The Start of a New Journey.

I feel as though I should be in the blogger's equivalent of a Catholic confessional.

Forgive me internet for I have not blogged. It has been two months since my last post...

In my defence, my lack of activity on the tiny speck of the cyberspace landscape that I call mine has been driven by the fact that my computer ceased to function. Having spent a rather long time being repaired by some genius whose skills make my head hurt, my computer is back where it belongs - on my desk and fully functioning (albeit with a slightly odd keyboard that may end up being to blame for some interesting typos).

I am back and so much has happened in the last couple of months that I don't know quite where to start. In the tradition of all good stories, I suppose I should start at the beginning.

For some time, my husband has felt dissatisfied with his current employment. A long commute each day bites deeply into the time available to try and achieve the elusive work/life balance. He is always ridiculously busy, sometimes overstretched and too often stupidly tired. On one such day when he decided to have a good moan about it, I was not in the mood to be sympathetic. I told him in no uncertain terms that he had no right to complain about the situation unless he was prepared to actually do something about it. He took my words very much to heart.

My husband is in the sort of job where head hunters periodically contact him with positions that may be of interest. He had responded to a few of these potential opportunities in the past but without the commitment of time (of which he has so little to spare) and energy (ditto!) or any real desire to actually change the wonderful bits of our life that we have built over the last decade,  these opportunities went nowhere.

Suddenly, with my words still bouncing around his head, everything went crazy. There were job applications, interviews and presentations to prepare. There were shirts to iron, suits to dry clean. There were long trips north and south to attend invitations to interview.

It came down to two strong contenders. A job in Yorkshire which I loved the sound of. I saw myself living in the Dales in a sympathetically renovated barn conversion with a big garden for me to keep my chickens and the kids to play. The property website RightMove fed my imagination as I perused suitable homes for sale within our price range. The job my husband favoured would mean moving to Sussex. Putting to one side for a moment that this was a great job, there were two compelling arguments in its favour. Firstly, my husband was born and raised in Brighton and has a strong affinity for the area. Secondly, it would mean we could see a lot more of his dad and be on hand should we be needed at any time. The major flaw in the plan was that our 'housing dollar' would have a really hard time stretching to any sort of accommodation even vaguely comparable to our current home. RightMove was no longer my friend.

My dreams of becoming a Yorkshire lass were put to bed when my husband accepted the Sussex job but before accepting it, a wild card was thrown into the mix. During the process of providing the names of referees for potential employers, my husband got back into contact with a man he had worked with in Switzerland. I have yet to meet this man but my husband describes him as inspirational and someone he would love to work with again. Contact with the inspirational individual generated the wildcard.

I am not a morning person. I can be slow to wake up and not worth talking to until after my first cup of tea. My husband brought me up my morning tea as usual and dropped the question out of the blue How would you feel about moving to India? It was many hours later that I actually responded, by text, to say that anything was possible.

Compared with reducing my belongings to fit into a trunk and packing my family off to another continent, downsizing to relocate in Sussex seemed like an easy option.

While my husband has been organising his exit strategy from his current employment, visiting India and preparing to start work in his new job (did I mention that he is a busy man!), I have been on a mission to sort out and streamline our life. We have accumulated a lot of 'stuff' over the years and comfortably spread out to fill our five bedroomed home. Taking stock of our possessions, breaking emotional ties and working out what we really need against what only serves to weigh us down is challenging. My mind is in a whirl with it all and I am very glad to have my computer back so that I can document the journey we are on. One step at a time. One post at a time. Here we go.