Back to Blighty (25th January 2010)

I wrote the following just before we left. It has sat here for over a year unpublished, unfinished. When I just read it back I could see why, but hey, it was how I felt at the time, so I am publishing it now as part of the wrap up, but I intend to do a 2011 version too.

This time next week, we will be at the airport waiting for the plane to take us home to the UK, after 19 months in San Francisco. It is almost impossible to put into words how I feel about this, but hey I'll give it a go. It's about time I blogged something.

Our trip back to Blighty in October changed everything for me. I was actually dreading the trip, in case I enjoyed myself too much and didn't want to come back here, or in case I actually had a bad time and felt like I didn't belong anywhere anymore. I have been putting off writing about the trip home too because of everything that happened next. In short, despite being made zombie with jet lag and 'sleeping' in a different bed every night, we had an amazing trip home. One of the things it made me realise was the fact that living in San Francisco has made me lose some of my independence. At home, I was me, as an entitity in my own right, and not just Mike's wife. Just driving again was great. When we flew back here, this city seemed very small, which is curious as the first thing we thought when we landed was that everything was so massive. As we unpacked in our tiny flat, I couldn't help thinking that the next year and a half we imagined we would stay here, was going to be very very long.

Only, it didn't really turn out that way in the end and now, as I write this, I am sitting on the only peice of furniture we have left, and waiting, waiting, waiting for next Monday. Our belongings are currently somewhere on a boat, either already on the ocean blue, or in a dock waiting to sail. We have no idea what our future holds, other than going back to stay with my mum for a bit until we get ourselves sorted, and I could not be more thrilled. Ever since we got back, despite the fact that San Francisco is a marvelous city, we have met some great people here who I know we will keep in touch with, the last year and a half will probably turn out to be the most pivotal of my life, the hunger for my homeland has grown and grown.

S.O.M.E.T.H.I.N.G C.H.A.N.G.E.D; a postscript

It has been bothering me for a while that my last blog post before my creative endeavours petered off is a rant. Not because at the time it wasn’t rant-worthy but because if someone finds this blog they will think that it was all about the misery. Well, actually it wasn’t (and the eagle eyed among you will note that I am now using the past tense.) It, I hope, was about the joy and the wonder, and at times about the loneliness, the longing; about the mundane, the extraordinary; and, on occasion, the ordinary, but not too much of that.

What happened next, as often happens in life, became a little complicated. I couldn’t write it down at the time, mostly because, as those of you who know me can testify, I am a border line compulsive truth teller who doesn’t do so well when a situation calls for subtlety. I am not going to record everything, and I can't remember it anyway but it feels important that this tale gets 'finished' not least because it was only in the process of leaving, and having left, that crystallised my views, and gave this story a proper end. So what follows in the next couple of posts is basically about what happened when we left San Francisco, but via a trip to Blighty first.

Having said all that though, I am back in the UK having adventures of a very different sort and I am thinking about blogging again. I still have so much to say. I have a lot less time now, but I have enjoyed it, and some people have even enjoyed reading it, but this is the end of High Fructose Corn Syrup, a journey of one year, seven months and a few days spent in San Francisco.