After the usual flurry of “to do” lists and packing/repacking (as one of our legs demanded a maximum of 15kg of check in luggage – no easy feat when you are away for 7 weeks!!) the day finally arrived when I was to fly solo to the UK to meet up with my family. Being knackered helped me sleep on the overnight flight to Dubai and by the time I arrived in London I felt quite human! I caught a train down to Hampshire where my Mum met me and I pondered how much easier travelling was nowadays with credit cards easily used to tap for tickets and free wifi on trains and stations making communication easy plus the luckiest thing of all is that we are English speaking – the most commonly used language in the world just happens to be our native tongue! It does have the tendency to make us a bit lazy though and you have to make a real effort to try and speak French, Greek or Italian when you know they can speak excellent English!
I spent a couple of days with Mum in the area I grew up in England and we revisited some of our favourite haunts and met up with old family friends which made me feel like I’d gone into a parallel universe where hardly any time had gone by rather than the 40 odd years since I’d left! It was lovely to stay at Mums and meet her friends and see in person all her pots and hanging baskets that she lovingly plans and nurtures each season – one of the many things that help keep her busy and stay young! We packed up the car and she drove us to Wales for our reunion with the other half of the family and before we knew it we were all chatting and clinking glasses and enjoying being back together. As I get older I get more and more nostalgic for these moments of reconnection and appreciation for our family so in that vein we planned an overnight stay at my cousin’s house in Warwickshire. Here our octogenarian parents could also easily get together and enjoy reminiscing about times past and Celia seamlessly managed to whip up a magnificent beef roast in her huge Aga which we enjoyed with copious quantities of lovely wines and lots of laughs were shared around the table. Thanks to Roger and Celia for hosting another wonderful family reunion….

After many years of our cousins living in New York and Sweden whilst we lived in Wales and Australia we were finally all in the UK at the same time and we arranged to meet in one of my very favourite cities – Bath. As its about halfway between Mum and Sandy we have often overnighted here and it never ceases to hit the spot. Built for pleasure and relaxation, beautiful Bath has been a wellbeing destination since Roman times. The waters are still a big draw today, both at the ancient Roman Baths and the thoroughly modern Thermae Bath Spa, which houses the only natural thermal hot springs in Britain you can bathe in. It has much to offer the visitor, once the home of Jane Austen there is now a museum dedicated to her, beautiful Pulteney Bridge that shares a similarity with the Rialto bridge with its built in shops, Bath Abbey and the grand curve of The Royal Crescent built in the late 1700s – there is much to see and admire.

We enjoyed a lovely lunch and a few hours of chatting and catching up with my beautiful cousins before we headed back to our hotel to rest up ahead of our Michelin starred restaurant dinner – no rest for the wicked!! Menu Gordon Jones was a set menu, very creatively put together and most delicious. I love that these great chefs are more and more concentrating on small restaurants with maybe 30 covers and doing what they love most – their passion shines through. Cocktails and girly chats rounded off our day and we retired to our hotel full and happy!

The next morning we had a final breakfast together at The Ivy and headed back to Wales on the train to spend our last few days together – walking along the beach with the sunshine warming our backs, shopping in Cardiff, a movie and an Indian meal out and lots of lovely home cooked food and wine with enthusiastic participation in board games – simple stuff but absolutely what I miss the most! We laughed at how we had different words for the same things despite speaking the same language (courgette/zuccini, aubergine/eggplant, peppers/capsicum) and how our lives differ mostly because of our different climates. Theirs is more indoors with long cosy months of cold weather and ours is based more outdoors as we can confidently organise a bbq or a walk along the beach or a play date at the park without fear of rain.

On my last day they drove me to Bristol from where I was flying to Athens to meet up with the MOTH and we enjoyed that other great British tradition – a pub lunch! The perfect full stop to my trip home. Saying goodbye never gets any easier but we have been lucky over the past 2 years with more frequent get togethers post covid but as nothing has been actually planned for our next meeting this goodbye felt harder. We are thinking of renting a cottage in the Lake District for a week or two next year perhaps which will keep us from being too sad!! Farewell for now lovely family…..