Today is our last full day in England, it’s a sunny and quite balmy afternoon.  We’re sat on platform 1 of Penrith railway station waiting for our train to Manchester airport.  It really is very pleasant and the information boards tell me our train is on time and we should be checked into our airport hotel before 8pm.

I don’t believe it though, because today has been a series of disasters.

Our train from Whitehaven to Barrow was cancelled, no replacement bus service, no nothing.  Kerry’s sister was kindly coerced into driving us to Barrow to catch our second train, and that plan was going well until we ran into roadworks on the only road that led out of the South Lakes, which was shut until much later in the day. We weren’t going to make our train. Panic followed, a range of options were aired and then dismissed as unworkable because the only road out of Cumbria was the one we’d just driven on for the last hour.  Three hours had passed when we left Frizington for the second time that day.

But here we are waiting on plan B and an announcement has just informed me that this train is delayed by 15 minutes.

I can hear all the miserable naysayers now telling me how lucky we are to be leaving Broken Britain with its crumbling infrastructure and shitty weather.  I generally think I’m a pretty positive person, and I’ve loved living here, but after the day I’ve had, I’m inclined to agree.

But it’s been a tough couple of months to be fair.

Since returning from Ireland, we’ve done a lifetime worth a serious adulting and I’ve had a gutful of it. The details are sketchy about my departure from Australia as a 23-year-old but I think I packed some clothes in a backpack and just left.  If I had to guess my mum probably organised my passport, British Visa and flights.  I just went along for the ride. 

But this return to Australia has been next level and everything we’ve had to organise has had its own little mini-disaster; just to keep us on our toes.

I’ll start with the dog, who cost a fortune to fly over and shat in her crate moments before she was scheduled to leave Heathrow and got booted off her flight.  That lead to a tense 24 hours as her flight was rescheduled, she hates travel and we began to have concerns she would ever reach the other side of the world.

She did, she’s in Australia now but she also recently had a burst cyst and cost us a few hundred pounds to get a vet  to see her in quarantine.

There were our belongings we sent by sea.  That involved a lot of exhaustive cataloguing and packing.  It was all very tense trying to comply with Australia’s strict biohazard laws and now our boxes have arrived the Border Force have decided to go through our measly possessions.  They also charged us a few hundred bucks for the honour of this special treat.

The van took a while to sell, there were plenty of timewasters, and I began to worry we would have to sell it to one of those horrible companies that would pay a pittance for our prized treasure.  In the end we sold it to a retiree from the North Lakes who has informed us the van is now called Ursula.  We’d never come up with a name, to us it’ll always be known as the van.

The house was put up for rent, but that’s also exhausting because there’s certificates and safety checks required for everything.  It’s also hard to pack and clean a home you’ve lived in for nearly eighteen years.

It’s been all been excruciatingly stressful and unpleasant. The opposite of those carefree days back in the 90’s.

My first ever Australian passport had a British Right of Abode stamp in it.  It gave me the right to apply for British citizenship after four years and if I really think back on it now, it that felt like an achievable goal, it seemed like it would be a handy thing to have.  It was.

And now, as I sit on the train racing me through the quaintest English countryside, the sun shining and all that adulting shit is finally finished, a half bottle of Cornish sparkling wine is seeping into my system, I feel tired and reflective.  This blog threatens to descend into a melancholy, self-pitying expose but I won’t go there.  We’ll be in Australia on Saturday night; on Tuesday my third Australian passport will expire.  Until I renew it, I won’t be travelling anywhere.