Well the fact is, I’ve probably felt almost that amazed ever since, with every day I’ve lived here. London has been a fantastic place to live, filled with wonderful friendly people. (So why am I leaving? More on this below.)

For anyone reading this who hasn’t been to London, who might be thinking of doing the “2 year working visa” trip, just bloody do it. It is probably the best thing you will ever do in your life.

There are loads of reasons.

I arrived in London with £200 and a backpack. I leave with a lot more. And most of that is because London was definitely the city of opportunity for me. I feel so very fortunate to have worked for wonderful British employers, who funded me through 2 accountancy qualifications, countless other courses, sent me on business trips around the world, encouraged me to develop my career, gave me brilliant opportunities to do so (especially at PwC) and through whom I met some wonderful, decent, salt of the earth people, ex colleagues who I am proud to call my friends.

There was only one place in all of 21 years of working here where I experienced homophobia and at first had a pretty rough time – not a bad run rate really and probably meant to happen, to help me appreciate how lucky I had been overall. And I won’t let it colour my memories of London, life goes on. It could happen anywhere.

Living in London helped me to travel the parts of the world that were always that bit too far from oz – Europe in particular. I will never forget my trip to Moscow and our holidays in Greece.

Living in London – south London – was a wonderful experience. I spent the first 6 years in a Council flat, a classic one built in the old fashioned way in the fifties – and I met the most down to earth people you could ever wish to know. People who had bugger all but would still help you out with some milk or by taking in parcels for you etc. And I then spent the next 15 years in my “ideal” London house, in the friendliest, most neighbourly street in Camberwell. What can I say about our neighbours, fantastic. Once neighbours, now friends. Love them all.

Over those 21 years, the much maligned NHS saved my life (yes, it was very close), I had my car broken into only once, my house never, and I can’t remember receiving more than 2 parking tickets. Not bad at all.

Yes indeed, London will be the hardest act to follow. Friends, neighbours, opportunities – the bar is definitely set very high.

So with all this gushing over how wonderful the place is, why am I leaving?? I’ve had this discussion quite a bit lately.

Three reasons.

1 – I always said I would go back to Oz one day, and I want to go back while I am still young and healthy enough to really enjoy it, to either build a business or a career, to get a lovely home and so on

2 – I figured that if I stayed in london for another 5 years, my life, though enjoyable, wouldn’t really be that much different to today. Except that I’d be 5 years older. Whereas, in Oz, its bound to be different – and hopefully just as exciting.

3 – I believe that life is lived in phases – I’ve done the western suburbs school phase, the inner-Sydney uni phase and the London phase and now I’m totally up for the “living by the water in northern Australia” phase. Bring it on! It keeps life exciting!

And what’s life if you don’t take risks. Boring, that’s what!

I will definitely miss London, but I will definitely come back to visit.

And I recall what my dad said those 21 years ago when I told him I was coming to London. He was upset and worried, like any parent probably would be, but he said something along the lines of he would never stand in my way and I should always do whatever makes me happy.

It made me happy to come over, and now it makes me happy to finally go “home”.

Since my last post was some time ago, here’s where we are as of today:

- crossing everything possible and hoping our house exchanges next Tuesday. I’ve signed the contract, taken a moment in the nearest starbucks to reflect on what a lovely home it has been and am now preparing myself for the trauma of finally saying goodbye in around 4 weeks time after nearly 15 years.

- hoping to confirm cats flights, shippers and temporary accommodation in London some time tomorrow. With a bit of luck, we will be able to stay in an apartment overlooking the Thames at Westminster and next to the London Eye. That will make for interesting morning viewing.

- I’m exploring a couple of brilliant job opportunities in Oz, most likely in Brisbane but possibly in Melbourne. Have had two skype interviews for one of them and its looking promising. Hope to hear in the next week or so. The job market in Oz for ecommerce / online is, according to an agency, about to take off big time and is a couple of years behind where we are in London – so hopefully things are in my favour.

- still also planning to work with Hector at some point, even if just on an ad hoc  basis for a while. All in good time.

- oh, and we now fly to Sydney on the 1st July, which fits in better with the sporting calendar. We now fly out the day after the England / Australia one day match at The Oval on the 30th and arrive in Sydney before the third state of origin, which is on the 7th July. I’ve got a ticket to the first and hoping to get tickets to the second. Also training Sue to hate cane toads and cheer on the blues.

- planning on settling in Brisbane at least for a year or so when we get there. If we don’t like it, we can always move.

- have started organising the important things. Mum is going to get foxtel connected in the apartment on the Sunshine Coast, where we will stay until we move to Brisbane. Broadband is apparently easy to do the day we get there. And we’ll probably unlock our google phones and take them with us.

- on the boring side, we’ve set up things like bank accounts, found our tax file numbers, changed our addresses, applied for our bike import permits and so on. I’ve started the sterling / Aussie dollar shuffle and brought all the Londonforfree billing up to date.

There’s still loads to do but every day I get closer to “home” and it makes it all worthwhile. As I’ve said all along, London is a wonderful city and I will miss it and the wonderful friends I’ve made here. But Australia will always be my home and I just can’t wait to get back!

shaping your site – we work with you to create a basic design for your site, define the content sections, the images, text, branding and other things you might want to include

creating your content – we help you to write or convert your content into web format, and take photos of your products and other images you wish to have on your site. We add your content onto your site – or, if you want to do it yourself, we train you in how to do it.

building your site – we build your site using standards-based design and best practice, which means it works correctly across different browsers and looks ok on mobiles and on other devices – maximising the number and types of customers who can view your site. In building your site, we bake in things like seo, accessibility and analytics.

testing your site – we think we’ve built it to work with all main browsers, but we test it with them just to be sure. We also test it for technical quality against current web standards, and check all the content is appearing correctly.

launching your site – we help you register and set up your web domain and space – or we can do it for you.

seo – we write your site’s code and content to make it search engine friendly before it goes live, and we also do techie things like monitoring your site using google webmaster tools, creating your sitemap and doing other technical stuff you probably don’t want to know about. All in the name of helping your customers to find you on the web.

analytics – following your site’s launch, we use google analytics to analyse visitors, popular pages, traffic sources, etc; – setting you up a dashboard and showing you how to use it, creating reports showing you trends for areas of interest (e.g. overseas markets); we also use google optimiser to test, tweak and analyse your site’s content and structure

adsense – if you want to try and generate income from your site through advertising, we can help there too. We can set you up for google adsense, create you a dashboard, monitor your revenue and even collect it on your behalf if you wish.