About Me
Welcome, bienvenue, willkommen, marhaba.
At four years old, I remember staring at a school display poster titled “Christmas in Australia” — people celebrating on a beach in December completely baffled me, and I decided then that I needed to see it for myself one day. I saved all the way through high school, and at nineteen I boarded a twenty-six-hour flight from Manchester to Sydney.
That trip changed my life. I came home with a heavy heart and a promise to myself: finish my studies, teach for a year or two, then leave. In 2001, I did. I’ve now spent more than half my life living outside the UK.
Twenty-two of those years were spent teaching at a school in the United Arab Emirates — genuinely good years, the kind that don’t leave you with much to complain about. But approaching my mid-40s, I felt no real pull to climb any further up that ladder. Then Expo 2020 Dubai happened, and it had a profound effect on me. I bought a season pass and went twenty-six times over the six months it was open, often popping in after work for just a few hours, to soak up the feel of the world in one place, side by side, peaceful, as it should be. I’m a total idealist, but that’s the world I want to inhabit.
Around the same time, Brexit forced a decision my partner and I had been putting off for years. We had a home on the Côte d’Azur we’d always meant to properly move into — Brexit meant claiming residency before the door closed, so we did. We learned the language, integrated, and started building the life we’d mapped out for ourselves: one split between the Côte d’Azur, Cape Town, and Dubai, with long stretches in Crete every summer.
Not long after we arrived, life took a turn I hadn’t planned for. I won’t go into the details here — it isn’t really mine alone to tell — but it was serious enough, and lasted long enough, to change how urgently I think about time. Life is for living now. Exploring can’t be put off until tomorrow, and neither can anything else that actually matters.
Two decades living inside a culture that wasn’t the one I was born into taught me that tolerance isn’t a slogan — it’s something you practice daily, in friendships, at work, in how you actually show up for people. That’s not a value I picked up recently. It’s one I lived for twenty-two years, and it matters to me more now than it ever has.
Wherever I go now, I ask myself the same question: could I live here? That instinct — imagining myself living somewhere, not just visiting it — is what makes me want to experience a place as a local would. I look for the casual coffee shop over the guidebook restaurant, the walk most visitors never take. This year, staying in Paarl, we climbed Klein Drakenstein Kop, a mountain my partner used to stare at from a school classroom growing up. I asked everyone I know in Paarl if they’d been up it. No one had.
That’s usually the difference — staying long enough to notice a place, rather than never staying long enough to see it. Everything on this site comes from that difference.
What that means for you: specific, dated advice from someone who’s actually there — not a listicle stitched together from other people’s blogs.
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