Bloggers of the world unite

Grit has been in Hong Kong with her Gritlets Three. This afternoon they came over to swim and play and have tea. We talked about life in Hong Kong, home education, moving back and blogging and it felt as though we sort of knew each other already. It was a bit covert if I’m honest, a bit like a guilty secret and when the Pioneering Accountant asked how I knew Grit I mumbled something about her being a friend of a friend who might be moving to Hong Kong. Mostly true. I may not have owned I’d met her in the blogosphere quite recently and that neither of us had actually known each other’s real name until a few days ago. Had I admitted that much, he might have thought me irresponsible. Yet Grit and I obviously had a good feeling about each other. Otherwise I wouldn’t have asked her over and she wouldn’t have come. Neither of us are axe murderers after all. Just blogging mums who share a patch of cyberspace.

Déjà vu

I will admit to feeling quite cross.

Whilst there is a lot to be positive about (a return to good schools, a challenging new role for the Pioneering Accountant, friends and family, Radio 4, Tesco deliveries, bike rides and green open spaces) I feel like a pawn in someone else’s chess game.

We would have liked to have set the agenda and timescale for our return ourselves, to have had the time to consider where we would like to return to. After three years here it is possible to imagine that we would have had enough of urban living. We might have sold up and moved out of London, sent the children to country schools and recreated ourselves as active participants in village life. Who knows? Pressure of time has removed those choices from us. Instead of a year to six months to think about it we have approximately six weeks.

Whilst it is true that planning for any big event tends to expand to fill the time available without improving the quality of the finished product I feel slightly robbed. Not so much of the remaining two years of our three year term, but of our last months here. Instead of enjoying the summer term, new places to visit and discover, time spent at the beach and the pool, my summer will be spent looking for a place to rent, selling a car, a job lot of dehumidifiers, helping Clarabel find a new job, sorting through the children’s clothes and toys and saying goodbye. Again.

Plans Awry

My triumphant return to the Common has taken a severe blow.

Our tenants don’t want to buy the house (you can hardly blame them, in this market) and have gently pointed out that the tenancy agreement is for two years, not one. That means we can neither sell nor move back in until August 2010.

But what about the break clause? I ask in dismay. There is one, yes, but it’s a standard clause which works unilaterally in favour of the tenant in case they need to exit early.

Why on earth did we agree to that? Because we thought we were going to Hong Kong for three years, maybe four. Thrilled at the prospect of having let the house for a full two years it didn’t dawn on us we’d be the ones clamouring to get back in. Damn!

I spent last night scanning FindaProperty and PrimeLocation for a house to rent. All the nice ones are already let and there is very little of a size similar to the one we left.

So, I face the prospect of squashing my family into a tiny terrace with not enough room to swing a cat or else paying a fortune for a palace. Assuming we move back to a rental property and then into our house in a year's time we will have moved house 7 times in 14 years. Sigh.

The Prodigal Daughter

I’m in London at short notice. It is early, cold and wet. I forget how to top up my Oyster card and stand in front of a ticket machine looking like a foreigner. Some one asks if I need help.

On the Tube, a yoof with iPod-stuffed ears sniffs loudly and repeatedly. Those sitting around him exchange irritated glances and roll their eyes. He doesn’t care, he can’t hear himself.

I arrive at Putney Bridge at 7am and need to buy a pen and an umbrella. The man in the newsagent is so friendly. Next door is a retro greasy spoon café. I order a cup of builders’ tea and the man serving asks where I’ve just flown in from. I am glad to talk. I want to hug him and shout, I’m back! I sit at a Formica topped table with ketchup, brown sauce and vinegar for company. There are others breakfasting and reading the papers: the PAPERS! They shout greetings across the café, discuss the weather and laugh. It’s London and I LOVE it.

I stay with my Lovely Neighbour. Awaking jetlaggedly early on Saturday morning I hear the dawn chorus. I pull up the blind and look across the street at my own house. Its curtains are drawn and it is strange to be on the outside. Putney Common does its best to persuade me we should return: the candles on the horse chestnuts are in bloom, magnolia, cherry blossom, hawthorn all in their Sunday best. And the sun shines and shines all weekend bringing people out to play ball games, sit on picnic rugs. I bump into friends, drop in for tea, am greeted like the prodigal daughter. We’re coming home, I say. They gasp in disbelief.

