Homecoming

A whole week has passed since we stepped onto that plane home. Australia was a lovely holiday, Tanzania a surreal dream. Or is it actually this life back in the U.K. that is the dream.
I’ve succumbed to a head cold, and a morning on the sofa, though it could be man flu. Perhaps it is that inevitable come down of finding myself surrounded by bags waiting to divulge their contents of our red soil life, the mountain of washing with no helpful housekeeper to whisk it away and children needing to shed themselves of layers of emotion built up in the heat Africa.
M had his reverse culture shock first, struggling to join us on our hedonistic sugar and wine fuelled holiday down under. The rest of us are having moments, either those of a strange realisation that life here just carried on without us, or on filling the supermarket trolley finding just how difficult it is not to buy food wrapped in plastic.
Our time away has coincided with the unrest of Brexit, a slowly mounting world awakening to climate devastation and an increased awareness of what humans modern diet is doing to us and the world. Having finally completed Sapiens,  I think I need to race on to his sequel to see if there’s a more uplifting summation of humankind and its future.
I went away searching to answer that midlife feeling of ‘what is it all about?’, discovered that family life and emotions don’t really change much when you transplant them to another country, and that my friends and patients in Tanzania all shared so much in essence to those back home.
I’ve soaked up the pleasure of familiar greetings, spring greenery on the school run, several cups of tea with those sorely missed ears who listen/shoulders to cry on/gossip sharers and delighted in a welcome home package from our village friends to greet us on our first day back.
Thank you for all the lovely messages welcoming us home....willl take me a while to catch up with dear friends...how lucky I am to have felt missed.
We have a move on the cards now that M has his job, so trying to enjoy the present moment without getting lost in the inevitable long lists that are building. At least I have another delaying tactic to the requests for new pets, having made the mistake of saying yes, when we get back from Africa!
So, we’re back......