It’s nearly 5pm, the heater is on and it’s almost dark here in Harlesden, a London suburb where we are staying in a little studio flat for a couple of weeks. In a number of ways it’s a long way from Canberra, and being here is the reason I can’t get to the reunion, much as I would love to be there to catch up with you all.

Here it’s the day before my birthday but I just noticed on my laptop that it’s already my birthday in Australia––my 17th birthday (40 years ago) was the day before the first HSC exam and I went shopping instead of studying. I wouldn’t want to bore you with too much detail of my life since then but it’s been, and still is, very good.

I have a family connection to two other Watson 69ers, having married David Coles, brother of Janet and of Susan who married Bill Walker. Both our children (Adam now 32 and Sarah nearly 31) were born in Canberra and we moved to the Northern Territory in 1984, where we lived (in Darwin, Humpty Doo and then Eva Valley near Batchelor) until last year. These were good places to live and bring up a family, and both kids have been making their own ways in the world for a while.

Work-wise and study-wise I’ve progressed through a number of areas, all basically related to education: teaching (ESL and Japanese), Aboriginal education policy, and tertiary education management. I retired from full-time employment in 2007 but have done a couple of management consultancies since then, some with David. No more for a while though as last year we sold the farm (literally––David became a mango farmer for a couple of years after he retired from the NT Public Service) and became travellers.

There’s been a fair bit of travelling over the years. We did a road trip around Australia for about 7 months when the kids were little and, after we moved to the NT, a lot of trips ‘down South’, including in 2000 to attend our year’s reunion then. On many of those trips we took scenic routes to see a bit more of Australia and we also did the standard family visit to that northern suburb of Darwin known as Bali. For work and study there have been several trips to Japan, Indonesia, the United States and of course around communities in the NT. After the kids left home (Sarah went to ANU when she was 18, after a year as an exchange student in Japan; Adam was more of a homebody and moved to Darwin when he was 21), we ventured further afield, with trips to Malaysia, China, Central Asia and Canada/Alaska’.

We originally envisaged our latest career (travellers) as lasting a year to 18 months. We’ve now passed the one year mark and it’s been a while since we amended the timeframe to 2-3 years. So far we’ve been to NZ, Vietnam, Malaysia, India , Turkey, Central Europe, Scandinavia and now London (with a short detour to Northampton for a bit of family history research). So we’ve got a lot of the world to go, with plans to meet people in some places. We’re meeting Janet in a few weeks in Cairo, for the start of a 4 month trip overland to Capetown; my sister Robyn and her family in Sarlat next June; Adam and Klaire (our daughter-in-law: us and Sarah at their wedding in the family photo below) in Mexico early in 2011; and maybe others in the US later in 2011.

We’ve bought a block of land at Kidaman Creek (near Kenilworth, just west of the Sunshine Coast) and will probably build there later as Adam and Sarah both now live in Brisbane, though we’ll have no qualms about changing our minds if something else comes up – that’s the beauty of being officially retired.

I noticed that a number of our fellow classmates have moved to Queensland. So it’s quite possible I could catch up with some of you there, or in Canberra, or somewhere else. If any of you are interested in catching up (in person or by email or voip), my email is kanzen.partnersATgmail.com and my Skype name is slowfeet2. We also have a blog at www.mytb.org/slowfeet (though David is the only one who has written so far – I do the editing/vetoing sometimes) and I am on Facebook too. I’d love to hear from you.

Thanks to the organising committee for a job well done, and all the best for a great get-together next weekend. I’m looking forward to the photos (or will we see something on YouTube?).