Writer, mother, expat (to be). Repat.
Born in Cuba to British diplomat parents, I started travelling as a baby and haven’t stopped. I’ve lived in eleven countries on five continents, and visited nearly 70. Along the way, I’ve picked up a husband and produced two daughters. I’ve worked as a journalist, diplomat, writer, press officer, antenatal teacher, customer service advisor, PA, coffee shop waitress, school cook (although that was only for one day). I now work from home, managing a journal (the International Journal of Birth and Parent Education), writing this blog and marketing the Expat Partner’s Survival Guide – as well as looking after the kiddies. We’re currently living in South Africa. I love Hotel Chocolat. I hate anyone who eats my Hotel Chocolat. I am not being paid by Hotel Chocolat to write this.
About the blog
I started this blog as a way to help people find my book, the keep a connection with my readership, but also because I love to write. I spent the blog’s first year experimenting, writing not just about expat life in general but also more precisely about my own expat life – past, present and future as we prepared to move to South Africa. In addition, I took part in various blog crawls, wrote about travel, and added the odd totally random post reflecting my thoughts of the day.
At the end of my first year of blogging, I decided I needed to change things a bit and focus more particularly on the subject matter of my book – the Expat Partner’s Survival Guide. This meant I would almost certainly be writing fewer posts but that they would be more relevant to my readership. I wanted to keep writing about travel and in particular travel in Southern Africa, so have kept a separate tag for that. But I felt the time was right to be more focused and to start really honing in on the subject that I felt strongly enough about to write the book in the first place.
As ever, I am interested in all feedback to please comment below if you have anything to say to me.
Cool….
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👍 and I love that photograph. What are the little people made of? 😄
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Thanks – it’s clay! We were at the Eden Project just after Christmas and they still had some of the seasonal activities going on. One of the things you could do was make a little clay snowman and leave him somewhere in the tropical dome. Because we were there so late in the season (I guess by then there had been about a month when people could do this) there were LOADS of them. It was a little freaky – like some sort of cross between voodoo and Apocalypse Now….
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I enjoy reading your blog, and I nominated you for the Liebster Award as one of my favourite new blogs. The details are on my blog if you want to participate: https://secretsofatrailingspouse.wordpress.com/blog/
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Thank you! I’ll get on to this in the week. ..
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So glad to learn that this sort of community exists! I look forward to reading through more of your work.
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Thank you! Your blog looks great, really interesting. I would welcome your thoughts and comments on my blog.
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Hi Clara, thank you for following me, and it seems that we had similar blog genre, partially about expat life. Only that I am not a writer like you. Nice blog by the way…
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I’ve known about you through Curts’ blog, and I guess yours is very good as well. I’m Spanish living in Barcelona, have you been here? if you haven’t … do come!!!!!
I’d like to get your entrances.
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Thank you Rosa. I have been to Barcelona, I’ve lived in Spain and Gibraltar so spent a bit of time I in that part of the world. Lovely country… We particularly love the food and wine!
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I also started blogging as a way to help publicize a book–in my case a novel. But blogging takes on a life of its own, doesn’t it?
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It really does! Someone warned me about this but I didn’t really believe them. I think what you don’t think about when you start blogging is the interaction. I thought I would just be writing posts and moving on. I wish I had time for more interaction – I always feel guilty about all those blogs that I follow that I don’t get the chance to read and comment on. But there are only so many hours in the day and as you know, marketing a book is a LOT of work!
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Understood. I try not to follow blogs that I’m not really going to read. I mean, what’s the point otherwise? I do dip in fairly regularly to some I don’t follow, but that seems marginally more manageable.
What I didn’t know was that publicizing the book by starting a blog also meant publicizing the blog. Which means finding other social media that need to be publicized. I feel like the old woman who swallowed a fly.
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I should be stonger at not following the blogs I won’t read. As for your last comment….I hope you won’t die! But I totally know what you mean. It’s neverending!
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Hi I’m enjoying your BLOG very much thank you. I’m also a foreigner in SA (living in Bryanston, Sandton) I’m from Sydney and it took me 71/2 years to stop feeling depressed about living here. I find the culture and people very different to my own tribe. I also lived in London for 8 years and loved it. Any hoo I have 3 daughters 3,7 and 9 and we are thinking of moving to the Seychelles for a year. We are thinking of home schooling as our children are in the Steiner Warldorf system and entering main stream as this stage would be too stressful. Our idea is too bring the family together and find more meaningful rhythm – not sure if we are being too idealistic here – but I look forward to any advice you could pass on. Additionally I am having difficulty trying to find long term rentals at a reasonable price as we will unfortunatly be travelling on ZAR. Keep well Jx
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Hi Joanne – have you seen the blog by Seychelles Mama? https://www.seychellesmama.com/
She would be a great person to contact about moving to Seychelles, both with practical advice and some feedback about what is really like to live there. My own personal advice is that moving somewhere like the Seychelles is rarely what you think it would be like – I am not saying don’t do it but be realistic about what is is like living on a small island. We lived in St Lucia for just off two years and I found it hard, very hard – a lot, lot harder than SA. However my kids were a lot younger and I am definitely not suited to small island life! It suits some, it doesn’t suit others. But just be realistic about what it can be like to live somewhere that it is very hard to escape from!
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