Here it is then, finally. I’m making plans to fly home in the next couple of weeks. Or rather, notplans, because how much can anyone really plan anything in these pandemic times when everything is predicated on not being invaded by a virus?

That word, repatriation, with its heavy cloud of foreboding carries emotional baggage familiar to any person of colour who grew up in the seventies. It seems appropriate. One can assume that it was originally redolent of cosy home fires that have been kept burning ready to welcome the returning traveller. The politically-motivated sending home of people who aren’t in the indigenous tribe still causes a shudder, however.

Though I should be overjoyed at the prospect of coming home, something I’ve longed for since I reluctantly let myself be dragged away from kitchen, friends and family, it does feel a like a journey from the  the frying pan into the fire in terms of both Covid19 and the state of the politics in the respective territories. I am reluctant to talk about one of these places: the other fills me with shame and horror that fellow citizens can have actually voted for these putrid, incompetent instruments of corruption. The reality on the ground as opposed to the grind of second hand news and opinions on social media will be an interesting calibration.

I am to come home on a shared private charter jet with pets on the cabin. For reasons that will take another blog post to explain it is has been very difficult to ship pets out of Hong Kong for the last couple of years, and the situation has only become more difficult since Hong Kong hardened its position on its Covid Zero policy. We were set to return some time this year in any case and I jumped at the chance to return with elderly and frail Oscar in the cabin with me rather than in the hold. Even now that return is not a certainty and depends on an unfamiliar vet’s assessment of him as fit to fly and me not succumbing to Covid in the next ten days. Notplans.

Some people seem to be able to waft freely with the trade winds from place to place, happily rootless and seeking only a new tribe of not-yet-friends. I, however, have a strong attachment to home. I don’t find it easy to uproot myself. It’s not as easy to move on as one might think. I envy the underthinking capacity of people who can “just move.”

I can only take 20Kg on the plane with me so I’ve already sent ten boxes of my life by sea freight to arrive some time in the next six months, I hope, and two, perhaps three, suitcases will be picked up to to be air couriered home at the end of this week. I’m up to my eyes in customs declarations and transfers of residence forms as well as all of the health paperwork for the dogs.

The material shifting of stuff is easy enough if one works methodically, though. It’s much more difficult to deal with the emotional strain. Memories of how I wrenched 7 year old Eliza away from the adoring bosom of her Paris classmates and plonked her back into an English primary school class that had moved on without her are still fresh. People are often quick to jump on the supposed resilience of children but I’m not so convinced.  Recollections of this emotional trauma are partly what prevented us from doing another overseas stint until our younger child had left for university. In the end, as you might recall, it was me that felt the emotional wrench of her leaving home the most.

This time, however, I worry about how Oscar and Raffles will miss the company of their beloved MsJ. Having pulled Oscar through his recent health problems to be within touching distance of his 14th birthday, the prospect of him pining away from a broken heart as he realises that she’s not going to appear at home in Beckenham appals me. At night I am kept awake picturing their sad faces of realisation as they are loaded into travel crates watching our goodbye tears. People who know dogs will understand this.

I’ve been very upset at the thought of leaving MsJ too, of course, not only for her work to ensure our comfortable life here, but with trepidation about what lies ahead for her. We will do all that we can to help her find a respectful new employer but I’m wondering how we will ever really know how she will be treated. Her visa is dependent on John’s of course, and she will have only a couple of weeks after he eventually leaves here to find a new job, a new home. It’s such a precarious existence and the atmosphere here is quite fraught.

These are first world problems, I know. I am returning to a life of  relative comfort. I am not a refugee from famine or other people’s wars of hubris, leaving with nothing and arriving somewhere unknown with the prospect of rebuilding a life from nothing. Even the comparison is disrespectful. I am, however, where I am.