January 2011

Happy New Year to you!

So the temperature today was a whole 9 degrees … which is 20 degrees warmer than it was just before Christmas.

Last year I was sitting in my living room in Uganda, keeping an eye on the UK weather and feeling sorry for everyone having to cope with minus 3. I announced that I wasn't coming back unless they did something about the arctic conditions.

This year, here I am, having just about survived minus 11, and reading in the Daily Mail that this was the coldest December for 120 years. What’s going on???

Kira and I would skate to her school on the icy pavements. My brother says you are not advised to clear the ice from the pavement outside your house as if someone falls they can sue you.

My mum and my sister both fell over on the ice, hurt their coccyx and were feeling sore for a few weeks.

Anyway now that we are no longer sub-zero, it feels almost tropical. I am down to wearing only 3 tops, lined trousers and 2 pairs of socks. Sometimes it's so warm I can even take my hat off when I’m in the house. Almost tempted to get the barbie out…

I’ve taken to riding my bike round the park, which is just down the road from us, 0.63km to be exact, according to the thingy-bob you put on your handlebar which tells you how far you’ve gone and how fast you are going.

One of the benefits of living where we do is that the area is flat.

In NZ we lived on

a hill, which meant that you started off a bike ride hurtling at break neck speed down the hill, hoping the brakes would work when you got to the bottom which joined onto a busy main road.

It also meant that at

the end of the ride, when you were tired and exhausted, you had to somehow get back up the hill - usually pushing the bike up the last few metres of the 1:2 slope.

The photo of Kira was taken when the fountain pond was frozen over.

The boating lake was frozen too, and the poor geese had to walk on the ice. When we stopped to take this photo all the geese stopped walking. When we set off again, they started off too!

There was a bit of a hoo-ha during the snowy period as some council’s didn’t let their bin men collect the rubbish due to the dangerous icy conditions. This meant that some people missed one bin collection.

Crikey, you’d think the entire infrastructure of the nation had fallen apart, the way some people were talking. I was listening to people being interviewed on the radio. “I don’t know what the world is coming to” they would cry.

Get a grip! It’s only one bin collection. The world hasn’t actually come to an end.

Anyway it was nice to spend Christmas and New Year with most of my and Jon’s families. It’s not something we’ve done as a family before. It’s also unusual spending Christmas in the winter - for the last 15 years it’s been summertime for us.

BUT … I actually felt a bit sad at having to take off the Santa toilet seat cover once the Christmas period had ended.

I think I must be losing it. I’m doomed.

In the UK it seems to be the thing to have a GPS / satnav. Whenever you ask people directions to somewhere they give you the postcode so you can type it into your satnav.

Anyway Jon - feeling a bit short of a gadget - ordered one before Christmas, paid for it and arranged for it to be sent here.

Ironically it got lost in the post.

Just as well we didn’t get it I guess, it probably wouldn’t have been much use!

He did order a different one, so we are now a satnav household. Crikey.

Mind you, I have to say that the woman we have on our satnav would be an ideal life coach or mentor. Whenever you take a wrong turn, she doesn’t make any comment or criticism, she just tells you how to reach your destination from wherever you happen to be now.

It’s interesting to see the technical advancements here. Some things are further ahead than we’re used to, and yet some things are less advanced.

For example when I was paying I some cheques, I posted the two cheques and paying in slip into a slot in a machine. A few seconds later a print out of the 3 pieces of paper popped out, all the right way round.

And at the local doctor’s surgery, if you have an appointment, you have to sign yourself in, in the lobby, on the big touch screen computer monitor before you get to reception.

However, the petrol stations still have pumps where you have to squeeze the right amount of petrol in. I am forever putting in amounts like £20.01 or £30.04.

And e-bay is infinitely more complex that New Zealand’s easy-to-use Trademe.

People here seem to be keen to add apps (ie application software) to their iPhone (yes,you have to learn geek-speak here).

You can get an app for your iPhone that instantly translates English into various Afghan dialects.

You can also, incredibly, get an ASBOrometer app.

Anti-social behaviour can be dealt with by an anti-social behaviour order - an ASBO. An ASBOrometer application lets you see the numbers of ASBOs in different parts of the country.

