{"id":419,"date":"2009-12-15T13:57:20","date_gmt":"2009-12-15T02:57:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thelondonbiker.com\/blog\/?p=419"},"modified":"2009-12-15T13:57:20","modified_gmt":"2009-12-15T02:57:20","slug":"im-moving-back-to-london","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thelondonbiker.com\/blog\/2009\/12\/im-moving-back-to-london\/","title":{"rendered":"I&#8217;m moving back to London"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As most of you know I&#8217;ve been living in Melbourne out here in Oz for about 14 months now. It&#8217;s been a blast &#8211; working for a pretty funky company that&#8217;s allowed me to explore new ideas and &#8216;do cool stuff&#8217; as well as discovering a pretty funky country.<\/p>\n<figure style=\"width: 500px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><a title=\"Ken &amp; Matthew Squash Open by mattcashmore, on Flickr\" href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/mattcashmore\/4181040760\/\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"margin-top: 5px; margin-bottom: 5px;\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/farm3.static.flickr.com\/2512\/4181040760_77117f89e5.jpg?resize=500%2C375\" alt=\"Ken &amp; Matthew Squash Open\" width=\"500\" height=\"375\" \/><\/a><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Squash with Ken... even though he won the trophy he&#39;s still a pretty nice bloke.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Australia has been good to me &#8211; it&#8217;s helped me lose a not-insignificant amount of weight (4 Stone\/26 Kg), it&#8217;s helped me discover an active lifestyle I didn&#8217;t really understand I had or could even make happen. It&#8217;s provided me with friends that I&#8217;m going to be exceptionally upset to leave behind&#8230;. it&#8217;s a culture and a life-style I&#8217;m reticent to say good-bye too. Working out of Australia has been a real experience &#8211; I&#8217;ve never really heard the phrase &#8220;drink a can of harden-the-fuck-up&#8217; and get on with it&#8221; before &#8211; but I have to say I agree with the general principle&#8230; Melbourne is the arse-end of beyond as far as the rest of the world goes, but that doesn&#8217;t seem to matter when you&#8217;re here &#8211; only when you&#8217;re on a plane trying to get here.<\/p>\n<figure style=\"width: 500px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><a title=\"BOM says it's going to get dry by mattcashmore, on Flickr\" href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/mattcashmore\/3827424241\/\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" \" style=\"margin-top: 5px; margin-bottom: 5px;\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/farm3.static.flickr.com\/2517\/3827424241_6b0b56a953.jpg?resize=500%2C375\" alt=\"BOM says it's going to get dry\" width=\"500\" height=\"375\" \/><\/a><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">I&#39;m going to miss the ride-outs with Nigel - actually I&#39;m just going to miss Nigel.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>I land back in the UK on Thursday (17th) morning &#8211; I&#8217;ll be in the office from Friday (18th) and back to my old tricks &#8211; still working for Lonely Planet &#8211; just doing it from a slightly more &#8216;connected&#8217; city&#8230; which should make my life a little easier.<\/p>\n<p>I shan&#8217;t miss a few things from Oz &#8211; the price of books for example, or the sad lack of any technology launched in the rest of the world in the last 12 months, or the customer service (seriously&#8230; I didn&#8217;t think it could get worse than London). But they&#8217;re trifling things and I don&#8217;t want to sound like I&#8217;m moaning. I am looking forward to being in London again &#8211; how well it&#8217;s connected to the rest of the world, the feeling that you can actually change the world and the ability to grab absolutely anything you need &#8211; ever &#8211; by jumping on the bike and finding the right part of town&#8230; then haggling for it! I&#8217;m also rather looking forward to being so near France and the rest of the continent again&#8230; I didn&#8217;t think I&#8217;d miss the &#8216;idea&#8217; of being able to dash over the channel&#8230; \u00a0but there you go.<\/p>\n<p>Here it is then &#8211; the final post from Oz, the final goodbye in the office and the final farewell to dear friends&#8230; but as the New Zealanders say&#8230; &#8220;you don&#8217;t lose a friend, you simply gain a place to stay in London.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As most of you know I&#8217;ve been living in Melbourne out here in Oz for about 14 months now. It&#8217;s been a blast &#8211; working for a pretty funky company that&#8217;s allowed me to explore new ideas and &#8216;do cool stuff&#8217; as well as discovering a pretty funky country. Australia has been good to me &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/thelondonbiker.com\/blog\/2009\/12\/im-moving-back-to-london\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;I&#8217;m moving back to London&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-419","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-ramblings"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelondonbiker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/419","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelondonbiker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelondonbiker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelondonbiker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelondonbiker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=419"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thelondonbiker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/419\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelondonbiker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelondonbiker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelondonbiker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}