It's been a long time since I set foot on English soil. I left the UK for Portugal on August the 1st, 2011 and have barely looked back. And so a trip to England this Christmas was almost overdue.
The flight here was awful. Truly mind numbingly absurdly terrible. The traffic on the motorway to the airport was busier than I'd ever seen it and so my family and I arrived at the airport later than we'd planned to. After queueing for ages to check in our suitcases we eventually proceeded to go through security where we then had to empty out most of our hand luggage so that the officers could verify that our children's electronic games were indeed just electronic games. Thankfully passport control went without a hitch and then a member of the hi-vis jacketed ground crew escorted us across the tarmac and up the steps to board the plane. Phew! We'd made it just in time. Well, just in time to sit and wait while the crew patrolled the plane checking everyone's boarding passes to deduce the identity of a missing passenger. To my mind, in the sensible and technologically advanced world that we live in, I would have expected the crew to have walked the aisle on the plane with a hand-held barcode reader, scanning everyone's boarding cards, which would have taken fifteen minutes. But no such luck here. An hour and a half of people checking and re-checking printed lists ticking people off with ballpoint pens. Fortunately that was the last of the problems and the flight went without further incident. We landed, collected our luggage, picked up our hire car and set off through the stormy night towards my wife's brother's house in Sussex.
Yesterday I took my family out for a gentle walk in the local town, just briefly, in the cold, along the high street of the local town to look at the festively decorated shop windows and simply enjoy walking along an English high street. We visited a couple of haberdasheries and finally a bookshop, where my children enjoyed perusing the shelves of English books. And I must say it was rather strange to hear English conversation going on. Driving back was also strange. My wife had driven from the airport and this was my first attempt at driving on the wrong side of the road, and indeed in a car with the controls on the wrong side too. In that very short journey I hit my right hand against the drivers door three times in attempting to grab the gear stick! I'm sure I'll get used to it just in time to return to Portugal and then have to re-re-adjust to driving on the right side (in every sense!) of the road again!
Today, I've had a lazy family day, with the children playing games and watching a variety of cartoons while my wife and I have continually checked the weather reports for flood warnings along the planned journey to Wales to stay with her parents for the next leg of our English Christmas. While I was at it I also took the liberty of checking the Portuguese weather and it looks like Lisboa will be enjoying a balmy sunny 15 degrees on Christmas day; I'd be lying if I said I wasn't jealous! Tomorrow's UK weather however does look like it's going to be much brighter than it has been for the last couple of days and the rain will be easing off from this very stereotypical English downpour. So, with that in mind, my family and I plan to set off bright and early tomorrow morning for Wales.
Today, I've had a lazy family day, with the children playing games and watching a variety of cartoons while my wife and I have continually checked the weather reports for flood warnings along the planned journey to Wales to stay with her parents for the next leg of our English Christmas. While I was at it I also took the liberty of checking the Portuguese weather and it looks like Lisboa will be enjoying a balmy sunny 15 degrees on Christmas day; I'd be lying if I said I wasn't jealous! Tomorrow's UK weather however does look like it's going to be much brighter than it has been for the last couple of days and the rain will be easing off from this very stereotypical English downpour. So, with that in mind, my family and I plan to set off bright and early tomorrow morning for Wales.
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