Help help! Someone get me out of here

Anyway, despite the idiosyncrasies of the British way of living, the children are doing OK.

Jordan - complete with trendy new glasses - has taken up Warhammer 40k as a hobby. It’s a game you play with others using small models of armies which you have to assemble and paint yourself.

His romance with Lucie is still going strong, and things at school seem to be OK.

The boy who is House Captain of Jordan’s school House has just been elected Head Boy. According to the school rules devised in 1844 this means he can now read the newspaper in the dining hall, grow a beard, smoke a pipe and graze his goat on the monitors’ lawn.

Kira is fine, has just sat the entrance test for Jordan’s school and has started a blog. http://myblogbykira.blogspot.com/

Feel free to leave a comment.

We’ve done a couple of car boot sales recently to try and get rid of our 12 excess boxes of stuff. The first one we went to was cancelled, but they didn’t let us know so we turned up - as did some customers. The customers didn’t want to waste their trip there, so we ended up opening our boxes in the car park, and they all had a root through.

Generally car boot sales are held at some ridiculously early time on a Sunday morning. Jon and Jordan did the next one and made the sum of £12.75. I did the next one with Jordan last weekend and we made a whopping £10.50 after getting up at 5.30am and spending 6 hours there. We had to go twice - once to drop the stuff off and then to man the stall. As well as the cost of the petrol to do this we also bought stuff from the café, so in effect we lost money.

People want to buy things for virtually nothing. However we are now down to 4 boxes, so will just give it all away methinks.

A while ago we got a bin bag through the letterbox from a charity, with a note asking for clothes donations. The charity will send the clothes overseas for people in developing countries to sell, in order to make a living.

I gave a bag of clothes away, and then realised that I’ve actually bought - from Jinja market - the kind of stuff people give away!

Jon - who is a Star Wars fan - bought a poster many years ago when the film first came out. He discovered recently that it is the rarest of the posters and that some of them are selling for about US$12,000! http://www.cinemasterpieces.com/cinestarwars.htm#newhope

My new business for women is getting there a bit at a time. I’ve called it Chrysalis for Women and will be launching the first stage of it soon.

The website is http://www.chrysalisforwomen.com/index.html but please don’t let people know about it yet as it’s only in draft format.

Here is one of our visiting squirrels. There are two and they come every day. I do miss having a pet, having had one for the last 11 years. We're not allowed pets where we are staying, so the squirrels will have to do.

And here is a typical Blackpool photo, taken on one of the piers in a howling gale - Jon, Kira and her cousin Rachel.

Keep warm, keep well and we’ll be in touch soon.

December 2010

What am I doing here???
Having discovered that a tropical climate suits me completely, I find myself living in sub-zero temperatures, having to scrape ice off the car and wearing every available item of clothing. All of us wear at least two pairs of socks, Jordan sometimes wears three. That’s nine pairs of socks I have to wash a day!
I still have the NZ Yahoo site as my homepage, and the temperature in the UK made their headline news last week. On Friday 7000 schools across the country were closed due to the weather.
Even when I go to zumba dance classes and jump around for an hour, I’m still freezing cold.
I have a little tray in the garden where I put nuts for the squirrels. This morning the nuts were frozen onto the tray and the poor squirrel was trying to wrest them off.
If you look at a world map when it is spilt into regions - the tropical region across the middle, the temperate regions either side of it, and the polar regions either side of them, then the UK is only just inside the temperate region. A few more metres and it would be in the polar region.
Aaaargh.

I’ve been to a couple of ‘African’ events recently.
My neighbour is involved with a charity in Kenya, Children of Watamu http://www.childrenofwatamu.net/, and Kira and I went along to one of their fundraising events. The charity started about 10 years ago when a woman from Blackpool went on holiday to Kenya, was impressed by the place but saddened by the lack of education for children there so went over and set up some schools and also an orphanage. She comes back regularly to the UK to raise funds for the work she is doing there. It was a great evening, and Kira came back with many prizes from the tombola stall.

