November 2025 to August 2026
There’s no question that we have been slack on the blog front. Not because nothing has been going on; quite the opposite. So much has been going on that we haven’t found the time to sit and write it all down.
Our last entry was in Morocco in October 2025; it is now the end of August 2026. We have traded the point breaks and golden sands of Imsouane for the fields and farmland of Welshpool in Wales. A rainy Wednesday has finally opened up the opportunity to pause, write and remedy the large gap in our blog timeline.
Over the last 9 months we have solidified our decision to ‘live’ in the UK – at least for the kids to finish school here. We’ve been through house moves, school entrance exams, GSCEs, Machinery of Government changes, organisational restructures, sporting achievements and broken limbs. So much has happened that we won’t do justice to it here, so we’ll have to settle for a quick summary.
So let’s go back to Autumn term 2025, when we still had the sand in our shoes from Morocco and were adjusting back to the pre-wintery darkness of London in November. This was prime ‘school time’ for UK schools – where the actual learning happens (albeit in short,6 week sprints between holidays). Winter sports were in full swing (along with the ever present school and county cricket trainings), as were activities like cadets for Jessie + the full time activity that was Alleyn’s birthday parties, a seemingly weekly (or twice weekly) occurrence, Halloween and Siennas 11th birthday shopping trip.
And the resurgence of the family 630am run club! Everyones favourite…
Ant escaped the ‘grind’ of a month in London by heading to Moldova for a long weekend with Adam, having a great time exploring one of the last remaining ‘unvisited’ European countries including the soviet throwback breakaway state of Transnistria under beautiful blue skies. It’s always fun to explore new places, and Moldova was no exception.
From there, Ant had to bounce quickly to an equally sunny New York for a couple of days for work. Whilst it sucks to be away from the girls, its always nice to go to New York and just wander the streets around meetings – or to catch up with our friends who are still there.
Back in London our house hunting was in full swing and, after a couple of false starts, we found a place we liked on Herne Hill Road – close to Dulwich Village and walking distance for Jessie to get to school. A few weeks of frenzied negotiation and we settled on a price… and then entered the 4 month ‘we’re really vested in this house but could get gazumped at any stage’ period that is unique to the English property market. Fortunately for us, this didn’t happen and we eventually got the keys to our new home in May.
November turned into December and darkness settled on London. We hadn’t been away for a few weeks so we left the kids at home with Emily the dog sitter and descended on Abu Dhabi for an awesome long weekend with friends for a combined 50th birthday party / Grand Prix extravaganza. We were hosted by Steve and Leen and joined by Chad (the co-birthday boy), Dave, Steve, Alan and Ana and Ma and Vinco. Even in a year of truly ‘pinch yourself’ moments (think trekking with gorillas in Rwanda just a few months earlier), this was an amazing trip. Great friends who had travelled in from all over the world, great experiences – not just seeing the Grand Prix, but a day spent swimming and exploring Abu Dhabi on Steve’s new boat;
wonderful dinners out and BBQs at home,
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mornings in the beach club and morning swims in the Gulf (before the mines were subsequently laid).
It was such a wonderful couple of days and so wonderful to connect with friends we don’t get to see hardly enough. We should absolutely turn 50 more often. When we got home, the feedback from the girls was twofold – firstly: why didn’t we take them to the Grand Prix too? Secondly, if we went away ourselves again, did they really have to look after the dog sitter again?
Back in London, the girls were finishing the autumn term and enjoying the great job that London does of preparing for Christmas. Parents only trip to the theatre, our ‘fast becoming traditional’ Christmas ice skating, gingerbread house competitions and trips to see the Christmas lights.
Our equally traditional Christmas/New Year’s ski trip with Dave, Lara and Thalia was pulled a day earlier than usual this year and, after some negotiation with the girls, we drove out of London early on Christmas morning, having celebrated Christmas on the 24th. It was just the 5 of us, Gus’s ticket had been revoked after his performance last year and realisation that he was happier running around in the muddy local park and/or being at home sitting on top of the dog sitter on the couch. We made our way safely to Le Shuttle and transited under the channel to France.
Immediately after our tyres hit France soil, our not-so-trusty Peugeot lit up like a Christmas tree and announced it had an emissions issue and would stop starting in 900km. We calculated just under 900km to get to Lyon. 300km to get home. Surely we could get the car to one of the many thousands of Peugeot garages in France and get the issue resolved – or at least the counter reset – to allow us to continue our holiday? We ploughed on, hammering it to Lyon, only stopping the car once to fill up with fuel. We looked at every Peugeot garage in the Lyon area – understandably none of them were open and those few with online booking systems suggested that the next available appointments were in 6 weeks time. Surely not? (In hindsight they were exactly right – all Peugeot garages have massive backlogs due to the high number of warranty recalls across their fleets at the moment).
