Wrightaboutnow.com

Ok, let’s start with an apology for the 24hr delay in getting this blog out. Today (Monday) is a Bank Holiday in the UK and we spent yesterday and this morning in Saunderton and Oxford with Steven Heggie and his family. Yesterday we walked to the Hellfire Caves near West Wycombe. (www.hellfirecaves.co.uk). The walk took us along a beautiful ridge that overlooks pretty valleys on either side. The caves themselves really are quite amazing and no matter how brave you try to be, when someone is standing behind you, peering over your shoulder and you don’t know they are there and you turn around to walk and its dark and scary… let me tell you, even the cutest face can give you a fright! Hahaha.

This morning we visited Oxford. I have wanted to take the rest of the family there since we got here, because for me, Oxford is the most beautiful city I have ever seen in the UK. There is just something different about Oxford. The buildings, the architecture, the people on bikes, the spires, the tree-lined streets and baskets of flowers, the parks, the cafés, the knowledge and the museums, the neatly mowed lawns of all the colleges, the streams, the deer, the boats and rivers, old doors, new ones, huge gates, quaint little blue doors, funny little stone faces that glare out from the architecture. It all comes together in one very pretty, breathtaking place. Steven once said to me: “I think two days in Oxford will be too much, there really isn’t much to see or do”. Not true for me, I am afraid! I could spend weeks in Oxford and never get tired of it and now I am glad the rest of the family can see why I rambled on and on about visiting it.

The overwhelming highlight of our week was the arrival of our container on Tuesday morning. The shipping company told us to expect it late in the morning or even possibly early afternoon. I imagined that the truck had to drive all the way to us from the port of Tilbury, so I thought their estimate was probably about right. So there I was lazing in bed, far too late for a weekday morning when I heard a truck outside. It couldn’t possibly be ours, right? I mean we had waited so long already. Then the doorbell rang! Well, there were the 4 Wrights in a scramble to the door, to the shower and to our stuff! Mitchell and Jenna were so eager to open all their boxes from home and Mitchell needed no invitation to get into the truck and remove his bike himself. I thought there was no way that we would ever fit all the stuff that we had brought into our little house over here, but lo and behold, we can even park the car in the garage now. I cannot resign myself to the idea of scraping ice off of the car in the coming winter mornings. So, come hell or high water, with a squeeze and a shove and a few clever packing ideas, everything finally fitted in so that the car could fit into the garage! Of course now that there is furniture in the house I cannot see the spiders and although some might think that is a good thing… the fact that I cannot see them, doesn’t mean that they are not there.

As for our broadband internet… Well, finally our router arrived in the mail on Friday. Remember, the first go-live date that they gave us was the 23^rd of July. From then on they started to push out the date every time we reached it. The landline phone was installed weeks ago, through the same company. All they had to do was send us the router and make us live… but as I write this blog we are still not live on broadband. The best part is that they sent us one of those “Rate our Service” emails. Can you imagine the cheek? It was just what I had been waiting for! Anyway, watch this space and perhaps, with a bit of luck our next blog will be published on our broadband line! [Yeah, right!]

It was my brother’s birthday this week and the first time I have ever had to phone and wish him from such a long way away. Talking to him on the phone was both wonderful and sad, but knowing that I am going back to SA soon (even though it is only for 1 week), made it a little easier. I am glad that I don’t take people and relationships for granted. It’s moments like birthdays when you are far away from someone that makes you realise that above everything else come the people in your life.

On Friday we met with a lady from a new little school that we found just up the road from us. Jenna has already been accepted into St Augustine’s CPS in Tunbridge Wells, but now that Mitchell will be travelling to school for free on the bus, there is no reason why we would want to do the morning school run in the traffic to Tunbridge Wells. So, we have applied for her to go to the new school. It is just a stone’s throw from us out here in the suburbs and the school is in a far prettier setting. It overlooks a beautiful valley with trees and fields. The problem at the moment is that the schools here are all still closed for the holidays so there is nobody around to talk to. Most of the schools go back this week and our application will go to the governors of the school for consideration.  If we get this one passed in our favour, then we will have completely won all our victories for our chosen schools.

One of the things that I love about living over here is the sense of community that you feel with your neighbours. We were lucky enough to have fantastic neighbours back in SA, but we could so easily get tangled up in our own lives and then all you’d see for weeks was a smile and a wave. Faith, the lady who lives next door pops over every now and again with plums from her garden, or other kinds of treats for the kids. She has all the good ideas for jams and preserves and recipes for everything. She sometimes just stops in to say how nice it is to hear Mitchell and Jenna riding their bikes and giggling in the street. John and Val, across the road have made my children feel very welcome and Jenna loves to go over and see the cats that Val fosters, until good homes can be found for them. Then there is Matt and Pat, an elderly couple up the road who get hold of Mitchell when we rides past on his bike and all they want to do is talk about South Africa, how we are settling in, and to tease Mitchell about his support for Manchester United.

On Friday night we went and got Ice-creams (with Flake in, by the way) and walked around the Castle. Everyone else in town seemed to be snuggled up in cosy restaurants and coffee shops, peering out the windows at us, eating ice-creams in the autumn breeze.

