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....