At 7pm on Christmas night we dumped the car at Fred’s local Peugeot garage, not knowing if or how the issue would be resolved but thankful that we made it that far. We popped into Fred and Noemie’s house, inadvertently crashing their family late running Christmas lunch, got plyed with some excellent wine and then made our way back into town for our own Christmas dinner with the girls at our now regular brasserie Le Vieux Lyon. We stayed at the now familiar Ibis Styles on the Rhône before wandering the streets of the old town.
On the 26th, after a beautiful run around Lyon in the December sunshine, we hired a new car for the trip up the mountain, dropping into the Guillot’s en route to say hi properly.
We met up with Dave and Lars in Albertville for dinner, our jumping off point for an early start the next morning and our plans to ski at least half the day on Ant’s birthday.
We arrived to see Meribel uncharacteristically green, with the lowest runs looking largely unskiable and foliage poking out off the side of the main runs which were reasonably well covered in man made snow. There hadn’t been a dump in almost a month, and none was expected whilst we were there. At least they have serious snow making equipment there, and the resort did an amazing job keeping conditions reasonable.
The girls all jumped into classes at Parallel Lines which became an immediate hit, both Ellie and Jessie dabbled with snowboarding most afternoons, Dave and Ant explored the 3 Valleys and Liz and Lars hit the walking trails.
The week passed quickly until the afternoon of New Year’s Eve when we visited the baby slopes at the bottom of Chaudanne to help Thalia with her first snowboard lesson on the magic carpet run. Cleverly Ant hadn’t bothered to loosen up his ski boots before running after Thalia on the slopes – resulting in a slip on the metal of the actual magic carpet, a twist and a spiral fracture of the fibula. Ant tried to walk it off but sadly to no avail; and agreed to a visit to the Medical Center under Liz’s insistence. An x-ray confirmed what the doctor already knew when we hobbled in, and Ant’s leg was put into a boot for the next 12 weeks. Not ideal.
Liz couldn’t work out what she was most delighted by – the prospect of driving the family down from the mountains and all the way back to London by herself, the fact that she would need to take on all the dog walks or that she would need to do all the driving for the family for the next several months once we got back. None of this was particularly popular.
At least we managed to drive home – Fred had managed to sweettalk his local garage into jumping the 6 week long queue and get our car ‘reset’ so that we could nurse it back to London to get fixed – where it spent the next month getting fixed.
Surprisingly excellent burgers in Calais on the way home heightened everyones mood!
Ant’s world shrunk during January and February – basically consisting of work, home and the gym. Liz’s world expanded to include every dog walk (particularly amazing considering this is the coldest, wettest part of the year, a fact that Gus was impervious to) and all the girls cricket trainings including those in Canterbury.
At the same time it was school entrance exam season – both 11+ (Year 7) and 16+ (Year 12); GSCE stress was building up for Ellie and we were gearing up to exchange on the house.
In January Ellie did her mocks – which shone a bit of a light on how stressful GSCEs were likely to be. Even the ‘warm up’ exams lasted 3 weeks – we were starting to understand just how brutal the GSCE process really was.
She did manage to get her head out of her books for long enough to celebrate her 16th birthday (we can’t believe how quickly that has come about) at the end of the month and host a wildly successful house party with her mates.
We also got the great news that both Ellie and Sienna got into Alleyns (Ellie on a cricket scholarship) – meaning that all 3 girls would be together at a top London school from September. We were super excited for them and it reinforced our reasons for staying in London.
To further solidify this position, after months of waiting we finally exchanged on the new housw, giving us certainty that we would, in fact, go through with the sale at the beginning of May. We just had to work out how to pay for it all now!
February half terms suddenly appeared (we’re still not used to these 6 – 7 week long half terms) and did a wet and distracted couple of day visit to Oxford and Cambridge (both lovely, but in hindsight trying to juggle a holiday around both Ellie and Jessie doing exam prep was probably ambitious) and the war in Iran put paid to our plans to visit Australia (on Qatar Airways) in April. In hindsight, taking 3 weeks out for holidays just heading into GSCE was probably not the smartest move either – so maybe it was a blessing; but there certainly wasn’t a lot of love for Donald Trump at the time.
