A year ago today, we packed up our bags and left the Big Smoke. I won’t deny that I had some anxiety about it; leaving friends and (my) family, introducing a 2.5 hour a day commute, having to drive everywhere and more, and with Emily (then merely "Hippo") on the way, it was a fairly hectic experience.

Looking back on the first year of this new life, I have absolutely no regrets. I’ve had barbecues from Spring through Autumn, played with my daughter on our big lawn, grown and eaten veg straight off the plants and fruit off the trees, run and cycled through village after village, made local friends via the NCT, discovered the joy of jumble, DIY and more, and am enormously enjoying the lifestyle. We’ve even found good local Indian and Chinese takeaway restaurants and discovered Papa Johns.

It’s been a fantastic first year. I still miss my friends but many of them are being good enough to visit with some regularity and I’m getting better at heading up for London nights out here and there.

Here’s to what comes next.

That said, the Galaxy S2 is a new phone, and my iPhone 4 is coming up to 15 months old, so I’m going to wait and see what happens when Apple makes its announcement on the new phone at the end of the month. Some of the new rumours are promising (although very unconfirmed) – nice ‘retro’ curved design, larger screen… we’ll have to see.

It’d have bad knock-on implications on my status as a Coolsmartphone.com iPhone blogger, so that’s obviously going to be a consideration! :-)

If anyone in North/West London has need of Terry’s services ping me and I’ll pass you details. I really should be on some kind of referral scheme…

I didn’t desperately enjoy boarding school. By the time I left, I’d made a few friends and found a localised kind of happiness and certainly gained a great deal from it – exposure to public speaking, journalism, intellectual discourse, guitar skills, philosophical debate, various sporting activities and the like helped net me a place at Cambridge.

However, a significant part of the time spent there was dotted with pained phone calls back to home, agonised discussions as to whether I should transfer back to a school in Malaysia, spates of bullying and a persistent sense of being marginalised by a community in which I did not really fit. And this resulted in a general sense of misery for myself and my parents for the duration.

Having become a parent, discussing my childhood with my parents, the question was asked: should I have been sent to boarding school at all? Should it be a regret for all involved?

Now, oddly, despite the relative unhappiness whilst I was there, I have absolutely no regrets about taking the decision both to go – and to stay – there. In both cases my parents applied very little pressure – first I wanted to follow in my brother’s footsteps, and then a combination of pride and obsessiveness had me wanting to finish what I’d started. And eventually friendships formed and it became less of a trial, and I grew to love elements of the experience.

It’s funny how any experience, once you’re sufficiently clear of it, can be seen for the ‘character-building’ goodness that it was. The person I am today was not entirely defined by my experience at school but certainly aspects of me were forged there – 15 years ago in the rolling fields of Buckinghamshire. And now I’m an extremely happy adult, it’s difficult to regret anything that got me to where I am today.

I miss some aspects of being at Stowe, and the friends and teachers I had there. I hope to reconnect with some of those people in the months ahead and see how perspectives have shifted in the decade and a bit since we all left… and just rekindle the memories of discussing fantasy novels with Will, cars and Transformers with Mac, Squash and alt-rock with Al and, of course, Radiohead, religion and Tintin with Roy…

After all, if we do five things that save a minute of our day each, in a week we’ve got the best part of half an hour back to other things. And a lot of the productivity-enhancing things I’ve seen emerge in products, services and OS tweaks – purely from a technological point of view – have the potential to save much more time than that.

A non-techie example – the Fiskars weed puller I bought a few weeks back. A simple technological innovation saving me hours of tedious weeding, easily worth the £30 it cost in time and effort saved.

So I’m pushing on with my mission of discovery. I want to learn, try, experiment with and potentially buy products, services and training that will help me and my teams at work save time, work ‘smarter’ (horrible, but precise), and dig our way out from under the growing mound of pointless information and legacy process endemic to the knowledge worker. I speak of email, non-collaborative workflows and the like.

And my personal mission – to do the same thing for life more generally – endures, as ever. If you know about it, I want to hear about it!

Many of my friends (and family, no doubt) are probably still somewhat mystified as to how I’ve taken to country life so well. My mother keeps saying "you were such an urban boy…" and smiling when I show off our veg patch.