A chilly, early morning wind begins to blow on a regular basis now and the leaves are changing and falling to the ground. We seldom think of “The Move” as such, anymore. Life just feels natural and as school starts this week, Mitchell and Jenna will each begin yet another whole new sub-adventure of this big journey.

This is Kerry Wright!

Before I start the new blog for this week, let me just say how nice it is to get feedback each week from readers of this blog. I really do appreciate the comments and emails that I receive about it. I guess there are many reasons for having a blog, mostly I would like Jenna and Mitchell to read it in about 10 years time and remember all the things we went through as a family in this move. I also sometimes wonder if I am also using it as a coping mechanism (not that I would consciously admit to needing one), but when you are forced to sit down each week and reflect on how things are going, it makes you realise that it’s all pretty good and that the good times really do outweigh the frustrations, it makes you see that each day you take a step forward and notch up another victory. It can be something as simple as discovering new things to eat, learning to read the bus timetable, or having your son take a photo of you filling the car with petrol.

This is my second-last blog of the summer months. Next week is the last weekend of August and my official end of summer. In the past week we have noticed a subtle change in the air. I suspect that the geese that I have been watching gathering each evening have gone now, as I have not seen them for a few days or heard them overhead. The morning air also has a crisp new feel to it, but the days are still hot and balmy, cloudless and still. The trees are starting to shed their leaves a lot more now and some of them are changing into beautiful colours. I imagine that the autumn colours will become quite a talking point in my blog in the coming weeks. Autumn is my favourite season of the year and now that I am in a country where the autumn colours are more noticeable than in SA, I think I am going to relish in the photography moments that will present themselves over here.

All the fields around our house have now been harvested. This has been a wonderful new experience for Mitch and Jenna to watch. They have been out in the fields watching the harvester shredding up the fields, sorting out the crop from the stalks and loading it into the trailers pulled by the biggest tractors we have seen.  It is going to be wonderful for them to watch the entire process over the year, from crop to harvest, ploughing and replanting and being able to see it as a complete cycle.

Mike completed his company induction in Newbury this past week and returned home with a new spring in his step, a new confidence about his business model, the support that he will get from the company and most importantly that he is accepted as a South African businessman over here. Some things that he mentioned from the induction that struck him the most was that if they stood up to leave the conference room they had to put their suit jackets back on and all the businessman wrote with fountain pens (of course Mike had a ball-point pen!).

This week Mike’s brother, Peter and his family from Malawi were here. They too have two children, so Mitchell and Jenna had a good week of fun with their cousins. Jenna and Jodie are like little twins and they are inseparable. Mitchell and Bradley are like too loud little African boys, and that’s just what they are. They played cricket, the girls skipped and jumped and played hiding-go-seek. It was fantastic to watch them, along with Tracy’s two (Kirstin and James) all just having good old loud, screaming, outdoor fun. For those of you who don’t know, Mike’s siblings are Peter (from Malawi), Tracy (in the next village to us), and Andrew (back in SA). Peter is also married to a Kerry so we have two Kerry Wrights in the same family.

On Wednesday afternoon I took Mitchell and Jenna to see G-Force (3D) at the Odeon theatre in Tunbridge Wells. We each got a funky pair of 3D glasses to wear and then the fun began. Objects looked like they were floating in the middle of the theatre, like they were flying towards us, that we couldn’t help but duck out of the way. A few times in the movie I saw Jenna reach out her hand as if to grasp something that appeared to be flying around the room. I have seen 3D movies before with old cardboard and plastic glasses and clearly less technology than this movie had in it.

Mitchell is thoroughly enjoying playing golf over here. He bought his own set of clubs just after we arrived and he does chores each week to earn enough to make sure that he can either go hit 50 balls at the driving range or to play the 9 hole practice green that runs around the perimeter of the driving range (both cost £3.50). I drop him off and fetch him about an hour and half later. He has now started to collect all the driving range balls that he finds on the 9 hole course and return them to the office. The owner then lets him hit them out onto the range for free.

On Saturday we went into Tunbridge Wells and bought Mitchells school uniform. He looks so dashing in it and he is very excited about starting school. I have noticed that Mitchell has become incredibly loving around us lately. He cuddles up with us on the couch or just looks for a hug whenever he can. Firstly I think it is a wonderful time and I know that it will not last forever. Sometimes I think that it feels like a big goodbye before he heads off into the teenage years and mom and dad all of a sudden are longer that important, but I also think it might be his way of dealing with the fears that he faces. He faces a new school in a new country, with a new syllabus, new teachers, and no friends to start with. So I think that he is finding a comfortable place in a fearful time, but I know that he will be ok. As I said in a previous blog, I cannot believe how resilient children are at a time like this. So for now, I will relish those little hugs and kisses, because I know that they are helping him to deal with some of his fears, but mostly I know that they will not last forever.

