Jason (and Kirsten) in the UK

It’s time to go…..Jason Kirsten.

It seems its been ages since my last update, and with good reason. The last few months have been filled with thinking and planning and scheming and we’ve finally made the decision to leave London.

It hasn’t come lightly, but both of us have come to the realisation that we’ve probably enjoyed the best of what the UK had to offer and we’re eager and excited about our life ahead. When we leave, it will be exactly 4 years for me, and just under 3.5 for Kirsten, so we’ve both had decent innings.

So far, this means heading to Perth in mid December 2009 after a brief stop-over in Hong Kong, a fair few weeks travelling around South East Asia in Jan / Feb 2010, back to Perth and Adelaide for weddings and then probably off to Melbourne for the next exciting phase of our lives.

Things aren’t really all that clear beyond the SE Asia trip (which will include the usual suspects of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, probably alongside some kind of resort action in Thailand or similar). I’m not phased by the lack of planning – the open ended nature of things is exciting in itself, and marks a significant departure of the business and ruthless efficiency with which our lives have been led over the last few years.

On top of all this, we’ve been busy with visitors – a couple of days of my sister and her fiancee, Kirsten’s friend Ben from Perth and now Kirsten’s mum and dad are here. As soon as they leave Jess will be back with her husband (!) having gotten married en route around Europe and then Kirsten’s mum and sister come back right after that.

In the middle of all of this (well, technically right after) we have a trip of a lifetime planned to Burma with my dad, his brother (maybe two), my aunt and her husband. I can’t wait for that, but it’s hard to distill everything that is going on at the minute.br /br /Work is as busy as ever, and planning the timing around announcing our resignations (we both have three month notice periods), payment of bonuses, travel, visitors etc has been a real challenge. Now at least both of our workplaces are aware, but it may be some time before we can officially announce things to our colleagues (and in my case, to my clients). A three month notice period is a really long time, and takes some management!

In a way, I think things will only accelerate from here and I’m sure the leaving date will soon loom large in our minds. We’ll face all the practical matters involved in the similar move we both made from Perth to London, only this time as a couple and without the base of our parents’ and their houses to aid us.

We’ve already started stocking up on clothes and other things we know we’ll regret not buying while we are here. We’ve not got much left on our ‘must do’ list as we’ve been pretty active over the last few years, but we’ll definitely be enjoying London as much as we can over the next couple of months. With the weather closing in, this means things like our beloved BFI Film Festival, a visit to the Globe Theatre to see some Shakespeare and the like.

Kirsten won’t treasure this, but I’m really looking forward to our last European winter – the coats and scarves, the comforting central heating and the crisp, dense winter air, the leafless trees and the weirdly short days where you savour every hour of daylight. In a way, its the essence of our experience here; love and hate all wrapped up together in a bizarrely inextricable way.

If I wasn’t looking forward to the future as much as I am, I might even start to miss this place before I’ve even left.