Observations of a OneTime Outsider.

People ask what we notice coming back here & I hardly dare mention two of the glaring ones because they are such sensitive subjects. But for the sake of documentation accuracy I will tell you. Suffice to say, I am not passing judgement, I am just observing:

1. the number of seriously obese people
2. the number of different nationalities living here.
3. the cost of living in Britain.

1. I have been to America many times & it feels like America in this way now. According to statistics 1 in 10 adults in Britain are obese. British women are the most obese in Europe, though still behind their American counterparts. In 1980 the average BMI for women (body mass index, healthy being anything between 18.5 & 25.9) was 24.2. Now it is 26.9 for British women. fro British men it is 27.4 (the 4th highest in Europe if you're interested)



2. Ok, so we live in Oxford & visit London, both of which are highly international places. We also have lived in the most homogenous society in Europe, so the contrast is stark. Nobody 'immigrates' to Albania, so apart from its handful of missionaries, NGO workers, embassy staff & for some reason a small Chinese population (the communist connection perhaps??) EVERYONE is Albanian. So much so that they really don't know how to treat ethnic minorities at all. A West Indian friend living there used to get called 'monkey' & such like in the streets.

But where I live here in Oxford, when I travel on the bus, I am a minority in terms of language certainly & colour sometimes. When I shop at Lidl, apart from elderly couples, I only hear other languages around me. I can't work out why other normal British families don't shop there. Ok so you can't get everything there but it's SO much cheaper, yet it's pensioners & foreigners who shop there, because, like me, they find Britain frighteningly expensive. Maybe other Brits aren't feelign as crunched by the economy as we are.....

The net result overall of all this is, it just feels very different &, to be frank, a bit disorienting. I am surprised it has changed so much in 6 years, but it really has. I guess living abroad you feel your 'Nationality' much more, I felt very British & identified strongly with my British roots. Coming home, I'm not sure anymore what that means....

3. As for the credit crunch, much as I said I want to have some space before commiting to anything, as well as training the puppy when we get it, decorating the whole house (which I keep putting off) & helping my children adjust, as the cracks are beginning to appear, I think I may have to go out to work to supplement the charity salary my husband earns. Maybe it's just 'set up' costs & once we have replaced the boiler, bought a car, decorated the house, things will ease up a bit.

One thing I loved about living abroad & working for an NGO, is they look after you & we could live within our means. Easily. And you could afford to have a cleaner, a shared driver, believe it or not, for the school run (it was cheaper than me driving everyday), eat out, employ babysitters frequently, travel, get private health care as part of the package, & stuff like tennis lessons etc were really cheap too. I guess I was very spoilt in some ways despite it not being an easy place to live. It's quite a shock, & one of the anomalies that whilst living in a developing country, with infrastructure issues, power cuts, pollution, horrendous traffic & much less available in the shops, you did have these significant perks, which I must admit, made the frustrations a lot easier to cope with. So I need to adjust now to a different & much more thrifty lifestyle.

The good news is I can do supply teaching, which is well paid; the bad news is it's soul destroying, & the very worst aspect of teaching there is. I have just met anAmerican woman who has moved here & put her children in the local state school (in middle class Oxfordshire. Ha!) & frankly it's horrific. The kids swear at the teachers & nothing is done about it, the walls inside the school are covered in grafitti, their daughter says there is complete lack of respect for the tecahers, the children talk all through the lessons, they have had no homework in 3 weeks, the Head of year has told the parents that they don't need to keep coming in (this was on day 2) when they have had NO information at all, the kids haven't had timetables even. her son went to the wrong lessons for an entire week. How could that happen? I couldn't believe it. Ok so not all schools in Oxfordshire are like that (though the primary schools have the worst Key stage 1 results in the country & are in the bottom 10% for Key Stage 2) I have taught in 6 of Oxfordshire's secondary schools & whilst 3 were pretty tough, none were that bad & certainly had better discipline & support structures in place.

So I am not looking forward to the prospect which couldn't be further from my 'perfect job' in GDQ International School in Tirana. I fear this reverse culture shock is going to take me a while to process....