Now, I have a story to share with all of you that I have pondered over the past two days. I couldn’t make up my mind if I was going to write about it here, but you know what… if you are going to read this blog then sometimes it is going to come with a little bit more insight into our lives than perhaps you had wished for. ha ha ha [superemotions file="icon_smile.gif" title="Smile"] ! On Saturday morning I had a bumble bee in my knickers! Yes, that s right, while I was wearing them, and it made its way to the lowest point it could find and buzzed and bumbled around with me dancing the jig, screaming and trying to grab it so that I could squash it. It was one of those big fat fluffy looking black and yellow bees that you see illustrated in children’s story books. I don’t know if they normally sting, but fortunately this one didn’t. Mikes very comforting words on the situation were: “Well now, that adds a whole new meaning to the phrase…Having a bee in your bonnet?” Now you have to be wondering how the bee got there in the first place…

The rest of this week was made up of meeting Lauren and Ken (an ex-South African family who live on the farm next to Tracy), playing another round of ten-pin bowling, enjoying way too many barbeques, getting confirmation that our container arrives on Tuesday and finally, on Friday, getting music back into my soul (thank you!).

This is Kerry Wright!

The days became weeks and the weeks are quickly becoming months. Life is settling into a lovely comfortable pattern over here, something like the harvested fields, I guess. We are all still wondering what happened to the homesick feeling. Did it pass by when we were sleeping one night, or is it still coming? Are we going to experience it at all, or are we blissfully just living through it unaware? I am happy that we haven’t felt homesick yet because it probably means that we made this move for the right reasons, we did it only once we had prepared enough, and that our family is a strong enough team to hold each other together.

This week started with a downer but ended on a multi-level high. I suppose that’s what most people would wish for in any given week. At the beginning of the week we got a letter from our potential broadband internet providers to say that we would no longer be going live on the 4^th of August like they had promised (by the way, we got the letter after the 9^th) and that we will now only go live on the 29^th of August. That will be about 8 weeks after we ordered it. So, to all of you that are asking when we will be live on Skype… just hang in there, we are wondering too.

On Tuesday Mike and I travelled through to Maidstone for the final appeal to get Mitchell into a Kent Grammar school. An independent panel weighs up the submissions of the school, which in this case was based on the fact that they were full, with the need for Mitchell to be allowed to attend the  grammar school. We put our best case forward, but at the end of the day it wasn’t emotion that mattered, but rather the facts of the case. The school technically had 2 positions vacant in the Year 7 class and although the school would have preferred to keep those 2 spaces open, the panel decided that Mitchell should be admitted to the school. So, one of the highlights to end our week on  was when we received a letter on Saturday to say that when the new school year starts in September, Mitchell will be attending Tunbridge Wells Grammar School for Boys. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunbridge_Wells_Grammar_School_for_Boys). This is something we have worked hard to achieve in this move and it is indeed one of our sweetest victories. We took a drive to the school this afternoon as the sun was setting over the sports fields. The gates were open so we were able to drive in and see a lot of the fields and facilities that the school has to offer.

On Wednesday Mike wrote another exam in Brighton. He has a number of them to write. Some are for the company itself and some of them are for him to get his UK licence, to be able to give investment advice over here. We all drove down to Brighton to spend the day at the beach. It was a beautiful early morning drive through the countryside, down narrow roads where the trees form tunnels over the roads and the early morning sunlight shone through the leaves. It was one of those picture-postcard moments, but on those narrow country roads you cannot stop to take photos. We passed through a tunnel along the way and when we exited on the other side there stood one of those large metal masts that hold up the electrical wires, and Jenna commented from the back of the car that we could have just passed through the Channel Tunnel and that electrical mast could indeed be the Eiffel Tower. Parts of Brighton reminded us of Port Elizabeth and the beach-front reminded us a lot of Durban. Slap-bang in the middle of the world famous Brighton pier we found none-other than a South African shop, complete with droë wors and koeksisters.  Brighton was a fun, crazy mixed-up day where we rode roller-coasters, went bowling, watched wing-walkers on aeroplanes, I had a seagull sit on my head and we got our first UK parking fine (£50). It was also a day where I started to question this whole pebble beach concept. We found an area where the pebbles were a bit thin, and with just a little bit of digging, guess what you find? Sea sand! Also, that whole coastline is made of chalk, so the mysterious question remains… Where did those pebbles come from? I have my theory that they were put there to stop the wind from blowing the sea sand into people’s faces, and a very factually-correct friend of mine added a theory to the mix, about the French skimming stones across the English Channel, but for now, YOU DECIDE…!

A lot of thought and dinner-time discussion this week, has gone into whether or not I would be going back to South Africa for my high schools 20 year reunion. By the time I leave, I would only have been here about 11 weeks and with the money that one ticket to SA costs, the whole family could go on holiday somewhere over here. But in the end, rightly or wrongly, I have decided to go. Linda (my longest standing friend, my bridesmaid, my “sister from other parents”) will be flying back from the USA on the same day. In a mail to the reunion organising team she wrote: “Keep a seat for Kerry and I, we are coming home.” So, for the first time in many years it is going to be: “The girls are back in town” and we are SO looking forward to it.

