LKC

My kiddos were quite a bit younger than yours when we moved back, so I can’t answer your schooling questions. However, we did move to Scotland, despite never having lived here before, and it is by far and away the best place that we have ever lived. If you have family/links here, I’d imagine it’d be even better! my husband and I separated shortly after we got here, but I don’t regret moving here, for a second!

I moved from Sydney to Perth & Kinross in 2017 - hands down the very best thing I've ever done! Things are a bit difficult here at the minute, but we've not been hit by Covid as badly as most other places in the UK, and hopefully things are starting to look a bit brighter. We'd not lived in this area before, but chose it partly because my (soon to be ex) husband had been offered a job, and because we didn't want to move back to anything, but rather on for another adventure. Despite Coronavirus, I've managed to retrain for a new career and find a new job, kids are happy and settled (although of course not at school at the minute), and I've made lots of friends, which is something that I found quite hard in Aus. I never really missed family, we weren't close, but I was very homesick for the UK, and I am beyond relieved that we moved back before my marriage went down the pan - I can't even think about how awful things would have been if we'd separated there and he'd not give his permission for me to return to the UK with the kids. In summary - life is good here in rural Perth & Kinross, and I'm really happy I took that leap of faith!

Try Dogtainers. We paid $6630 for four cats (in two crates) from Sydney to Scotland about 3.5 years ago. Great service from them, cats arrived safely. They were just moggies though, not a special breed (I don't know if that affects things).

It was almost a relief when I found out that other people felt like this too. I spent years blaming myself for not trying hard enough to make it work, although I know that I did. It wasn't that there was anything wrong with the place or the people, it is a beautiful country and I met some wonderful people, but I just couldn't shake that feeling of it not being my place. It was something deeper than there being things that I didn't like about Aus or preferred about the UK, if that makes sense?

It was never about family for me. I left home at 18, and lived 100's of miles away from family for my entire adult life. After my dad (who I was really close to) died when I was 24, I saw my mum/sister/grandma maybe once a year? I never missed them at all, nor my ex-husbands family, who we also lived 100's of miles from. Being 10,000 miles or whatever away from them didn't matter. Of course I enjoyed seeing them when we visited the UK, but they weren't the source of my homesickness at all. When we moved back to the UK, we chose Scotland, which is almost as far as you can get from family in Kent and the Midlands! I haven't seen mum or my sister since my grandmas funeral in January (although obviously I couldn't even if I wanted to at the minute). Yep, I can't even really explain how it feels - it never really hit me until we'd been in Aus for maybe five or so years. I'm not a believer in woo or magical thinking at all, but it's almost like your soul is just in the wrong place or something. Like your feet are walking on ground that you don't belong to, or you're in a place that you aren't part of in some way. And although I now live in Scotland, even though I've never lived here before, it's still part of my island, and I feel like I'm meant to be here or something. It's really hard to describe. It's a really deep sense of...everything.

I'm probably not going to be much help, but my first thought was not to make a rash decision in the middle of a difficult time, but then my second thought was life is too short to be living somewhere that you don't want to be! I moved back a bit over three years ago, and my marriage broke down soon after we arrived back, but I don't regret moving back to the UK for a second. That said, we moved to a completely different area of the UK (Scotland, where we'd not lived before), rather than moving near to family/friends, so we never got the feeling of going back, or that everyone else had moved on whilst we were away. It just felt like a fresh start. I think that helped in a way, because we weren't trying to recreate something that had gone. Maybe think about moving back, but rather than look at it as a move back, look at it as a move on. To something new and exciting! You never know what's round the corner - since we moved back I retrained for a new career, got a new job working for a really great company in an industry I'd never have thought I'd be in, do self-employed work on the side, and met the love of my life!

We did this the morning after we landed - I don't think I slept the night before, and I honestly look like a serial killer on my photo That said, it was really handy to have for ID purposes. We went into a post office that had a kind of booth/kiosk thing, which did the photos and electronic signatures for the licence, they checked it and sent it, and we had them back within the week. If you look on the Royal Mail website for driving licence renewals, they'll tell you the nearest one that offers the service. Money transfer wise, we used OFX. Due to the amount of money, we had to do several transfers, but we had spoken to the bank (went into the branch in Aus) beforehand, and they increased the limit. They (Westpac) also gave us a little gadget thing (SecurID Token) that generated a unique passcode every time we logged in to do a transfer, just as a second security measure, in case we weren't able to use our Aus phones for the SMS passcode. As it turns out, I managed to somehow lose the Aus SIM cards soon after we arrived (they were in a plain envelope, I think I must have thrown them away by accident), so I'm glad we'd sorted out the other thing! Our house sale in Aus didn't go through until about two months after we left, due to our buyers needing an extended settlement, but the money transfer side of things was really no bother to arrange from the UK.

This with bells on! My mum once said to me 'It's alright for you. You live in a holiday place', because she'd assumed that living in Sydney meant that we spent every minute at the beach, in the pool or having barbecues in the sunshine, while she was living a life of every day drudgery back in the grey old UK. That might be true for some people, but for the vast majority, the phrase 'same sh*t, shinier bucket' comes to mind. You still have to go to work, take the kids to school, mow the lawn, do the housework, the shopping and the cooking, and the thousand other banal tasks that everyday life throws up. For me, it wasn't even a shinier bucket in the end. I've lost count of the number of people who've told me we were mad to move back to the UK, both before and since our move. However, unless you've lived it and experienced those feelings for yourself, it isn't really possible to understand them. Life here is immeasurably better than it was in Aus, and I don't regret moving to Scotland one tiny bit!