Back to School

Today really marks the beginning of a New Beginning for us. It also marks a few firsts. Not only did my two children start new schools, in the UK; my son's 3rd school in 6 years, my daughter's 5th school, but it is also the first time my daughter has been to school in England. And it is my son's first day at secondary school. Up to now, being back has felt the same as every summer back in the UK, pretty much. But now, September has come, the leaves are already falling, the air is cold & we are still here. And I am resolutely refusing to let my mind wander to what temperature it still is in Tirana.

Needless to say, both children were very excited, uniforms, (a new concept), tried on repeatedly, pencil cases packed & repacked & ties learnt to be tied. And with true ex-pat style, they sailed into their first days with ease & confidence. I was very proud of them.

Needless, also, to say, I sailed slightly less confidently into the day. In a way the whole re-entry adjustment has somewhat eclipsed the momentousness for every parent, of their first child starting 'Big school' (Incidentally I rather liked the fact that at my son's school, one of the buildings is actually called 'Big School'. It even has an elegant little plaque on the wall saying so. I have yet to discover the history of this primary school-ish name for a building, but I like it.

I found myself once again sitting at the kitchen table (different tables, different countries, same scenario), wondering, not for the first time, what my new beginning would be. What was I going to do?

It is time, once more to re-invent myself, or time to invent/create a life for me here. My husband has a new job, my children have new skills, I have..... the shopping to do....

I also have the cleaning to do, the ironing & the ferrying of children to & fro. It's one of the peculiarities of living in developing countries, (in particular), that whilst there may be poorer infrastructure, power cuts, worse communications, less choice of available goods, what you do have is cheap labour & people needing work. So, slightly uneasily, I have enjoyed the privilege of having someone do my cleaning & ironing & even school runs for the last several years. So that is something to get used to again. And looking back wistfully, I wonder at my squeamishness at this benefit...

But on this first morning, I went shopping. I must confess I haven't suffered the horror at the 'obscenity of choice' in supermarkets in Britain. I have to admit i have rather revelled in it. Of course I do find the packaging ridiculous & wasteful; the sanitised polystyrene & cellophane wrapped meat slightly unreal & plasticky (having been used to seeing my meat butchered on the street) & the regular, perfect, shiny fruit & veg even more so; but I never baulked at the variety of choice available. I love cooking & get very excited at the plethora of options & foods on offer. I get excited at the thought that I could cook pretty much any recipe I fancied (I am sure this will wear off.....) And I love browsing the aisles. Sad, but true.

Of course I do get the ex-pat 'choice anxiety' about choosing between the myriad versions of the SAME item. I just stick rigidly to either what I have used before, or which is the cheapest.

The second thing i did was go to the library, partly for the novelty factor of having access to a library full of English language books, & partly because I wanted to do something for me. I am going easy on leaping to help out at church, school, interest groups etc until I see how our new 'routine' pans out; but I have always wanted to be in a book club, since forever, as they say. I joined a rather boozy teachers' one in Colombo, which was a mainly an excuse for consuming cocktails. I used to feel a real girly swat because I had 'done my HW' & wanted to talk about the book. No one else seemed to. Still I learnt some very nice new cocktails. It was also hampered by a lack of available English language books in Colombo. Then i joined one in Tirana which was set up as a rival one to an 'invitation only' group, but that fizzled out as people moved away & titles were even harder to come by in Tirana. Then a friend was talking about one she was in, here in Oxford, so having learned from experience overseas of the need to be proactive& get stuck in & involved, I took the bull by the horns I asked if I could join.

Reader, I could. My first book is 'People like That'. I may not have a new uniform or pencil case, but I am very excited about mynew Book Club.

So there we are, small beginnings; but there's a verse in the Bible which says "Who despises the day of small things?"

Not me. That's a lesson I have learnt abroad. Little by little. Bite sized achievements & goals. And not to be too hard on myself. It takes time. That I know for sure.

Reconnecting with British Culture.

It has been interesting, endearing & quite amusing seeing how our children react to things they are not used to & seeing the things they don't know about.

As I said, they are thrilled with the house which they don't remember at all. It is interesting the things they love about it. Our daughter spends every waking moment playing on the banisters as if it were a jungle gym. She just loves having stairs. She thinks they are really cool! They both love the fact that you go out of the kitchen straight into the garden & can come in & out at will, unlike in our Tiranan 2nd floor flat.

