Chronicles of a Trailing Spouse...

Look, I'm not saying I'm not happy to be up here in the outback, thousands of kilometres from civilisation; light-years away from bookshops, cafes, swanky bars, cinemas and the beach - and did I mention bookshops? No, I'm not saying that at all. However, I will admit that the first line in her memoir 'Diplomatic Baggage', by journalist and diplomat's wife, Brigid Keenan, does strike a proverbial chord with me when she writes: " Oh God, I don't know if I can bear it. This is my first morning in Kazakhstan and it is only 11 o'clock and I have already run out of things to do and I have another four years to go (that means one thousand four hundred and sixty days) until this posting comes to an end. How on earth am I going to get through it?" Hilarious read... A certain truth rings loudly from this paragraph for me. Yes it is a privilege to live somewhere as extraordinary as the Pilbara - how many people can claim that? But I sometime...

Last month marked the fifth anniversary of this family leaving Ireland. Five years - it sounds at once such a short period of time - a snippet, an ad break! - and yet the world we left behind us in Ireland seems like a murky dream, something from another lifetime. These past five years have been eventful - life changing even. When we left Galway for Abu Dhabi back in 2008 it was with the idea that we might stay away for a year, maybe two at the most - you know, have an experience, open our minds, and all that jazz , before returning to the comfort of our lives. However, the collapse of Lehman brothers shortly after we left - and the gory aftermath of that - combined with the realisation that this world was far bigger than our tiny part of south county Galway - meant that pretty quickly we knew we wouldn't be returning to Ireland any time soon. If ever. In the UAE I never really thought of myself as an expat, never sought out Irish people in particular, didn't give any ...