17th May - Nottingham, 53°N 1°W, GMT+1

Karen's brother, Pete, picked us up from Manchester Airport and whisked us home via Scunthorpe (not really on the way but we weren’t complaining). The house looked remarkably similar to how we'd left it, our neighbours had done a great job of stopping it looking abandoned in our absence. Naresh and Nila had also generously left a bag with provisions like bread, milk, cheese, tea bags and so on in our kitchen for our return.

Phil switches everything back on again while Karen and Pete go to the supermarket. When we left the house one of the last things Phil did was to lock all of the house keys in a small fire safe and then locked it and put the key 'somewhere safe'. We still don't know where that key is.

After a lot of searching Phil had a look on YouTube and is now adept at opening all types of cylinder locks with a carefully bent paper clip and kirby grip. Despite being able to open lots of other locks with his new skills the fire safe remained stubbornly locked - back to YouTube. This time he finds a video by a boy demonstrating how he can discover his brother's secrets by opening his brother's fire safe with a small penknife blade. This works first time and we have access to all of the keys!

Max the cat has been fostered by Phil’s friend Tim while we were away. We visit him the day after we get back and like all cats he barely acknowledges us - fair enough, we did leave him in a strange house (with a dog!!) for ten months (that’s four cat years). It’s probably just as well he doesn’t get too excited as we are leaving him at Tim’s for another week as we are going to Sue and Will’s joint 50th party in London.

The heating had been drained before we went away and Phil had planned to use the opportunity to reroute some of the heating pipes before refilling it when we got back. It is mid-May after all and should be reasonably warm. Unfortunately it is a British spring and freezing cold, especially after coming from some very warm countries. There are some complications with moving the pipes and getting the boiler working again (this is not unheard of with Phil’s projects as Karen likes to remind him) and we have a couple of weeks of using a carefully positioned fan heater and electric radiator to keep specific parts of the house warm.

19th May - London, 52°N 0°W, GMT+1

On the way to London for the party a large piece of rubber(?) is kicked off the M1 by the car in front. It makes the largest ‘stonechip’ we’ve ever seen on a windscreen - it looks like someone has hit it with a hammer. The only positive thing is that it would have cost more to fix if it had hit the car bodywork. Sue and Will’s party is excellent. They have hired half a pub and we see people we haven’t seen for ages. The day after we go for a walk around the Forty Hall Country Park in the wilds of Outer Enfield followed by a drink at the King and Tinker.

On the Monday after the party we pick Max up and he immediately runs straight to where we normally put his food - It looks like he has remembered where he used to live after all. By the end of the day it seems like he has never been away. Tim discovered that the reason he wasn’t eating very much was because the Cat Lady down the road had been feeding him with fish and chicken and, unsure of his sex, had named him ‘Fluffy’. Max is a good looking long haired cat but, as he is keen to point out, 100% male. We can only imagine he had to grit his teeth a bit before tucking in to the Cat Lady’s grub. We had thought that if Max had really settled in at Tim’s we would leave him there. Tim tells us that in Max’s first week in the new home Max attacked him, sinking his teeth into Tim’s wrist and wrapping his body around Tim’s hand to form a ‘furry death mitt’. Unsurprisingly Tim is quite happy for us to have Max back.

Postscript

Phil, who had to resign, has got his old job back. Karen’s job was kept open but she is continuing her holiday for the time being. We’ve both lost a bit of weight on the journey (not entirely sure why) and have embarked on wardrobe clear outs as there is clearly no chance we will ever put the weight back on. The most useful thing Phil took was a universal travel adaptor with two USB charging sockets which plugs in to any socket in the world and, into which, you can plug virtually any plug in the world while, at the same time, charging your phone and Kindle. The least useful thing probably a mini mouse which Phil went to the length of shortening the lead on to save weight and then only used twice. Phil also chose to take a mains lead with a plastic earth pin rather than a brass one to save weight (5.4g since you ask), a saving that turned out to be completely irrelevant as the trip went on. Karen’s most useful item was a headtorch and her least useful an inflatable beach-ball sized globe that was only blown up once because of the impracticality of transporting it while inflated.

During the trip we took 9300 photos and 170 video clips in 14 different countries. We learned a few words in 10 different languages and then forgot most of them. We loved Japan, South East Asia and India. The people in Australia and the scenery in New Zealand were both great. Will we do it again? Not in the foreseeable future but it would still be nice to have an odd month travelling now and then.