Tag Archives: Brit abroad
Ave Angliae Mater!
Well here I am. Home. I am officially home. I am now neither Homesick nor Heatstruck (Any ideas for a new blog name, folks? Answers on the back of a postcard…). I am not permitted to complain about the British weather in any way ever again – either directly or implicitly – for the rest …
Tree-Hugging and Forest-Bathing
‘Tree-hugger’ is a vaguely insulting term for those perceived as hippy environmentalists, used fairly indiscriminately to describe pretty much anyone from an animal rights activist to a bypass protester. It’s also an epithet that has come to be associated with Prince Charles following his mid-1980s confessions about talking to his trees and plants to encourage …
Dark Mornings and Grey, Rainy Days
This is, apparently, one of the most depressing times of the year for British folk. The sparkling fairy lights of Christmas are long gone, but the winter drags on – bitingly cold and remorselessly damp. The mornings are dark and, throughout the grey days, the evenings loiter just beyond the horizon, bringing back the night-time …
Like a (cautious, considerate and law-abiding) bat out of hell…
I had never driven an automatic before, or driven on the right, or driven on the crazy roads of Dubai. But we were moving house and buying furniture and transporting fish tanks and cats, and the whole thing would have been a nightmare without a car, so I grasped the proverbial nettle… The advice I …
Opposite, Above and Beyond: Ponderments from a Balcony
From my fourth floor apartment’s balcony I have a spectacular view of… someone else’s balcony. In our particular part of town, the apartment blocks are packed together so snugly that, should one choose to sit on the balcony and soak up some sun (for the seventeen minutes a day when it isn’t eclipsed by other …
The Sheep-Brain Curry
As a child, I was a notoriously fussy eater. My catchphrase as a four-year-old, “There’s a little bit of black in it,” was stubbornly repeated when rejecting any food that was well-cooked, new, mixed up with something else or prepared with herbs or seasoning – so just about everything interesting really… (Parents of fussy children, …
How to Cope with Homesickness: Top Ten Nostalgic Puddings
There are many different ways of coping with homesickness. One option is to indulge it completely by eating buttery toasted crumpets and sobbing to an episode of Countryfile. At the other end of the willpower spectrum we have the healthier, low-fat option: ignore the homesickness completely, go exploring, and lose yourself in the ‘otherness’ of …
WELCOME to all those who are fed up, foot-sore or far from home…
This is Homesick and Heatstruck, a blog about coping with my displaced (or misplaced?) existence. For three years now I have lived in a noisy city in the middle of a desert, 4000 miles away from home. One might think that the pangs of homesickness would wane after a while, but one would be quite …