I am looking at houses. Our tenants have hinted they would like to buy our place. I am here to grovel at the door of my children’s former schools. I take the bus to Oxford and see my mum. She is delighted at the news but tries hard to stop the corners of her mouth from twitching as I tell her in earnest tones that we are victims of the Credit Crunch.

On Sunday evening I get an email from the Head of the big boys’ school saying they will be able to take up their former places in September. I weep for joy. My dream of returning to my former life is about to come true. Back in Hong Kong, in just three hours my eldest son is due to start a new school. His third school in a year. I can hardly wait to give him the good news.

About Turn, Quick March!

Imagine you had spent six months preparing to move your family half way around the globe. You had found schools, a place to live, let your house, packed your life into boxes, tied up all lose ends back in the UK and said goodbye as you headed off for a New Adventure.

Imagine you had spent six months making a new life, a home. You settled your children into new schools and helped them find their way. You gradually overcame your loneliness and made friends, learnt your way around and began to feel you could do this. You got through your body’s dislike of the heat and humidity, ceased to miss home quite so much and threw yourself into it all that the new place had to offer.

And just as you are beginning to enjoy it, to appreciate the climate, the outdoors, the quality of life, just as your hitherto unhappy son is about to start a new school, they pull the rug out from under your feet and tell you you’re being recalled to London.

The words I wrote to friends last Christmas have turned out to be prophetic.

'Hong Kong is definitely feeling the global financial crisis. The first waves of job cuts have seen people leaving at short notice and everywhere you hear the same question, “Is your job safe?” The fact of the matter is that none of us know. However, we rather hope it will be a while longer before someone says, “The Dxxxx Family? Now there’s a cost we could cut!” '

Not that much longer, as it turned out.

I have been through the full range of emotions ever since the news plopped into the Pioneering Accountant’s Inbox. He glanced at his Blackberry and his body language said it all. It was Good Friday and we were in Beijing. Yes, I kept that out of my Beijing post. We were still too gob smacked to know quite how to react.

I’ve not been sleeping. It gets late and I am nodding over a book but I don’t want to turn out the light. If I hang on to today it means that the uncertainty of tomorrow is delayed for a little bit longer. I can’t talk to anyone, the information is still sensitive. I feel sick. I want to laugh. I’ve had a little weep. I’ve put my head in my hands. I’ve looked on the bright side and I’ve yelled expletives in my head.

Beijing

At Easter we headed north to Beijing.

26 million people live in China’s capital. The scale of the place is breathtaking: from its cavernous, spanking new airport terminal to the broad six lane boulevards that traverse the city.

We arrived late expecting to be met. None of the waiting drivers had a placard with our name on it. Suddenly aware of the helplessness that can neither speak, understand nor read the language we looked around, bemused and a little concerned and returned for a second look at the signs. Our eldest saw it first:

MY.DY
YSDAL
E.MAL
CDLM

He was right, but you’d be forgiven for not having known it.

The next morning the sun is trying hard to shine through the dull, yellow cloud that sits on the city. We are met by our guide who introduces herself as Sweet Lee, But you can call me Sweetie. Or not, I think. Beijing is pleasantly warm, spring like as the leaves bud into a green haze and blossom transforms the winter greyness. It is so different from evergreen Hong Kong where seasons are identified by rainfall, temperature and humidity.

Sweet Tea takes us on a tour of the Forbidden City*. While we admire its vast, ancient, wondrous beauty we are swarmed, at every stop, by crowds of curious onlookers. Mildly entertaining to begin with, it becomes increasingly trying. Sweet Tea does her best to assure us the interest is not malevolent, that provincial tourists may be seeing blonde hair or blue eyes for the first time and are unable to contain their delight at the sight of four siblings. We try to shrug it off and yet I hear both my own and my husband’s voice bark out a loud “No!” in unison when a stranger lifts our daughter from her buggy to snatch a photo opportunity and a cuddle.

We head to Tiananmen Square* where ‘it’ all happened in 1989. It is hard not to think of this as yet another Stalinist parade ground. Chairman Mao lies embalmed in a mausoleum at one end and yet this was a square used for gatherings and festivities, celebrations and fireworks as long ago as 1406 when the Forbidden City was first constructed as a playground for China’s Emperors.