The other highlight for the end of our week was a visit from Steven Heggie and his family. Duncan and Meg stayed over with us on Saturday evening. Duncan was a very welcome friend for Mitchell and Jenna and a good time for them to learn about England from one of their own. It also gave them a chance to tell Duncan stories from their school back home and to compare notes. It was interesting to stand back and listen to them chatting about things at the dinner table.  Jenna has been missing her dogs so much and having Meg around to play with, gave her hope that someday she can get another pet on this side. Today our two families took a walk (in the beautiful sunny Kent weather) to the pub just up the road from us where we sat and had lunch in the garden. Every visit from friends and family over here brings a wealth of much appreciated advice and discussions that help to answer some of our questions and to alleviate some of our fears. This visit was a wonderful end to an exciting week.

So with or without our broadband, with or without our container, we have family and friends over here who are making it a little bit difficult to feel homesick, even if we wanted to.

Mike leaves tomorrow for a week in Newbury, my brother in-law, Peter, and his family from Malawi arrive, and we live in hope that a huge truck will pull up outside our house with a container on the back… but more about those stories in next week’s blog.

For now, this is a smiling, Kerry Wright!

Firstly, welcome to our new blog site: www.wrightaboutnow.com. There is so much that I want to add to this site in the next 2 weeks. I will upload some photos to the gallery and intersperse the stories with photos. At the moment we are still not on broadband, so if I want to upload photos to the net, I have to travel a few miles across town to use the internet at my sister-in-laws pub, The Hare and Hound, in Bidborough. There have been a few days lately when I have started question whether I am going to have enough to write about each week, then a week like this one comes along and I start to wonder if one blog will be enough…

Monday was scheduled to be the day our container arrived in Tilbury harbour. From the day we left SA we had been told that our container would arrive in the UK on Monday the 3^rd August. We called the shipping company on Monday and got confirmation from the agents that the ship would dock later that afternoon, but that it would take about 2/3 weeks for it to clear customs. Then, on Friday morning (5 days after the ship was due) we got a letter from the shipping agents to say that our ship will now only dock on Monday the 10^th (tomorrow). Well, what more can we do, but just wait? We have now been “camping out” since the 15^th of June when our container was packed back home. If anything, it has taught us that we can actually live with just a few meagre possessions.

If I had to find 2 words to describe this week, I would have to go with “hot air”. The weather in Kent has given us perpetual sunny days with blistering hot temperatures, the eagles at the wildlife park used the thermals to soar high into the sky, but most of all because this was the week of hot-air balloons. On Tuesday night we took an evening walk and soon we were stopped by some very flustered looking guys from a hot-air balloon company. They were frantically searching for a balloon that had “gone down” and they could not make mobile phone contact with the pilot. We found the balloon in a field and soon found the place where it had carved its path through the trees on its way to the “landing” spot. Then, last night we took a drive into Tunbridge Wells to go 10-pin bowling. As we drove along the freeway we spotted another balloon (mysteriously the same colour and logo as the one in the field). Anyway, it rose, but not too high off the ground and within a few moments it drifted slowly towards the trees, crashed into them, and toppled over slowly and effortlessly. Within a little while it deflated and disappeared behind the trees. We don’t know what the outcome was. I just know that I am reconsidering my romantic notion of going up in one of those.

10-pin bowling ended up being a blast and this was the first time that Jenna had played.

On Wednesday we took a drive to Bewl Water. (www.bewl.co.uk) This is a very large dam just outside Tunbridge Wells. It must surely be the water sports dream of the South East. Paddling, sailing, zip-lines, king-swing, windsurfing, cruises, yachting and even giant plastic bubbles that you can get into and run on the water. The dam is surrounded by the most beautiful forests, playgrounds, and a restaurant. We hired mountain bikes and took a ride part-way around the dam. Now, I am missing my bike more than ever.

One thing which has grasped my attention a lot this week has been “the gathering of the geese”. Every evening, around the same time, flocks of rowdy geese have begun to fly in a V-shape over our house. They didn’t do this in the first few weeks that we were here and it is starting to make me think that they might know something about the changing seasons that we might still be taking for granted, thanks to the beautiful summer weather. They are beautiful birds and every evening when they fly over, I run outside to see them, but photographing them is proving to be more difficult than I thought.

Friday morning began under a cloud of misty fog. It was a beautiful sight to look across the open fields and see the fog hugging the trees and almost hiding them from our view. I think those moments might make for some good photographs in the coming autumn and winter months.

On Friday night my cousin Kirstin travelled down to visit us. We have not seen each other for more than 6 years and it was a wonderful evening of catching up, dining out and a whole bunch of laughs.

On Saturday we took a drive through to Sevenoaks and then went on to the Eagle Heights Wildlife Park. (www.eagleheights.co.uk)  This park has  Siberian Huskies, Meerkats, Cheetahs, Camels, Reptiles and of course every species of eagle and owl. They gave us a flight display by eagles, a South American Condor and various falcons that was absolutely fantastic. Sitting out in the open with those massive birds, whose wing spans are beyond belief, soaring just a few feet over our heads was breathtaking and a reminder to me that this planet is not owned by us. There are creatures of immense beauty and strength that we, more often than not, take for granted.

