The one with the notebook permanently in his back pocket and the slow internet connection permanently in his face. Writes the dispatches you read here. Cooks the porridge. Reads the same five-page bedtime story until it has become a kind of family folk-tale.
Previously: in recovery, in publishing, in a small flat in south London where the boiler never quite worked. Now: on the back of a scooter with two children behind him, asking what's for dinner.
Plans the routes, finds the rooms, knows where the nearest pharmacy is in every town we land in, and keeps the family's documents in an actually-coherent system. Has talked us into more good ideas than any of us would have managed alone.
The reason we are here. The reason we are still here, fourteen months on. The reason we will still be here when we are somewhere else.
Currently working his way through anything with a dragon in it. Asks impossible questions about the buffalo on his evening walks. Has decided, with no encouragement from anyone, that he is going to be a marine biologist, an architect and a chef.
Started this trip nervous of strangers and afraid of new food. Recently asked the lady at the market for "another one of those, please, but spicier, please, mum is being boring."
Yes, two e's. The younger one. Maker of friends in any language, particularly the bánh mì lady on our corner and the dog that lives outside the bakery. Knows everyone's name in a six-street radius. Loses every single one of his socks within a week.
The unofficial mayor of whichever town we are in. Has a five-year plan and it involves a boat.
The morning we left London Heathrow with one-way tickets to Bangkok we had no real plan beyond a vague easterly direction and a quiet conviction that the long, retirement-deferred life of the West was not the only one on offer to us.
We had recognised the limits that mainstream education has for our two boys — both neurodiverse in their own ways, both bright, both quietly miserable in classrooms that asked them to sit still and be quiet for the better part of a decade. We did not want them to be told who they were by a building. We wanted to show them.
The West's bargain — work until you retire, then live the life you wanted — assumes a perfect health and a surviving pension that we are not prepared to bet our family on. So we sold most of what we owned, strapped on four backpacks, and started moving east.
It is, fourteen months in, the best thing we have ever done. The hardest, also. The two are usually the same thing.
Three months across Rajasthan and into the foothills of the Himalaya — Diwali in Udaipur, dal in Pokhara.
A long lazy month of laksa and street art and humidity that taught us how to walk slowly.
One-way tickets booked. Heathrow → Bangkok. Backpacks on. No return.
Three months in the foothills — the slow start to slow travel, and the boys' first lessons in Thai.
Two weeks of corrupt officials and flooding before the country let us in properly. We deserved it.
Home, for now. A yellow town between rice paddies and the sea. The longest we've been anywhere in fourteen months.
Hà Nội. Then maybe Laos. Then we shall see — that, after all, is the whole point.
If we haven't answered your one, please write — we love a good question.
The short answer: the world is the curriculum. We use a loose framework of reading, writing, maths and project work, but most of our days look more like field trips than lessons. The boys learn currencies by buying mangoes, geography by booking trains, language by haggling at markets. We keep a portfolio of their work and check in with their progress weekly.
The long answer: a whole blog post — read it here →
We sold most of what we owned, including a small flat in south London, and we live carefully. J freelances when he can; R consults remotely a few hours a week. The day-to-day cost of living in Hội An is a fraction of what London cost us — rent on a two-bed family home here is less than the council tax we used to pay.
The most common question, and the easiest one. Both boys have more friends than they ever did at school. There is a substantial worldschooling community in Hội An — twenty or so families at any time, from all over — plus the local boys they play football with, plus their friends back home over video call. They are, if anything, over-socialised.
Yes, often. We miss particular people, particular pubs, the smell of Sunday roast in our kitchen, the quiet of a London Sunday morning. We miss our parents. But "home" has turned out to be a less geographical thing than we thought it was. It is, mostly, the other three of us.
Honestly — we don't know. The plan is no plan. We have a flat in storage and a cat at my mother's. We will probably go back to visit. Whether we settle there again, or somewhere else, or just keep going for as long as the boys will let us — we genuinely have no idea. Which, fourteen months in, feels right.
A short letter every other Saturday with the latest entry, a photograph, and a daft thing one of the boys said this week.