Sienna continued to extract everything possible from her last few months at Sydenham, including her last prep-school excursions and trips away.
And then it was April holidays. Not met by the same level of excitement as previous holidays – mainly because we were meant to be in Australia but we weren’t. It’s a funny time to be in London – it is nice and light after the dark of winter, but it’s still cold and everything still feels wet from winter. It’s a great time to be travelling… which in this case we weren’t.
We checked weather forecasts for Australia, groaned a bit and then returned to study and work. By this time Ellie was consumed – trying to get across 9 subjects and 26 exams – something that is way more similar to HSC exams in Australia than anything that is served by to 16 year olds. It was unrelenting, and required her to step back from pretty much everything else – friends, social occasions and sports. Except for the ocassional trip to the skate park to stomp some spiders!
We used the time to try and put the rental property we’d been living in for the last 3 years back to its original state; and plan for the renovations of our new place. We sensibly planned to get the keys just as the cricket season started (thereby consuming much of our free time on the weekends) and to actually move house during Ellie’s exams.
At the beginning of May Alan and Ana came to visit and Liz went to Crete with Rosie, Annie and Anita for a 5 day ‘joint 50th’ celebration…
The day she was due home we completed on the house. Ant went down to the real estate agent who ceremoniously passed him a single key in an envelope and then returned to painting her nails. It felt slightly underwhelming considering the amount of money that changed hand for that key.
This kicked off a couple of weeks of relatively frenzied decorating as we tried to ‘reset’ a well maintained but dated old house into our new home. We planned to paint Jessie and Sienna’s rooms (previously blue and yellow respectively) into a neutral white to give them a canvas to decorate themselves. We would also replace the carpets from the current blue to something more neutral. And that was it.
Over the first week that we had the place, painting two rooms became the entire second floor (definitely choosing quantity over quality in some places) as well as ripping up the stair carpet and preparing the stairs for a new runner. This all had to happen before the carpets went down, the new wardrobes were installed and we physically moved from Lordship Lane the following Wed-Friday; and all of our stuff came from storage in Australia the next day. It was a tight plan with little margin for error.
The move from our old rental was relatively painless – managed over 3 days to minimise disruption to Ellie’s exams and most of our stuff easily found a home in our new, bigger house. Only a few specific pieces of furniture didn’t have a place. On Friday night we sat down and had a drink; looking around our mostly full new house and mentally trying to work out what was coming the following day.
8am Saturday morning a truck pulled up. Followed immediately by a second truck. We paled. But it made sense that 196 items would not fit in a single truck. It similarly made sense that this amount of stuff wouldn’t fit into our new house. It was a combination of our place in Ryde, a good portion of Liz’s parents’ house in Goulburn and the remnants of Ant’s parents’ house in Eastwood. 4 generations of stuff all landed in our already full-ish Georgian house.
We spent the next 4 days going through boxes, consolidating and sifting and playing Tetris with our two attic spaces. We took 12 trips to the tip/donation center, filling up our car to the brim each time to try and create enough space in our house to be able to close the doors.
The concept of uncluttered space quickly left our plans, and we pivoted seamlessly to ‘eclectic’ as we filled the loungeroom with family heirlooms and wooden rowboats/bookcases. Classic style. Despite this (or maybe because of it) over the next few months this house became our home. The grapevine growing over the back trellis started heaving with fruit and we started entertaining groups again – something that we hadn’t really been able to do at scale in our old house. We’d slightly forgotten how much we enjoyed it.
In all of this Jessie turned 14!
After almost a month of constant exams, Ellie was done. She locked herself in her room and curled up in the foetal position for a few days to recover before cautiously popping her head out to reengage with the world. First stop.. parental endorsed nose piercing to celebrate the end of exams.
Her cricket season kicked off with a couple of games for Alleyns, the GDST combined team and Kent – but it all felt a bit like just trying to get through a day with a massive hangover.
Jessie and Sena were enjoying their last few weeks of school – Sena in particular making the most of her last few weeks of prep school with her end of year school play (Oliver), musical production, camp, year 6 camping weekend and all the goodbye presentations. Not to mentioned finishing up her role as school captain! It was hard to believe that we would have 3 high schoolers next year. They were both enjoying the cricket season this year – Jessie had taken over as captain of her school team and scored her first 50; Sena’s Dulwich team continued to win everything they played; and both were enjoying Kent festivals.
Jessie’s end of year activity week was curtailed by extreme heat, as a second 38 degree heatwave roared across London – which combined with the fact that it hadn’t rained since April created an uncharacteristically London drought.