They also love the fact that we have a land-line & a postman. Every time the phone rings or the door is knocked, they race to get there 1st to answer it. It is evidently such a novelty to have a front door accessible to the outside world & to have a phone line into the house, which we haven't had for the last 5 1/2 yrs. They can't get enough of it. Suits me they can deal with the cold callers....

I am slightly less enamoured as I had forgotten how many door to door salesman you get, cold callers & people selling things, or trying to con you on the phone. And then there is the long ensuing discussion when the children want to know who they were & what 'That Person' wanted. When we set up the landline, we joined the telephone preference service & asked to be ex directory. Good old BT somehow managed to overlook this, so within 24 hours of getting the line, (before we had given the number to ANYONE), both Mr NGO & I had calls telling us there was a problem with our computer & trying to get us to buy something etc. BT told us it would take THREE weeks for us to become ex directory & on the telephone preference list. And meanwhile our number is 'out there.' Grrrrr.

Despite all their travelling, living in 2 different cultures abroad & in many ways seeming very mature & worldy-wise, there are some things (normal to us in the UK), which they haven't really experienced. After his grandparents phoned the other day our 11 y-o said,

"It is amazing what you can do these days; I was talking to granny & grandad at the same time! They were on 2 different phones"
In Albania in June, on a short trip where we had 2 hotel rooms, the kids kept calling each other on the internal phones & collapsing in giggles at this technology they had never used (in THEIR living memories) Hearing their sibling on the other end was just too much evidently. I don't know why it should seem so different to mobiles or skype, but they had never used a normal landline ... It was like using those tin cans on a string & marvelling that it actually worked.

On one occasion we were talking about things we were looking forward to about living in the UK, & I said I was really looking forward to having central heating in the winter. Our son immediately pipes up with,
"What's central heating?"
And why indeed should he know? But what a treat he's in for!

A friend of his was telling him about a gig he was going to for 'youth' on the holiday camp they were on & asked whether our 11 y-o wanted to go too. Our son said "I don't know, I don't know what a gig is."

Perhaps it's just as well they're on a "Rekonnect" holiday camp this week for third culture kids returning to live in their home country. I guess it's time to learn some jargon, gain some street cred & acculturise to the good ol' British culture, (though events this week hardly endear us to the culture we have returned to.) Their innocence & refreshing delight in everything is hard to let go of. It's a bit like when your toddler says words wrongly & you know they need to learn & say it properly, but it's hard to correct them when you just love their little malapropisms.

My daughter came up with a good one actually on the way to this holiday camp. (not a cultural issue, just a vocab one!) It got corrected in the nick of time. She was asking me about the holiday & said,

"Will there be lots of girls in the lavatory with me?"

"Well, yes you'll probably share one, but not all at the same time of course."

"So I'll be in there on my own?"

"Of course, they won't expect you to share."

"But I thought you said there would be lots of other girls in the lavatory with me?"

"Well it depends if they want to go at the same time, but you'll just have to queue."

"Why would I queue?"

"Because there may only be one lavatory & obviously you will need to wait your turn."

7 y-o seriously confused now.

"Why do I need to queue up to go to sleep?"

11 y-o starts laughing & says,

"You mean dormitory, not lavatory."

Seems obvious now, but driving a noisy little Fiesta up the M1, whilst keeping an eye on 3 bikes strapped to the back & watching my speedometer so as not to go over 70 because of said bikes, I obviously wasn't concentrating very hard.

Well by this time on Friday perhaps I will have returned to me, 2 newly cool, culturally adapted, street savvy TCKs (Third Culture Kids) But actually I just hope they had a great time connecting with other TCKs, sharing their rich life experiences & having lots of "You too?" moments, & celebrating their lives abroad, rather than feeling odd, different or 'out of it' . And realising that what they have to offer is unique, valuable & amazing.

Hello England

Well, we've been back 6 weeks, our shipment's arrived, our house vacated by our tenants & we have moved back in. The children are very excited to be in a house, not a flat, to have a garden, and grass, stairs AND bannisters (to swing on, slide down etc) & a bedroom, each.

We have cleared out of it innumerable sets of bedlinen, 7 pyrex dishes, 6 duvets, 5 very wobbly & chipped Ikea bookshelves, 5 woks, 3 sandwich toasters, 2 kettles, 2 slow cookers, 2 spare beds, 3 complete sets of cutlery, a wool rug, 2 bike helmets, 2 coats, & a sports bag full of XL football kit.

