Feb
28
This is the 34th Sunday night that I have sat down to write a new entry for this blog. 34 weeks, or 65% of a year. Can you believe that time can fly by so fast?
I have been startled this week to see how many more of my friends, family, and ex-colleagues have either left, or are packing up to leave the shores of South Africa. Some have just touched down in Australia, some have paperwork in the process and others are just at that “maybe we should consider this” stage. Either way, I hope that those of you, who fall into any of those categories will read the entries in this blog, find a way to deal with your own situation and ultimately find that place in the sun where you feel that you belong. It’s not always easy and the bad days sometimes sneak along for a ride too, but if you can look back and think that what you are doing, or what you have done will ultimately be for the better, then the good days just seem to overshadow the tougher ones.
It was another crazy, busy week in the Wright household. No matter where you live, the activities that your kids do will ultimately steal up all your spare time, but that is part of the joy of it all. Every day there is something that they need to do, sport to attend, groups to go to, but in the end it is what has made the transition over here so easy for them. Jenna’s gym routine for the competition has been finalised and she is getting so excited about it. We watch her on an almost nightly basis rolling and jumping around the lounge, knocking into the furniture, trying to get those legs straight and shoulders back. Mitchell has started guitar lessons and I am ashamed to say that when he wanted to try it out in SA, I was the one who kind of steered him away from it. He had so much on his plate at the time with all other sports and I didn’t particularly think that Mitchell would take to music all that well. Over here, he just joined the guitar club at school and came home to tell me he was now part of it. The difference is that over here the lessons are during his lunch-break during school hours, so it wasn’t a big deal and wasn’t going to take up any more of his class-time or sports time in the afternoons. He is so excited about these guitar classes though and he is proud of the fact that this is something he went off and did on his own. He honestly feels that this is going to give him even more motivation to do better in it than he even hoped for.
Wednesday night was “parents evening” at Mitchells school and we had allocated slots to meet with each of his subject teachers. We left the school feeling as if we were walking on air. Not 1 teacher could fault Mitchell. They praised his high level of work, his communication standards, and most of all, his impeccable behaviour in class. His English teacher commented that she can quite clearly see that he has come from a very different discipline structure to many of the other boys in the class. You have to wonder why it is like that. Why a country that is so strong and so powerful and so sought after in the world, is failing its children by disempowering them with the very rules that they hope to protect them with.
On Saturday we took a drive to the Lakeside Retail Park in Essex which is only about a 40min drive from our house. Essex is the county next door to Kent, just north and across the Thames River. To get to Essex from Kent you take the Dartford Crossing. 
The Dartford Crossing is made up of the Dartford Tunnel (which runs under the river) and carries the traffic from Kent into Essex, and the Dartford Bridge (which is a 137m high cable stayed bridge) which carries about 150,000 vehicles per day in the opposite direction, from Essex into Kent. On days when the weather is bad, the bridge gets closed and the tunnel converts into a dual carriageway.
The Lakeside shopping centre is a huge shopping centre and while we were driving through the car park, I laughed as I heard the SatNav say … “continue 0.2 miles (0.3km)and enter the round-about (traffic circle), enter the round-about and take
second exit”… This was IN the parking lot! Can you imagine how big the parking lot is, for the SatNav to give instructions like that? Well, to the absolute delight of Mitchell and Jenna we found a Spur Steakhouse overlooking the lake. We stood outside for a few seconds and I was almost too afraid to go inside just in case it was different to the ones back home and we would all be disappointed, but as we pushed back the door, that indisputable smell of the Spur came wafting towards us. Everything was authentic Spur. 100% the genuine deal! It seems like such a small thing to be going on about in this blog, but it is just one of those moments when we could experience a little part of SA using all our senses. We could smell, taste, hear, see, and feel a little part of something from so far away; just the way we remember it.
This week I saw my first real spring bulbs sprouting out from the grass in a park. Beautiful little patches of crocuses in orange and purple, daffodils which still need to open and show all that makes them so beautiful, and a little wave of white snowdrops on the undulating ground, 
beneath a tree.
It was the most beautiful walk – as they always are – those walks through English parks, with ducks and birds and dogs doing funny tricks, with squirrels that peer at you through a fence, where the trees are starting to change, where you feel like you can experience “the whole world” in such a short space and time. I look forward to my next spring flower walk when I hope that a swathe of colour will be waiting for me.
By the time you are reading this blog it will be the 1st of March and forgetting all sorts of things like when the official equinox occurs or when daylight saving stops and ends, it’s just a nice day to wish everyone in the Northern Hemisphere…. Happy Spring Day.
