clear now about some of my answers. You have to build a home. To build a home you have to love a place. To love a place means investing in it....and Investing in a place is building a home. So you do it and you fake it until you make it. What do homely people do - they do homely things ! They plant, they decorate, they explore locally, they join in and they entertain.
I have talked to Jane over the years (and this was an idea picked up and observed from other expats) about the difference between living "in a place" and "on a place". When you live on a place you do not put down roots. You do not join anything or learn too much or interact with the place to any meaningful degree. You are capable of being washed off it's surface with ease. Nobody notices as you slide away and you leave little evidence that you have ever been there and the place leaves few marks on you. It is less painful to move but less rewarding in the transiting. I had one acquaintance years back - the ultimate peripatetic couch lizard who firmly believed that his whole life should fit in one bag. I cannot remember him ever making me a coffee or offering to share a tin of beans. He is now divorced.
Living like that you are moss on a corrugated plastic roof. Unloved and neither welcome or able to "be welcoming". Isn't life and a place a two way process - do you not have to live at a place and at people as well ? We did not treat Dubai like couch lizards or moss and as a result we went through the drawn out process of uprooting by taking great earthy clumps of the place with us in the form of goodwill, friends, memories, ideas and values. We all have good healthy root-balls in need of a new deep hole and a good soak. I now feel as if I am being craned in at last, a well travelled tree in need of a good aspect for a final resting place. . Hopefully that's it now for good.
The same question then applies once more - how do you build a home and life in every sense of the word ? You invest and you put down roots. It's over four years since I started this blog - mostly carried on by Jane in latter years. Jane has been able to build her beds, take time to really observe and let the place get under her nails. She is firmly rooted and "feels" the place and is in tune with it - she has firmly taken with a mitochondrial net of emotions and ideas linking her to its trees, corners, seasons and colours. She is a volunteer gardener at a local estate and delivering leaflets for the Shropshire National Gardens Scheme (Worth a nosy if you have never tried it). I have some catching up to do but there is time. I have joined the local toy soldier/war games club which is a start. I will find some local birdwatchers in due course and an allotment or vegetable club.
The original plan was to quit work all altogether and to move toward small holding and that "Good Life". Well that may not be financially viable with the current state of gas bills and two boys still at university. I have no immediate plans though to get a job. We still have to eat if I am going to be so financially irresponsible so I start with potatoes. This time last year I planted Red Duke of York.
Potatoes seem apt. Twelve nicely "chitted" Red Duke of York seeds potatoes fill up half the space in one bed. The overwhelming view is that chitting is a good thing. This happens in egg boxes in the light on the window sill in the utility room. You should reduce to 2-4 small shoots from the eyes. from the bigger more bulbous end of the tuber. A half a dozen Blue Danube (a new variety on us) and similar count of Pink Fir Apple make up this years new potato cast.
This is it. This is essentially what I have dreamed of for something like twenty-five years. I am 54 in a couple of weeks and went to work thirty years ago in the law. I met Jane when I was 29 in London and very soon I can remember the conversations in our flat on Clapham Old Town Square in the evening turning to existential questions about what we should actually be doing. Ironically I met Jane at a party in the Cotswolds. Some mutual friends by a circuitous route had taken a cottage in Charlbury to escape from London every weekend. Hugh Fearnley Whittingstones' first series of River Cottage was airing on Channel Four the year we met and every weekend we would jump on trains or dive into the old Volvo to go and find a slightly larger patch of green. Jane's parents were living near the MaLvern Hills with their veterinary place practice in a five hundred year old extended country cottage and mine were building their forever home with a Chelsea designer garden in Constable Country in Suffolk. Life seemed like an endless dash to the country as that was where we preferred to be and especially once the children were born. I stared in envy at allotments out of train windows as I visited the courts of the UK and at the long borders of country houses at the weekend. I think we rapidly fell out of love with London with its child care nightmares and crowded tubes. We spent every penny we had snatching at happiness and worked like demons. I bird watched an awful lot to compensate for the concrete in my daily view. I would disappear off to Erith and explore the lower Thames with its skeins of geese and flitting waders. A Dickensian water colour world where I could breathe and had space. I even bird watched at work as Pergerine Falcon's took up residence in the Barbican.
I always had the nagging sense that I needed to be living somewhere else. We had a garden in London but the soil was dry. We scratched out a few beds. I had my first go with Dahlias. The move to Manchester and then the move overseas to Dubai - always the idea of a place in the country where I could grow food was on hold. I wouldn't live the last 25 years though any other way as it has been rich in other ways although this final move for me does now feel like it has been a long time in coming. It has always been the plan, our plan. Consequently I owe it a good go. The price of gas is the price of gas. Vegetable seed is not expensive.
I am now home and jobless. Oaklands needs another groundsman. The pay is fresh air and a good night's sleep. Our final shipment of furniture arrives from Dubai this morning. A busy time and thats enough philosophical posting for now. I will post up first crops, first birds, first bits of maintenance and get on with it.
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