Summertime and emigratin’ ain’t easy

Selling a house, arranging a wedding, wrapping up two jobs and emigrating to the other side of the world are all huge challenges in their own right. Try doing all three compressed into a couple of months of (an English) summer, and life gets beyond hectic. Crazier still, we did it all twice (apart from the wedding bit).

My wife, Jenny, is Australian. I was a Pom. Now I’m “bi” (dual citizenship). Both journalists, we met in the newsroom of London’s Evening Standard, which closed in September. It was a clandestine affair until I mistakenly sent an email meant for her alone to “all newsroom users”.

Then came the first of several brutal rounds of newspaper redundancies (sound familiar?). A change is as good as a rest, so we decided to head for Sydney. Our Victorian cottage in Twickenham, purchased for a modest £90,000, went on the market. That was the easy bit.

At the same time came evenings of filling out residency application forms. Yes, we really are in a relationship. Here’s the gas bill in joint names to prove it. Here’s £1000 in support of my application.

Also time-consuming was the wedding planning. Church, invitations, sit-down wedding breakfast. All simple. But the reception … try working out the seating plan for 80-plus guests on the back of an envelope when you need to place a bunch of journalists not impartial to a drink or few (especially when the bride and groom are paying) alongside various aunts and friends whose biggest bender was probably a thimble of communion wine.

The house sold, everyone got on at the wedding reception and the residency was finally approved. We arrived in Sydney mid-winter.

Three years later we went back to London. We had become “Ping-Pong Poms”, a Facebook support page.

Another decade of northern-hemisphere summers down the track, and now with two children, we returned to Sydney to visit the mother-in-law for Christmas and a proper hot Australian summer.

Our daughters, aged 7 and 9, are boogie-boarding in the waves of Bilgola Beach on a sunny Boxing Day when they emerge from the water. The older one remarks casually that my wife had been so lucky to have grown up in Australia and why couldn’t they …

Here we go again. We farewell an English summer and touch down in Sydney mid-winter.

My summer birthday has now become a winter one. I grew up with cold Christmases. Now Christmas is hot, with inflatable Santas and seafood barbecues. Still good, just different.

Some of the stories on Ping-Pong Poms make for agonising reading. Couples and families move back and forth between Australia and the Old Dart, often many times with pets in tow and shipping containers of belongings following behind. For some, the grass is always greener – they miss gentle English birdsong, the light of balmy summer evenings, and English country churches and pubs.

But when back in the UK, they then miss spectacular golden beaches, the sparkling harbour, the mangoes and prawns and the coffee prepared by our world-class baristas.

Now, no more ping-ponging for us. Emigrating is an exhausting summer pastime. To do it once was challenging. Twice could be considered madness.

In the words of Ella Fitzgerald: Summertime … and the livin’ is easy, fish are jumpin’ … and the cotton is high. Yo’ daddy’s rich … and yo’ mama’s good-lookin’.

Rich, maybe not, but there’s a wealth of good reasons to be spending summer right here in Sydney. We’re going nowhere.

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