I think we must have had a 'better class of tenant' or, to be more exact, better off. Often tenants nick your stuff; these left stuff they no longer wanted. So we had a major task on our hands before 100 boxes arrived a week later. I started off with good intentions, wanting to recycle, give to charity shops, good causes & not dump in landfill. However, my motivation wore a bit thin, when Homeless charities tell you, you need to wait a month before they can collect, others say they don't take furniture, some say it's not good enough quality; & then there's things like 3 manky sandwich toasters you have to spend hours cleaning before they're good enough to give to a charity shop. I ended up, I'm afraid, going to the tip more than I would have liked. Duvets are particularly difficult to get rid of. Can't put in textile banks, charity shops don't want them. Well, here's a top tip. Animal sanctuaries will take them - for cosy bedding for their cats & dogs. So, there, you can feel doubly smug, you've recycled AND kept a dog warm this Christmas.

Since being back the question I'm most asked is "What will you do? Will you get a job?"
I think people are surprised when I say no, not for at least a year. But then of course I will be settling two children in schools, painting & decorating our house, training a puppy, putting a house on the market, selling a house, buying a house. And then painting & decorating again. I think I'll have plenty to do.....

No one asks about Albania, but then I expected that. It's more a case of; "Well you're back now, business as usual."

The books tell you not to expect to slot straight back in to your old life/friends etc. We actually have, by & large, which feels weird. Don't get me wrong; I am very grateful for the welcome, love & support we've had from friends, it's been lovely. Several local friends have said, "It's just like you haven't been away."

Not for us.

We feel very different.

But it is all very familiar; same house, same friends, same social circle, same routines & so it has the effect of compressing the last 6 years. But I don't want them to be wiped out. They have changed us, we're not the same people. They are a vital part of our history. That's one of many reasons why we would like to move & start afresh somewhere else, though still in this town.

And the children? How have they fared? Well, that's a subject for my next post. You see I'm not ready to give up blogging quite yet. I think I'll still have a lot to write about over the next few months...

Goodbye Albania. Mirupafshim Shqiperi

Today is the day we bring 3 ½ years of our lives to a close as we leave Albania. Inevitably we have very mixed feelings. A blogging friend has said on several occasions “I bet you can't wait to be out of there.” This is a misunderstanding of how we feel about living in Albania & probably my fault for blogging too much about the exigencies of life here. But much like literature, when everything's happy & jolly, you don't need the catharsis or 'sense-making' process of writing, quite so much. It's what I tell my students when they ask why so much poetry & literature is depressing or gloomy & unhappy.

Perhaps if this was more of a travelogue it would be more upbeat & merely descriptive. However it is about everyday life bringing up a family abroad, which is why I am seriously considering winding it up & closing this (blogging) chapter of my life.

The main frustrations of living here have been developing country issues: infrastructure (power cuts/shoddy workmanship, sewage problems) or bureaucracy & corruption issues. Those aside there is much that I love about Albania, Albanians & our life here. My husband always says that I am a slow starter. It takes me about a year to adjust, settle, & make a life but then I get stuck in & enjoy it.

Leaving in the summer is doubly difficult because the weather is just so....fabulous & I am definitely a summer girl. It's in the summer that you realise that we are living in the Mediterranean. In the winter, it's definitely the Balkans. As I leave, I must remember the flat's winter temperature of 12 degrees & the frequent power cuts & our landlord frustrations.

But I have decided to correct the balance & tell you what I love about living here:

I love...

