On Returning To The U.K. I Thought That The Overseas Employment Phase Of My Life Was Over, But Nothing Could Have Been Further From The Truth.
During the four years I spent in P.N.G. I was entitled to 6 weeks leave a year with air fares back to Scotland thrown in. After the first year, I did return home for 6 weeks, but after that, I would go home for 3 weeks and stay in Bangkok for the other 3 weeks, normally on the way back from Scotland. On my second stay in Bangkok, I met a girl who worked at the hotel I normally used. I remembered her from my previous trip, and I asked her to come to see a movie with me. We enjoyed the latest James Bond movie. I can’t remember which one it was, but it was in English with Thai subtitles. To cut a very long story short, Riu spent the last 6 months of my contract living with me in Port Moresby.
It was with mixed feelings that we said goodbye to our Port Moresby friends between Christmas and New Year 1984. My future wife and I traveled “the scenic route” back to the U.K. via:
1. Port Moresby airport, which had been completely renewed since I first arrived four years previously.
2. Fiji, just for a holiday, though we did bump into a friend who had left Port Moresby three months before us. He had found a job in Suva.
3. Christchurch, New Zealand, to visit my younger sister. She lived there with her husband and young son, my only nephew.
4. Perth, Australia, where we had ex-Moresby friends.
5. Bangkok, Thailand, to visit Riu’s family.
6. Tokyo, Japan, where Riu ordered a meal she had always wanted to eat but never had the chance before, called Gimashi. She loved it, but I had a mouthful and thought that it was disgusting.
7. Los Angeles, California, where we saw the “Hollywood” sign and visited Disneyland for a day
8. Las Vegas, Nevada, where we broke about even after both of us had been gambling for 3 days. One night, when I was winning, I had my first (and last) $100 bet on a roulette table. I had a sudden urge to bet on black, and it came up red. I retired to the bar to drink the little that remained of my winnings, only to be joined a short time later by Riu gleefully waving the $50 she had won on the slot machines.
9. Ontario, Canada, where we had more ex-Moresby friends. The highlight of that stop was a visit to Niagara Falls. And finally-
10. Direct to Glasgow, Scotland, my home city. That was a trip neither of us will ever forget.
We spent about a year in the U.K., both in Scotland and in Croydon, my old home just to the South of London. During this time, Riu (known as “Tim”) and I got married at Croydon Registry Office, followed by a one-day honeymoon driving to the South Coast and back. I worked either on a self-employed basis or through temporary employment agencies.
I set up a computer system for a sole practitioner Chartered Accountant, husband of a secretary who worked in my original London office, and also for a friend of his. I also trained them in the benefits that the use of spreadsheets could bring to their clients in their everyday work.
But things were boring. Tim hated the cold weather, and she was not 100% happy. Then, on two consecutive days, we received two letters. The first one was from an ex-Port Moresby friend who now lived with his Myanmar wife in Perth, Australia. It included a second letter from a partner of the Perth office of the same company I had worked for in P.N.G. It offered me the job of computer manager in the Perth office. It was a job similar to the one I had been doing in Port Moresby. I knew and liked my future boss from a couple of seminars we had both attended in Sydney, and it didn’t take Tim and me more than ten minutes to decide to accept the job offer. We had both enjoyed our visit to Perth on our round-the-world trip. That afternoon, two letters were winging their way to Australia. One to my soon-to-be boss and one to my pool and golf playing buddy, Andy.
The next morning, a second, more scruffy-looking envelope arrived bearing a Thai stamp. Inside was a piece of paper which had been torn from a book of some sort, with words scrawled in child-like writing. “Mother Tim have death”, is all it said. Telling Tim that her mother, somebody she had dotted on, had died was one of the hardest things I have ever had to do, even though at 85, she had lived 10 to 15 years longer than the average Thai woman at the time.
After her tears had dried up, Tim told me that she wanted to go back to Bangkok as soon as possible. “Okay, we’ll go up to London now and see what we can do,” I replied. By mid-afternoon, we had managed to book a single direct flight on Thai Airways three days later. There was one refueling stop in the Middle East somewhere, but apart from that, it was a direct flight. I wanted to make it as easy as possible, as Tim had never flown on her own before.
We also applied for permanent visas at the Australian Embassy. When we handed in the application forms, I explained about Tim’s mother and Tim’s travel plans. An interview was hurriedly arranged for the next morning, and medicals for the following afternoon. After they had been completed, we were informed that it would take two months for the first preliminary approval to be granted, which would be followed by a second interview. The second interview was normally a rubber-stamp formality. We were told that, as long as they were able to confirm my job offer, there should be no problems. I asked if, after the initial approval, all the paperwork could be sent to the Bangkok Embassy, and the rubber-stamp exercise could be conducted there. I was told that this was unusual, but under the circumstances, something could probably be arranged.
Two days later, I said goodbye to Tim at the entrance to the departure lounge at Heathrow airport. The despair over her mother completely blocked out any fear she may have had about flying alone, and she seemed quite confident as she disappeared to show her passport at emigration.
When I received the offer to go to Perth and Tim had to leave suddenly for Bangkok, I was working on a temporary basis in a small Chartered Accountants office about 20 miles further South of London than Croydon. They already had a computerized system set up, and I was working more like the head of a small business department, doing my own inputting and everything else that was involved. The computerized system could have been better, and I did have plans to improve it, but all of that got put on hold after the Australian offer came through. The two partners of the firm were disappointed when I told them I was leaving, and I was told that they had agreed to offer me a partnership. Would I like to reconsider my plans? I thought about it overnight, but the next day I turned down the offer as nicely as I could.
Tim called me and said that she had arrived in Bangkok without any difficulty, and she had been to pay her respects where her mother’s ashes had been buried, and that she had felt a lot better for being able to do so. She was happy staying with her older brother and sister-in-law, but she said that she was looking forward to starting a new life in Australia.
About two months later a letter finally arrived from the Australian Embassy, saying that our application for a residency visa had been provisionally accepted, that and our complete file would be sent to the Embassy in Bangkok, where the final interview would be carried out basically at my convenience, as long as I made an appointment at least a day in advance.
I had enjoyed working with the little firm South of Croydon, and it was quite sad when I said goodbye to the two partners and the three other staff members two weeks later. Another week later, after spending half of what Tim’s ticket had cost, I boarded an Aeroflot plane bound for Moscow, which would connect, after a five-hour wait, drinking a bottle of vodka, with a direct flight to Bangkok. After drinking the vodka, I nearly missed my flight call, but I managed to get to the gate just in time to board. My second working trip abroad had finally begun.
Unlike most of the others, this blog post has little in common with affiliate marketing. It happened many years before the introduction of the Internet. But if it happened today, including our round-the-world trip, I could have worked on my affiliate marketing business every single day without interruption. If I wanted, I could hide the fact that I was traveling from my clients, and they would be none the wiser. For all you know, I may be sitting in a bar in Moscow airport right now, with half a bottle of vodka on the table in front of me. Stranger things have happened.
Cheers
Phil