We moved back three years ago with an 11 year old and a 9 year old. The goodbyes were hard, of course, but new friends were soon made and they settled easily into life here. They stayed in touch with their Aus friends for a while, but it petered out eventually. We live in Scotland, eldest has an English accent (ex and I are both English, and she never really picked up the Aussie accent despite having lived there for 9 years), and youngest has an Aussie accent, and neither have been picked up or singled out because of how they speak. I know we're in Scotland rather than England, but really life is great here. Yes, there is uncertainty with regards to Brexit, and of course we're in the midst of a pandemic, but I'm honestly of the opinion that moving here was the best thing I've ever done! We've settled, made new friends, I've retrained for a new job and got the first two part-time jobs I interviewed for (after 12 years at home with the kids, with no actual experience in the field, and in the midst of the Brexit/pandemic uncertainty), and although ex and I separated, that would have happened wherever we had been, and I am thankful that it happened on home soil, as it were. Life is too short to be unhappy.

We used Dogtainers for our four cats, and they were absolutely awesome! The cats were collected on the Monday morning (we flew Monday pm), and were with Dogtainers for 24 hours as the rules required, were vet checked, put into two big crates (two cats in each), and flown to Dubai, to land at night when it was cooler. They were then let out into a pen for a stretch, water, and for their crates to be cleaned, and were then put on their onward flight to Glasgow. In Glasgow, a Dogtainers associate collected them and completed their paperwork, and then delivered them to our door. They were a bit crumpled and smelly, but otherwise in very good health. They were pretty confused and slept a bit on the first couple of days (jet lag, I guess like VS's dog), but they were soon back to their usual selves. Like VS, they sent photos of the cats to us en route, so that we could see they were okay. I was really stressed about bringing them back, because our eldest daughter is autistic and pretty much worships the cats, and I was worried that something bad would happen, but it all went very smoothly. This was in September 2017, so way before Covid and the reduction in flights, but I'd imagine that the various companies would take this into account.

As the others have said, just rock up to the GP practice and register. I'd got NHS cards for three of us from before we left, but had somehow misplaced one kids card. It wasn't a problem, she actually needed to go to the doctor three days after we landed, and I just filled out a patient registration form. I also agree that you should start decluttering ASAP. I actually started packing well in advance, and put some things in storage before the house went on the market. I used an app called Sortly, which you put an inventory on, then you can print out a label with a QR code for the front of the box - made unpacking at this end really easy, as we were in a rental to start with, didn't want to unpack everything, but occasionally needed to find something from the boxes. Good luck with it! Moving back to the UK is the best thing I've ever done!

I don't think getting married changes your name, but you can use your marriage certificate as evidence of the fact that you can change your name, if you wish (if that makes sense). When I got married I had to provide my marriage certificate to change my name with the bank, for my passport etc., but I didn't have to change my name. I could have stuck with my maiden name. Now I'm getting divorced, I will probably keep my married name so that it is the same as the kids, until they are adults themselves, even if I remarry, although if I did remarry I'd just use my new marriage certificate to change it. your married name doesn't automatically revert to your maiden name on the event of a divorce. But I think I could use my marriage certificate and decree absolute to change it back instead of by deed poll if I wished. Obviously things like the name on plane tickets and passport, bank card and ID, name you gave to Medicare and any hospital visit etc. would have to match.

Exciting times! We used Chess, and paid about $8,000 plus extra for insurance to move a five bed home from Sydney to Scotland. This was in September 2017. It seems quite a bit cheaper than yours, but given it was three years ago, and the fact that a large amount of our belongings were already packed and in storage (decluttered for the house viewings) so there was less packing to do, and that we didn't bring any sofas or mattresses back (we decided to get new in the UK), you might well find that a quote with them is a bit higher. Chess were great at the Aus end - nothing at all was broken or damaged. They used another company here (I don't actually remember which one), who tried to charge us more because we changed the delivery address at this end, but in fairness they did drop the extra charge once we pointed out that we were in fact much closer to the dockyard at Grangemouth than we thought we would originally be, and thus we should be getting a refund for the mileage not used! I would recommend having a good sort out. I have just unpacked 5 boxes of toys that the kids insisted that we bring back - they were packed in about March 2017, and haven't been touched since then! I'm sure there are more boxes of things in the garage that I could have done without bringing too! If you pack any of your things yourself, there is an app called Sortly, which allows you to list inventory and print out QR codes to stick on boxes, so you can see what is in each books at a scan of the QR code. I found that invaluable, particularly because we left much of our stuff packed when we arrived, as we were in a rental and decided not to unpack much of our stuff until we bought. It allowed me to easily find items that we did need in the mean time.

We used Dogtainers to bring our four cats home - it cost $6,630 for the four of them with two cats in each of two large crates. It was really straight forward, they were looked after brilliantly, and arrived a couple of days after we did.

I honestly considered Australia home, for maybe the first four or five years that we lived here - there are plenty of posts on here with me saying as much. I think the change happened for me when my marriage started going down the pan, which happened probably three or four years before we went back to the UK. My ex kind of withdrew himself from our marriage at about that time, and I started feeling intensely lonely. I had lots of people who I knew through school and so on, but no one that I could really confide in about what what happening - they were all busy with their own families, and I was always kept at arms length. It was only after we moved back to the UK and I had made some really good friends, that I felt strong enough to end our relationship, and things started to get better. I feel more at home in Scotland than I've ever felt anywhere else, even though I've not lived here before. I just seem to have landed in the right place at the right time, somehow.