Then my friend Jane, who is a primary teacher, has been doing a project on Africa with the children at school. She invited me to give a talk to the pupils (aged 8) about life in Uganda. It was interesting seeing the children’s reactions to some of the things I shared with them. At one point I showed them a photo of a small Ugandan house and explained that the mother would put a washing up bowl outside the front of the house and wash her children in it. I asked them what they thought she washed next in the bowl, expecting them to say “clothes” or “the dishes”. One little girl shouted out “her husband!”
I’d also explained that many Ugandans think that white people are very rich, so at the end of the talk one little boy came up to me and asked me my name. I said “It’s Mrs Chamberlain”.
He replied “I’m going to write in my book that Mrs Chamberlain is the richest person in Africa.”

So, Jordan and Kira are doing well in their respective schools. They both had parents' evenings recently and both got good feedback.
Kira was described as a ‘model pupil’, and is doing well academically.
Many of Jordan’s teachers think he’s wonderful (one teacher even thanked us for sending him to the school), and he is doing well too.
He got his school report on Friday, and Jon and I had to laugh at the physics teacher’s comments: ‘He shows an excellent knowledge of the subject and I enjoy his input in lessons even though they are not always about physics.’

His house at school puts on a fundraising event every year to raise money for a local hospice. This year it was a MADD night (Music, Art, Dance, Drama) and in one sketch Jordan had to play the part of a female nurse, complete with false boobs.
As you know, Jon has been the pantomime dame in the Jinja panto production for the last two years, and so was looking on very proudly.
“That’s my boy.”

We have been sorting out our many boxes of stuff that we need to sell, and Jon came across his old, very expensive and extremely sturdy briefcase.
Jordan - whose knowledge of science includes the fact that cockroaches can survive a nuclear reaction - looked at it and said “There are three things that will survive a nuclear bomb. Cockroaches, Ugandan cakes and Dad’s briefcase.”

Jordan has a girlfriend now, Lucie. She is a pupil at the same school and they have been together for a month. He phones her every day in the evening for about an hour, and they’ve been out on their first date to the cinema.

Kira’s school had a nice Advent celebration in church last week.
Mind you, I was amazed that I had to pay £2 to go along and see it. I’ve never paid to go to church before!
Schools these days are run like businesses and there are many things we have to pay for.

We also discovered that Kira will need to get glasses. She went to the optician this week and he said she is a bit short sighted, so we’ll start her off with glasses then will look at getting contact lenses a bit later.

Kira is having a poem published in a book! Children at various schools submit a poem and the best ones are chosen to go into the book ‘One Upon a Rhyme’.
Imagine being published at age 10!
Her poem was about an event that happened a few weeks ago.
There were posters around school asking ‘What is ‘It’?’ and then a huge nest appeared in the playground (about 3 metres square) with a big egg in the middle.
We went to a Sunday afternoon event to find out what ‘It’ was and discovered that it was this huge bird.


This is Kira’s poem:
‘It’ had a trick to lay an egg by its leg
‘It’ can fly in the sky
‘It’ can be on the run just for fun
‘It’ has no hair but ‘It’ likes to be in the air
That is ‘It’
When it is night don’t go near or ‘It’ might bite!







And so this year will be the first time all that all four of us will have been with our family over Christmas.
My sister has been getting into the Christmas spirit since October when she bought - yes - a Santa toilet seat cover complete with a little bell on his hat that rings.
How sad is THAT?

We had a housewarming party a couple of weeks ago and she bought us a housewarming gift.
Yes - a Santa toilet seat cover complete with a little bell on his hat that rings! .... this is terrible ….. people will think I’ve bought it!

Anyway it was very nice to have both my and Jon’s family together.
As the families live in different parts of the country, we haven’t all been together since our leaving do when we left the UK fifteen years ago!

I hope you enjoy your Christmas and New Year and we'll be blogging again in 2011.

K, J, K, J x

November 2010

So, here we are in Blackpool in northwest UK. Jon describes our time here as an ‘adventure’ - hence the blog title.

I’ve been here about 10 weeks now with the children. It’s 15 years since I last lived here. It's very strange being in England, as I'm not used to being 'the norm' any more. I’m used to being the foreigner.

And so, some things change but the weather never does! I did wear a pair of summer trousers and sandals for ONE WHOLE DAY not long after we arrived, but that came and went in the blink of an eye. It will be about another 7 months until I can wear them again. Summer clothes and sun screen last forever in the UK! He he.

