One Step Ahead

Of course, the chap who is sorting out my mortgage thinks I'm mad. Brave and crazy, but mad. The chap I met at lunch time today thinks I am setting myself up for a lifetime of pain. I think of it as keeping busy.

Plan A was, of course, to write about it as I was doing it. I was going to turn this site in to a useful guide to how to move from Foreign to Here, with a useful list of tips and contact numbers. Plan A was, of course, nonsense.

Of course.

Let's just say that things are moving along nicely, and I am managing to stay one step ahead of disaster.

My ever-increasing number of to-do-lists fall nicely in to a number of categories.

There's the stuff to do with money, which is my current worry. Not the costs involved, but the fun business of moving it from one account to another, and making sure that nobody thinks that I am an international money launderer.

There's the legal stuff, which is happily burbling along and under control.

As is the insurance stuff.

Then there's the tax stuff - trying to sort out my taxes Here and in Foreign, where both tax authorities owe me money, money which I intend to blow on sweeties.

Once we get the keys to the flat, we'll be getting it redecorated. This is Mr Twinky's main area of expertise, and he's organising it remotely with minimal chunks of help as required from his army of foot soldiers on the ground. By which I mean my long-suffering parents, who are both being fantastic although they probably don't think they're doing much apart from keeping me sane and keeping me company.

I'm whiling away my idle hours by planning what electronic gizmos I am going to buy, and working out the order of various calls that I have to make two weeks from now (in order - electric, gas, phone and broadband, ordering electronics, getting a television licence, getting satellite television).

And only after that do I think about getting a regular vegetable box delivered, or those lessons I've been talking about for years, or sorting out my National Insurance.

Through a combination of luck and more luck, I've not managed to screw anything up yet, but I know I'm just keeping one step ahead of disaster and I couldn't do it any other way.