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Homesick for Sunny California

Homesick for Silicon Valley? Being back is a state of mind By Deborah S. Gale We’re BAAAACCCKKKKK! Right on the heels of “your” horrible floods, and “our” horrible election, we planned this return and have taken up permanent residence here on the island. I say permanent since we sold our house in the Silicon Valley of California, and thus will never be able to afford to live there again. I can verify that until quite recently, those valley streets were indeed paved with gold, albeit a bit dot.com and greedily tinged. Our triumphant return collided with the British build up for Christmas. Silly old me, completely forgetting that the entire country shuts down for the two weeks until New Year. I really should have known better. We’ve been back for three, damp, chill filled months. The remnants of my year round tan have vanished making my “natural”(read peroxide) highlights look as artificial as they are. But then I am back in Blighty where weather talk is perfectly acceptable. Here, weather descriptions are full of “ings” Thickening clouds, freshening (read freezing) winds occasionally joined up with anticyclonistic east to southeasterly flows which, and I am not kidding you, means dry. Now, a few of those I could get used to but we haven’t seen any just yet. Invariably I am asked what does it feel like to be back. As I crawl into full consciousness I discover that being back is a state of mind as well as a physical reality. I am no longer just another happy expat. Expats dutifully rent time, always at the ready to make the next move even as the two-year assignment drags on to four or gets abruptly abbreviated at the one year mark. This time, I am the resident alien. No more waiting to buy something or telling my kids to hang in there just a little longer because home leave is coming up shortly and they can have everything they want in six different colors for the same price as half of one here. I have been conditioned for this sort of deferred gratification over the years and I still find myself checking to see if the skyrocketing cost of petrol it takes for me to get to the closest Costco or Asda is sufficient to offset the airfare required to fly home so that I could get a really big shop done there! But now this IS home and adjust I shall. Being back is great and it’s like we never left and it would have been a whole lot easier if we hadn’t. I’ve been fairly successful at instituting the UK standard rule of no shoes in the house but know I will have lost the keep clean battle once our animals get released from quarantine. We put our two cats in a local kennel so that the children could visit them once in awhile. When you visit they ask how long you want to stay. I bit my tongue when my husband signed us up for 45 minutes. We were then escorted and locked into their very own but not while we were there “heated” cage. The kids lost interest approximately immediately. The cats never showed interest. The zookeeper was unreachable even after I stopped yelling and banging on the door and the children started screaming. Thankfully my husband remembered his mobile so we called the kennelmaster and were sprung just before the 45 minutes were up. After that ordeal, even I was convinced that we had made the right decision to send Jazz, the black Lab, to my sister in law in France to avoid being kenneled here. The UK is slowly easing up on the quarantine laws and a pet passport scheme has been introduced between EEC members. Glancing at the bill from “ Pets Begone”, I figure Jazz must have flown first class from SFO to Charles de Gaulle before being chauffered to Normandy for his six month holiday. We went to visit him at half term and traveled on Le Shuttle from Folkestone. We planned to return the same way but a freak snowstorm and our distinct lack of snowtires foiled our attempt. The 37 minute underground channel crossing had to be replaced by a six hour ferry crossing with all seven of us in a four berth cabin which closely resembled that cage for the cats. We made it off the boat having lost only part of my remaining mind and even got everyone back to school the following morning. We managed to convince ourselves that even if the cats didn’t much care, Jazz absolutely remembered us and missed us and that one day when we look back, this will all have been worth it. Time will tell but a summer full of anticyclonistic flows wouldn’t be too bad of a start….. About the author: Deborah S. Gale is a Pennsylvania native, loving mother of five daughters aged four to nine including two sets of twins. Married to a classically cynical, witty Brit with whom she enjoyed DINK status briefly. She hasn’t held a full time bill paying or spa treatment covering job since the children and spent most of the '90's as an expat. wife and mother in Paris and London. After 23 years of calling Silicon Valley home, she bid adieu to the South Bay in December 2000 when she made a permanent move back to the UK. Deborah writes a column for the American in Britain magazine © Siliconmom

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