DrFannyWe’ve been home in Oxford for a month now, unpacking, repacking, and easing ourselves back in to ‘normal life’.
Today is Dr Dick’s first day back at work, Tuesday is mine (and Ruby’s first day back at school), and Maddy skips into Reception class on Wednesday! So it’s all change here. New shoes and uniforms for the girls, all labelled and polished…while the grown-ups have to struggle back in to long trousers, enclosed shoes, and shirts with buttons! The horror!
Our trip round Australia now feels like another life. Did we really do that? Or was it all a dream? Things back home all just feel so…normal. Unchanged.
Of course, there are a few changes. Ruby and Maddy’s friends have all been stretched taller by about 10cm. There are one or two new shops at the top of the street, a few others shuttered. But on the whole, our lovely neighbours are still here, my favourite cafe is still going strong, and the late English summer has turned on a heatwave just in time for us all to enter back into non-air-conditioned offices and classrooms.
Interestingly, even though we have had a life-changing experience, so far we have slotted back into our Oxford existence as if nothing really happened.
But it did happen and we have changed, in quite profound ways that I suspect will become more obvious once we are truly ‘back to normal’ in work/school etc.
For a start, we lived with so little for so long, and never felt any want. Our travels taught us that have so much more than we need. All our clothes, for four people, for both hot and cold weather, fitted in a tiny storage drawer in the back of the Patrol. Now we each have separate wardrobes and chests of drawers. Admittedly, we need more clothes here (I don’t think we’d get away with a rotation of 2 pairs of shorts and 3 tee shirts in clinic!), but so far we’ve managed to pack several large boxes of clothes to send to the charity shop, and there are more to come.
We feel the same way about the rest of the house – boxes and boxes of odd wine glasses, fancy crystal, rarely used kitchen implements, books, games, toys… all unpacked and immediately repacked into the charity box. If only we’d known this before we left, I might have saved a packet in storage fees!
It feels great, and it is a real privilege, to know that we have enough. We’ve been told this for years, of course, but, as is so often the way, it’s only after actually experiencing life with less stuff that we have worked out how true this is.
The other big difference is that we have come home with happy hearts, with the knowledge that we have chosen to come back. We have a lovely home, the girls are in a fantastic school, and we work less than 5 minutes away. Replicating that anywhere else in the world is not so easy. We have chosen to slot back into life in Oxford, for now, but we may change our mind in the future. Because we upended things with a year-long career break, we know we can do it again if we choose. This is good for us, for now.
What we missed during our year in Oz, we have truly relished seeing again. There aren’t many things on this list: our two big boys in Bristol and Leeds (one now home for the summer); a few dear friends; and our beach hut by Chesil Beach in Portland. Oh, how good it was to spend a few nights ‘down the ‘ut’! We’ve seen many beautiful sunsets over the past twelve months, but, in our opinion, nothing beats this one.
I’ve got so many stories and thoughts about our year off but they still need to percolate through my brain before I can put them down on paper…so there’ll be more of the actual fun travel stuff on this website in time! But for now I wanted to celebrate a full year off, and to mark this special day Back to Reality.
