Tuning into the UK

A week has passed since husband left me and our youngest daughter here and had to fly back to Kazakhstan (with his suitcase of haggis!) to be a) at work, and b) with our other two daughters whom we had totally abandoned for five days.

It has been an odd week. I usually enjoy being back in the UK since it is part of a holiday or at least a break from the routine, and I have a long list of things I want to do and people I would like to see. This time, though, it is slightly different. I am not supposed to be here yet. I have a long list of things I need/want to do but they are all in Almaty, not Dorset. So I am having to start from scratch and get some kind of routine in place.

Having our little one with me is pretty much a joy. She has settled down, and despite a few tearful conversations about where her Daddy and her beloved sisters are, she is very happy at "Banny's" house. I am enjoying her company tremendously and she is so easy to look after. We wake up most mornings in the same bed with her hugging my head as hard as her small little arms can go.

We went to Rythmn and Rhyme at the local library on Friday. Daughter was pleased to see some other children even though they were all about half her age, and enthusiastically joined in with her jingly bells and all the songs she knew. There is a playgroup on Monday mornings for mums and tots in hhe local church hall which I will go to next week, and story time at 2.15 on Monday afternoons again at the library. Tomorrow morning we will check out the local swimming pool for swim times for mums and little ones.

It is quite interesting to be making genuine forays into life with small kids in the UK, when I have always done my child rearing abroad, usually in an environment trying very hard to imitate "what we would do at home" (albeit with an awful lot of foreign mums unable to go anywhere without their nannies (!) so with double the necessary number of adults present).

It strikes me, after my 10 day sojourn to date, that the UK is a pretty cushtie place to live. In general people seem to live fairly pampered lives, although they tend to feel that they are all miserable and work far too hard, and spend no time at all rejoicing in their good fortune that they weren't born into a Mumbai slum. There is no comprehension at all of a) the hardships that joe public endures in places like, for example, Kazakhstan and b) how incredibly luxurious (unnecessarily luxurious) their lives are. Everything is such high quality, relatively new, well-maintained and unbelievably safe in this corner of England.

Lots of small things have struck me since arriving. All the toilets are immaculately clean, the public services are quite good (buses etc) and it is all SOOOO easy to understand being in English and not Russian. Scarily, the strength of the "Health and Safety" authorities/lobby is extreme, its depressingly bland fingers reaching into every corner, and I think it has most obviously affected new parents. Spotting potential "hazards" is almost a competitive activity among young mothers. One of the girls at Rythmn and Rhyme, like a pious, goody-two shoes pupil at primary school who knew the answer to a question before the rest of the class, was worried about the kids holding the sets of obviously extremely well-made and clean jingle bells, in case a bell might be ingested by her one year old child. Oh, come off it! The librarian tactfully told her that they were quite safe and washed every week which shut her up, but it was symptomatic of the over-cautious nature of modern western life. Gigantic pushchairs (for added safety???), huge baby car seats (the car seat lobby has been very active in the last decade) and a bunch of neurotic, over-booked, under-relaxed older parents all fretting about keeping their offspring alive, rather than absorbing their new arrivals and carrying on with life.