Trying Freedom

Around 10 months since my last post and it’s time to resurrect the blog, after spending the last few days fighting technical gremlins and looking through my posts I’ve realised that it’s long overdue.

I can sum up why pretty easily given that I ended the last post with;

In the meantime, I’ll fight off the rat race.

It’s fair to say that until recently I’ve done the exact opposite to that, for a variety of reasons but none of them were intentional which I hadn’t reflected on until now.

Initially, I think my expectation for returning to the UK was that I’d easily be able to continue living the same lifestyle as I was while travelling, I remember being very vocal to people who I’d met during that time that it was my intention too, however, the reality was far from that.

I was almost immediately spending significantly more money day to day because of the higher cost of living, without doing much of the fun stuff I was previously, mainly because my friends were also all in full-time employment so even if I was happy to spend more money I’d likely be doing activities solo, which was fine when I was away but not the expectation when I’m back in my home town with friends around.

There’s also the point that Norwich doesn’t have the same options to fill your day, I’ve tried to continue doing some of what I’ve experienced whilst away now and experienced the poor 1ft waves of Cromer and looked into scuba diving in the murky waters of West Runton but the days don’t pass as quickly as they used to.

Conscious of giving Norwich a bashing here which isn’t the intention, it’s a lovely place to be in the UK and I’d highly recommend visiting it over somewhere like London if you wanted to get a flavour of what life in the UK is like, it’s just what I’m used to having lived here most of my life.

With all of this in mind, two months after returning I found myself stopping consulting and starting a permanent 4-day per week job, slowly moving back to the lifestyle before travelling. Take this with a massive pinch of salt as I’m sure you’ve all got your mini violins out for the man who still works less than the typical 5-day working week, however, this is from the perspective of someone who had gone from working 2 days per week and being comfortable with earning enough to get by and enjoy life and even save some money.

I was now earning way more than I needed (considering I had less free time to be able to spend it). Still, I did have that extra day off during the week which was delightful. However, I don’t think it changed anything too much for me, as it allowed me to go away on more long weekends. Still, I believe that I could’ve had the same time off within a normal holiday entitlement while working anyway and when I didn’t have any trips planned I’d normally end up with one eye on my emails.

Regardless, I made more of an effort to get the most out of those long weekends and have managed to fit plenty of them in, such as;

• Trips to the Peaks/Lakes climbing and hiking
• A week in Cornwall relaxing, climbing and attempting to surf in awful conditions (well-timed trip)
• One trip to Wales climbing, need to get some more of these in soon
• Trips to France
  • High Alpine Rock Climbing in Chamonix
  • Mountain biking in Morzine
  • Snowboarding in Alp D’Huez
  • Ice climbing in Chamonix (below)

Not everything has been all sunshine and rainbows though, the family emergency I mentioned in the last post has since turned from bad to worse, taking some positive from it though, it has reminded me to reflect on where I want to be and as part of that I decided to leave the new job at the end of May to give me time to focus on that and be with family in the meantime.

Fortunately, I was able to save enough money to give me a good amount of time to do just that but until then, Norwich remains home!