Today Jenna and I went on a lovely 3 hour walk with Nicole and Graeme. Now a 3 hour walk should really be called “an epic voyage of discovery”. Do you have any idea what you can discover by walking around in the open fields for 3 hours? The recycled grass that the horses leave lying around does not smell bad, even when it is stuck to the bottom of your shoe; Ladybirds, which you hardly ever see in SA anymore, live on all over the UK; Dock weed really does undo the sting from the nettle bushes; apples growing in the wild can be seriously sour, acorns fascinate me, and little 7-year-old girls can walk a lot further than you think… well, that was just some of the things I enjoyed.

On the other hand, Mitchell looked at me on Friday evening and said: “Mom, I just want to say thanks for bringing Jenna and I here. I know it’s not easy for you and dad and I know that you are doing this for us, but I want you to know that we love it here”. Well, if I was ever going to need affirmation on our decision to come here, that moment was it.

This is Kerry Wright!

So, this week marks our first month in the UK. I am still trying desperately not to convert every purchase that we make, from £’s into R’s. Everyone, especially Mike, keeps telling me not to do it or I will drive myself crazy (too late to prevent that, I am afraid), but no matter how hard I try to resist, I just seem to do the mental maths and then I flinch! Some things come across as being extremely expensive and other things seems quite reasonable. I must admit that I don’t mind paying £2.99 for some tiny little thing at a shop, but then I bleat every time I have to pay 80 pence to park the car for 1 hour. I would rather pay the car-guards back home to cheat on the parking meters for me. (Yes, yes, you all know what I am talking about, we all do it. You get the car guard to only feed the meter when they see the traffic officers coming.) Over here you pay for parking by anticipating how long you might be. For example, you make an appointment to open a new bank account. The bank tells you that this can take up to 1½ hours, so you feed the £1.50 in the meter. (Yes, work it out in rands, you know you want to.) Now, the meeting at the bank is over in 15 minutes and you are left thinking about the rands that you just pumped into that little silver machine for nothing. On the flip side, you may think you are only popping into town to fetch something you ordered from a shop and it’s going to take all of about 10 minutes, so you pump the minimum 80 pence into the meter. This time, however,  you are 7 blocks away from the parking lot and you bump into a friend who invites you to go for coffee… You look at your watch and realise that you will need to feed the meter… Do you walk the 7 blocks to the parking lot and then back to meet your friend for coffee, or risk getting a fine? On the bright side though, my bike gets here this week and then I am going to cycle to town. Whoohoo.

This week has again been full of frenetic activity. We got our landline phone this week, which does of course mean that we are at least 1 step closer to getting our broadband internet connection.

On Wednesday we took Mitchell and Jenna into London. The train trip from Tonbridge to London takes about 30min, depending on how many stops the train makes. Mike had a lunchtime meeting at his office in London, so we all spent the morning and afternoon together and he just popped into the office for the meeting. Jenna was excited to see Big Ben and Buckingham Palace, but then she got far more excited about feeding the squirrels in Green Park. Our “flight” on the London Eye was absolutely beautiful. It is big and graceful and slow and silent, you can see as far as your eyes will allow in every direction and it was amazing to watch the Thames seagulls, but this time from above them. It was indeed a very touristy thing to do, but worth every cent (sorry, penny).

Tomorrow our ship sails into Tilbury harbour. It is still going to take about a week to clear customs, but just knowing that ‘our stuff’ is just a few miles off the UK coast right now, is a sweet, sweet thought.

Jenna and I took a late evening walk on our own this week. We called it the girls’ night-walk. Mike and Mitchell had gone to the golf-driving range, which stays open until 21:00pm in the summer. It started to get dark and we were quite a long way away from home, out in the farmlands. It was an incredible feeling to be out there and not be afraid. Don’t get me wrong, I am not becoming complacent and I know that good and evil happen everywhere, but there we were, out in the bush with wild foxes and hares and not another person in sight.

On Saturday we were invited to meet another SA’n family who live in Tonbridge. It was fantastic to get some good old advice from people who live in the area. They gave us lists of scout troupes, dancing schools, gymnastics clubs, youth groups, etc, that Mitchell and Jenna can join. Kent seems to be ‘the little South Africa of the UK’. I hear that it may have something to do with the fact that the pleasant Kent weather attracts the SA’ns. Shops, bakery’s, dentists, everywhere you go, business are owned by South Africans. There are also a lot of South African children registered in most of the Kent schools that we have had dealings with.

Today Mike and Jo Bowen drove down from Greenithe (next to the Dartford tunnel) to spend the afternoon with us. Mike and I were at Crewe Primary school together and then we studied IT together at PE Tech. Mike and Jo have been over here for 10 years, so they had some good advice to impart to us too. It was an awesome afternoon of chatting and catching up on a lot of missing years.

Sunny weather, starry skies, night walks, new friends and old ones, pounds of rands and helping hands… the weeks march on, the weather changes, the days get shorter… each day we learn something new… a lot we like and a some we don’t.

This is Kerry Wright!

Sundays nights are fast taking on the title of ‘blog night’. I quite enjoy reflecting back on the week gone by, thinking about the wins we have notched up and the mistakes we have made. It also gives me time to think about the week ahead.

