Month: January 2016

The suspicious Londoner, in case you were wondering, is me.  (Incidentally, this might be the first time I have ever referred to myself as a Londoner, rather than being from Yorkshire – living somewhere for more than 15 years will do this to you.)

The lesson that I’ve learnt is about interacting with people.  In the UK, and particularly in London, virtually everything you do is easiest online.  You shop at Amazon, get your groceries at Ocado (or Tesco), keep in touch with friends on Facebook, and get insurance, utilities, credit cards and bank accounts courtesy of a ridiculous meerkat or an appalling parody of a tenor.

Arriving in the US, we needed car insurance.  So off I go to a website.  The quote is really expensive and when I forwarded it to the local agent asking if they could help reduce it, I had no reply at all (this is you, State Farm).  So Charlie persuaded me that we could do better at the local insurance broker round the corner.  (I would never have done this in London.)  And of course, the quote was cheaper, the cover was better, and he explained everything to us as well.  Mea culpa.

The problem was that while I was farting around with insurance websites, the dealer sold the car Charlie had her eye on.  But again, knowing people came to the rescue and, courtesy of an Englishman called Jools, we found a natty blue Beetle that Charlie, and Alice, love.

I had a similar experience with American Express: fill out a form on the website and wait a fortnight for nothing to happen.  Call them: the card is in the post the next day…

So, Chris, you nasty suspicious Londoner, stop trying to do everything online and start talking to people!

 

This is the question we repeatedly asked ourselves during the week from hell where we packed up the house, put it all in a container, sold the car, sent the bunny rabbits away to be shipped and started living out of a suitcase at my mother-in-law’s flat (though, that was warm, comfy and very welcome).  That was the question I repeatedly asked myself when I was still going to work right up until the day before we left.  And it was the question we repeatedly asked ourselves when we touched down Stateside, and spent several hours sitting in traffic in the rain, not getting anywhere.

But the next morning we got the answer:

I should back up a bit.  Why would a fairly ordinary English family give up a decent life, jobs, school, friends and family in London and move to Charleston, South Carolina?  Well, over the last few years we have holidayed in the USA at least twice a year, culminating in a five-week stint in Charleston over the summer of 2015 which cemented our desire to live in this beautiful part of the world.  The only thing we had to do was to find a way to make some money…

The first port of call was a job website or two… not much luck there.  The second idea was that I could do my London job remotely, but that request fell on deaf ears.  A few more ideas came and went (perhaps I could be a music teacher?  perhaps I could start my own business?) until finally, I made a contact through a friend of a friend and scored myself an interview.

This was not your normal interview.  No suits, ties, or drab office rooms here.  We went for a drive to the South Carolina Aquarium and walked around it, chatting.  We visited the building site that would become new offices.  We had lunch.  Oh yes, and I had flown over from London specifically.  I guess I did OK, because a couple of months later a job offer arrived.

Then it was crunch time: we had to make the decision.  Certainly a move like this is out of my comfort zone so thanks to Charlie for pushing me in the right direction.  Alice, who was seven at the time, had been saying “I don’t want to move to Charleston,” but as soon as she heard I had a job, she asked when she could start packing her room – so I guess she was happy about it too!  Once we had made the decision, it was just a mammoth exercise in logistics: more about this next time.