So what happens now…

We could have had a baby in the time that we’ve been away! If either of us had a womb. It’s been nine months and two days since our last real blog post and today’s my last day in work before we go on holiday so it seems only fitting to be writing a post about it. Oh and don’t worry, it’s my last day in the sense that a normal person means it. We’re not doing this, this or this, in two weeks time I’ll be back from our holiday.

I’m writing this for anyone who is still out there who reads this, if we’re on your RSS feed – hello! What a surprise to hear from us, we hope you’re well and enjoying your travels or if you’re not a traveller, enjoying whatever it is that you’re doing. If I can give you a potted history of where we’ve been in the last nine months and what’s next for this blog.

Landing back on earth

Between November last year and March of this year Thom and I were out of work and it was a very hard time for us both. Friends and family were really supportive but Thom’s mum and step-dad were particularly fantastic in their support of us and we lived with them whilst we got our heads around what we had just done. I toyed with the idea of setting up my photography business full time as I had always planned and Thom was adamant that he wasn’t going to go back to being a theatre technician. We had some dark nights of the soul between us and I came to realise that the time for starting up my photography business had come and gone. We made other choices and although this was heartbreaking we thought about the bigger things that we wanted and why we had come home in the first place.

After what felt like a lifetime out of work, being depressed, hopeless and downright miserable we managed to see it out and get jobs, get back to London and get back to life. Thom’s got an amazing job as Technical Manager and Lecturer at Greenwich University and I’m back in the public sector doing project management

London calling once more

And who would have thought we’d have made it back to London? We were determined not to come back but you know what, between my career specialisms and Thom’s – in the middle of the worst recession since the fall of Babylon – fickle gays really can’t be choosers. However, what we have discovered is that when you’re not squeezing every last penny out of your income you can have a much better quality of life! We’re now living in Blackheath which is a lovely, open and thoroughly middle-class ‘village’ of London. We’re ten minutes walk from Greenwich and we’ve taken the boat into central London on a number of occasions. This is how you live in London for a long period – you allow yourself to ‘upgrade’ as circumstances (ie salary) allows. Thom doesn’t need to commute into central London so he’s delighted and I can get the train in which is much more pleasant than the tube.

I once read that to call yourself a Londoner you have to live in London for ten years. Well I moved here in October 2004 so I had to wait until October 2014, I was planning to have a party and everything. I’m not starting again and wasting a good six years so I have decided that given that I didn’t pay rent at any time between London and London I can simply add my time away. This means I now have to wait until July 2015 until I can say that I’m a Londoner.

Thunderbirds are go!

I proposed to Thom on 8 April 2011! We’re getting married next September and you’re all invited !

(correction: some of you are invited, invitations to follow, apologies it’s not all but unless one of our travel sponsors want to become a wedding sponsor we can’t afford to cater for you all!)

Instead of getting Thom an engagement ring we both got engagement tattoos of American Indian Thunderbirds. We each have a completely different design but it’s the same mythological creature – the sacred bearer of unlimited happiness.

And this blog?

Who knows. First off, I’ve converted back from magazine format to blog format which is infinitely more pleasing. I’m going to change the overall ‘sense’ of the blog. It’s not going to be ‘Thom and Sean’s World Adventure’ but ‘Thom and Sean’s adventures in the world’. The primary focus for the foreseeable future will be travel so don’t expect a tonne of updates because we’re both in full time jobs that pay so this is going back to being a hobby.

We might also stick in some other bits and bobs as well. Things that we want to talk about with a wider audience. I don’t know what those things are just yet but keep us in your RSS feed and you’ll find out!

I would love to say that we’ll go back and fill in all the blanks between New Zealand and Australia but that is highly unlikely. I do still have my journal from every day of the trip but the thought of going through the photos again is, I think, more than I can bear.