Timing

The UK is heading back into recession and will take a long time to recover, so we're told. Two more years of pain. A lost decade. Etc.

A good friend of mine was trying to persuade me that I should up sticks and leave the UK. It's the wrong place to be and will be for a long time. Be free. Not just George Osborne who is being pressured to come up with a Plan B then. Well, I'm not doing all this again from scratch in 5 years time. The UK is the only game in town, at least until we have established something worth coming back to.

Coming from where I am, it doesn't look so bad. I don't have any assets to downgrade, a mortgage to pay or a job to lose. Anything will be progress. When I get a job, it is likely to pay more than I've ever earned before - though not perhaps in purchasing power. Everything except beer and cheese was cheaper in Taiwan. No pay rise for a couple of years? I haven't had a pay rise in 10 years. In fact, English teaching in Taiwan has attracted approximately the same hourly rate of NT$600 for 20 years or more. In the early 1990s foreigners would find themselves literally dragged off the street by the over excited owners of cram schools and expected to teach English primarily on the grounds that they were white. Halcyon days.

The future is in China. At least as far as English teaching is concerned.

Why do they have to....

After 9 years bemoaning Taiwanese ways of doing things, the boot is on the other foot.

Why can't I pay bills or buy beer in 7-11 at 3a.m. using an Oyster Card? Sunday trading? Isn't Sunday the day you have time to go to the shops? What is a mobile phone blackspot, anyway? Download limits? The London Underground is so poky. And the bureaucracy - "that'll take 7-10 days to process, sir!"

I was warned by a fellow returnee not to go on about how much more convenient, modern, better things were out there. It's easy to become a bore - the retired colonel who served in Bongobongoland, sitting at the end of the bar, always with a story to tell.

It is nice to have milk delivered to the door though. And at least decent beer and cheese are more affordable here.