Everything seems on the up at the moment. My courses are underway and are running smoothly, the blog is surviving better than I thought, and the semester is one step closer to being over.

Plans for us to continue to leave the country, though, continue and we are hoping to be out of South Africa permanently within 1.5-2.5 years or so. Yes, our current time frames aren’t necessarily the best but, hey, we gotta do what we gotta do. Either way, no matter when we leave the country permanently, the South African branch of the family is busy planning a trip over to England next March so it won’t be too long before we see our close friends and family again. Hold on guys, almost there.

While our moving plans are “borne back ceaselessly into the past” (to quote F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby), my sister and her husband have settled in quite fantastically in their new life in London since their arrival this January. It would be beyond fantastic to be living in the same country as them from day one but the wheels are very definitely in motion to make this happen. As part of their final preparations to make their stay in England permanent, my brother-in-law has come back to SA from London so that he can pack up the remainder of their store-room and some other administrative tasks (in addition to catching up with family).

Tim flies back to London on Friday afternoon so we’ve just had him over for dinner tonight and opened a bottle of wine before he has to leave. Although it won’t be that long until we meet up again it feels quite strange that tonight was one of the last times we’d see him until next year.

In other news, there has been a couple of rumours about another ‘shutdown’ of UCT which is due to start at some point tomorrow. As to how true they are: I guess I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to find out. While I wholeheartedly agree that people should stand up for what they believe in but the fact that any protest action against inequality – in all its forms – is necessary its quite sad that societies still have people fighting for equality in the first place.