When we lived in the UK we were not really happy. I mean, there are a lot of things there which were great and which we enjoyed, but daily life ground us down. The weather and the traffic mostly. We spent most of our years there trying to figure out how to get out with dignity, and that probably led to us being down on some aspects of British life when we didn’t need to be. I’ll tell you, there are things I pine for now. Sorry, Britain.

We lived in an outlying suburb of London. We started off there because The Daddy was working in central London and I was working … not actually in London at all, in fact quite close to Oxford. So we had to find something in the middle. Then I had the T-Bot and stopped working and we could have moved, but by that time we had neglected to buy in our favorite area (obviously the ONLY POSSIBLE area) and house prices (and rents) had doubled.  So we stayed. Oh, and how we grumbled.

The whole point of this post really is that sweet Andrea of Sweet Life tagged me for a meme. It’s the sixth photo in your sixth folder one which I have already done but joy! The Daddy messed up my photos and now the sixth of the sixth is a different one! So here it is, the view from the roof of our apartment building:

Recently I revisited this High Street (FYI the British words for Main Street) courtesy of Google Maps, and after four years away I was still infinitely familiar with every store, every storefront for the whole length of it. Not much has changed there. I used to walk this route twice a day pushing my stroller, sometimes with the T-Bot on my back, all the way up to the library and back. We would stop in at stores we didn’t need to stop at, visit the playground, sometimes sit in the library for a while. The supermarket was across the road and we would go there most days. It was a regular, mind-numbing routine. But it passed the time and it kept the T-Bot occupied and sometimes would even tire him out enough so that he would sleep.

When we were there tourists used to tell us how pretty it all was and how quaint and we used to ask ourselves How? Why? All we could think about was the traffic, the drawn faces, the buildings blackened by pollution. The arctic winds whipping down the high street numbing fingers and noses. The crime. The line for the slide at the playground (What? The line for the slide at at the playground can be a major deal. Especially if it is a line 20 children long).

But the fact is, with distance anything can look quaint. And we surprised ourselves when we looked back at this set of pictures, because suddenly it didn’t look so bad after all. Now that time has passed and we no longer have to be there, we can look at this photo and think: “Awwww. Quaint!”.

I am not going to tag anyone for this meme, but if you want to do it, just throw the link in below!