I have started to notice a marked changed in the length of the days now. A few photos taken in the week when we arrived are bathed in sunlight, despite the fact that they were taken very late at night. When the change becomes noticeable it is a far more significant than in South Africa. It is still light until about 20:45 in the evenings but it is changing fast. While I am on the subject of seasonal changes I will mention the storm we had this week. On Friday we took Mitchell, Jenna, and James to play putt-putt (crazy golf, as it’s known over here). In the distance I could see a massive storm on the brew (someone once told me that storms over here were not really as exciting as I knew them back home, so I wasn’t expecting it to develop into much at all). I sort of fobbed off the black sky and we all got our putters. I started off lecturing the kids about how rude it was to go ahead and start the next hole until everyone had finished the previous one… Well, a few loud thunder-claps and a couple of bright lightning-bolts later I was reviewing my moral-highroad on the etiquette of crazy-golf… Everyone was told to finish every hole at their own pace and in record breaking time! Clouds that looked like they could have been from a wild typhoon were closing in on us at speed. With just moments to spare we shoved our putters through the window of the office, having completed 18 holes, and we sprinted the 3 or so blocks to where we had parked the car. Every man for himself when that kind of torrent comes down! We just got into the car on time and before we had got to the end of the street we were in a deluge! (My hard-learned lesson for this week – It is not a good idea to open the car sun-roof when it is covered in water… even after the rain has stopped. Ha ha ha.)

On Tuesday Jenna’s new bed arrived. 1 wooden cabin bed in a flat-pack box! When these people say they will deliver sometime between 08:00 and 12:00 they really mean business. 07:30 the truck was outside! So there we were: 1 comic-strip family, 1 flat-pack bed in a box, no tools in the house and a set of paper assembly instructions. Who writes the assembly instructions for things, anyway? Comedians? Well, 2 hours later, 1 book of swear words, fits of laughter and a bleeding knee and Jenna finally had a new bed. Mike had read somewhere on the internet how satisfied lady customers of this product had said they had put these beds together single-handedly within a few minutes. He had some choice words for them. Ha ha.

Wednesday was our day in Dover. It was Jenna’s birthday. She woke at 06:30 to take her new bike out for a ride! SkyTV had arranged to come and do the installation between 09:00 and 11:00. I was afraid that they would be late and we would not be able to go out for the day, but of course they arrived at 09:00 and within an hour we had the dish installed, SkyTV active and were on the road to Dover. The channel tunnel, pebble beaches, long piers, clean water, magnificent ferry boats, castles on hilltops and hundreds and hundreds of seagulls made for an awesome day. The Dover Castle was probably the best castle I have ever seen. There is something very moving about standing in a 2000 year old lighthouse overlooking the English Channel. You cannot be there without being in awe of what people could do with so little resources. The White Cliffs of Dover lived up to every expectation that I had ever had of them. We left Dover and travelled to Folkestone where we stopped at The Battle of Britain Memorial. I am amazed at what Mitchell knows about this part of history.

All my blogs so far have been filled with what I have liked and enjoyed about the UK, so being here 3 weeks, I feel that at least I can list just 1 thing that I don’t like. SPIDERS! They are everywhere! How did I choose to move to a country that is covered in the very thing that I am the most afraid of? I got onto the internet this week to read up on them and this is what I found… “There are around 640 named species of spider in Britain. About 100 species live in the average garden, and a dozen species are found in the average house.”

The kids are enjoying a lot of the activities over here. Jenna has spent quite a lot of time at Honnington Equestrian Centre with her cousin, Kirstin. She enjoys mucking out the stables, brushing the horses and sneaking the odd ride. Mitchell spent some time at the village cricket ground with some of the boys, hitting in the nets and getting in some bowling practice.

Today we finally made it to a car boot sale. I think you can honestly furnish an entire house at a car boot sale for around £10. We bought a toaster for 50p! Mitchell bought himself a set of golf-clubs (you see, all that lawn mowing is finally paying off) and is looking forward to his bike arriving on the ship in the next 2 weeks so that he can cycle to the golf driving range in Tonbridge.

This weekend we had our first braai! Braai-ing (spelling?) on gas should probably not be called “a braai” at all. I think we will call it a barbeque over here when we use gas, just so that the word “braai” can be exclusively reserved for those special moments when the Thornwood crackles and fragrant smoke fills the air.

Last week’s blog stated that I am missing Crosse and Blackwell Mayonnaise… Well, I popped into the South Africa shop this week and they stock it!! YAY!! So, scratch that off the list and we are back down to only the tea bags. I think it’s not too bad that I have been here 3 weeks and the only thing that I am missing is a brand of tea bags.

Looking forward to the week ahead…

This is Kerry Wright!

I am not sure if it is because there is so much going on at the moment, the fact that every day is packed full of something to do, be it organising Sky TV, licensing the car, responding to letters from British Gas and car insurers or just finding things like the library and the dentist, but these 2 weeks seem to have crawled by at a snails-pace for me. I feel as if I have been in the UK for 4 months, instead of just 2 weeks. Things that should still seem very new to me, now just seem routine. The rest of the family feels that the time has flown… Perhaps it is just because the kids are not at school and will only be going back in September or maybe it is the fact that I just feel “at home” here… either way it still feels right, 2 weeks or 4 months, it doesn’t matter.