Meanwhile we were starting to enjoy the new house and having space for visitors and guests.
In June Ellie had prom, a girls trip to Brighton and general winding down.
Then at the beginning of July we put her on a plane to Tampa by herself for the first time – she was off to spend a week on a cruise around the Bahamas with Abby Tattersall, her mum and brother for a week. As you do when you’re 16.
Meanwhile we hit up Wimbledon and the women’s finals of the T20 at Lords! Go you Aussie good things…
And then school broke up and it was summer holidays.
Throughout this early summer period our not-so-trusty Peugeot had been having more dramas. The emission light was back on and there was also a recall on the camshaft. It spent June in the shop getting fixed – all the time promising that it would be ready in the ‘next few days’. Fair to say we were less than pleased; although we were lucky to get it back in time for our summer holiday road trip to Aix with Alan, Ana and Matty.
Driving out late on a Saturday night after a cricket match we headed to Le Shuttle with high spirits, looking forward to returning to Aix for the first time in a few years and hanging out with friends. We rolled off Le Shuttle and drove south, reminiscing about our ill-fated trip to skiing in December. It was like the car heard us, and immediately lit up like a Christmas tree again – only this time warning us that it wouldn’t start in 200kms, rather than the customary 900kms. We pulled over, assessed our options, and ultimately turned around and drove back to London – spending a total of 75 mins in France.
Some rapid flight booking and tersely worded emails to everyone in the chain of command at Stellantis / Peugeot and we ultimately flew out the next evening to Marseille, 1500 GBP lighter and 2 days of holiday consumed by our new travel plans; whilst our car was sent back to the service center to get fixed (again again).
Once we finally arrived we had a lovely 5 days in Aix – the place we stayed was probably our favourite place ever, it was great to catch up with some of our Aixois buddies, explore the wonderful countryside – include the Gorge du Verdon and the Cote d’Azure – and of course just hang out by the pool with good friends. Our minds naturally turned to whether we would consider moving back here after our time in London was finished … who knows?
Whilst we were away the UK welcomed it’s 6th PM in the last 7 years as Andy Burnham replaced Keir Starmer without any election or competition. His first decision was to reduce energy bills by 45 GBP per year; his second was to fold DSIT (mostly) back into the Department of Business and Trade… which surprisingly and brutally put Liz’s Board and ARAC out of existence. It’s amazing how slowly government works until it moves quickly … and this MOG (Machinery of Government change) happened in a matter of hours and days. A few weeks on and the dust is still settling as the various bits of DSIT get carved up into other portfolios. It just shows how uncertain some of this stuff can be. Fortunately Liz had already started a role on the Board of the Home Office – so continues to be both busy and fully engaged in the world of government over here!
The rest of July and August was spent juggling cricket games (Kent U16; Kent Regional Festivals and various club games) with social occasions and hang outs/play dates for the girls. We even got to go with Ellie to All Points East (as a sorry for being away for the ‘rite of passage’ Reading Festival).
After a very quiet start due to GSCEs and some interesting role choices (eg opening the bowling), Ellie’s cricket season felt like it actually got moving when she returned to the top of batting order mid season against Surrey – carrying her bat against Sussex and saving the U18s match against Essex – all of which should put her in good stead for U18 County next year. Ellie’s Kent team made it to the Quarter Finals of the ECB County Cup where they were predictably hammered by Surrey.
It is now nearing the end of summer and we’re staying at a cottage in ‘mid Wales’ near Welshpool, overlooking pastureland speckled with sheep and goats for Liz’s 50th birthday. Typically reflective, Liz has decided to live her 50s with no reservations and just have fun. We’re both curious and a little trepidatious to see what that brings. Gus has been rehearsing the role of ‘holiday dog’ to rave reviews, thereby booking himself a ticket to a family ski holiday over new years. We have spent our time up here hiking, playing tennis and golf (a new sport that Jessie seems to be taking a shining to) and catching up on reading, games and blog. It is a welcome bit of downtime for the crazy ‘return to school/return to life’ from the week after next.
It feels like the long, hot summer is drawing to a close – we’ve had rain for the first time in months and temperatures have dropped down to low 20s. The holidays have done their job. Everyone feels a bit more relaxed and a bit more sure-footed going into the next school year – particularly for Ellie starting her A levels and Sena high school at Alleyns. It will be nice to spend a bit of time in London without wall to wall cricket matches; enjoy our new house (and make some headway on the outstanding renovations) and have a bit of time to ‘enjoy where we live’ for a while in Autumn and the cold kicks in again.
