We’re now back in the UK.
Everything was going smoothly having moved back into our rental house on Friday, until disaster struck late last night…All at once water started pouring through the smoke alarm in the kitchen, triggering both alarms in the house. We hot-footed it out of there back to my stepdad’s house and have yet to return (as I type, I’m waiting for Jonathan to get back from picking up a rental car so we can head back there and check the house is still standing).
Pretty sure it’s a leak in the bathroom somewhere which is one of those all-plumbed-in, nicely-hidden affairs (that is, until you need to do something to it) which will no doubt require extensive work and cost a small fortune.
Just what we need after a hideously expensive month in Dubai and the additional set-up costs of coming back to the UK (TV licence, phone connection + line rental, council tax, buying bare essentials which we thought we’d kept but obviously given away in a generous fit of “we won’t need this ever again” etc. etc.).
Coming back to the UK has felt, and still feels like a step backwards but I know that it’s infinitely the most sensible thing to do for us and the baby (incidentally, my stomach seems to have exploded within the last 2 days and I now most definitely have a bump, odd!).
Several people have asked why we decided to come back here instead of having the babe somewhere else; there’s several reasons which include cost, language, the FX rate of GBP being so shocking, being able to stay somewhere indefinitely should we need to, without worrying about visas plus the fact that we still have a few things to sort out here – and now is definitely a good time to do that.
We’re also going to use the time to test out some business and marketing ideas in preparation for the next phase of location independent living avec baby, so my attitude is changing…we’ve come back so we can move forwards.