Feet Back on the Ground?

Link to Made by Niki lingerie.

Who would have thought that the homecoming would be even more exciting than going away in the first place? Taking off all those months ago, I thought I was embarking on the biggest adventure of my life, and it did turn out to be pretty large. We've partied with new pals, climbed mountains, made friends of elephants and cruised all kinds of waters in varying degrees of discomfort.

We've just spent six weeks 'settling' in Australia. Now, Australia is a cracking place, and it knows it. It plays hard to get, and some people are willing to do all the chasing in such a relationship. In our case, attempting to penetrate Sydney forced us to evaluate how much we wanted certain things ut of our lives.

A Proper Job? Ours for the taking if we were prepared to wait up to a year for the right one, take a step down, and be sponsored by a company. Hmm, being sponsored sounds alright, except that it's like selling your soul literally, because then that company owns your visa, and if you hate them, they'll kick you out. Not just out of your job, you understand, but out of Australia!

At least in London you can change jobs anytime it tickles your fancy. But wait a minute, didn't we want to stop doing the corporate thing and get all creative on our own? No worries. We'll just set up our own agency, we thought. Some investigations soon showed us that wasn't gonna happen unless we could show the Australian government that we had half a million squids in the bank. Ha ha ha ha ha ha HA HA HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.

Never mind, I thought, ever the optimist. I'll get cracking on my lingerie brand. Oh, but all my sewing machines and equipment are in the UK embedded underneath ten tonnes of boxes, somewhere deep in my mum's loft in the heart of Lancashire. Stumped again.

So after six weeks of jobhunting and friend-finding, I arrived in London a couple of weeks ago for my brother's wedding, sure that I'd be going back to Sydney to prove them all wrong about the difficulties of settling in. London tired me out after a few days. It was just too exciting. So much going on. And sunny. Ooooh hot and steamy, only the British get pressure cooked when the sun comes out. Everyone else in the world runs for cover but no, the British scrub down, dress up and flaunt what their mama's gave 'em. I'm telling you, there is nothing quite like a British summer, and I should know because I have just engineered myself an entire year of summer out there in the world.

The wedding itself was wonderful, beautiful, touching and sweet. In a way, it was also like an obscure form of therapy for me, because friends and relatives asked me over and over what travelling was like, and what were our next plans. Then something odd happened, instead of rattling out the same old story about returning to Oz, I was beginning to talk about getting a move on back in the UK, where no visa's could hold me back. My whole point of view about England had changed from thinking of it as a competitive place where anything was difficult, to it being the only place in the world where anything is possible.

Then, even odder things happened. I got asked to write a travel book by a major publisher. I applied for a University Degree in Contour Fashion (basically means Lingerie Design and Corsetry). They accepted me onto the course which starts on 26th September. I cancelled my flight back to Sydney and Scott is on his way home. I'm going to be a student, a writer and an entrepreneur, and Scott will finally have his very own design agency, something we all know he should have done years and years ago.