Whilst I do miss the proximity of friends and family, the transition from city dweller to country gent really hasn’t been a hardship in any way. Apart from the extra space, there are lots of other things that have made it easy on me.

1. Everything is more convenient. Admittedly its more convenient thanks to having a car, but the truth of the matter is that getting anywhere in London takes a disproportionate amount of time. I had a rule of thumb – if I had to get a tube or bus somewhere in London, it would take at least 30 minutes. And crossing London can take a considerable amount more time, never mind when there’s a disruption, fall of leaves on the track or a light shower of rain. In the countryside? Most things I need to get to are a maximum of 10 minutes drive away.
2. The pace of life is wonderful. When I get home, it feels like a dramatic gearshift. I’m sure a lot of that is due to being a family man, but even if it wasn’t – walking around in the late evening sunshine in my back garden, bouncing Emily around or looking at the veg… is pretty amazing.
3. The commute is better. I know, I know, I moan about it… and the SWT guys aren’t great, but, except, for when I was in cycling range of my office, the public transport from other places in London – like my sister’s house – can take longer than the train does to get home. That’s the 5 miles from our offices in Victoria needing an hour and a quarter to traverse (admittedly on a bad day, in rush hour).
4. I like the structure the trains put around my day – I’m in the office every day at 7.40am and have to be out at 6. Still a long day, but at least without the uncertainty of when I’m getting home (again, except for delays). And obviously I’m able to be productive on the train in and out of Basingstoke in a way that I could never be on any London transport vehicle.
5. I was never really a ‘true’ urban dweller. I grew up in the suburbs in a country where you had to drive everywhere, spent five years in the deepest countryside, 3 years in a small University town and then 7 years in London. I’m beginning to think that living in London as the unusual part of my life…

All that said, I do still very much enjoy being in London for work. Some of the things that happen here, only happen here, and I’ll never stop thinking of it as one of the greatest cities in the world. It’s wonderful to visit friends and family there, when they’ll have us, but I have to admit, I’m resoundingly and categorically glad I don’t live there any more.

This is absolutely wonderful news. Amanda made Nigella’s London Cheesecake and it was possibly one of the most delicious things I’ve ever eaten. Ever. And this is on top of the celebratory lasagna I made for her using Lactofree milk and semi-hard cheese (for the white sauce and lasagna topping) after she had her mid-maternity leave back-to-work day.

I’ve also tried the soft cheese on a bagel and its really indistinguishable from traditional soft cheeses. The semi-hard cheese is a bit thin on flavour, hopefully they’ll keep working on it.

So, kudos, you nice people at Lactofree. I’ll try your yoghurts if they ever get stocked by one of my local supermarkets, will look forward to you experimenting with lactose free creams, and getting a proper hard-cheese recipe right. I’ve love to know more about the process by which you get rid of the lactose – it sounds too simple from your website:

Lactofree semi hard cheese is made from cows’ milk. As part of cheesemaking, bacterial cultures are added to the milk to create acidity, aroma and flavour. These cultures need a source of food and this food is lactose. The bacteria uses up the lactose naturally found in the milk to give Lactofree cheese its distinct flavour. The bacteria will stop working only once all the lactose has been used up, leaving cheese that is lactose free.

Lactofree soft white cheese is also made from cows’ milk. The lactase enzyme is added during the cheese making process to break down the milk sugars into simpler forms that your body can absorb. So what you get is Lactofree soft white cheese, with the taste and nutritional goodness of regular soft white cheese, just without the lactose!

Clever stuff.

1. Show me the way to go home – YouTube here – I sing this one to calm Emily down.
2. Dingle dangle scarecrow – YouTube here – for all occasions
3. Heads shoulders knees and toes – for instructing Emily in basic anatomy
4. Twinkle twinkle little star – Nani’s favourite tune to sing to her – although you gotta love the Mozart variations
5. A whole new world – YouTube here – sung whilst teaching Emily how to waltz
6. Incy wincy spider – in Danish – YouTube here
7. Ten in the bed and the little one said – roll over – sung whilst training her to… roll over
8. Boogie Woogie Washerwoman – slowly for sleep, quickly for play! Can’t find an ‘official’ version of this song but here’s a random singing it on YouTube.
9. “Walking on sunshine” – re-worded so she’s “Walking on Daddy.” A favourite game!