• The blue skied days, even in winter. Albanian skies are Georgian ceilings compared to English low-ceilinged cottages. The sky always seems so high. You don't get that too frequent British grey blanket hanging just above you.
• The café culture
• The weather.
• The aroma of coffee in the streets as you whizz past the multitudinous cafés on your bike
• The fact that you can buy fresh flowers SO cheaply on the streets as villagers come into Tirana to sell their garden produce in buckets on the pavements.
• Waiters walking through the streets balancing a tray of tiny espresso cups delivering to local shops their 1^st 'quick coffee' of the day.
• The mountains. How I love the mountains
• The many, many hours of sunshine.
• The wonderful (mostly organic) fruit & veg, the food markets & the fact that young & old,men & women are interested in good food & press, prod & test the fruit before buying.
• The way fruit sellers always tell you what part of the country the fruit has come from.
• The beautiful gorge where we go swimming.
• The greetings routine, where you stop & greet even if you are in a car with a queue behind you & the person is walking past.
• The way Albanians put their hand on their heart when thanking you sincerely for something.
• The still present feeling of community. People have time for each other.
• The amazing culture of hospitality.
• The lack of health & safety restraints or a nanny state. And I love the slightly anarchic, fiercely independent Albanian spirit, as well as a generally easy going attitude to things.
• My classes: multi-cultural, lively, amusing, intelligent, engaged, surprising, appreciative & great fun. And best of all the fact that they laugh at my jokes.
• The dedicated missionaries who have given up their comfortable, suburban live s back home, & made Albania their long-term home, learning the language, integrating into the culture & giving so much to their communities & to the country as a whole. Did you know that it was the Christian community, 0.5% of the population, who were responsible for 80% of the aid to Kosovan Albanian refugees in Albania, many taking refugees into their homes to live with them until they could safely return? They were given a public vote of thanks on TV by the president of Albania after the crisis.
• Finally I love the untamed, wildness that is Albania. Raw, beautiful & wild. Called by many Europe's last true wilderness. There are still bears & wolves in the mountains, many roads are untarmaced, people still ride on donkeys, till the fields by hand,shepherds graze their flocks, families harvest the olives. It really is a 'Bible-lands' landscape.

We have made good & often unexpected friendships here. My children have spent significant childhood years here & our daughter, in particular, passed through many miles stones; lost first teeth, learnt to ride a bike, to read, to swim. And both have made friends, gained awards, and scars, said many goodbyes. We have made a life here and we will miss it.

Goodbye Albania.

Hospitality

I should have said in my last post that one of the reasons I found those lessons hard to learn is because I am, in Myers Briggs terminology, an extrovert. (ENFJ if you want the whole thing.) 'Extrovert' & 'introvert' doesn't mean lively versus shy. It means you get your energy from people & feel buoyed up by a party or gathering or conversation. Introverts are drained by people.

So, I love friends dropping by unannounced (or announced). I like cooking for lots of people, having people to stay, talking, interacting, generally being around people. This is one of the reasons I found moving abroad so difficult, dealing with the initial loneliness, lack of interaction, lack of human contact sometimes. Being stuck at home, with a small child, in an alien environment, without toddler groups & without a very large ex-pat community, didn't make life easy for an ENFJ bod like me. The getting started bit is never easy. The language barrier was a significant hurdle, and the culture shock effect meant I felt so tired & drained by the culture, my lack of understanding of its ways that my normal desire to 'get out there' & meet people was quashed. Bit of a Catch 22 then..

I also found the transition hard because in the UK I lived somewhere with friends walking distance away, we had regular contact with friends, & living very near the M40 Oxford junction, people passing through would call & ask to drop in. I just love that. Of course as people get older, busier & more tied up with work & families, people don't just drop by the way they do when at university, when they are wafting between coffee bar, lecture & doing their laundry.

However, we picked a good country for our second move. Albania excels at hospitality. People make you feel so welcome. The guest is honoured above all else in the old Kanun code. A host was duty bound to protect you with his life. Nowadays the treatment still makes you feel like a VIP even if they don't quite take a bullet for you. Even in small ways they make you feel so welcome & help you out, such as when we arrived at our rooms by the beach last summer; we couldn't find the owner, so the family in the room along from us invited us to sit down & join them for lunch. The raki (plum/grape brandy) was immediately cracked open & offered to my husband, we were urged to share their fruit, byrek, cheese & bread & baklava. We had in fact just eaten our picnic lunch, but they wouldn't take no for an answer!

On another occasion my husband got a flat tyre & had to walk 45 minutes across the city in the midday summer sun to reach the 'bike shop road'. The guys, who only charged $3 for a new inner tube & nothing for labour, offered him a glass of cold water, then one of them went out to get him a chilled fruit juice from a shop. They then shared their bread & lamb with him which they were roasting over a little stove. My husband found it a truly humbling experience. These men, who mend bikes there, are pretty poor & had so little, yet shared what they had with him, simply because he was hot & had arrived at their lunch time.