Anyway, it has been another crazy week. We registered with the local doctors, found a groups of dentists (5 of whom are South African). Our dentist trained in Pretoria! (Full circle moment?) Mitchell also registered with the local football club for when the new season starts in September… and we continue to wait for a decent Internet connection…

Mike and Mitchell have both had the flu but they have both had really mild symptoms so we are not stressing about swine flu, yet. We saw something quite funny the other day. A sign on the door of a doctors surgery … it said: “If you suspect that you have swine flu, please DO NOT enter these premises”.

Jenna turns 7 on Wednesday (it would also have been my grans birthday) and we are trying to make it a special occasion for her. She doesn’t have any friends over here yet but she is looking forward to being with her cousins on Wednesday. Her new bed arrives this week so her nights on the stretcher will finally be over. We have bought her a new bike for her birthday. She has always been given Mitchell’s hand-me-down bikes and scooters, so this time she gets her own new bike. The only thing is that her helmet is in the container, somewhere at sea and I don’t want to pay another £18 for a new one when a perfectly good one is on the way.

Mike and kids took a drive to Biggin Hill Airfield on Saturday afternoon. Yes! It was definitely always going to be one of the first things that they did over here. (Hey, it’s not our fault that you don’t understand how important it is to scout out the local airports in a new country. Hahaha).

The appeals process for two of the Kent grammar schools happened this week and although we hold little hope of being successful, because the schools are completely over-subscribed with student numbers, we are still trying to remain optimistic. We also have an appeal with Tunbridge Wells Grammar school for Boys in August.

Lately I have been having very pleasing visions of myself swimming out into the ocean to go and meet the ship carrying our container. It just can’t arrive soon enough, I’m afraid! Not only is it bringing our furniture and belongings, but its arrival brings with it so much more that I am looking forward to… Surviving with a few borrowed plates and 2 pots is a challenge and making salad in a pot because we don’t have a bowl is not as funny the 10th time around as it was the first time we did it. (Ha ha ha)

On Friday night my nephew, James, stayed over with us. We took all the kids down to the sports ground in the evening as there is a beautiful play park that they enjoy. On the way there we crossed one of the foot-bridges over the river Medway, which runs through the town. We had some bread with us to feed to the ducks. As we walked across the bridge we could hear that the ducks sounded in distress. One duck had become entangled in fishing line against the bank of the river (the hook was firmly lodged in its mouth and the line was tangled around its neck and feet). It was struggling frantically in the water. The kids ran off to the Tonbridge Swimming pool to raise the alarm and the RSPCA was called out to save the poor creature. My kids felt like the town heroes.

Last night I stood outside in the chilly night air and stared up at the cloudless sky. For those of you that know this about me, you will appreciate that this is something I love to do. When I left SA I thought that my nights of star-gazing and wonder at the full moon would be over. I thought that the stars in the northern hemisphere could never replace those I left back home and I was afraid that the perpetual cloud cover that is synonymous with the UK, would block my every vision. On the contrary, in the two weeks that I have been here I have seen a beautiful near-full moon, and night skies filled with stars. Most of them I cannot identify yet, but I will get there one clear night at a time and no doubt with some advice

I quite enjoy shopping at the open-air markets for fruit and vegetables. This morning was supposed to be our first trip to a car-boot sale, but we got there when the cars were packing up… It was only 11:00am, but I suspect that the rain may have played a part in the early exit of the stall-holders. We’ll try again next week.

Today we went to a Football Fiesta at the sports grounds. It was a “David Beckham/Chelsea Football club” sponsored Academy, with professional coaches, a tournament, and just hundreds of local children having a whole load of fun. Soccer is not a sport here, it is a religion!

In my last blog I said that I was only missing Lipton Yellow Label tea bags. Well, you can add Crosse and Blackwell Real Tangy Mayonnaise to that list. Mitchell says he is missing Debonairs Pizza, but in all fairness to the UK pizza places, he hasn’t tasted any pizza’s here yet…

South African schools open tomorrow and with it comes another fresh wave of realisation for me that my kids no longer go to school in SA and that I no longer work at Hudson Park Primary. I do wish my ex-colleagues a good term ahead and to the academy kids who may read this blog, I say… “get off the Internet and get back to work!”

This is Kerry Wright!

