My experience is that most people do a “life update!” as an explanation for a long absence but I haven’t been anywhere. I’m not going anywhere either. But things are changing behind the scenes and I thought I’d do a post about them.
So, you may have noticed we’ve been living through a plague. I still have days when I can’t believe it’ll ever come to an end (“Boris saaaayyyyyssss we can go to the pub and sit next to anyone we like and you don’t have to social distance outsiiiiiide!!!”) but sometimes I feel like I can see things getting back to normal and I can see real life shimmering in the distance. 20201/21 has made some big changes to my life and actually, they’re mostly fairly positive.
First and foremost, my financial situation. In March 2020, I had two jobs. I’ve talked about this before but I’ll run over it again quickly. I had Job A, where I’ve been since 2008 (give or take a mistake in 2016), which is a small export company. I also had Job B, where I’ve been since 2017. Job B is part-owned and was part-managed by Job A. I was headhunted by my boss at Job A when he was helping the boss at Job B with the recruitment (it literally went “Juliet, can you pop upstairs for a moment? We’re looking for someone to stare at spreadsheets for weeks on end. You can start on April 1st”), it’s actually based in a coworking space London and my terms of employment were that I would work from Job A’s office so I’m a long-term remote worker, although the work from home thing was new to me. I worked Monday & Wednesday at Job B and Tuesday & Thursday at Job B. Or possibly the other way round. Life changes quickly these days and I lose track.
Last September, my boss at Job B decided he wanted me full time so I left Job A. I had a huge pay increase (15-20%, I think, which is huge) but on the other hand, I’ve now left Job A and so I won’t be returning there even just to sit at the desk after the plague so working from home is now permanent regardless of the global situation.
I’ve also not been travelling, having random weekends in London whenever I fancy or buying a comedy ticket a week. In short, I’m seeing things in my bank account that I would never have imagined in my wildest dreams a year and a half ago and for the first time ever, it’s starting to look realistic that I could buy – buy! – a home of my own. So now I got on Rightmove every week or two and either rage over the lack of choice for my potential budget or worse, rage over what’s in my potential budget because it’s still potential, I don’t actually have that budget just yet and by the time I do, that place I really like and can nearly afford will be gone. I really shouldn’t look.
Over the last ten years, I’ve concluded that having my own home just isn’t going to be financially viable ever and discovering that it could be and that “having” can mean “owning” has turned my brain upside down a little bit. It’s not quite consuming my every waking and sleeping thought but it’s something I’m now quite acutely aware of. I could buy a house and one day I might even have a reasonable sized house with multiple bedrooms and a garden and a garage. I mean, the mansion & garden will still be some years off but it’s no longer an utterly impossible dream.
And to that end, I’m not going to be throwing quite as much of my salary at travel as I have over the last twelve or thirteen years. Something I did during the plague was make a database of every flight I’ve ever taken – from where, to where, what airline, what date and the damning bit, how much it cost. Oh yes, now I get to see exactly where my mansion deposit went. I don’t regret it, any of it, but I won’t be travelling at that rate and that cost again, not until I reach my 50s or 60s and mysteriously suddenly have lots of money in the way that people in their 50s and 60s seem to. Not that I’ll be staying at home always and forever. I’ll still go to Iceland and I’ll never be able to resist “return flights to Paris for £50?!” even though I don’t love Paris. I’ll spend more time around the UK and I’ll still go away as often as my mortgage allows. But I won’t be off for six or nine trips a year for a couple of decades unless a miracle happens.
Which is where this blog comes in. I’ve always called it a travel blog but realistically, it’s always had a mix of travel and adventure and outdoors and Guiding. In the last year, for obvious reasons the balance has tipped away from travel and more towards the outdoors and instead of it tipping back once the plague is over, it’s going to stay like this. It’ll still be a travel and adventure and outdoors blog but it’ll be weighed more heavily towards the outdoors and less towards the travel. You probably haven’t noticed some minor cosmetic changes but I’ve done them over the last month, moving menus and categories around, changing my brand colours away from the pinks and purples and towards the greens but that’s as dramatic as it’s going to get. I’m more of a house sparrow these days but I’m still a polar bear and not much is really going to change.
So what I’ve got in my blog schedule over the next few months is some local glamping next month, some kayaking in both the summer and the autumn, a bit of TV, some local travel, walks, Dartmoor and the New Forest and the South West Coast Path and then of course, there’s always going to be some international travel content I haven’t done before, some things that are going to be rewritten because they deserve more than three views in five years and in general, the blog in the future is going to look pretty much like it has over the last year. It doesn’t need an announcement but I think I needed to write it down somewhere.