But the piece de resistance was when some very long suffering shepherds in the middle of nowhere took pity on my husband & 4 fellow mountain bikers whose 'map memory' of Google Earth had failed them & they ended up not so much lost, as without a path to follow, the wrong side of a massive lake, in the dark, in a thunderstorm.....

Albania has very few maps. Well they have old Russian military maps but (still) no one is officially allowed access to them & they are indeed very hard to get hold of. There are no marked paths, certainly no mountain rescue, route markers of any sort, only sheep & goat paths which may (or may not) lead anywhere. On this occasion, a p.e teacher was taking 3 teenagers biking with my husband who just tagged along, not knowing that the route had not been examined that carefully on Google Earth. Had this been done, they would have discovered steep cliffs on one side & no discernible path on the other, or that the lake was enormous.

They set off at 7.30 a.m & reached the top of the gorge at 10.30. As it was still early they decided to carry on & see if they could get round the lake & link up with the next gorge over. 5 hours later they decided they couldn't go back & that it would be quicker to continue. The path was so muddy & steep at times that my husband ended up carrying all 5 bikes (one at a time) as he was the only one with cleats on his shoes so he could grip. Even so he slipped down the slope & plopped straight into the lake at one point, bike & all.

Then it began to rain. Then it began to thunder. It was also getting dark. They had had only a few snacks all day & it was by now 8.30p.m. I hadn't heard from my husband since 2.30. His phone had succumbed to mud & died. They then came upon 2 shepherd's cottages. The shepherds were adamant there was no way round the lake & that the only way out was by boat. They didn't know the name of where they were living & there were no roads at all. They offered to put the bikers up for the night & row them back across the lake the next morning. They insisted on washing the guys' feet, gave them all a supper of bread, yoghurt, sheep's cheese & some fruit & made up beds for them by the fire in the 2 roomed cottage. He took them along the corridor of the unfinished upstairs & opened a door at the end into thin air & via gesticulation indicated that that was their bathroom. They just opened the door & 'went'. If they needed to do anything else he told them to find a bush outside......

Sure enough at 6a.m the next morning, the shepherd rowed the guys across the lake to the next gorge & the welcoming committee of the International School's director (who was translating for them by phone & trying to ascertain exactly where they were), a doctor from the international clinic (his son was on the trip) the teacher-parent of another of the lads & another teacher on a motor bike who knew the area very well. Needless to say this ensured that this story has gone down in Tirana history in the ex pat community, though for what reasons I would not like to hazard a guess. My husband is still greeted with 'I heard a story about you the other day' & he knows invariably which story it is. They all thought it was a grand adventure; wives, girlfriends & mothers were slightly less impressed. I did ask why, when the route was SO non-existent they kept going. The answer? To quote Macbeth they were "stepped in so far, returning were as tedious as go o'er" They assumed it had to get easier & because the return journey would be at least 4 hours back, it would be quicker to continue....

My husband was due to fly to Georgia that same morning, so he had a narrow escape. He got home & washed, while I packed his stuff, fed him brunch & drove him to the airport for his 11.30 flight.

When you look at the google earth image, there is NO civilisation that side of the lake at all. Only a few stone folds & a few cottages nearer the beginning of the route. My son thought they must have been heavily disguised angels looking after his dad. I think they were typical hospitable Albanians who would never turn away someone in trouble.

We're going camping by this lake this weekend, so wish us luck. However at least we will be carrying our own accommodation & I'll be navigating....

Hurry hurry

It's one of the things I absolutely love about Albania. People are not in a hurry (unless they're male & driving a big flashy car). People will pass the time of day, greet you, (even if they are in a car in front of you & the person they see is a pedestrian) but in general they have time for you. Some people bemoan the fact that as Tirana (not Albania) develops, this is changing detrimentally. It's true of the Balkans in general, and, I suspect of many developing countries where time does not determine everything, & where people are not suffering from Hurry-sickness. People & relationships are what count.

There is, in fact, a new-ish movement called The Slow Movement. Books have been written e.g 'In Praise of Slow'

People are recognising the negative effects of stress, of hurrying & of never having enough time, as well as the dehumanising, joy robbing effects of being in a permanent hurry.

