The end and the start

I've quit my life in London, sold almost everything, and moved to Mauritius.

Thanks to the pandemic I got to try working remotely. I'd always assumed a remote PM role would be rather soulless. The jobs I'd seen in my periphery involved overseeing external teams in Eastern Europe - an exercise in cost saving. And I wasn't sure good product work was possible remote when so much relies on meetings and talking and looking and pointing and thinking together.

But then through the lockdowns my team and I still got high quality work done. Myth busted. And I preferred working from home. So decision made. My next role was going to be fully remote.

I got a job at Remote. My partner got a fully remote job too. We started questioning what was keeping us in London.

London time limit

After 8 years in the city, and definitely sped up by the pandemic, I was starting to feel like London wasn't the place for me any more. A previous flatmate once told me "People have a natural time limit for London. Some people it's one year, some people it's 20 years, but everyone hits their time limit and leaves eventually." I remember vividly thinking, "Pfft, that's just an excuse for getting old."

Either I got old or I hit my time limit. Maybe both.

Then in July our apartment got burgled. We were away in France seeing my partner's family in one of the moments of covid calm. We got a call from our landlord saying someone's broken in, lots of things are gone, and the flat is a mess. That is now sad, stressful, muddy water under the bridge but it was the final nail for life in London.

So although I love London it was time to say goodbye.

Where to?

If not London, then where? My family is in Scotland but I don't really want to go back. My parter's family is in France but she doesn't really want to go back. And if we can go wherever we like (covid restrictions willing) then there's the whole world to choose from. But how can we choose?

In a growing crescendo we quite quickly went from "Maybe we try traveling and working?" to "We could go somewhere warm to avoid winter" to "Let's move to Mauritius".

So that's where we're starting.

Win-win either way

At some point around September the idea just took hold. We'd talked about it enough. It was real now. Either we get on with it or we shut up. So we bought our flights, we gave notice on our flat, and we started selling our stuff.

The hardest thing was actually selling everything. I was really surprised by the sheer amount of stuff I'd collected and just carried around with me for years. Place to place, shelf to shelf. Even stuff I'd forgotten I had. I'm not a shopper type, but I am a sentimental type and a dreamer so I even still had fine art tutorial books from my first year at Uni. What if now was the time I'd become a landscape painter? So I carried them, and a lot of other stuff, around with me for 15 years.

Luckily I had a very strict limit on what I could keep. Whatever I kept needed to fit in luggage I could get on a plane. It took several iterations, and quite a lot of umming and ahhing, but eventually almost everything was sold or donated or gifted.

And once it was all gone, I felt a sense of freedom I wasn't expecting. Even without traveling. The act of reducing the amount of stuff I had made me feel lighter and untangled from responsibility and more flexible. I'm sure Marie Kondo has got a word for it.

So now it is happening. And I really feel like I'm in a win-win situation. Worst case scenario I don't like nomad slow travel life. But in that case London is still there and I've had a great holiday to a paradise island.

But best case scenario I get to roam the earth exploring all the different places I might want to next call home. YOLO. Let's do it!

Everything I own is in that suitcase and backpack. In a matter of minutes I can pack up my whole life and go somewhere else. I'm excited to find out where the journey takes me. First stop, Mauritius.