We're all going on a summer holiday....

When we came here in February we promised the kids we would be back in the UK over the summer so they could see friends and family, enjoy the Olympic vibe and have something familiar to look forward to if the move was all too much. And so I'm about to get on an overnight flight with three very excited children, plenty of ethnic tat to hand round as gifts, an empty bag to fill with summer sale shopping, a bag of wet weather gear and the beginnings of an itinerary which we hope will give us a holiday, a chance to catch up with loads of people and limited mileage/ time living out of suitcases. I suspect we will settle for the middle of those.


I could have done without realising at 7pm that I had left my passport in a colleague's locked cupboard in the locked High commission and without the last minute hiccup with our booking which now has us travelling back via Amsterdam - at least take off is a more civilised hour and the flight is on the day we wanted to travel rather than a date that has been and gone. The kids have been remarkably chilled about these changes in plan, confident it will all work out in the end - 5 months in Kenya is beginning to show. Tim is hanging on here for a bit as he's got work trips to do and the chaos of our departure to recover from (and a developing cricket net in the middle of our garden to tend to!).

We are all agreed that the thing we are most looking forward to is seeing friends and family. But there are other things on our lists too. Eating good quality cheese, bread and chocolate, reading newspapers and all those olympics sports stories, watching a few movies, some shopping for the things that are triple the price here, driving with clear traffic rules like stopping at red lights. Some of this will, I think, take a bit of adjustment - I'm fascinated to see how much for each of us.

And of course we are going to miss our lives here, the friends we have made, scrumping for bananas in the wilderness at the end of our garden, getting to know our newly arrived cats and of course the weather (from what we hear about the UK summer). But we will be back before we know it.


Anne