Back in Blighty

Moving to Spain is not for everyone. If it was, the country would be vastly overcrowded.

There are many reasons why people don’t settle to their lives in a new country and long to return to their homeland. Some will cite the hot climate, others their difficulty in coping with the language or the bureaucracy. In the present economic crisis, many simply can’t afford to be here. Whatever their reasons, living in Spain is not right for them.

Many writers warn however that the country you return to will not be the same as the country you left. Things will have moved on since you left and you may not like the changes that have been made.

When I was 11 years old, we moved to Canada taking my grandmother with us. She didn’t settle well at all and pretty soon convinced my father that we had done the wrong thing emigrating there. So we returned to England eighteen months after leaving.

Whilst I was not unhappy to return to England, there were many things that I came to miss about the country I’d left. I’ll never know whether my life would have been richer if we had stayed in Canada, in my opinion my parents didn’t give it a real chance.

Just so that those who are keen to be back in the UK know what lies in store for :-

Britain is bracing itself for one of the coldest winters for a century with temperatures hitting minus 16 degrees Celsius, forecasters have warned.

Parts of Scotland have had snow cover for nearly three weeks

They predicted no let up in the freezing snap until at least mid-January, with snow, ice and severe frosts dominating and the likelihood is that the second half of the month will be even colder.

Weather patterns were more like those in the late 1970s, experts said, while Met Office figures released on Monday are expected to show that the country is experiencing the coldest winter for up to 25 years.