It has been roughly six months since we emptied the nest and the resident teen went off to UNI back in the  United States with the outlaws.

Knowing she was scheduled for a late start to the academic year, we started looking at alternative locales early in 2019. Singapore was principally focused on, but Thailand or Malaysia were also under consideration.

The specifics of the country weren’t that important, just something different, preferably lower taxes, equivalent benefits etc. BREXIT and what it potentially means for the UK is part of the reason but certainly not the reason for considering a move.

New Year rolled around uneventfully and then the offers started to appear. A mixed bag, some even from the Netherlands. Many interviews were had, there was some “ghostings” and some prospecting abandons. Mrs Jones got the principal offer though. Fortuitously one from Thailand and two from Singapore.

A Singapore one was chosen, though it was a tough choice given that both offers were attractive and even Thailand was good. At the same time my niece confirmed her move to Cambodia. Things then started to get really interesting. The Wuhan outbreak and then the Italy fiasco all rang alarm bells and actually had us scratching our heads. I literally made it back to the UK from a trip to Australia and Malaysia just a couple of weeks before things went crazy in Australia with people buying gallons of hand sanitizer and stockpiling toilet paper.

After roughly four months of lock-down it seems that the W.H.O declared pandemic is now circulating in reverse. The whole business has made 2020 a bit of a bizarre year to say the least. For us it seemed to put the move in suspended animation as we wondered whether we were going or not. We had offers and visa processing was in process but we hadn’t booked flights and were in lock-down ourselves. Unhappily choosing not to go anywhere despite having tickets booked and travel plans. A bunch of flights were cancelled and either refunded or credits given but none of these related to the move, just family visits and visiting.

What the lockdown definitely demonstrated is that some businesses and job roles can endure even in circumstances of lock down and in the absence of face to face meetings etc. Even school sort of functioned with parents acting as proxy tutors for virtual classrooms and online content.

Finally the visas were granted on the proviso that we traveled within 30 days of the granting of the visa. The issuance of the visas was staggered so flights were booked as they became available. Then the process of getting a permission to travel letter.

Eventually we managed to get our paperwork and flights all sorted and Mrs Jones left first. Arriving via Singapore Airlines and incarcerated in a Sheraton quarantine hotel.

Next it was me, I came by British Airways a week later. A three hundred seater 777, sparsely populated with about twenty passengers and an equal number of crew. I can only hope the hold was full of freight!

The flight was a relatively pleasant over-nighter landing just at the time of the late afternoon monsoon showers. Myself together with about a dozen others, were shepherded through the airport ghost town, kept socially distant and then piled into a 80 seater bus to be put in a hotel in downtown Singapore

Here we will wait in our relative isolation for two weeks until we are released into the wild, assuming we all pass the COVID19 swab test.