Next we are driven to a silk manufactory, shown the life cycle of the silk worms and how each strand of silk is spun from ten individual cocoons. Sometimes cocoons are interwoven by two worms and these matted fibres are used to make wonderful light weight silk quilts which are on sale at a snip. I decide a purchase is in order for our spare bed where our guests have hitherto had to sweat out the humid Hong Kong nights under a 13 TOG winter duvet. The Pioneering Accountant has simultaneously decided that this purchase is entirely surplus to requirements. He takes an ideological stance against the silk factory on the grounds that we have been brought here solely to part with hard currency. I couldn’t care less if this is the reason. If the cap fits, wear it, I say, and I consider a double silk quilt a bargain at RMB380 (approx £33).

To my intense annoyance I have left my credit card in the hotel and am thus totally dependent on the Chancellor of the Exchequer. All reasonable appeals on grounds of practicality, functionality, usefulness, durability, value for money are in vain. He has entered the valley of stubbornness on a one way street. I feel like a child who has been refused pocket money and thus behave like one for the rest of the day.

My husband then decides on an ill-fated excursion to the Summer Palace just as the children are tipping over the edge of exhaustion and are no longer able to take in any more of Beijing’s imperial buildings. They are cheered by a paddle boat trip on the lake while I sit shivering and resentful on the bank listening to the babble of a million tourists.

By evening we are too tired to hold out our entrenched positions. A visit to the Flying Acrobats Show is on the cards. The children are easy to motivate once more and we enjoy an extraordinary display of Chinese contortions and daring do complete with parrots and lasers yet all bizarrely dressed up as some journey to the depths of time with cavemen, time lords and primeval warriors. For the row of students sitting in front of us we appear to be the main attraction and once more we have to fend off the requests for photographs while the children practise their Mandarin and receive compliments such as Bootifur and Vewy intewigent boy.

At the hotel a Chinese guest asks if all the children are mine. I confess, Have they been misbehaving? Here we are only allowed one child, she explains. There are big fines to pay if you break the rules and sometimes if you work for the government you can even lose your job. People here will think you are very rich to pay all the fines for four children. Forget the fines, I think, what about the school fees, the shoes, the after school activities and, let’s face it, the need for a vast house? It’s self-induced financial punishment, that’s all.

Saturday sees us marching along the Great Wall* some 90km north of Beijing. Sweet Pea has once more excelled herself and we stagger and clamber up and down the steep steps that were built to keep the Mongol hordes out. It is a beautiful and impressive sight in as much as we can see: the mist is low but the cherry blossom is out and we are atop one of the wonders of the ancient world. A cable car takes visitors up to the Wall and there is an option to ride down on little carts along a giant zig-zag chute which the boys delight in doing.

As we return to the city, the driver takes us by way of the Olympic village, the Water Cube and the Bird’s Nest stadium. Like the rest of Beijing, their scale is magnificent. They sit unused, but for the steady flow of visitors who are charged Y50 to see the empty insides, a reminder of Beijing’s glorious last summer.

We are herded into a tea ceremony and have four different types of tea brewed up in front of us to taste, and it is assumed, buy. Another opportunity to divest us of our cash but this time we are in complete agreement. We’d swap all the tea in China for a good cup of Tetley’s.

We eat at Beijing’s night market, fried meat on sticks, beef and vegetable wraps, fresh fruit and banana doughnuts, marvelling at yet eschewing the star fish, silk worm larvae, scorpions and river snakes also available fried on sticks.

Sunday is Easter Day and yet there is nothing to suggest it here except the warmth of a spring day, the yellow forsythia and the pink cherry blossom. We are taken by rickshaw to see the traditional Hutongs*, an area of narrow lanes and courtyard homes that once housed all Beijing’s inhabitants before population growth and space restrictions caused many families to be re-housed in suburban apartments. We get to meet the lady of one Hutong and our guide interprets our questions about life in Beijing. I ask her if she would have liked a second child. She asks me if my children fight. Both of us answer with a resounding Yes!

We eat dumplings and fried rice and take in the Temple of Heaven*, another vast complex where the Emperors came twice a year to give thanks for the harvest and to worship their ancestors.

I am pleasantly surprised by Beijing. I had anticipated traffic chaos, pollution and high rise monotony. Instead the city is low rise, spacious and light. The air is heavy with the yellow sand of the northern Gobi desert which blows in during the spring leaving our hair and skin grimy at the day’s end. And yet it is surprisingly organised and modern, clean, but for the smog, and orderly. There are decorative flowers and trees throughout and the parks are well tended and green. High-end designer stores cosy up to the big hotels in the city centre, as anywhere and yet there is an undemanding simplicity to the place, a relaxed atmosphere and a welcome depth, history and culture.

