To Tell or Not to Tell…???

Well in the 6 days since my last blog our talk of emigrating has become more and more serious.

We have spent the Easter bank holiday weekend down in Devon with my Nan. She lives in a beautiful place, we love it so much that we chose to get married there last year, on a cliff overlooking the beach and estuary at Bigbury-on-Sea. When we go there it feels like coming home – I spent most of my childhood summer holidays there. So I knew it would be a real test of my nerve, to see if it I really want to leave England.

We bought a copy of Bill Bryson’s “Down Under”, and have been squabbling over it all weekend, eventually Jon finished it on Saturday afternoon and I am now half way through. I’ve been learning some fascinating things about Australia, I’m not usually one for history, but the history of Australia is quite extraordinary! For example, did you know that after Cook discovered Australia (or New Holland as it was known then) it took 17 years before England chose to return to claim it as part of the British empire, and only 4 hours after they anchored up in Botany Bay the French arrived with same intention! So Australia missed being ruled by the French by only four hours!

Despite deciding not to tell my Nan about our plans to emigrate, we found the main topic of conversation over the weekend kept returning back to Oz… we’d be sitting having our dinner and I would suddenly pipe up – “did you know that of the top 10 of the worlds most deadly snakes, all reside in Australia?” or “did you know that Canberra was only chosen as capital of Australia to stop an argument between Melbourne and Sydney?” I think we just about managed to convince her that we were just interested because Jon is off to Brisbane next month for a business meeting, but that fact alone must have raised her suspicions surely?!

On the way home we stopped in at my Aunty and Uncle’s for lunch, where once again I managed to manipulate the conversation until I was telling them about the POW camp in the Australian Outback where on one side 1,200 Italian POW’s were so relaxed about being in prisoners in Oz that their Officers were even allowed out to the local town as long as they shut the door behind them! But on the other side there were 1,200 Japanese POW who were so ashamed of being captured that they planned a suicidal escape mission where I think about 300 of them were shot dead by the confused Aussie guards, and another 700 fled into the Outback only to find there was no-where to go! My Aunt and Uncle seemed to enjoy the story, and other interesting Australian facts about Box Jelly fish, poisonous octopus and so on, but our excited tirade of Australia talk soon came to a halt when my Aunty inquired if we had any intention of going “gallivanting off to the other side of the world…” to which we both diverted our gaze to the depths of our soup bowls and muttered something along the lines of “no, er, yes, maybe one day….”

We had one final stop to make on our Journey back along the south coast from Devon to Brighton, and that was to my parents in Salisbury. But it took 4 and a half hours to get there in bank holiday traffic so I whiled away the time by changing the words in every song on the radio to be about us emigrating to Oz, my favourite being a whole rendition of Daniel Beddingfields “If your not the one” changed to tell the story of how we hate chavs and would rather live in the sun with the Kangaroos. Jon was quietly tolerant but about halfway through Somerset, without warning, in one swift movement he detatched the front of the stereo and flung it over his shoulder into back of the car. I continued for a little while without accompaniment, but soon gave up.

I managed to have a cup of tea and hot cross bun at my parents house without mentioning Australia once – but we made plans for my mum and my elderly aunt to come to Brighton today so that I could drive them the remainder of the way back to my Aunts nursinghome in Kent (my mum hates driving anywhere she’s not familiar with) and then drive back to Brighton alone with my mum.

So I am faced with spending the whole day with my mum, without mentioning Australia once, OR I could tell her…..

Half of me thinks I should not tell her until we know we’re defiantly going… but the half says it better to tell her now, when its still just a possibility not a certainty. Give her some time to get used to the idea!

Oh well, I’m just going to go with the flow and see where my big mouth leads me…..

Wish me luck!