The Last 385 Yards

Following my request for help recently, Swiss Toni asked "What made you move out in the first place? What's it like? How do your mates cope without you?"

Here's my answer.

My main reason for leaving England was to see some of the world. Prior to last year, the only travelling I’d done had been limited to a few holidays in Spain and France and one Christmas in Australia. I didn’t want to leave particularly; rather, I just knew I had to go. I certainly hadn’t had enough of England. In fact, I loved it. But my confidence had grown a lot in my late twenties and I was sure, for the first time, that I'd be able to cope with living elsewhere. I wanted to see if I could love somewhere else too. It started with a holiday to Thailand and Singapore in April 2004. By May, I had a job here. This was a big decision for me, made very quickly and if it hadn’t happened so quickly, I’d probably have thought about it too much and not come.

It’s a very strange experience to get on a plane with only a one-way ticket. There was so much I was leaving behind and those things, of course, were on my mind as I left. This was the biggest risk I’d ever taken. I was pretty emotional and I felt similar to how I felt as a child when I first went on a school trip for a week. Oddly, though, I didn’t feel any doubts about where I was going. I wasn’t worried about what was on the other side. I was just worried about missing people too much.

Just before I left, I kept meeting people who had already been to Singapore. Indeed, I had a bizarre conversation with the man who collected my rented washing machine.

“Singapore’s great mate,” he remarked in a broad Bristolian accent. “You can get some real cheap gold there. Real cheap and real good quality.” He pronounced “gold” to rhyme with “tooled”, just to give the uninitiated some idea of what a broad Bristolian accent can sound like. I toyed with the idea of informing him that I wasn’t particularly interested in gold, cheap or otherwise, but didn’t. He was certainly sporting some tawdry gold on several of his fingers. He also informed me that there were some “great bars” in Singapore and that “great women” were “available”. I nodded and smiled and said, “Yeah… great… looking forward to it… imagine that,” etc, as one does when someone else thinks that they have the same interests as you and you can’t be bothered to explain otherwise.

Having visited Singapore a couple of months before, I knew that there was more to the place than gold and go-go dancers. It was comforting that I wasn’t going totally into the unknown. However, visiting somewhere and living in the same place are two entirely different things. I saw more of the place in the week I was visiting than in the first six months of living here. But that’s always the way. A while ago, I had a look at a friend’s copy of “Lonely Planet Great Britain” and read the Bristol pages. I discovered that I’d only done about ten per cent of the things it advised visitors to Bristol to do. And it’s the same here. I’ve written about the rain forest reservoirs here before but have still only been to one of them, once. I’ve not been to the art gallery, or the Asian Civilisations Museum. The only times I go to places like Little India or Chinatown are when I have visitors from home. I have never been to Zouk, the biggest and best nightclub here which attracts celebrity djs every weekend. I’ve only been to one gig and that was Norah Jones – hardly rock n roll... although I am going to watch Nana Mouskouri soon…

However, I’m making up for my lack of adventure in Singapore by using my generous teacher holidays to bomb off to somewhere new every few weeks. So far I’ve done Sri Lanka, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Vietnam. That’s why I came.

I haven’t really missed home. I have missed people, though. Every so often, I go through a spell of thinking about one person or another and I might send them a text or drop them an email or something. I might also just carry on thinking about them without doing anything. I look through old photos from time to time too and listen to music that reminds me of people. It’s reassuring to have those connections.

The strangest time was when I bought my ticket to fly back to England this summer. I booked it about 2 months before I came back and, with every passing day, I became more and more excited about the prospect of being back in Bristol and started to think about it more and more. I suppose it was like the last 385 yards for a marathon runner.

I have to decide in about one month whether I want to stay for another two years once my contract expires.

Still undecided.