I’d live here, I tell the Pioneering Accountant. I imagine myself learning Mandarin, making Chinese friends and pedalling about on my bike with the children in tow. Whereas a year ago the very thought of China scared me, its size, its pollution and crowds all that has become the substance of the life we lead, no longer frightening, just fact. Or testimony to the ultimate adaptability of the human being.

*I’ve taken pictures but on a new camera and I don’t yet know how to upload them.

Return of the Reluctant HR Manager

Last week I gave notice to one half of the Dream Team. More of a nightmare than a dream of late, if I’m honest. Tired of being held hostage in my own kitchen, of not being able to say, I'd actually like it done this way, for fear of having my head bitten off, I steeled myself and relieved the Turkey Boiler of her duties.

The atmosphere had become unbearable. The Turkey Boiler was threatening and shouting at her younger sibling on a daily basis and I had encountered the sister in silent tears more than once. Whenever I suggested to Annie that she could possibly be a bit kinder to her sister she would bark back that I did not know what Clarabel had done to her. OK, I said, finally, What has she done?

You know those questions you wished you'd never asked? I got the full family history, with knobs on: teenage pregnancy, sibling rivalry, abandoned children, unpaid debts, banished daughters, drug-addicted sons, accusations of rape, drunken husbands and yet could not quite ascertain what Clarabel had done wrong other than giving her boyfriend (who turns out to be the husband that she married secretly just before coming to Hong Kong) special power of attorney over her house and property back in the Philippines. That's her house and property? I clarified. Yes. And?

In the end I pointed out that whilst the family history was no doubt very important to them, what mattered most to me was that they did a good job in my house. Three weeks later we were back in the same place. I began to get that nasty feeling you have when you've done one too many turns on the roundabout.

Last week while I was out Annie went off to do her personal shopping when she should have been looking after three of the children. Her sister was upstairs doing the ironing so there was no immediate danger but when I returned from a doctor's appointment the children were fighting and screaming and Annie was nowhere to be seen. When she got home I raised a quizzical eyebrow only to have her snap back that whilst I always assume she is to blame Clarabel should have been watching the kids.

I'm not blaming anyone for anything, I explained, the point is quite simply that you left your work without my permission, when I thought you were looking after my children. I also explained that the reason we employ two helpers is so that the housework gets done even when one of them has to divert to distract the children in my absence. She argued back and I explained it again, more slowly and clearly than before. When she started to shout I said I was going to leave the room and would return when she had calmed down.

Naive as I am, I did feel this approach was a fairly clear indication that it might be wise to think through the consequences of her actions and to acknowledge, on my return, that leaving the house during paid work hours without her employer's prior consent was not the best way to further her career. But no, hell-bent on destruction Annie would not accept the principle and fought her corner to the very end.

I will admit to being momentarily concerned about the silver and yet dismayed as I was at her stance I was not about to put her on the street. Whilst she has worn me down with her stubborn, sullen manner over the past five months, I was left feeling only saddened that, having given her the chance of a steady income and a relatively secure future, Annie had been so determined to shoot herself in the foot.

She left on Monday. Only after telling the neighbourhood that Clarabel and her friend, another Filipina helper, were to blame for her having lost her job. At one point the friend came marching in and demanded a show-down with Annie in front of me to clear her name. Oh, please no, not that as well! Fortunately for us all, Annie was not in.

I gave her a month's wages and a plane ticket home, took her to the check-in and wished her well. In the taxi on the way there we spoke not a word. Yet oddly enough she did some of her best work in the days after I gave her notice. She asked if I wanted her to continue cooking until she left, Yes please, I said, As long as you're not going to poison us! She laughed and flashed me her most brilliant smile, one I have seen only a couple of times since she arrived. No Ma'am, I'm not going to do that! Did she think I hadn’t really meant it? Or did she believe the charm offensive might win us over? God knows what she thought, but I knew we’d reached the end of the road.

Only time will tell if my analysis of the situation has been accurate or fair and if my actions have opened yet another bitter chapter in that tragic family for Filipina pride is a fierce and unpredictable beast. In the meantime, one thing is certain, that whilst our house may be a little less polished than before, the atmosphere is a whole lot more cheerful.