I read a book recently which was about various 'disciplines'. In it the author says hurry is the enemy of love. They are incompatible. You cannot show love & concern for people if you are in a hurry. He also talks of 'Sunset Fatigue' the fatigue at the end of the day when we are too drained, tired or preoccupied to give love to those we care for most. How very true.

He gives a funny example of how one evening he was bathing his young daughter who, when she got very excited, would run round in circles singing 'Dee Dah Day, Dee Dah Day' His response was to say, “Hurry up Mallory & get dried & dressed”.

She stopped, looked at him & said “Why?”

She was living in the moment (as children do, & enjoying that moment greatly it seemed!)

And he didn't have an answer for her. He didn't have anything specific to do, appointments, calls, not even a TV programme to watch! He just wanted to get through the bed time routine, get her to bed & on to the next thing. And it made him think. He said we spend so much of our time preparing for the next thing or racing through something to get onto the next thing. But why? (Note here it was the father doing this, not the mother who might have had just cause to want to hurry if she had been looking after miniature people all day.........)

And I am sure you have all had that most discomfiting experience at a gathering when you are talking to someone & you see their eyes look past you to somewhere else or someone else, or look around the room, before flitting back to you as you struggle on with what you were (so interestingly) saying. I dry up when that happens to me. I am ashamed to say my worst experience of this was a pastor of a church I was introduced to. He clearly was far too busy & preoccupied to be talking to me....

The author also suggests that hurry makes us multi-task (which research now suggests is less effective or productive than focussing on one thing at a time as our brains prefer) & that 'hurry' also contributes to superficiality. In our internet, information age we have perhaps traded breadth for depth. Depth isn't achieved quickly. This is something I struggle with as a teacher, for example, with students who are used to abbreviated writing forms (Twitter, Facebook, Texting), constantly changing images, a plethora of social media, surfing rapidly from one topic to another on the internet. Trying to read a novel or keep such students' attention for an hour is quite a challenge.

Two things which the writer recommends to 'cure' hurry-sickness are: 'slowing' & 'solitude'. He suggests deliberately choosing situations where you have to wait or slow down – not jumping the queues in a supermarket, driving in the slow lane, not honking your horn (that's a tricky one for me here in Albania, where my hand rests permanently on the horn), waiting to let people out from a side road. Try & focus on one thing rather than multi tasking, or bite your tongue rather than finishing your children's sentences for them, stop making To Do lists. The list is endless, so to speak.

The other – solitude, is the place where we can gain freedom from the forces of society which try to mould us. The truth is, as Kierkegaard once said, “The press of busyness is like a charm”. It makes us feel important, keeps the adrenaline pumping. It means we don't have to look too closely at the heart or at life. It keeps us from feeling our loneliness. It's good sometimes to stop & question why we do certain things. Is it because it makes us feel needed or important? As an experiment go somewhere with no phone/Blackberry/ipod/book/notepad & just sit & do nothing. It's incredibly difficult & agitating when you are unused to slowing. It's like being on the treadmill at the gym when you look down thinking, “I must have been going at least 6 minutes already, only to find you've done 2.” Again it's something I saw a lot both in Sri Lanka and here. People just watch the world go by. I am constantly amazed at how people can just sit & do nothing, not even read. I am not necessarily advocating that but hopefully there is a middle ground.

It is for these lessons that I am, strangely, most grateful to my time abroad for. The very things that I have found most challenging, I have learnt most from. I have had enforced slowness & solitude. I have experienced loneliness & I have learnt the value of gratitude, enjoying simple pleasures (e.g. electricity!), of contentment, of having time for people & valuing every relationship, even if it is the day to day interaction with a neighbour or shop assistant. It is dignifying everyone's humanity & worth I believe. It says 'I may be busy but I am not in too much of a hurry to greet you & ask how you are doing'.

Our children have had fewer opportunities and less to do in terms of school & activities perhaps, but in the school of Life, they have travelled all round the Balkans & Asia, lived in two very different cultures, interacted with multiple different nationalities on a daily basis, and are incredibly close for boy/girl siblings 4 years apart. As a family we rely heavily on each other, we can make our own entertainment & we truly appreciate community & inter-dependence.

I hope I can hold onto these lessons when I dive back into the British rat-race & the maelstrom of middle England.