What I would do differently if I had my time in the UK again

Hi, how are you? Are you holding up OK in the midst of lockdown? I sincerely hope that your life and the lives of your loved ones haven’t been too greatly affected by the changes that we are all having to make in an effort to control the Coronavirus outbreak. If it has then know that I am sending love and strength to you.

Today I wanted to talk about what I would do differently if I had my time in the UK all over again. This is a topic of conversation that comes up at home on quite a regular basis.

The back story is that both my husband and I worked in London for over a decade. And like most other London workers we had to put in a good old stint on the train and in my husband’s case the tube also in order to get us into London and home again, each day.

My daily commute, whilst not the longest compared to some friends and colleagues, was still rather long (and expensive!) at an hour and 15 minutes each way.

Trains dependant, the earliest I would be able to get home was 6:30, the husband was generally later due to the tubes being delayed. By the time dinner was cooked, eaten and the kitchen tidied there wasn’t much of an evening left to do anything with other than watch a programme on TV before heading to bed to get some shut eye ready to do it all over again the next day.

As for weekends, in the main these were spent doing the food shopping, cleaning the house, running other errands, seeing family etc... because there was no time really to do any of that during the week. Looking back now I wonder when we ever found the time to “do”, and enjoy, life. 

At the time the ideal was to work locally but to get paid London salaries; that wasn't ever going to happen so we had no choice but to suck it up.

Then Jersey happened and we realised that there is such a thing as a decent work-life balance. BUT, living in Jersey, despite its benefits and the fact that, you know, I absolutely love the place, has highlighted to me, more so in recent months and years, that we really didn't make the most of our time in London, or the UK in general. And I kick myself for having been so silly and blinkered and for having wasted so many opportunities.

Travel

As I said, we love living in Jersey but when it comes to travel we didn't realise that the world really was our oyster when we lived in the UK. We had so many countries at our finger tips; either by air or by train. And I'm ashamed to say that we did not take advantage of that.  Not. One. Little. Bit. Nowadays when we want to go anywhere, we have to factor in the cost, both time and financial, of the Jersey/UK return flights, as well as the toll a city break would take on our annual leave allocation, because we can’t do a weekend trip like we would have been able to when living in the UK; the flights just don’t work in our favour for that. We would have to take at least 1 day’s annual leave for a short break (and in reality it’s more like at least 2 days), and more often than not that day/those days would have to be fully dedicated to travelling.

I wish so much that I had realised the opportunities that were there for the taking; there are so many countries that I wish I had visited when I had the opportunity to.

And as for exploring the UK, that’s a whole other gripe I’ve got with myself. A few years after we moved to Jersey we were invited to a wedding which was being held in Stow Maries, a pretty village in Essex. It was a gorgeous setting but being the geographically challenged individual that I am I had no real clue where we were really relative to anywhere else I knew in Essex, for example where we used to live, where my in-laws lived at the time. It wasn’t until the drive back to my in-laws house the day after that I realised how close this gorgeous little village was to “my” Essex – the areas I already knew/lived in and around; it took all of three songs on the radio to get from the venue to my in-laws. And it made me so annoyed with myself that in all the years we had lived in Essex, we had never taken the time to just explore; to go for a drive, find a country pub to stop off and have some lunch at; to admire the views, the setting, the beauty.

Given my time again I would definitely clock up some mileage in the car and sniff out some of the pretty little villages that Essex, and even the surrounding counties of Suffolk, Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire…..I’m pretty sure that villages have tea rooms 😊

Shows

London has so many great shows/events on and again these are things we didn’t really take advantage of. I’ll be honest, after a day at work all I wanted to do was get home to relax.

In theory I used to love that I could go to this show or that show at the drop of a hat. There is a great ticket booth at Oxford Street tube station where you are guaranteed to pick up a ticket for a show for that night. If you’ve not got your heart set on seeing a particular show and are happy to see whatever they have tickets available for, this is a great way to save money and have an impromptu night out. In my experience though whenever we have used this place we’ve always been able to get tickets for what we wanted to see. But in all honesty the thought of having to make our way across London on the tube after the show had finished, rushing to make the last train before it left Liverpool Street, was too high a price to pay to see a show just for the sake of going out that evening. And so it came to pass that we didn’t really make the most of those opportunities either.

Exploring London

I follow a blog called A Lady in London and it’s written by Julie Falconer, an American ex-pat living in London.

Her blog documents her travels all over the world, and whilst she has an extensive (and impressive!) travel list, some of the articles that intrigue me the most, are her musings of the little pockets of London she has visited. This blog just serves to highlight how much of a hamster wheel I was on when I was living in the UK; how is was just a case of get up, go to work, come home, have dinner, go to bed and repeat again the next day. There was no real room for spontaneity. We lived close enough to London that we could work there, but too far away for us to just “pop” to London for a little explore if the fancy took us one Saturday when we didn’t have much planned.

Green Space

London has some absolutely stunning green spaces; Primrose Hill, Regents Park, Hyde Park, Hampstead Heath……never once have I been to any of these places. I would make it my business to tick off at least some of these gorgeous green spaces; make arrangements with friends to meet there, have picnics or walks there. Just to be there and enjoy them.

Museums, exhibitions and Landmarks

How often do you explore the place you live, see what it has to offer, be a tourist in your own town or city? I’m guessing the answer is not often, if at all. But why is it when we go to visit other places we spend so much time beforehand researching what that town or city has to offer, planning our days so as to cram in as many sights as we can, and we leave the joys and beauty that are on our own doorstep largely ignored and overlooked?

The British Museum, the Science Museum, the V&A, St Paul’s Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, the Houses of Parliament, the Tower of London, Tower Bridge.

These are all places that tourists travel thousands of miles to visit and explore and enjoy yet, despite them all having been on my doorstep, the number of places I actually visited when I lived in the UK was appallingly few.

If I could whisper into the ear of my 18-year-old self as she was about to embark on her London journey and adventure, I’d tell her of all the hidden treasures there are awaiting to be discovered by her. I’d tell her that impromptu nights out are definitely worth the added effort of getting home late at night, and the tiredness hangover the next morning. I’d tell her that the memories she will make by exploring London and the surrounding areas at the weekends will be worth more than knowing she was able to get her food shopping and house cleaning done. I’d tell her to take as many trips abroad as she can because one day the opportunity to just jump on a plane from Southend or Stanstead airport for a few quid will not always be an option. More than that, I’d tell her to slow down a bit and enjoy the journey. Create memories that make her smile, laugh, cringe with embarrassment, cover her face with her hands because she can’t believe she did that.

If you’re reading this and you found yourself nodding a even one of the things above, I urge you to fix that as soon as COVID allows you to. Don’t let the food shopping get in the way of enjoying life!