One day it was so rainy that when I turned up to an event, the water was literally dripping off me. It looked liked I'd stepped out of the shower without drying myself, so I had to go into the bathroom and dry myself with paper towels. What fun.

Jon has taken to wearing a vest / skivvy for the first time in his life as he hasn’t acclimatised yet. I kept telling Jon and the children how cold it was going to be, but would they listen to me…???

Kira is possibly even worse than me, and typically wears 5 layers of clothing around the house, including her coat!

Given that it’s the children’s first time living here, they have adjusted really well.Jordan (or Gordon as his mates call him at school) has taken to using the word ‘well’ instead of ‘very’ as that seems to be the local vernacular, and can often be heard saying such things as “That’s well cool”.

They have both adjusted to their schools, Kira’s teacher saying “You wouldn’t know she hadn’t been to an English school.” I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not! She’s doing well, and has taken up netball, been on a cycling course and met the mayor a couple of times. They have a trip to France planned in June next year, so she’s looking forward to that. Sacre bleu!

Jordan has managed to cope with the culture shock of a very different form of schooling, and is doing well. He goes from 8.30 till 5.30 most days, except on a Monday when he is there from 8.30am till 8.30pm as he does hockey after school. He is ‘forced’ to do rugby, which - despite coming from New Zealand - he really doesn’t want to do, and lets us know that on an almost daily basis in case we forget ...

However, he does get to do other interesting things such as rifle shooting and an activity called CCF, where students choose army, navy or air force activities. He’s chosen Army, has all the camo gear, and has been on a day’s trip to one of the local barracks.

The school believes in work hard, play hard and have long holidays. I quite like that as a life philosophy, actually.

Not only does he get called Gordon, but also Harry Potter. The school really does look like Hogwarts (J K Rowling visited the school and modelled Hogwarts’ dining hall on Rossall’s dining hall), and Jordan in his uniform does look rather like Harry Potter with his dark hair and glasses. When he was five he fell through a glass pane and so even has a scar on his forehead!

Not long after I arrived I went to an evening event at Jordan's school. The first person I spoke to was from South Africa. A few days after I went to a networking event where I found myself sitting next to a (white) woman who comes from Uganda. A few days after that I attended a course where I was sitting next to a man from Nigeria. Yesterday I was on a course with another Nigerian man and someone who was in Kampala few months ago. I must be a magnet for African people, as they are hardly in plentiful supply in Blackpool.

After the simplicity of life in Jinja, I find there is TOO MUCH choice over here.Trying to choose an electricity and gas company, for example, was a nightmare. The man at the utility supplies told me there are 2000 ways to get an electricity supply here!

Even if Umeme (the electricity supplier in Uganda) was awful and even if there were no gas suppliers there, at least you only had one choice - you either had electricity or you didn’t. Much simpler.

Even going round the supermarkets is a bit of a mission - there are too many aisles offering all kinds of things I’m sure I don’t need ... or do I? The marketing is so clever I have to constantly make decisions as to whether I need something or not. I didn’t have that problem in Jinja. However, the one good thing about the UK is that they have decent CHOCOLATE here! I am very happy.

So I found a nice house and moved in about a month ago. It’s two streets away from my Mum’s house, and we like living here. It has 4 bedrooms, is on three storeys (you can't see the 3rd one in the photo) and has a small garden which has birds and squirrels in it. It also has nice stained glass windows. It’s the first time the children have lived somewhere with central heating.

It took a long time for our furniture to arrive. We had all our furniture from New Zealand sent over. It comes by boat from - literally - the other side of the world. It arrived quicker than the few boxes we had sent from Uganda which came by air from a much nearer place. Good old Uganda, never fails to make a simple job very challenging.We asked the Uganda company to send the boxes by air as they said it would only take 2 weeks. It took 2 months.

I asked how long it would take if we sent them by boat and they said ... 8 months.

“Is it coming by rowing boat?” asked my brother.

It only takes 5 weeks by boat from NZ! Can't possibly imagine where the boat would go to for 8 months.

We have way too much stuff to fit into the house, have thrown a lot away and have about 12 boxes of stuff, plus some furniture to sell. I can’t believe how much we spent to store our goods for two years and have it sent over when there is so much we don’t need.I found myself taking things out of boxes saying “What on earth did I keep this for?”