So ends my first week in the UK and the reality of a life in a new land starts to set in. The holiday feeling is fast subsiding, and I am glad for that, because we are not here on holiday, we are here to live and the sooner we accept that and begin to live within that frame of mind, the sooner we will settle and everyday life can become a reality.
There are still so many beautiful things to see and we have only but scratched the surface.
Yesterday we took a walk through a wooded area with deer and foxes, the woods are just like Hogsback, but they are everywhere. On the walk we came across a large pond where people were sitting under huge trees, fishing. It was like being in another world yet you are strangely aware that you are still almost in a residential area.
Today I took the children to see the Tonbridge Swimming Centre which has a heated indoor and outdoor swimming area, pools for babies, pools for toddlers, a lovely little caffeteria, saunas, showers, etc… Just outside the swimming pool complex is a miniture train (we have dubbed it, “The Smartie Train” for obvious reasons, but I will still have to try and convince them to paint it like a box of smarties). We stopped along the way to feed the ducks and the swans. This all takes place at the foot of the Tonbridge Castle. (you can google Tonbridge Castle, if you like).
Mike started work in London today so it was his first day of commuting and this was one of the very things that brought home the reality of our move, getting up and going to work! He will not be travelling into London everyday as his offices will be out here in our area, but the training academy and headoffice are in London, so for starters he will commute for the next few days. I think he quite likes it and we will have to wait and see how long it takes before the novelty wears off.
The kids have embraced everything about this place. This move has taught me more about the resilience of young children than anything else. Jenna misses her dogs the most and asks me every day if I can reconsider the decision not to bring them over here. I feel desperately sorry for her as she was so close to her animals and they were her everything.
Mitchell, strangely enough, enjoys doing chores around the house here. He knows it is the only way he is going to earn that premier league soccer ball that he has his eye on.
I still have not felt a sense of being homesick, but for those of you back in SA it does not mean that I don’t think of you often and miss you a lot. It just means that I have embraced this change a little more easily than even I thought I might.
Someone told me today that there is already a noticeable difference in the length of the days, as we slide towards winter, but we have not been here long enough to notice and with the sun still setting so late at night, it is still all very strange.
So far the only edible thing that I miss from SA is Lipton Yellow Label Tea Bags (the triangle ones).

PS. If any of my friends in the UK know where I can get some – please advise! URGENTLY! If anyone from SA is coming over here, pack some in your bags… please!
Today I put fuel in the car!!! I swore I was not going to do it over here. I was going to sit in my car and wait for someone to do it for me, but when the push came to the shove, it was top up or walk home in the heat. The petrol station owner laughed at me and said: “Oh you must be from SA”? Well, who cares? It’s a badge I wear with pride. Anyway, I guess from now on fuel will not be a big issue for me.
I am just starting to get to grips with the recycling system over here. I must admit that in the first week I really didn’t give a damn, as everything in my life was upside down and saving the planet one aluminum can at a time, just wasn’t high on my agenda, but now the kids are into it and Jenna is even in charge of the compost system for the garden. I think she just enjoys the worms in the tub. Hahaha.
There is a 3-wheel car in my street. Exactly like the one that torments Mr Bean and everytime we go out now I have to take the kids past that house so they can see it. Who would have known that a 3-wheeled car could be that entertaining.
For the rest of it, it’s pretty much learn and do. I am getting around more without the GPS system now and learning to drive with conviction on the narrow country roads.
Watch out for the next instalment….
This is Kerry Wright!

So, this is my blog and your way to read up on what is going on with the Wrights as we settle into our new life in the UK.

The past few weeks have been a roller coaster ride, but we got here in the end. The UK is beautiful. There is just no getting away from it! Say what you like about the weather, this place works and I can see why my gran dreamed of coming here, why she loved this country despite never having seen it. Yeah, yeah, I know what you are saying, “Just wait until the winter, its easy to talk in the summer”, but this place is like a well-oiled machine. Country life is stunning. Fields and flowers, trees and colours, smells and architecture that you just cannot imagine are everywhere.

Mitch and Jen are settling in so well and I wish that I was as resilient as they are. They both went to orientation days at school today – although the new school year only opens in September. Mitchell told one of the boys in his class that we had monkeys in our garden back home and the news spread through the school like wild-fire. He is now the hero of the school, across all grades and everyone wants to talk to him. See, not only are these people friendly, but they are also very easily impressed.
Jenna loved her day at school and her teacher cannot believe how confident she is. She met some lovely little friends and she can’t wait to go back. She does say that she battles to understand what they are saying (the accents) but she laughed as she openly admitted that she just copied what her friends did, to get by. It will get easier as time passes. There are other SA’n children in the school too.

We have met some of our neighbours and taken some lovely walks in the area. The UK has lived up to its reputation and given us as least a few drops of rain of every day that we have been here. It is no great shakes and as long as you are like me and run out of the shops to stand in the rain and take it all in, then it is fine. You do end up looking like a drowned rat, but nobody knows me here yet so looking like an idiot is just fine with me!

The long days mess around with your internal clock a lot. The kids are going to bed way too late and getting tired easily in the days. The sun is still only setting after 21:00.

Shopping is fun, as you try desperately to identify items on the shelf and none of the labels are familiar. I am still refusing to pump fuel into the car. I will rather push the car home if I run out of fuel.

Country lanes, narrow roads, old buildings, hanging baskets, different flowers, horses in paddocks, its all part of the game. ‘

Can’t wait for our container to arrive and to pack out some of the stuff that will make us feel more “home”.

Never underestimate the value of good friends. Jon, you are a shining star and I will never know what good I did in my life to deserve you being a part of it. You are my rock and I am just a little more wobbly without you.

So let this be the start of many blogs as I try desperate to make sense of lifes full-circle moments.

This is Kerry Wright!