Lullabies – generally we just play her an album for this – this one – and it helps Emily with her bedtime routine  alongside a wind-up ticking alarm clock and a sheep much like this one (thanks to Luke & Em). Amanda sings a calming set of vowel sounds to help her sleep when she’s upset.

What are your songs to sing to baby??

It’s fantastic for the discipline of blogging, but I haven’t yet applied a filter by topic, and haven’t worked out a way to sort my blog post ideas thematically – so apologies if you’re getting a fairly random flow of consciousness. I’m by nature interested in everything, so posts will continue to vary from communications consultancy to technology and software, to soup and cooking, to film and TV, to babies and fatherhood  (ooh, also golf, running, etc. etc.)

So hope you’re enjoying the ride. I’m loving blogging at the moment and hoping that friends will continue to engage, here on the blog and via FB, as I continue to spout out random thoughts, insights and random views on this, that and everything.

Was amused when Aunty Maria pointed it out. Expect my folks will get the joke made to them a fair few more times in the weeks and months ahead!

Update: My Dad has not been ‘awarded’ a Datukship. He became a Datuk when Emily was born – i.e. he became a grandpa. Apparently this wasn’t clear!!

That translates to nearly 1000 posts, over 500 comments, tens of thousands of visitors and a great deal of enjoyment and satisfaction for me. Whilst these stats pale in comparison with the vast majority of genuinely popular blogs out there, my inconsistent, polymath tendencies make this a difficult blog to pin down and want to follow.

So here’s to you, my friends and Internet followers, for making it an interesting ride, and here’s to future blogging.

And here’s to the fans of Outcasts for making this month the most popular month on my blog in 8 years!

Am I being massively cynical to think that if the subject of the museum had been something non-Islamic, in this country it would likely smell, be overheated, understaffed, and totally unimpressive? Or should I just be pleased that at least we have a good (if relatively pricey at RM12 for entry, RM5 for a bottle of water) cultural destination?

Planning on checking out the aquarium in KLCC tomorrow, hopefully that’ll be fun too.

The Science Centre, which we visited yesterday, wasn’t bad but nowhere nearly as polished as the art gallery (although admittedly far more child-oriented… I guess it’d be comparing the circus to the opera house…)

Baby Emily enjoyed both enormously, of course, being in her buggy for both experiences, getting hands on with plasma exhibits in the science museums and just giggling with glee as she whizzed through the art gallery.

One of the many highlights of recent days has been seeing her start to be even more responsive and interactive during activities like this. She smiles during tummy time, gazing around the room to see the smiling relatives looking on adoringly. She even lifts her head up so she can get a good chomp on Sophie the Teething Giraffe (a favourite toy).

The other recent fantastic experience is seeing her react to her buggy – in the UK she wasn’t quite big enough to sit in the buggy chassis for her Silver Cross Surf pram, but the relatively cheap and cheerful Hauck three wheeler we’ve acquired over here (something like this) is better suited to her current size – and she sits in it literally trembling with excitement as she zooms around shopping malls, leaning forward (she’s in a permanent state of crunch) to grab the bar and lift herself up for an even better view. She giggles joyously when we play with her in it.

Huge fun. Being a dad is *awesome*.

If you’re a Facebook friend you can view the vid on my wall. If you’re not, you get this pic. She’s even more beautiful when she laughs!

However, Emily’s coping with the 20 hour journey from our home in Hampshire to my parents’ home in Malaysia was absolutely remarkable. Whilst slightly anxious on the flight, she more or less maintained her regular routine, was only briefly upset by the air pressure changes, and persistently charmed every stewardess, immigration officer and fellow passenger she chanced across. It was the single best flying experience I’ve had (and thanks a bit to KLM for that, they were absolutely super), in spite of having a new baby, although it was a bit hair-raising at the start when we didn’t know how she’d react. Amanda kept her ‘drugged’ with a feed on the first ascent/descent from London to Amsterdam.

Safely arrived in KL, she’s gradually getting used to being somewhere… else, the climate, and soon-to-be-arriving torrent of family. Her Dad is coping less well, having been up from 1-7am. Argh.