The base of our bed is still in our dining room as it won't fit up the stairs! We have a queen size bed, which is normal in NZ, but not normal in the UK. Apparently the only way to do it is to saw it in half, take it up the stairs then fix it together again.The house had three beds in it already, so we are using one of the beds here, but we haven’t decided what to do with our bed base yet.We actually have 6 beds here now, so one of the bedrooms is full of spare beds and stuff that won’t fit anywhere else.

Anyway I now have new contact lenses, which is very exciting! The ones I was using weren’t fitting very well and I couldn’t get the type I wanted in Uganda, so I had to stop using them in January.

Mind you, I couldn’t get the type I wanted in most opticians where we live so ended up having to go to a specialist contact lens place in Birmingham (a 3 hour journey from here). Of course the ones I need are state-of-the-art monovision lenses costing VAST amounts of money. Oh well.

Jon came back from Uganda a month after he had planned to, as he was offered another contract. In fact, in order to be able to leave he had to pass the work over to someone else otherwise he would still be there. He came 2 months after us, by which time I had sorted most things out, and fortunately he likes the house and car I’d chosen.He arrived in Blackpool on Monday three weeks ago, had a meeting on Tuesday and was offered a couple of contracts, so we were very pleased about that.

I’ve taken up zumba dance classes with my sister once a week - great exercise and the teacher makes it fun and enjoyable. It’s also nice to do something with one of my family members as I haven’t been able to do that for years.

I was also able to go to one of my friend’s 50th birthday party. I’ve known Pauline for ... well, 50 years actually, as she was born a bit after me in the house next door ... so that was really nice. The photo is of me and my friend Liz who lived next door the other way and who I've also known since I was born.

(It really isn't my pint of beer, by the way!)

And talking of going to a ‘do’, I somehow managed to get my photo in the upmarket local magazine - and I’ve only been here 5 minutes. http://lancashire.greatbritishlife.co.uk/article/sefton-womens-business-network-awards-formby-hall-golf-resort-and-spa-26350/

The clocks went back recently (not a concept you have to get used to when you live on the equator), so it gets dark early in the evening now. Only another 6 months to go until we start getting lighter evenings...

(Tell me why I’m here ... in the cold and dark with too many choices to make...?)

Sunday was Halloween and it is celebrated big time over here. The shops are full of Halloween dress up clothes, pumpkins, Halloween food and Halloween sweets you can give out to trick-or-treaters.We bought lots of sweets and fruit to give out to children (and parents) who came to the door. Kira and her friend went trick or treating with some older children. Jordan didn’t want to go “I’m 14 now”, but the lure of lots of free sweets made him put on a mask and black coat and go round with Kira and the others! They came back with a carrier bag half full of sweets, hundreds of them.

Blackpool is famous for The Illuminations, which is 10km of light displays along the coast road. Blackpool has a tower similar to the Eiffel tower and you can see it lit up in the background of the photo.

The lights are on just after the summer holiday season finishes in order to make the tourist season last a bit longer.

We walked along part of it one evening - wrapped up in our coats hats and gloves. It’s always very impressive and there are lots of amusement arcades and gift shops open along the way. Jon and the children bought some doughnuts.

So, my cunning Master Plan is to set up a new business - it's a service offering personal and professional development for women. Some of it will be locally based, for example presentations training for women. I have revamped my women’s course, have included a psychotherapist along with dance teacher, reflexologist and massage therapist - all of this combined into a wonderful course to help women who are nervous when speaking to groups. A big part of the business will be an online service as I need something that isn’t geographically based because we plan to move country at some point in the future. So there will be a team of advisors offering online advice and coaching to women regarding a variety of personal and professional development areas.

If you are female and haven’t done my survey, and you have a spare 5 minutes, please go to http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/78HPZPG

Thank you.

Also - I need a name for my new business. This is proving to be a bit of a challenge, as every name I think of has already been taken.If you have any suggestions, do let me know. Even if it seems an unlikely name, still let me know as it may spark off another idea. Merci!

And finally, I have been invited to speak at a couple of events next year. One in Uganda in April and one in NZ in July.

Ha! You thought you’d got rid of me.

If these eventuate, I’ll let you know the dates so you can lock the door and pretend you’re not in.

Bye for now, Kim x