No such thing as adrift

We've visited five towns now, trying to find the right place to settle. I don't like making decisions based upon such snap impressions. Crawley is diverse, but the teenagers slope around like packs of wolves. Horsham is too good to be true - there's something Stepford-like about it. Redhill and Reigate are London suburbs with only a couple of miles between them, but with subtly different characters.

Walking around Reigate this evening we explored the ancient castle-mound, which is now a park/garden surrounded by flowers and shrubberies. The only other people in the park was a young dad and his daughter. On an impulse, John struck up a conversation. The young dad was very helpful, but his daughter, who was only 3, was not too keen to stand around watching adults talk.

We walked around for another hour, and then decided to get dinner. Options were discussed, a place was chosen, but was a pub and so had an age limit. Off to somewhere else...
and then we stumbled across our dad-and-tot pair again, outside a restaurant. The next step was obvious: invite dad-and-tot to join us. And so we did.

Turns out Dad is a Jamaican by birth, working for a Japanese investment bank in London. He had lived in Reigate in the past, then in London proper for a while, and now had returned to Reigate. His charming daughter kept James and David entertained while we asked Darryl all sorts of nuts-and-bolts questions about banks and cell phones and school systems and so on. Moving overseas is a snarl where these things are concerned: you can't get a cell phone sent to you until you have a residential address, but you can't choose a residential address until you know about schools and such, and you can't establish a bank account until you have a residence either, so you can't get a credit card to bill your cell phone to...

By the end of the time in the restaurant we had Darryl's name, phone number, and e-mail, as well as an invitation to get in touch with him with more questions. At a time like this, that sort of kindness and helpfulness means an awful lot.

I read on an expatriat blog ("She's Not From Yorkshire") that it takes 6 months to make real friends here. I think that we might very well find ways to do it in less time than that - by God's grace.