The Times Magazine 53t a long overdue family dinner last
weekend, a favourite aunt asked me
if I was happy to be home. I said
yes, of course – partly because
I couldn’t really say anything
else. It would sound churlish and
ungrateful – particularly while
surrounded by many of the people
I moved back across the world to
be closer to: my brilliant parents;
cousins whom I consider extra siblings – to
admit, while passing the panna cotta, that being
back in Britain after more than a decade away
is a mixed bag. Good bits and bad bits. That
mostly I’m happy, but I’m also finding it hard.
That just because it was the right decision, that
doesn’t mean the resettlement isn’t bumpy.
The truth is that while I always intended
to move home at some point, were it not for a
global pandemic giving me the nudge, I might
not have. At least not right now.
There are no official statistics, but I’m
far from alone in rapidly becoming a “repat”,
Covid having forced us to reconsider our lives
overseas and return to the place that issued
our passports. In a recent survey of its global
customers, property firm Knight Frank found
that two thirds of expats said that lockdown
had led them to buy a property in their
home country. Of those, 29 per cent said they
were returning home full time. Anecdotally,
and certainly among my friends, the pandemic
has prompted moves back to the UK, Ireland,
Australia and Italy, in some cases from
those who pre-pandemic never envisaged
themselves repatriating.
“In the past 18 months we’ve heard of
so many people who have ended up moving
closer to home or what feels like home,” says
my old university friend, Dan Rookwood. “And
when you hear about people doing that, it
sows that seed in your own mind – it makes
you reassess.” Dan, 43, a journalist and editor,
and his wife, Sam, 41, a marketing executive,
lived in Sydney for four years, then the US
for eight – latterly in Portland, Oregon. While
in the US they had three children: five-year-
old twins, Indigo and Rosie, and Alfie, two.
Unable to travel home to see family and
friends when the pandemic hit, Dan became,
he says, “Properly homesick. My dad had never
met his grandson. And the fact that we couldn’t
fly home made me very anxious. If anything
happened to him, I’d never forgive myself.”
He did “a lot of soul-searching over the
past year or so, asking, ‘Why am I asking my
family to live so far away from everyone and
why am I doing that to my family back in the
UK?’ I felt quite selfish about it.” They moved
back to the UK in September and are living in
Marlow, Buckinghamshire.
When I decamped to New York in
September 2010 it was only supposed to be
for one year; two max. The newspaper I’dworked for had closed in the recession and, at
32, with no kids or commitments and a small
redundancy slush fund, it seemed the ideal
time for an adventure while I was still ( just
about) young enough to have one. I would,
I figured, freelance for British newspapers, sit
out the recession (ha), then head back when
the job market was better.
From my sofa bed in my friend’s
windowless spare room in Brooklyn, where
I spent my first delirious, martini-filled three
months, I quickly realised why, for all its many
faults, America is still seen by so many as the
land of opportunity. Soon I was interviewing
George Clooney, Arnold Schwarzenegger
and Jennifer Lopez in Los Angeles, Gwyneth
Paltrow at her Hamptons mansion, and
presidential bête noire Stormy Daniels in a
New York hotel room. I drank tea with Yoko
Ono in the flat in the Dakota building where
she lived with John Lennon. I went heli-skiing
with Navy Seals in Alaska and spent “weed
weekends” in Colorado (both purely for work,
you understand), and hobnobbed with A-listers
at the Emmys and the Golden Globes.
Dating was its own adventure too.
Everything you’ve heard about the cut-throat
New York singles scene is true. In a city filled
with cash-rich, time-poor, hypercompetitive
overachievers, how would finding love not
be gladiatorial combat over gimlets?
And yet, somehow, a British accent stillremains a novelty, and British attitudes to sex
even more so. In the US, The Rules (whose
rules I was never told) dictate no sex on the
first date; anything before the third date is
deemed slutty, in fact. My more European
approach – alcohol-fuelled sex followed by
morning-after awkwardness, repeated until
a loose pattern is established – didn’t always
work out brilliantly, but it did save me a lot
of tedious second and third dates.
When you’re living abroad there’s also a
sense that you could and should say yes to
everything, especially things you might not
do at home. Like – a purely hypothetical
example here – go to a weekend sex camp.
Since nobody really knows you, nobody
really cares. There’s no judgment from the
neighbours, no accountability. Dan’s right: the
expat life is selfish. But, God, it’s liberating.
There were, of course, times when liberation
turned to loneliness, and a couple of bouts
of major homesickness, usually around
communal events I was missing – festivals all
my friends were at, the royal wedding, London- Sometimes I had to switch off social
media and remind myself why I wanted to
be where I was.
And if things ever felt truly bleak, I was
never more than a seven-hour flight home.
I could, and did, whizz back to the UK for
A
MOVING BACK WAS THE RIGHT DECISION,
BUT RESETTLEMENT HAS BEEN BUMPY
OPENING SPREAD: MURALS BY ANNIE MORRIS. THIS PAGE: JEFF GILBERT/TELEGRAPH SYNDICATION Continues on page 65Emma and Michael Linnitt, 51 and
56, who returned to the UK last
summer after 19 years in Hong Kong