Week 7 — the story continues

Australia has some of the most stringent immigration laws of most countries. And rightly so. You don’t just turn up and live in the “lucky country”. In fact, you don’t just turn up here, period. As we found out when Victoria tried to visit for a holiday. Needing a visa was one of the crucial details, perhaps the most crucial detail, that I somehow forgot to mention. I had the spreadsheet completed, meals and trips booked, yet none of it would be of much use if my guest could not even leave the UK.

“Good evening, where are you travelling to today madam?”

“Sydney. Australia.”

“Hmm.”

“Is everything OK?”

“I’m sure it is. Just let me check something on the system.”

“…”

“Where did you get your Australian tourist visa from?”

“What Australian tourist visa?”

You see, you can’t even come to Australia for a holiday unless you have secured a tourist visa, that typically allows you to stay for 90 days. The fact that I had previously had numerous of these, easy to come by, free visas, was probably the reason this most basic requirement slipped past me when helping plan Victoria’s trip.

Thankfully, on this occasion, Victoria was able to get an emergency visa, and thus make her flight. No doubt cursing me with unprintable expletives. The spreadsheet was not going to waste.

To come and live here is exponentially more difficult. This is the reason it took me the best part of a couple of decades to get around to completing the necessary paperwork. With each extended holiday here, I was returning to the UK, with two things. A winter tan, and an increased desire to up sticks and chance my luck down under.

Initially, I was just dipping my toe in the water. And in fairness, I probably wasn’t even dipping the whole toe in. I was perhaps kidding myself, that by completing an online assessment of the likelihood of me getting a visa was research. It wasn’t. Not really. I filled in a few questionnaires, answered a few stock questions, and I was “reliably” informed I had a good chance of getting a permanent residency visa. All I had to do was send a cheque (yes, we still had them in those days. Ask your mum if you don’t know what one is) to the migration “expert”, and they would assess me in more detail. Needless to say, my research stopped there. As did my chances of moving to the lucky country.

And as they say, life is what happens whilst you are making plans. Not that I was making any firm plans of course, but you get the picture.

My time in Dublin came to an end around 2008. If the term “halcyon days” was coined for any epoch, or era, it was that time in Dublin. As it turned out, my time in Dublin wasn’t the only thing coming to an end. Over the last couple of years, much structural damage had been done to our relationship. Irreparable damage. The type of damage you only notice retrospectively. The type that hides in your foundations, whilst you continue living your life. Until an event triggers the fault line, and you both collapse into the earth, like an old store front at Pompeii, with what was left of your time together.

“Here for a good time, not a long time”, became the unofficial motto of Dublin. Maybe taken too far at times. I look back now, with a few more years on the clock than I had then, and I wonder how we did it. I am lucky to see past 10pm these days. But then things were very different. All of us were in the same boat. Living away from home. With very busy jobs. Long hours in the office morphed into long nights in the pub. And the early starts at work didn’t stop, meaning some days we were subsisting on very little sleep, and copious amounts of Guinness. It is a meal in itself don’t you know.

Weekends back at home were a welcome respite. Not that I could show that. I had to summon every last reserve of energy. And remember that I wasn’t recounting a holiday I had been on. But just the humdrum every day of work life. Making it sound like I was having the time of my life wouldn’t have gone down very well, and would have resulted in the breakdown of our relationship much faster.

Whilst the end did not coincide directly with my return home from Dublin, it was definitely the beginning of the end. We would try and get things back to normal. Adjust to the happy life we had before Dublin, but something had changed. Irrevocably. Something unspoken, but always felt. Like a filter had been laid over the top of us. One we couldn’t escape. The boat was slowly letting in water, and the bilge pumps could not empty it fast enough. We were slowing sinking with it. We took overseas holidays. We entertained a lot, making use of the home we had built for ourselves. Filled with all the things that are supposed to act as the glue that holds you together.

Expensive furniture. Big TV. Garden set up for long summer evenings, BBQ glistening on the newly laid deck. We could have almost put up a white picket fence, such was the facade of domestic bliss we were exuding. Now that we were spending more time together, we were growing further apart. Mistakes were made. Big mistakes. I had crossed a line that there was no coming back from. My own personal Rubicon. And like Caesar, I was destined to come off much worse. It would be brutal.

The benefit of age, and wisdom, has shown me how much hurt I caused to the one person that loved me. If I had anything to add, with the benefit of hindsight, it was I wish she had found a way to show me that love in the way that I needed it. The decisions we make can’t be reversed. And the effect and consequences of those decisions have been something I have had to learn to live with. Whether there was, or will be, any forgiveness, is something that I feel I am destined never to find out. And that makes me very sad.

Ironically, whilst being reunited permanently upon my return from Dublin created an uncrossable chasm between us, now separated we started back at the beginning, and inextricably found green shoots of a relationship growing. This took time, but once the glacial boundary between us started thawing, we found ourselves closer than we had been for a long time. I’ve read that a broken bone, once healed, is stronger than it was previously. Maybe this is the way with some relationships. It appeared to be for us. For a short time. But this was me. I knew it couldn’t last.

Now living in separate homes, but visiting each other regularly, we seemed happier. Happy with each other. As though we had to break what we had, to test its strength. Drinks. Meals out. We even started having sleepovers like we were teenagers again. Things couldn’t have been better. And then, boom. I pressed the self destruct button again.

Who was it who said, “the truth will set you free”? Let me tell you, it does. Whether that is what you want or not. I don’t know it was the outcome that I truly wanted. I felt I had worked out what I wanted. Finally. Then I made one decision that altered the course of my life.

So, for the first time in many years, I was single. All self inflicted. Mea culpa. And with the sale of our house I had some spare cash sitting around in my bank account. All those fancy accoutrements we had spent hard earned money on? The furniture. The TV. I walked away. They held no value to me. The economist in me was shouting “sunk cost”. Which highlighted to me just how important this kind of stuff is. It isn’t. I was happier, and freer, without it. And that freedom brought on the thinking that maybe the trip to South America wasn’t such a bad idea after all. Cue me opening the laptop on that night at home, pointing my browser to a flights search engine, and what would become the next chapter of my life.

My newly found, or forced upon, freedom also helped me make the decision to get serious about moving to Australia. No more online assessments. No more talking about what I would like to do. I talked earlier about how I had set myself the goal of knowing by the time I reached 40 whether I would be making the big move down under. With no more ties, emotional, or financial, I now did things properly. Engaging a migration specialist based in Sydney, and making a not insignificant financial outlay, or as I saw it, investment, I began the application process, culminating in that cold Halifax morning in December, shortly before my 38th birthday.

I had read that this process typically took around 2 years. So, with the application on its way to Sydney, I had some time to kill. I would kill the first part of the next year exploring South America.